Category Archives: Uncategorized

Webcurios 03/10/25

Reading Time: 36 minutes

 

Leaving aside the obvious tragedy of the attack on Manchester synagogue and the deaths that resulted, and the miserable reality of the continued rise in antisemitism being seen the world over, it was also miserable to be able to broadly predict the way in which the attack and its perpetrator are likely to be used by some of the worst people in the world over the coming weeks in order to keep peddling the same racist arguments as they have been all summer. Shall we all collectively agree not to listen to those cnuts this time? Eh? What? Oh.

Anyway, it’s been Something Of A Week – a selection of links to largely-pointless webspaff accompanied by Too Many Words is unlikely to make anything better, but console yourself with the fact that what follows is, at the very least, unlikely to make anything appreciably worse.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you ought to know better by now.

 By Christophe Jacrot

I AM GOING TO ATTEMPT TO WAKE MYSELF THE FCUK UP THIS MORNING BY LISTENING TO THIS NEW GRIME MIX BY MANGA, AND DEPENDING ON THE STATE YOU FIND YOURSELF IN WHEN READING THIS YOU MIGHT LIKE TO DO THE SAME!

THE SECTION WHICH DIDN’T EXPECT TRAVIS KELCE TO BE CAST IN THE YOKO ROLE BUT FEELS IT’S NOW INEVITABLE, PT.1:  

  • Messenger: Regular readers – or at least those of you who pay some sort of minimal attention to what goes into this weird, lumpen digital gruel each week – will be aware that I normally tend to save anything that might vaguely be described as a ‘game’ until the end of the miscellaneous links; I feel, though, that it’s been something of A Week for many of us and as such you might want something gentle and soothing and, well, *nice* upfront to ease your ingestion of all the lumpier and more, er, challenging bits that come later on (actually this is a reasonably-benign edition, I think, so DON’T BE SCARED!). As such, we kick off this week with a site which is both lovely and SO TECHNICALLY IMPRESSIVE – Messenger is a little in-browser game in which you play as a, er, messenger kid of some sort; you’re dropped onto a TINY PLANET and your task, should you choose to engage with it, is to run around said planet’s surface delivering messages to its various inhabitants. It’s all very simple – talk to person x, travel to destination alpha, deliver message y, rinse, repeat – and there’s not a lot of depth here, fine, but it’s whimsical and cute and SO PRETTY! The graphics are nicely cel-shaded (ish), the music is unobtrusive and pleasant, and in general it’s just nice to run through the streets of the tiny world here presented and just enjoy the seaside-ish moderately-Eastern vibes. This is SO CUTE and the fact that it can run on your browser is frankly astonishing – if you need a sort of mental palate-cleanser then this will work wonders. Oh, and there’s also a light multiplayer element in that you will occasionally bump into other players currently online and have limited emoji ‘conversations’ with them (why the developers thought it necessary to give you a toilet roll emote is, I confess, troubling me slightly), which lends a nice air of community to the whole thing – honestly, this is VERY impressive and generally just a nice, soothing time for all the family.
  • Weird Web October: In another week in which I saw a post decrying the fact that there was nothing fun on the internet anymore doing numbers – PULL YOUR FCUKING FINGER OUT AND LOOK HARDER YOU BOVINE FUCK, HAVE YOUR CURIOSITY AND DISCOVERY MUSCLES ATROPHIED ENTIRELY??? – an antidote! It will not have escaped your notice that it is October (it certainly hasn’t escaped mine, a generally hateful month and frankly I would quite happily hibernate until January should anyone have access to some high-quality sedatives and some sort of medical setup to keep me fed, hydrated, clean and free of bedsores until 2026) – but it is not just *any* October! Oh no! This is WEIRD WEB OCTOBER, in which you (well, anyone really, but you’re the one reading this so let’s presumed it’s aimed squarely at YOU) are encouraged to MAKE STUFF ONLINE! “Weird Web October is a challenge to try and make a website every day of October, based on the theme for each day, inspired by Inktober. It’s open to you and everyone!…We want to bring back the WEIRD WEB. When people just put fun and silly stuff on the internet, not for followers or likes but just for the joy of making something and sharing it.” Each day has a different theme to inspire you should you want a directional prompt to inspire you, and there are instructions on the page as to how to share your creation with the world and link it to the rest of the movement – I’ll keep an eye on this over the next few weeks and share some nice examples, but, well, why don’t YOU make something? GO ON IT ISN’T THAT HARD. (please, though, not another fcuking substack, what is wrong with you? And the same goes for podcasts, before you start).
  • Foom: Well, it’s been a BIG WEEK for AI-generated video and the general evolution of the concept of ‘AI telly’ – we will get to Sora in the longreads (seeing as the fcuks at OpenAI have made it US and invite code only, and I am neither in the US (thank Christ) nor in possession of a MAGICAL ACCESS KEY, chiz chiz, and am therefore yet to try it out), but this is FOOM, a new (ish) 24/7 AI video feed by Runway, which, per the blurb, offers “A 24/7 broadcast of AI culture. Weekly shows, interviews, films, research discussions, endless inspiration, livestreams and experimental new programming.” Does anyone want this? NOONE ASKED YOU SIT BACK AND SHUT UP AND WATCH YOUR AI TELLY FEED, PEONS (AFTER ALL YOU CAN’T AFFORD TO GO OUTSIDE DUE TO THE SEEMINGLY-UNIVERSAL £20 ‘LEAVING THE HOUSE’ TAX WHICH NOW SEEMS TO APPLY TO ALL CITIZENS)! I have only given a relatively cursory degree of attention to this – I don’t watch actual, human-made telly so my interest in machine-made video feeds is…minimal – but the little that I have seen suggests that programming skews further towards the ‘slightly-pretentious pseudo-arthouse documentary’ – right now there’s some sort of elaborate Kinect-ish serious of flythroughs around some Gaussian interiors, but it’s curious enough in general to warrant a click and a gawp, even if only a quick one. It does rather feel we have crossed a rubicon, though – again, remember that just because YOU don’t need or want this stuff, and just because YOU think it is gross and an anti-artistic aberration built on theft and greed and all the rest, it doesn’t mean that the majority of the rest of the world is going to feel the same, and if you’re a media or creative worker posting on Bluesky you are, it’s fair to say, significantly less representative of What The World Wants than, say, a bunch of kids in India happily scrolling through the slopfeed with nary a care in the world.
  • The Crewkerne Gazette: Speaking of AI video (SEAMLESS!), welcome to the era of SATAIRE (not a typo, this time)! Crewkerne, for those of you not aware, is a town in Somerset (my friend Dave grew up there, his recollections of it mainly seem to revolve around terrible soapbar and a lot of teenage ennui, although I can’t guarantee that’s a representative picture) – this is not, despite what the name might suggest, a website for its local paper, but instead a YouTube channel which about a month ago pivoted from AI-generated ‘history’ videos about Somerset witches (and a very odd parody Louis Theroux episode about a man enjoying congress with a Henry Hoover) to instead producing fast-turnaround ‘comedy’ videos about the government with a ‘satirical’ bent. So you have videos about Keir Starmer and Lord Ali’s ‘gay relationship’ (perhaps my favourite mad conspiracy theory from the UK (sorry, YOOKAY) populist fringe, to some sadly-predictable stuff about migrants, Angela Rayner, the ‘brit card’, all now dropping at a cadence of about one a day, all seemingly made with either Grok Premium Plus or Veo3 or, perhaps more likely, some of the Chinese models…you will be unsurprised to learn that the ‘satire’ is leaden and the music is terrible, and the lyrics banal (this isn’t my politics, I promise, this stuff is just objectively bad), but the point is less about the quality and more about the fact that this stuff is now relatively-trivial to produce at pace, and the costs are low enough that it’s worth someone’s time to churn these out in the hope of going a bit viral and earning some algopennies here and there. They’re not super-popular with the most ‘viral’ topping out at 65kish views, but you imagine that there is a LOT of this out there (see the other Rayner rap vid I posted a month or so ago which was from somewhere else entirely). Oh, and I was curious as to how they managed to generate this fairly-astonishing rip-off of Lily Allen’s ‘Smile’ for this execrable little track – have a listen, it’s quite the ‘tribute’.
  • Forgotten Languages: OOH, SOME PROPER INTERNET WEIRD! Ok, this is VERY strange, and another one of the seemingly-endless number of websites I am amazed that I have never seen before (see? I don’t spend ALL my time online!) – Forgotten Languages has been going for over 15 years, as far as I can tell, and is a series of posts…Oh, Christ. Ok, so everything on the site is in…cypher? Basically it’s all in code, apart from some bits that are in English for reasons that make no sense to the casual observer, and, while it might look like it’s gibberish, over the years various intrepid internet sleuths have sought to uncover the meaning of the site and to crack its code, and, to the extent anyone has managed, it seems that…it’s all about aliens? And, er, bioreprogramming humans? And, er, us as a ‘seed planet’? And it turns out that various people have over the years corresponded to a small degree with some of the ‘people’ behind the site, who, it transpires, may or may not in fact be extraterrestrial beings? Look, I am not saying that they ARE, just that, well, that’s what they seem to claim to be. You can learn a little more about the site and what people have managed to find out about it here, and here, but I can’t promise that it will really help much. This is either a byproduct of possible schizophrenia, or a portal into an alien intelligence – I’ll leave it to you to decide which is most likely.
  • The Creative Cheat Sheet: Do YOU work in advermarketingpr? Do YOU still have a job? I mean, on one level LUCKY YOU! Anyway, you might find this useful: “The Creative Cheat Sheet was built to help advertising creatives come up with great ideas, share them effectively, and find success in the ad industry.” Basically there are links here to loads of resources which you might find useful should you be employed to make people feel or do things they wouldn’t otherwise feel or do without your intervention – GO WILD!
  • Alter Ego: We’re at a very strange inflection point when it comes to our relationship to technology; on the one hand, after the past 15 years or so of having the world slowly coopted by Silicon Valley’s socially-inadequate god emperors we’re all *fairly* agreed that, possibly, it’s not all bein an unalloyed success, and maybe, in the future, we might want to do a *touch* more thinking, planning and research before moving into the ‘fcuking around’ and ‘finding out’ phases; on the other, we’re also increasingly-clearly only going to get out of this NOT INSIGNIFICANT species-wide bind we currently find ourselves in vis a vis the environment without, well, a pretty-spectacular tech hail mary – WHAT TO DO? Well, whatever your perspective, I would suggest what we should be doing is killing ideas like Alter Ego at birth – because, honestly, listen to this: “Introducing AlterEgo, the first near-telepathic interface, designed to make technology as intuitive as using your inner voice.” YES THAT’S RIGHT IT’S A FCUKING DEVICE THAT PROMISES TO LITERALLY READ YOUR THOUGHTS SO YOU CAN, I DON’T KNOW, OPEN TIKTOK. Except, obviously, if you watch the video it reassures you that it will only be able to read the thoughts you WANT it to read – yes, guv, of COURSE it will! The devs sell it as “a breakthrough technology, developed at MIT, that connects you with AI through a minimal, non-invasive device. Using Silent Sense, it understands what you intend to say without speaking, allowing you to extend your thinking without the need to type, tap, or talk out loud” – and look, this is VERY prototypical and not really anything more than vaporware at this point, but I can’t help but think that if you have to repeatedly put phrases like “AlterEgo only responds to intentional, silent speech. Your private thoughts stay private, and you direct every interaction” in the blurb then maybe, just maybe, you have invented something potentially evil and should possibly just, well, stop inventing it.
  • The GDELT Project: This is quite possibly one of the most ambitious data projects I have ever seen or heard of, and I had no idea at all it existed before this week – “the GDELT Project monitors the world’s broadcast, print, and web news from nearly every corner of every country in over 100 languages and identifies the people, locations, organizations, themes, sources, emotions, counts, quotes, images and events driving our global society every second of every day, creating a free open platform for computing on the entire world.” Basically this is a whole bunch of datasets that researchers can access to attempt to draw patterns and map information networks across the world, about…anything? Honestly, I only came across this yesterday thanks to Shardcore and haven’t really had time to dig too deeply – and it’s very much something designed for researchers and academics rather than for casual spelunking – but the scope is BOGGLING and the potential use-cases absolutely fascinating if the data is of the quality promised. The website is HORRIBLE, mind (as I sort-of think always ought to be the case for anything SERIOUS and VAGUELY-ACADEMIC like this).
  • The Doomsday Scoreboard: An excellent website tracking all the different predictions that we’ve made as a species about when the world is going to end (‘end’ is a pretty elastic quality, turns out – I always wondered with The Rapture, for example, whether all the faithful who get spirited up to heaven then get to spend some fun, indulgent popcorn time gazing down on all the poor unfortunates that didn’t, watching them suffering through the biblical apocalypse like the world’s best disaster film – because, well, that doesn’t sound very Christian, does it?), and keeping a list of the remaining active predictions we’re still waiting on (8, at the time of writing – our next is an asteroid collision expected in 2026 which will end us forever, according to one Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi, should you be curious).
  • Air Fiesta: Another fun website – SEE THEY DO EXIST PULL YOUR FCUKING FINGERS OUT AND STOP WHINGING – (again from Lynn) which uses Google Earth data to let you pilot a hot air balloon around a virtual representation of THE WHOLE WORLD! It doesn’t explain itself hugely well, so know that you will have to click a few of the pin icons to access all the features you’ll need to move freely around the world, but once you can then you can pass a really lovely time gently floating about an accurately-rendered version of the planet, tuning into local radio stations and looking at the scenery as you go; I promise, this really is very relaxing indeed, and, were I the sort of person who believed in stuff like this, I might even call it ‘meditative’ at a push.
  • Offline Church: Speaking of meditative (SEAMLESS!), this is a cute idea. Open this site on your mobile (I always assume that none of you are the sort of sickos who put yourself through the miserable horror of reading Curios on mobile), then turn on airplane mode and MARVEL AT WHAT HAPPENS (you get a short meditative exercise designed to let you INHABIT THE MOMENT, it’s not that exciting). I actually think there’s quite a nice riff on this that you could do in places where people often have to spend a lot of time waiting – doctor’s, dentists, etc – which might be worth exploring; but, also, I am just some cnut writing a newsletter in his pants at 818am and you probably don’t need to listen to me.
  • Grok vs MAGA: A TikTok account sharing examples of people on the right in (mostly) the US getting annoyed when Apartheid Toad’s pet AI Grok doesn’t give answers that conform to their particular worldview – I personally don’t find stuff like this anything other than exhausting and sad (“ALAN YOU ARE SHOUTING AT MATHS, AND YOUR WIFE AND CHILDREN STILL HATE YOU”), but depending on your tolerance for ‘MAGA CHUD GETS OWNED BY BASED AI’-type content then you may enjoy it more than I do.
  • Classic Web: A Belusky account sharing regular screenshots of websites from THE GOOD OLD DAYS (they were not good! The days have always, in the main, been mediocre for the vast majority of people!) – even if you’re not some sort of retropilled nostalgiafetishist this is worth a look, mainly to see the wide, wonderful range of design applied to sites back in the day, compared to the slightly-more cookie-cutter look and feel applied to the more professional web of 2025. BRING BACK CREATIVE USE OF HTML PLEASE.
  • The Sovereign Citadel: When I found this I was convinced it was AI-generated and put it on The List as my inaugural example of a Machine-penned Substack – but now I look at it again I wonder whether the writing is too…idiosyncratically-bad to be fully AI? No, hang on, look at the cadence, this HAS to be AI-assisted. Or the author is, er, VERY COMMITTED. Anyway, the Sovereign Citadel is a newsletter for MEN about, er, BEAUTY and TRUTH and SELF-IMPROVEMENT, and occasionally about why modern women are disappointing (OBVS) – I mean, listen to this INSIGHT: “A woman who is obsessed with herself can never master a man, because to master a man is to be obsessed with understanding him more than she seeks to understand herself. Most women lack a curiosity beyond endless self-exploration, and so do not even begin to chart the soul of the man they deem worthy.” ASTONISHING. Anyway, this fcuker is posting 2-3 times a day, which seems…unusual, frankly, take a look and see what you think (but don’t read too much of it, it will make you at least 3% more stupid than you currently are).
  • Black Dot Tattoo: Tattoos are ART (not always good art, fine, but ART nonetheless) and there is something very human about letting another person mark you forever with their work – except not any more, thanks to Black Dot Tattoo which is a company that’s invented a TATTOO MACHINE, which will do the whole thing automatically and which will, according to the business model let artists anywhere upload their designs to the corpus so that they can be worn by anyone anywhere…this is either a sensible tech evolution of an ancient practice or a fundamental traducement of What It Means To Get Inked – to me it feels like it reduces the whole thing to the same sort of level as ‘getting your face printed onto the foam of your cappuccino while hungover in Cannes’, but see what you think. There’s currently only one of these in the world, in NYC, but they’re inviting applications for other tatt studios or ‘appropriate partners’ who might wish to get in on the act, so expect to see these in your local ‘Spoons in ~3y time.

By Brittany Sheppard

NEXT UP, IN TRIBUTE TO ITS 25 YEAR ANNIVERSARY, THE SUPERB AND FRANKLY SEMINAL ORIGINAL DELTRON3030 ALBUM CONTINUES TO BE WORTH LISTENING TO IN FULL!

THE SECTION WHICH DIDN’T EXPECT TRAVIS KELCE TO BE CAST IN THE YOKO ROLE BUT FEELS IT’S NOW INEVITABLE, PT.2:  

  • Ambienst: I am an absolute sucker for projects whose central premise is ‘making stuff with words’ – this is a ‘turn words into sounds’ toy, which lets you plug in any text you like (or select from some examples) and use it to create MUSIC! Ok, fine, ‘music’ is possibly a bit of a stretch, but certainly ‘sounds’ – each word corresponds to a note/tone (you can change the nature of how they correspond in the settings) and so there’s a very real sense that every single combination of words can and will create a new soundscape, but the effect is much more ‘ambient noodling’ rather than ‘tuneful melody’ – still, I rather like it and found the excerpt from a past Curios I just listened to rather soothing, so give it a try and see what you think.
  • Episode: I went for a drink with Jay Springett earlier this week who told me all about Episodes, a whole narrative storytelling experience for mobile which is, apparently, FCUKING MASSIVE with children and which is making some people a LOT of money through creating stories on the platform, and which I had literally NEVER heard of before he told me about it – this is interesting, partly as a vector in ‘stories are still really popular, turns out, partly in terms of the rise of the visual novel, partly as a new frontier in the ‘creator economy’… as far as I can tell (and I am obviously VERY far away from the target audience for this stuff) the stories tend to be aimed at girls, tend towards the romance genre, and feature pretty simple mechanics (there’s limited interactivity, the storytelling is largely linear)…but millions and millions of people are lapping this stuff up. Super-interesting (conceptually, at least – I don’t think I am going to be rushing to watch any of these things myself, unless one of you tells me about the secret, miserable existential angst channel).
  • Anisota: This is an interesting idea, although I don’t *quite* understand it (no, shut up, that IS a valid thing to say, leave me alone) – anisota basically lets you experience Bluesky as a series of cards rather than a scrolling feed, each post presented as an individual element which you read and then discard. Except there are obviously layers to this – there’s a ‘stamina’ gauge which depletes with each ‘card’ you look at, and presumably disables you from looking at any more once it hits 0; you can collect ‘items’ in various categories, and there appears to be some sort of…bestiary buried in the interface somewhere? Basically it feels like there’s some sort of a weird ludic element to this that I am yet to discover or work out, so, er, if one of you would like to find out how it works and what it is that would be great, thanks!
  • Work In Charities: Are YOU looking for a job in the charitable or third sector? Would YOU like a website that lets you search every single (ok, I can’t guarantee this, but let’s presume) charity job currently being advertised in the UK? GREAT! Built by someone at Newspeak House by scraping all the UK charity websites for job listings and then filleting and representing the info, this is a super-useful resource and something I figure a few of you might find useful. There are currently 8k+ roles being advertised on there, which you may or may not find reassuring.
  • The Unwritten She: Are you a woman? Do you have an inspiring story to tell? Are you worried that your inspiring story might never find its audience because you simply don’t have the time or the energy to commit to writing the important memoir that you know that the world deserves? WELL LOOK NO FURTHER! The Unwritten She is the brainchild of one Shannon St Hilaire (a great name, unquestionably), author of a couple of novels (which may or may not be self-published, it’s hard to tell), who is offering YOU, yes YOU, the chance to work with her to bring your story to the page. St Hilaire is offering upto three people a year the opportunity to work with her to write their memoir – as the website puts it, “Our process is a deep-dive into your life’s work and core truths. Through immersive interviews directly with you and meticulous research, we capture the authentic voice, philosophy, and spirit that define you as a founder, matriarch, or trailblazer.” And what do you pay for this privilege? Between “$10-25,000+”, with the finished work delivered in 6-12 months apparently – which…I don’t know, man, feels a bit steep? Not sure what sort of length we’re looking at here, or indeed what the final step of ‘guiding your manuscript through a premium publication process’ means, but, well, it’s probably all legit! I especially liked this specific example from the FAQs: “What if we don’t have many materials to work with? Some of the most powerful books begin with a single, powerful truth. Our expertise lies in our interview process, where we help you unearth the profound stories and wisdom you already hold. Your life is the only archive we truly need.” And in this particular case, I get the impression that Ms St Hilaire’s ‘single, powerful truth’ is ‘there’s one born every minute’ (or, more accurately, three a year). I really hope she doesn’t Google herself, on reflection.
  • DeArrow: I think we might have passed the point of Peak Thumbnail in terms of YouTube generations, but this might still be of interest to some of you who spend a lot of time on there: “DeArrow is an open source browser extension for crowdsourcing better titles and thumbnails on YouTube. The goal is to make titles accurate and reduce sensationalism. No more arrows, ridiculous faces, and no more clickbait” – if for some reason you find Creator Thumbnail Face insufferable then this will improve your YT experience a thousandfold.
  • Moving Paintings: I’m normally a huge fan of Google Arts & Culture’s work, but this feels to me like it’s a rare misstep – in collaboration with Japan’s Fukuda Art Museum, this project takes a bunch of paintings from their collections and animates them using Google’s Veo3, giving a bit of voice-over explosion to explain a little more about the painting, its history, the artist, the cultural context it was created within…there’s nothing nasty about the concept per se, but the way it’s executed ends up looking a bit, well, shonky, which isn’t something you tend to associate with Google’s stuff in my experience, and it feels like it detracts from the works rather than adding anything to them in a meaningful sense. See what you think – personally I think the works don’t need this sort of w4nk.
  • Play Snake In The Address Bar: Click the link. Look at the address bar in the newly-opened window. Yes, that’s right, it’s snake, You can play it RIGHT THERE in the bit you type the url into. Amazing, isn’t it? Eh? Fcuk’s sake you joyless cnut, CAN YOU FOR ONCE NOT JUST BE CHARMED???
  • Canes: An old friend of my grandfather’s was an enthusiastic amateur woodcarver, which is why I have in my possession a hand-carved cane-cum-walking stick, made from a single branch of…some tree or another, whose head has been carved into the shape of a curious hound. It is ACE, but it would be immeasurably better had its creator seen fit to embed some sort of blade into it and turn it into a canine sword stick. Anyway, this is a forthcoming auction of various canes soon to take place at Bonhams – some of these are BEAUTIFUL, and while I haven’t checked all of the lots it seems plausible to me that at least one of them will double as a concealed bladed weapon because some of these *really* look the part…oh, balls this was in fact yesterday, how galling. Sorry to all those of you who had momentarily dreamed of owning some sort of malacca beauty – still, it’s worth checking out the lots because there were some beauties in there.
  • Bird Photo of the Year: Another week, another selection of photographs of tiny dinosaurs, this time from entrants into the Bird Photographer of the Year contest – I always say this, but there really ARE some great shots; my absolute favourite is the ‘Bloody Petrel’ pic because honestly it looks like a painting in the best possible way and I want it in my house.
  • Record Welsh Place Names: ARE ANY OF YOU WELSH? Would you like to contribute to the preservation of the language and culture of your country? OH GOOD! This is a project looking to record the old Welsh names for places, landmarks and the like which are in the main not officially part of the geographical record – per the site, “we want to ensure that as many place names in Wales as possible are collected and shared so that they can be used now and by future generations…At present, many Welsh and historic place names do not appear on online maps. If you have names for these, or any other elements of the Welsh natural, topographic or built landscape, you can help us by using this online form to record them. We’ll share the information with Wikipedia, Mapio Cymru / Open Street Map, and the List of Historic Place Names of Wales, so that the names you have contributed appear on as many different resources as possible, encouraging their use.” A laudable project which we should all share with all the Welsh people we know and then bully them into participating.
  • Lastill: This is…odd, I don’t quite understand it and it unsettles me a bit if I’m honest. It’s the website for a fictitious tool manufacturing company – Lastill – which presents as a silly, superficial joke…which it is, obviously, except…well, it just goes on a bit too long, and too deep, and it all feels a bit like something that starts funny but which eventually becomes sinister because someone maintains eye contact a bit too long, or laughs a little too hard, or keeps touching your hand in a way that you realise might be a cry for help…there is a LOT in here, and some of it is quite…odd, and while there’s a page buried here that does acknowledge it’s a gag there’s also something…sinister about it. I don’t know, man, feels…strange.
  • IKEA Catalogues: Would you like to explore seven decades of IKEA catalogues? OH GOOD! This goes all the way back to 1950 and whether or not you have an personal interest in utilitarian Scandi furniture – and I personally don’t – this is a FASCINATING archive of design trends, both from the point of view of the furniture being shown off but also in the way in which said furniture is presented in each year’s catalogue…in many respects this is a hugely-significant part of the modern era from the point of view of aesthetics and mass-consumerism, and for some of you this is quite possibly the best and most interesting thing in here this week.
  • Swearsky: Dave ‘Bagpuss’ Forsey (we don’t ask) returns with another little project building on the Bluesky API – this time it tracks how sweary the site is at any given point, specifically “the % of English Bluesky posts that contain one or more swear word in the last 10 minutes. Graphs show the average each hour (so changes a bit over the day). Posts every ~4 hours if the index remains normal, but makes extra posts if 1% above the 7-day average.” At the time of writing, the site is 3% sweary, down from an overnight high of 4.4% (what WERE all you Americans so exercised abo…oh, yes, of course, sorry).
  • Fashtermind: A depressing little game that asks you to guess which charming funster was responsible for a selection of unpleasantly-fashy quotes. Was it Hitler? Was it Nigel? Was it Donny? WHO CAN EVEN TELL ANYMORE!! Ah, the overton window!
  • Oh It’s That Guy: Literally the least-suitable game for someone like me who doesn’t know the first thing about cinema or who any actors are or what they look like – still, if you’re a film buff then this might well be catnip for you. You’re presented with five actors each day and a selection of films – your job for each is to correctly guess which of said films that particular actor was in. Honestly, this was embarrassingly impossible for me when I played it earlier this week.
  • Chartle: Via Giuseppe, Chartle is, er, Wordle but for charts! Each day you’re presented with a different chart and asked to guess what a particular highlighted element of it refers to – so today’s is a graphed ranking of different nations’ CO2 outputs over time, with your job being to guess which country the highlighted line refers to. Which, ok, doesn’t sound hugely fun! And, ok, fine, compared to, say, sex, or crack cocaine, or playing FIFA (it will always be FIFA, don’t look at me like that) it probably isn’t, but it’s QUITE fun and sometimes that has to suffice.
  • Doors: I love this! A philosophical point-and-click game which explores the nature of image and representation via the medium of a gently-amusing LucasArts-style point and click adventure all about, er, doors! Look, I know that I have just made it sound awful and tedious but I promise you this is a lot more fun than my frankly-shoddy description might have initially suggested.
  • I Will Strangle A Horse: Finally this week, a small, very silly, very funny little Twine game by Guy Kelly. You do not, to be very clear, need to at any point actually strangle a horse; also, you will die repeatedly. You will, though, also laugh, and that is probably worth the risk of committing accidental equine murder.

By Von Wolfe

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS BY FREAK OUT AND IS, PER THE BLURB, “ROCK & ROLL ATTITUDE WITH HOUSE, ELECTRO, EBM, AND DISCO” AND YOU WILL ENJOY IT VERY MUCH I THINK!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Sleezy Dad: Despite the fact that you will need to VPN yourself outside the UK to see this – unless you have a verified Tumblr account – this is not bongo; it feels bongo-adjacent, true, but there’s nothing on here that is in any way NSFW; it’s just got very strong fetish vibes, but I quite like the overall aesthetic despite not personally being Into This Sort Of Thing.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Xania Monet: A NEW AI ‘MUSICIAN’ (LOL) EMERGES! This is ‘Xania Monet’, a project where an actual musician (per the lore, at least) writes the lyrics and then uses Suno to set them to music, and then uses a bunch of other tools to create the visual persona to go along with the tracks and act as a virtual front person…I mean, look, this is a long way from being My Sort Of Thing, musically-speaking (it’s R&B, and pretty by-the-numbers stuff), but at least one of the tracks has 3.2m views on YT and the lack of a video means that an awful lot of people don’t seem to have clocked that ‘Xania’ is nothing more than maths… I have said this before and I will keep saying it – LOTS OF PEOPLE SIMPLY DO NOT KNOW AND DO NOT CARE AND TO SOME DEGREE AI MUSIC IS INEVITABLY GOING TO BECOME A THING. I AM SORRY.
  • Rato Milton: By way of a palate cleanser to the last link, this Insta feed posts a different video each day featuring a slightly-blocky CG rat dancing. Why? WHY NOT IT IS A DANCING RAT FFS TAKE THE SMALL MOMENTS OF JOY WHERE YOU CAN BECAUSE SOON THEY WILL ALL BE GONE FOREVER.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • False Prophecies: We begin this week’s longreads with another selection of articles that are shamelessly-parochial and UK-centric in focus; those of you who couldn’t give two hoots about my homeland’s increasingly-desperate-looking flailing can skip forward a couple, but, for the rest of you, this is a really good piece by Sunder Kutwala looking at the ‘memo’ that was allegedly circulating at Labour conference ahead of Starmer’s speech this week, which effectively seemed to cede significant portions of the argument on immigration and associated issues to the Farageiste wing; Sutwala does a good job of neatly unpacking why that’s b0llocks, and, while the whole piece is very much worth reading in full, I thought this section was worth reproducing as a good precis of the article’s scope: “Britain certainly faces real challenges of identity and integration. But that is a statement that is less true about the United Kingdom in 2025 than of any other multi-ethnic democracy in western Europe or the Anglosphere. To cast eight million ethnic minority Britains as unfamiliar out of reach others, living parallel and pillarised lives – without contact with British symbols, social norms or opportunities to study, work or live alongside their fellow citizens – is the kind of atomised nonsense that can only be propagated by an online scribbler who mistakes the increasingly skewed and radicalised X platform for the society that they live in.”  BONUS LINK ABOUT UK POLITICS!: this is VERY wonky, and will only be of interest if you’re the sort of person who wants to get into the weeds about voter bloc demographics, but, if you are, then a) I am glad you exist; and b) you will really enjoy this analysis by Ben Ansell which looks at how different professional types voted, how that has changed over time, and how the idea of the ‘working class voter’ doesn’t really work as a monolithic construct in 2025. It’s quite hard not to look at this and want a three-way leftist coalition at the next election but, well, I think we all know how likely or even possible that is, so.
  • Some Thoughts of Digital ID: I think I have mentioned Rachel Coldicutt’s work in here before, but she is both smart and knowledgeable when it comes to questions of government digital and its implementation, and this list of initial thoughts on the UK Government’s planned Digital ID ‘right to work’ scheme is a sensible, practical set of considerations which are worth thinking about when critiquing the policy; per my comment last week, I would point at this section near the end as being worth remembering while we all get frothy about the details: “This is a very ambitious programme to deliver in four years — particularly given the welcome commitments to consultation and inclusive design. And the government has set itself a particularly difficult challenge: working out exactly what form this digital ID will take will be hard enough, building it to a satisfactory level of quality so that it is secure, reliable and robust enough to support the livelihoods of more than 40m adults and 5.5m businesses is also a non-trivial task. But the hardest part will be rolling it out — ensuring that adoption is easy and trustworthy for everyone who needs it will require a huge communications and customer support effort. And that is just the software.”
  • From Posting to Policy: Long-term readers of this fcuking blognewslettertypething might have noticed over time that I am not…hugely-positive about the ability and intellectual acuity of the world’s communications professionals, in the main characterising them as pointless double-figure IQ dullards who wouldn’t know how to think if you paid them (which is ironic, considering that is ostensibly what they are often in fact paid to do!). AND YET! Occasionally an agency will write something and I will read it and think ‘hang on, this isn’t totally stupid or facile!’ – and this is one such occasion. REJOICE! SLAUGHTER THE FATTED CALF! Ok, this isn’t AMAZING, but it’s an interesting look at the way in which the ‘conversation on X’ to ‘media/Westminster bubble talking point’ works in 2025, and how, terrifyingly, being part of the right lunatic fringe on Elon’s fash-simpatico platform is now basically a direct route to the ears of the more online-addled members of the (right wing, in the main) political classes. You won’t necessarily be surprised by any of this, but it’s a decent account of how the sh1t flows through the pipes, so to speak. Lest you think I am being too charitable about the lobbyists who penned this, by the way, I encourage you to click the ‘people’ tab of the website here and check out the diversity on display – MAN do they all look like people who would happily counsel the world’s worst people on how to protect their interests with naught but a bloodless smile and a quiet line about how ‘everyone is deserving of representation’! Hello, by the way, to anyone from Montfort who happens to read this!
  • Computers That Want Things: James Meek on excellent form in the LRB, with a (long) piece about AI and ‘artificial general intelligence’, and the question of how ‘desire’ is itself an element of intelligence and how that can and might work within an artificial one, and ideology and embodiment…If you’re someone who’s been following this and reading closely around it for the past few years this won’t be new to you, but it’s a really decent overview of some of the questions around where we are trying to get to with this stuff, whether we in fact will, and what it might look like should we ever arrive, and it’s a pretty good ‘where we are right now’ overview in terms of the general push towards AGI (spoilers: WE ARE ALMOST CERTAINLY NOT GETTING AGI VIA THIS PATH WHATEVER ANY OF THE FROTHY CNUTS WITH THE VESTED INTERESTS WANT (AND INCREASINGLY NEED) INVESTORS TO BELIEVE).
  • Sora2: So, the week’s big AI news is the launch of OpenAI’s new text-to-video model, Sora2 – it’s only available in the US, with an invite code, and if you want the app then you will need to be on iOS, but from the examples coming out of the States over the past few days it looks very much like a new best-in-class off-the-shelf model. The big news, of course, was the app, which offers users both the promise of an infinite feed of scrollable AI-generated video (muchlike Meta’s ‘Vibes’ thing, which I didn’t mention last week because all they have done is renamed the existing ‘discover’ feed on Meta AI which I wrote about ~4m ago) and the chance for all users to create AI avatars of themselves – ‘Cameos’ – which can then be dropped into your AI-generated videos, and can also been made available for free use by anyone else. AND THAT CAN’T POSSIBLY GO BADLY! Muchlike Grok, aside from some ‘no, you can’t make a video of that famous unless they have specifically allowed their Cameo to be messed with’ guardrails, this has obviously been trained on ALL SORTS of copyrighted material– which is why people are making all sorts of unholy pop-culture mashups, and which will probably drive a LOT of usage amongst kids and middle-of-the-road types for whom ‘put me in Forest Gump! Put me in Harry Potter!’ is the apogee of the imagined digital experience. A lot of the coverage has been focused on ‘wow, they’re going to get sued into oblivion’ and…I mean, look, I am no lawyer, but it’s interesting to me how Grok’s been letting you do this for 6m (admittedly static only, but still) and there’s been not a peep from the content owners, so, well, I wouldn’t be hugely certain because, again, there’s no obvious guarantee that they would be victorious in a court of law. Anyway, it will be interesting to see whether the FEED OF SLOP (copyright every tedious cnut on Bluesky) will catch on – what’s interesting to me is that every single article I have read about this since launch has featured the journalist admitting, almost begrudgingly, that they got sucked in by the feed of AI video – I think this stuff is probably JUST good enough to scratch a TikTokish itch, personally speaking. Anyway, between this and Veo3 you really can kiss goodbye to any semblance of widely-agreed ‘this is what is happening and what is real’ consensus – so, er, GREAT NEWS EVERYONE! Oh, and look at all the sh1t people are doing with Gemini now – THE RUBICON IS IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR, BYE!
  • On W4nk: Iris Meredith writes a LONG, but very persuasive, essay about how we need to add another term to the lexicon of modern dreck – to whit, ‘w4nk’ used to connote a specific type of communication which is “motivated, not by a desire to communicate or make a fact known, but by feeling: it aims to make the person speaking, in one way or another, feel better about themselves…[and] that having made the statement, and having been unconsciously deceptive about what the statement is for, challenges to the statement are then treated, unconsciously, as an attack on the self.” Honestly, take those two qualities and frame them in your mind, and then hop onto the social platform of your choice and look at, say, a dozen posts and FCUK ME DO YOU NOTICE IT. In particular, this bit had me nodding furiously to the point I thought my head might fall off: “When groups are built around w4nk-statements that both purport to be objective and have the full measure of emotion and identity preventing challenge or implementation, you have to be able to agree exactly with the statement being made to be a part of the group: if you question the foundational assumptions even a little, you’re labelled an enemy. This phenomenon, I think, is largely the reason behind the tendency of leftist groups to split and infight: holding to objective statements about the world as an emotional support mechanism is bound to make everything kinda go to sh1t.”
  • The EA/Saudi Deal: A rare post about BUSINESS now – except it’s not so much about BUSINESS as it is about soft power and geopolitics, and how everyone’s favourite pivoting petrostate is continuing its gameswatching project after its efforts over the past 8-10 years to cosy up to the eSports community by pouring a fcuktonne of money into it. This feels like smart analysis of the hows, whys and wherefores of the whole deal, which – and you might be surprised by this – seems to have benefited Jared Kushner…not insignificantly!
  • Reddit Guys: Charlie Kirk getting ventilated feels like literally YEARS ago, but, er, turns out it wasn’t; this is a really good piece on Max Read’s newsletter about ‘Reddit Guys’, people like the shooter who were very online, not very funny, a bit awkward, memepilled…honestly, there was something very odd about this because I realised that the person being described here was…quite a lot like one of my little brothers (rip you poor little fcuks), and how sad and lonely it all sounds. Seriously, pitch “All The Sad Young Posting Men” as a novel concept NOW, you will get bites, 100%: “Kind of cloying, desperate for approval, really liable to get into unfunny in-jokes, furry references. “Hey fascist, catch this”–an epic video game reference.3 I don’t know if you could use the word “epic” in [redacted publication], but that’s really the best word to describe this. He’s trying to be epic. He’s trying to be cool. He’s trying to put these little references to video games and online in-jokes and stuff. And it’s not funny. I know this isn’t the relevant thing here, but I was just immediately struck by how unfunny it was. It’s just making these stupid references to these stupid memes that were old a decade ago.”
  • Notes From China: Jasmine Sun writes about her experiences of visiting Shenzhen, Shanghai and a few other cities – I really enjoyed this, partly because I can’t help but find China fascinating right now (in the main because it seems fairly clear to me that the next 20-ish years will be driven by its culture significantly more than they will be driven by our) and partly because Sun’s open and honest about her thoughts and feelings about the trip, the country and What She Thinks It All Means. This is told through quite a startup/tech/BUSINESS lens, but as long as you bear that in mind I think it’s a fascinating piece of writing and series of observations. “Someone once told me that China is the best place in the world to be a consumer. You can see such innovation shine brightest in the tea-drinking accoutrements: disposable cups for cold-brew that filter out leaves, carrier handles for take-out cups, flavors like Manner’s “osmanthus longjing latte” that actually taste good. Urban hubs feature other exotic conveniences too: battery packs on every block that you can rent for $0.75 an hour and drop off wherever, tiny electric fans to relieve you from 100 degree August days, LED screens in form factors that the West has never seen—building facades, foldable phones, and smart glasses much lighter weight than the Vision Pro. In the Hangzhou spa, we donned pink pajamas; dined on an AYCE buffet of crab, dragonfruit, and coconuts; lay down in camp-themed nap pods; and restored our chakras in Himalayan salt saunas.”
  • The Sugar Daddy Crash: I was not expecting to read a piece about how the parlous state of the employment and wage market have impacted the ability of ‘sugar daddies’ to keep on keeping their, er, ‘charges’ in the style to which they might have become accustomed; this is, in some ways, a very funny piece, as long as you ignore the sort of basic economic horror that underpins all of it; it’s also a lot more explicit about the fact that this is in many, many cases a very straightforward transactional relationship in the traditional ‘oldest profession in the world’ sense rather than some sort of newfangled findom-type arrangement. “For some, sugaring doesn’t look that different from a traditional relationship, with biweekly dates and shared vacations. The way they see it, all relationships are transactional in some way — they’re just making the implicit parts explicit. For other daddies, “pay per meet” dates provide a way to fulfill specific fantasies, be with more beautiful women, or get a leg up in a hostile dating market. “I’ve been with models, people who posed for Playboy,” says Jay. “And also everyday girls who are better-looking than what I’d get on the dating scene.”” MY DUDE, YOU ARE PAYING FOR SEX FFS.
  • The Crisis PR Industry: Despite having worked in PR for quite a long time, I have never done celebrity-type work (thank Christ) – as such, the world described in this piece, all about the behind-the-scenes work done by various teams of publicists and, more grubbily, astroturfers or bot army owners, was entirely new to me. It is a GREAT read, although you will want a brisk shower after reading it.
  • An Oral History of Deltron3030: I didn’t realise that this album turned 25 this year – this piece is very much one for the fans, but if you remember it with nostalgic fondness (and you really, really should) then you will like this article looking back at its genesis and speaking to the three principals behind its genesis.
  • The Product of the Railways is the Timetable: Ok, fine, I know that this sounds DEATHLY DULL, but I promise you that ACTUALLY it’s a really interesting essay about what the important parts of systems or processes are, and how this can, should and does inform the strategy for the running of said railways. IT IS NOT REALLY ABOUT TRAINS I PROMISE YOU COME BACK!
  • Self-Help Books Are Turning Us Into Cnuts: Oh, ok, fine, I am possibly giving it a SLIGHTLY stronger title than the editors at the NYT did – basically, though, that is very much the thrust of this article, which argues that the current wave of self-help literature (and indeed the general ‘self-help industrial complex’ around it, comprising podcasts and TikTokers and YouTubers and and and and) is, fundamentally, selfish and solipsistic and is encouraging people to focus solely on their own wants and desires and perceived wellbeing at the exclusion of all others, and that this is…not good? I mean, look, I have never read a self-help book and the only part of my self that I am interested in optimising is the ‘how quickly and painlessly can I die when I decide I have had enough of this sh1t’ part, but based on my interactions with, well, EVERYONE ELSE over the past decade or so I can certainly say that this *feels* right.
  • Returning To Narnia: Ok, you will need to have read the Chronicles of Narnia books to make this worthwhile – and to have at least a passing recollection of their contents – but if you do then this will be a TREAT. Nathan Goldwag revisits all 7 of the Narnia books as an adult, capturing his feelings on revisiting his childhood but also analysing them as both stories and works of Christian allegory (Goldwag is not a Christian, to be clear) – seriously, if you were the sort of kid who read these over and over and over again (hello!) then this will speak to something deep in your childish soul. This is part 1 – part 2 is linked at the bottom of the post. Honestly, this is LOVELY.
  • The Flag of Ahab: A great – if LONG – essay about charisma, specifically charismatic characters in literature, and what qualities ‘charisma’ requires a character to possess, and how that reflects the ways in which charisma manifests itself in characters in the real world…this is just excellent writing, smart and interesting and compelling throughout, and you don’t even need to have read the works it references (least of all Moby Dick) to enjoy and get something from this, promise.
  • Going To Fake Oxford: Did you know that at some point in the mid-90s there was a private University just outside Oxford which fooled a bunch of Americans into thinking it was part of the ACTUAL Oxford University, and which convinced them to pay money to travel across the world to go to an institution which, while being physically proximate to the real thing, very much wasn’t? WELL YOU DO NOW! This is a great story – I love how totally unrepentant the guy behind it is, and, while you can obviously make allowances for the fact that we’re in a pre-web era and as such fact-checking was trickier than it is now, you do sort of feel that the yanks here could possibly have done a TINY bit more due diligence than they in fact ended up doing.
  • Hanging With The Witches: The FT really is the most interesting newspaper in the UK at the moment, which feels like a mad thing for someone who doesn’t have a proper job and who doesn’t understand either business or, really, money to say – but it’s true! Here is Jemima Kelly writing about her experience of hanging out with witches – this is interesting and open and non-judgmental, and generally just a good read: “Aspinall discovered she was a witch when she was a teenager and realised she could “manifest things” for herself (making boys fancy her was one), though she kept her gift largely private for a long time, afraid of a negative reaction. After coming across a couple of witchcraft pages on Facebook that seemed inauthentic, she decided to set up a coven with a social media presence of its own: the Coven of Gaia, which now has 19 members aged 32 to 70. One of those is my dance partner Mark Ashley, 64, one of three male witches in the coven, an auctioneer who appears on the TV programme Bargain Hunt. I initially made the mistake of calling him a “wizard” (in my defence he is the exact image of what that word conjures up) but he corrects me. “Wizard’s a bit Harry Pottery,” he says. “I’m a witch, which in old English just meant ‘wise person’; it was gender-non-specific.””
  • All The Young Dudes: The second week in a row in which I’m featuring a piece on older female sexuality, which I promise is just a coincidence – this is another really good piece by Sari Botton, on ageing, on finding (and being found) attractive, on gender politics and the differing ways in which men and women are taught to expect that desire works… it’s funny and personal and I felt GOOD after reading it, and perhaps you will too.
  • The 5g Conspiracy King: We all know that we’re living in a time of crackpot theories and lunatic fringes, but I do like a sensitively-written dispatch from the edges; this is a very good piece of journalism by Jake Shepherd in The Dispatch, about a man who’s rallying the troops against 5g – I think what struck me most about this was that, at heart, this feels quite a lot like…a lot of lonely people finding community, which I’m increasingly starting to believe is the root cause of a metric fcuktonne of mad radicalisation at present: “As the founder of the political group Save Us Now, Steele regularly appears at rallies and addresses more than 20,000 subscribers on his Telegram channel. “Trafalgar Square was a big turnout,” Steele, now in his mid-60s, told me earlier this year from his home in Gateshead. “It was brilliant.” He was wearing a pale-yellow shirt and his signature black rectangular wraparound sunglasses. They were, he explained in a thick Geordie accent, designed to shield his eyes from what he believes are harmful microwaves emitted by 5G towers, streetlights and traffic lights…Steele’s theories do not end there. He believes the defence industry exerts “total control” over extreme weather events. He speaks of satanic cults — which include P Diddy and Justice Secretary David Lammy — and their murderous agendas. “My whole life is wrapped into exposing this criminality,” he said, adding that he was currently facing legal action on “the front foot and the back foot””
  • I Don’t Want To Be This Kind of Animal Anymore: Our final longread this week is about perennial Curios obsession Disco Elysium, the stellar videogame which, I maintain, is the best book I have ever played and the best game I have ever read, and how the manner in which the player reconstructs the protagonist into whatever shape they want is analogous to the trans experience, and I found this beautiful and smart and sad, and it made me look at the game in a way I hadn’t done previously, and, even if you’ve not played it, I think this is a lovely bit of writing which deserves an audience.

By Ofer Dabush

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS !:

 

Webcurios 25/09/25

Reading Time: 36 minutes

 

You know, I haven’t felt nostalgic for the experience of attending political party conferences for…well, never, as it happens, they are fcuking AWFUL things. If you accept that  ‘politics is rock and roll for ugly people’ (and it really, really is), then Conference is Glastonbury – gossip and hedonism and the opportunity to spend four days fcuked off your tits in a cloistered environment almost-entirely divorced from reality, and, in general, unless you’re a particularly-politics-poisoned sort there is literally no worse experience than having to spend 96 hours breathing the same air as people who have STRONG FEELINGS about fringe meetings and how best to organise a truly democratic leadership process.

This year, though, I wouldn’t actually mind attending Labour Conference, mainly because there’s something almost…fun about these events when they’re overtaken by the scent of blood in the water, very much the case now with the Burnham wagons being mobilised and Bad News coming left, right and centre (on which point, does anyone else feel that it’s…coincidental how many unhelpful leaks there have been about people in Labour’s inner circle since the unfortunate business of Lord Mandelson and the Epstein Files? No?), and I think that this weekend is going to see some deliciously-poisonous gossip and some pointed positioning as the jockeying for next June’s seemingly-inevitable leadership contest begins in earnest.

Then again, I also remember the moment when I realised definitively that I had to quit the lobbying industry before I murdered someone – it was at Labour Conference in 2004, at about 3am, annihilated on booze and alone in some bar, watching as Oona King and, yes, Andy Burnham sang a karaoke version of ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ and I realised that I hated every single person I was currently sharing air with with a passion that was bordering on dangerous. A month later I had handed in my notice, and now here I am writing a newsletter about ‘stuff on the internet’ to YOU, dear anonymous reader. So, in some small way, Web Curios is Andy Burnham’s fault. FFS Bambi, you cnut.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios. and you probably didn’t want to read the preceding three paras about UK politics but you should know by now that what you want matters to me not one iota.

 By Maud Madsen

WHY NOT KICK OFF THIS WEEK’S CURIOS WITH AN EXCELLENT AND FREEWHEELING AND PLEASANTLY, APPROPRIATELY ECLECTIC MIX SENT TO ME BY READER JESS PRICE WHICH IS DESIGNED TO BE AN IMAGINED SOUNDTRACK TO THE NEW PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON FILM (AND THEREFORE ALSO TO THE PYNCHON BOOK ON WHICH IT IS BASED!)? 

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO SUGGEST THAT ALL OF YOU CONCERNED ABOUT THE UK ID CARD STUFF TAKE A MOMENT TO CONSIDER EXACTLY HOW LIKELY IT IS THAT THE UK GOVERNMENT IS GOING TO BE ABLE TO DELIVER A COMPLICATED, CONTROVERSIAL, UNPOPULAR IT PROJECT WITHIN A SINGLE PARLIAMENT, PT.1:  

  • Pink Website: You don’t, if you ask me – I appreciate noone did, but it is 704am and I am sleepy and I hope you will forgive me this slight bit of authorial sleight-of-hand as I attempt to muster up the motivation to write this fcuker rather than just going back to bed where it is warm and safe – see enough truly baffling websites anymore; ok, fine, I know I regularly feature things in here where my overriding descriptor is basically ‘I don’t really know what’s going on here’, but that, if I’m honest, is more to do with me being a lazy and ineffectual Virgil than it is the true inscrutability of the webproject in question. Not this time, though – Pink Website is a WONDERFUL, curious, mysterious and CREEPY little throwback to a time of ARGs and curious, fictional rabbitholes, a website which is also a portal to a strange, unsettling and, yes, fine, not a *little* bleak bit of storytelling about the end of the world (or is it?). Click the link and you’re taken to a countdown to the end of the world – from there…Gah, no, I don’t want to tell you much more about this, it’s far more interesting if you just feel the shape of it yourself. You won’t know what to do, but that’s ok – just…click around, is the only advice I can give you. Eventually the bones of a story will emerge, about DreamLucy and the apocalypse, and you will start to get a feel for the particular tone and vibe of the piece – this is creepy and sad and confusing and sort-of beautiful, and I really really like it a lot.
  • NobleMobile: What, do you think, would convince you to spend less time on your phone? Legislation? Threats? The sudden and inexplicable overnight loss of all your digits? How about MONEY??? Should the answer very much be the final one of those, you might be interested in the Noble Mobile proposition, a US proposition which offers Americans the chance to sign up to its network and, er, earn money back based on how little data they use each month, the idea being that this incentivises you to spend less time on your mobile scrolling through ephemeral bullsh1t and more time, I don’t know, observing the slow erasure of your country’s democratic institutions and processes by a lunatic demagogue. This, honestly, feels like a genuinely-dumb idea – if nothing else it feels like QUITE an easy thing to scam simply by ensuring you use WiFi or just get hotspotted by your mate with an all-you-can-eat dataplan, but I am going to assume that the people behind this aren’t total morons and that the $50 a month basic plan includes a LOT of fat, and the discounts are pretty small to ensure there’s a minimal profit margin baked in to the offering regardless of how little data people do in fact end up using. Basically I don’t think this is ever going to a) catch on; or b) make any sort of meaningful difference to the way that anyone actually uses their phone (after all, people who are addicted to something famously tend to keep on seeking out the thing regardless of financial benefits/disbenefits to themselves – demand for skag from heroin addicts tends to be fairly price-inelastic, you may have noticed), but it’s an interesting idea which I think probably has a few pivot-y usecases which it might be interesting to explore.
  • The Ig Nobel Winners 2025: This feels like I am a week late – which, fine, I am, but these came out a week ago and JUST too late for last week’s Curios, so this is basically the linky equivalent of me sheepishly offering you a slightly past-its-best carrot or stale biscuit or something. BUT! What a tasty carrot-slash-biscuit this is, regardless of freshness! The 2025 crop of winners of he Ig Nobel award for the most pointless-sounding piece of scientific research of the past 12 months is, as ever, a wonderful testament to both human curiosity and the generally-accommodating nature of academia; I do wonder whether by this point every single research scientist in the world is allowed to undertake one project solely for the purposes of securing an Ig Nobel nomination, because otherwise I am baffled as to how any of these got signed off. Is there any conceivable scientific reason as to why any researchers would need to spend time investigating whether “from an engineering design perspective, how foul-smelling shoes affect the good experience of using a shoe-rack”? Also, what the fcuk does that even *mean*? Anyway, there are some lovely, dumb-sounding pieces of academic work referenced in here (which are also, obviously, SERIOUS AND COMPLEX EXAMPLES OF THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD), although I refuse to believe that the project looking into cheese clumping in the making of cacio e pepe is anything other than a vital contribution to human knowledge.
  • Find My Parking Cops: In more ‘America is sh1t these days’ news, this project was sadly only live for about 24h before getting comprehensively-nixed by The Man – still, it was a lovely idea why it lasted, and it’s worth sharing even in its now-mothballed state. Find My Parking Cops was a project by Riley Walz, whose work I have featured in here before, which used live data made available by the city of San Francisco to track the location of the various traffic policemen wandering around dispensing tickets, not quite in realtime but by noting the location of their last logged fine – if you want a proper explainer as to the ‘how’ of all this you can read one here, it’s a really smart piece of deduction and implementation. Anyway, it doesn’t work anymore because within a day the city changed something in the way its systems functions and the data that it’s possible to pull, but it’s a glorious idea and it was fun while it lasted. BONUS FUN URBAN TRANSPORT FACT! If you ever happen to go to Rome, you *probably* don’t need to buy any bus tickets; you can just walk on to any bus in the city and, while you *technically* need a ticket to access the network there are in fact only about 30-odd ticket inspectors working across the whole of the city and (and this is the best bit) THEY NEVER ALL WORK AT THE SAME TIME, meaning that your statistical likelihood of getting caught is pretty much close to zero (NB – Web Curios is in no way advocating theft, and is also not going to take ANY responsibility should you get your collar felt by a buscop when you’re bumping merrily along Via Del Corso).
  • AI Red Lines: So, three years into the whole generative AI thing – is it a boom? Is it a bubble? Is it going to change EVERYTHING FOREVER? Er, yes! – and despite various petitions and INTERVENTIONS and interviews and doom-laden predictions from scientists and THINKERS and, frankly, any cnut with a public profile and a desire for a bit pf publicity, we’re no closer to any sort of collective agreement as to how best to seek to ensure that whatever we do with this tech doesn’t end up fcuking us in half as a species. BUT! Surely this time it will be different! That, presumably, is the hope for this latest…what, document? Manifesto? Set of loosely-expressed hopes? Anyway, the AI Red Lines here presented are described as “specific prohibitions on AI uses or behaviors that are deemed too dangerous to permit under any circumstances…limits, agreed upon internationally, to prevent AI from causing universally unacceptable risks.” All sorts of FAMOUSES have signed – oh look, it’s Geoffrey Hinton, a man with a seemingly-insatiable desire to be talking head on this stuff despite his ‘interventions’ amounting to nothing more than a lot of vaguely-worried handwaving! – and they are calling for these RED LINES to be agreed upon and implemented internationally by the end of 2026…look, I am not suggesting that having some sort of collective view of How Best To Proceed With This Stuff isn’t a good idea, but, equally, I am not sure exactly what the fcuking point of an OPEN LETTER which basically says ‘yeah, so we need to agree on how to do this so we don’t absolutely banjax ourselves as a species…what? Ideas? No mate, you’d have to ask someone else, we’re only here to make vague requests and garner some media attention’ is. I mean, read this: “The red lines could focus either on AI behaviors (i.e., what the AI systems can do) or on AI uses (i.e., how humans and organizations are allowed to use such systems). The following examples show the kind of boundaries that can command broad international consensus.Note that the campaign does not focus on endorsing any specific red lines. Their specific definition and clarification will have to be the result of scientific-diplomatic dialogues.” Yeah, this is DEFINITELY going to save us all from a rogue machine future. FFS.
  • Dial-A-Poem: Oh, this is lovely! “First launched in 1969 by poet John Giorno, Dial-A-Poem began as a radical experiment: pick up the phone, dial a number, and hear a poem. Today, it’s a global network. Working with partners around the world, Giorno Poetry Systems records contemporary poets reading in their native languages and makes their work available through freely accessible local phone numbers.  This website brings together Giorno’s original recordings alongside those from each international edition in one accessible space. Click the phone to pick it up and hear a poem. Click again to hang up. Click again to hear another.” You heard them, CLICK AND LISTEN TO POETRY!
  • The Dig Archive: Ooh, this is fun, a personal library of…stuff, collected over the years by one Lee Tusman, comprising things that they have found interesting and wanted to preserve and share with others. There’s something so…generous about this, and it made me think that there’s something lovely about the idea of a networked of these sorts of collections, like an infinity of tiny libraries or galleries presenting a snapshot of the culture and artefacts that have shaped a life. What’s in here? WELL I AM GLAD YOU ASKED! “There are the informal rules of composer/musician John Zorn’s improvised “game pieces” that are handed down from musician to musician. There are coloring books and manuals, as well as half-manuals/half-coloring-books from virtuousic psychedelic synth designer Peter Blasser. There are whole books, like the New Art/Science Affinities, a book on the intersection of art and technology, with big photographs and strong artist profiles, which I assign to students in my classes to read but had disappeared from their original website years ago. There are exhibition catalogs, such as for the exhibit FOOD about the same-named artist-run restaurant that included Gordon Matta-Clark within its community. There are teaching activities on the Gee’s bend quilts, from the Philadelpha Museum of Art; conversations on self-hosted feminist servers; user guides for old game-making software Klik and Play; a slide show by artist and graffiti writer Barry McGee; and photographs of the funeral of Kazimir Malevich, which included a truck affixed with the black square to its bumper.” WONDERFULLY random and disparate – one of the documents on here is a very old document explaining how to build a mattress from scratch, and if that doesn’t recommend this link to you then, well, check your fcuking pulse is all I can say.
  • Weight Rocks: I don’t…I don’t quite get this, it’s fair to say, but I would quite like one of you to dig around and find out and perhaps to try and explain it to me at some later date. The site basically lets you, er, buy rocks. There’s nothing special about any of these rocks, as far as I can tell – they don’t appear to be particularly pretty, or to have INTERESTING GEOLOGICAL ELEMENTS, or to have any sort of value whatsoever other than that conferred to them by the website, which is selling them for $50 a pop. Why would you pay $50 for a rock? I DO NOT KNOW.  Pay them money and you will receive your rock, as well as a certificate telling you its “exact weight (documented to the gram) and sequential number (#000001, #000002, etc.)”. Oh, and you will also be able to “access link to your rock in our database”, which I can’t pretend didn’t send me down a pleasingly-silly ‘AUTHENTICATED ON THE ROCKCHAIN’ mental rabbithole. Why? WHY NOT BUY A ROCK, LIVE A LITTLE. Shipping will begin on 1 November, apparently, so if you’re in the market for a unique Christmas gift then, well, look no further.
  • Beads: Would you like a website that lets you create geometric arrangements of digital glass beads in a sort-of square lattice pattern? No? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? Look, *you* may not think you need or want this but you are mistaken and so I am, with all respect, going to give it to you anyway. CLICK THE LINK, MANIPULATE THE SOOTHING BEADS.
  • Will It Lamp?: My maternal grandfather was in many respects a curious man, with some unusual pastimes and qualities – some more acceptable, like making homemade cobnut booze, some less acceptable, like his steadfast refusal to abandon fascism as his political ideology of choice long after the Second World War had ended – but one of the more benign was his compulsion to make lamps out of anything he could get his hands on (he went through a period around the Italia90 World Cup of making lamp versions of the weirdly-cubic tournament mascot Ciao, which drove my grandmother fcuking insane). Anyway, my granddad would have been deeply confused by and suspicious and social media, though I have a sneaking suspicion that he would probably have quite liked the unprecedented quantities of near-naked female flesh it gave him access to via his phonescreen, but he would have LOVED this TikTok account in which people attempt to see if they can, er, make a lamp out of various things. SPOILER: you can basically make a lamp out of ANYTHING with a plug, a bulb and some wiring, so this isn’t exactly laden with tension, but it’s nice and craft-y and sort-of soothing, and you might enjoy it if you’re the sort of person who likes to spend their weekends Making Things rather than cycling frantically between the twin state poles of ‘drunk’ and ‘wanting to cry’.
  • Jelly Gummies Gifs: The Giphy page of a digital artis working under the moniker of ‘Jelly Gummies’, who makes grotesque animations that look as though they feature creatures that have been crafted from that expanding foam that you often see used in cavity walls. Yes, I know, but it WILL make sense when you click the link, I promise you (it might also make you feel a bit queasy, but that’s your problem rather than mine).
  • Bluefacts: Would YOU like a lightweight profile-analysing tool for increasingly-moribund-feeling lefty bubble platform Bluesky? GO ON THEN HERE YOU ARE! Plug in any account name you like and you will get served a bunch of data about said account – its relative popularity in the grand Bluesky scheme of things, famous or influential accounts that follow it, etc etc. This site is where that ‘ranking of most-engaged-with accounts on Bluesky’ screengrab that did the rounds this week came from – the one which proved that a significant proportion of the site is made up of annoying ‘RESIST’-style US liberals – and you can also get information about the fastest-growing new profiles, and see the ‘top posts’ of the past 24h…the last of these is an interesting and illustrative snapshot of why the site is, in many respects, as po-faced and annoying as its detractors say it is (sample high-performing post at the time of writing: “I miss the days when Obama could just post his summer playlist instead of dire warnings” OH GOD JUST LET THE MAN GO FFS IT IS IN THE PAST HE AND IT ARE NOT COMING BACK), but it’s also a nice reminder that, if you use it smartly and curate your feed, you can basically ignore all of the predictably-tedious US politics stuff and actually still have quite a nice time.
  • TwoSlice: A font! Which is TWO PIXELS HIGH! And, weirdly, somehow still just about readable despite that. I challenge any of you with admin access to a significant website to install this across the whole thing and leave it like that til Monday. GO ON LIVE A LITTLE.
  • Jan: One for the techiest amongst you, or those who REALLY want to mess around with LLMs in a semi-serious way; Jan is an interesting project which basically offers a wrapper for all sorts of different open source LLMs, from Meta’s LLAMA to Mistral and beyond, or a way of pulling in GPT or Claude, all running locally on your machine, all within a seemingly-pleasant-looking interface. There’s a whole bunch of stuff on here about what you can do to integrate Jan with your email systems and your on-device files, and, if you’re serious about tinkering with The Machine in a more practical and direct way than just asking it to write you a story about ‘sexy bake off’ (I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE LIKE) then this might be worth looking at.
  • Pointcloud Garden: Oh, I really like this! Basically this lets you select from a dropdown to pick one of a selection of different garden views, which are then rendered in your browser in a sort of Kinect-ish, pointillist abstract multicoloured cloud (which is still semi-recognisably a garden). There’s something both weirdly-retro about the look of this, reminiscent of a certain style of game art from the 90s, and also oddly soothing; I could honestly look at these twinkling pixel gardens for hours (so tired, so very tired).
  • Niche Design: A reader writes! Specifically Itay Dreyfus, who emailed me to say “Just released a new project of mine…It’s a self-published project exploring where design flourishes in the age of sameness. It’s a mix of essays and interviews with the (poetic?) web people like are.na, Kinopio, mmm.page, Light Phone, and many more.” Ok, so this is an ACTUAL THING YOU HAVE TO BUY but, well, I am a sucker for this sort of small publishing project, and I think there might be a few of you who might be in the market for “A zine for designers and product makers seeking meaning beyond metrics, inviting you to rethink our culture through the ways we design.” See what you think.
  • Yamanotes: OH THIS IS LOVELY! I was hitherto-unaware of the fact that the each station on Tokyo’s Yamanote line (and, presumably, all the other lines of the city’s train network) has its own special melody that plays when trains depart the station; this site, which was apparently created as a companion to a train driving game set in Tokyo, lets you play all the different little melodies at will. Why? WHY NOT YOU JOYLESS FCUK??? Click the link, play around and then spend some time thinking about what sounds would be most appropriate to signal arrival or departure at YOUR local station! Actually, fcuk, this feels like a GREAT little digital project you could do with the tube map and the ability to upload audio files; anyone want to make this? ANYONE??? Christ.
  • Birds’n’Bass: Ornithology and amens, united at last! A TikTok account that combines footage of birds with drum’n’bass to surprisingly-effective ends. Click the link and realise for the first time how much an avian aesthetic would add to your next rave.

By Robert Euwe

NEXT, WHY NOT RETURN TO SADEAGLE’S CREPUSCULAR CORNISH HIDEWAY TO ENJOY AN HOUR OF HIS EXCELLENT RECORD COLLECTION? THERE IS NO GOOD REASON! 

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO SUGGEST THAT ALL OF YOU CONCERNED ABOUT THE UK ID CARD STUFF TAKE A MOMENT TO CONSIDER EXACTLY HOW LIKELY IT IS THAT THE UK GOVERNMENT IS GOING TO BE ABLE TO DELIVER A COMPLICATED, CONTROVERSIAL, UNPOPULAR IT PROJECT WITHIN A SINGLE PARLIAMENT, PT.2:  

  • Dopeloop Beatmaker: Ok, fine, I appreciate in-browser drumloop makers are not exactly a rare commodity online, particular in the era of the stellar 10k Drum Machines project, but it’s rare to come across one that is as simple and satisfying to use as this particularly example; apart from anything else, I spent a good 15 minutes playing with this earlier in the week and wasn’t ONCE able to come up with anything that sounded awful or arrhythmic (ok, fine, that’s literally impossible based on the software) or that wasn’t basically…quite good? Effectively I think that if you have even a modicum of musical talent – and, quite possibly, even if you don’t – this is a foolproof way of making some pretty decent drum loops in doublequick time.
  • Generativ Design: No, it’s not a typo ACTUALLY, they have decided to leave off the ‘e’ and who am I to argue? NO FCUKER, etc etc. Generativ Design (Christ but does it upset me misspelling it like that, though – oh, hang on, it’s because they couldn’t buy the domain with the proper spelling, fine, I forgive them) is a nice set of little digital design toys which let you create different sorts of graphical and textual designs; rotating word grids and geometric patterns and gradient wave lines and and and…Per the blurb, “This site is a preliminary research prototype that combines a technique called generative art, which draws graphics using code, with practical applications for visual identity.” There’s LOADS of little toys on here that you can use to make pleasant visual objects with, each playing with a particular on-page element, and if nothing else this is probably quite a useful resource for inspiration around graphic design and typography and the like. Although, honestly, like I’d fcuking know, I haven’t had visual inspiration since approximately 1983.
  • Tinter Battles: What do you DO for a living? Now I come to think of it I am genuinely curious – who ARE you? Seriously, if any of you read this and don’t mind indulging my curiosity I would love to know what it is that you do to keep the wolf from the door and a roof over your heads (presuming of course that you’re not reading this while sleeping rough and starving – and, er, if you are, please also get in touch because, well, I feel the least I could do is offer to help), and whether or not your career is the sort of thing which can be turned into a COMPETITIVE SPECTATOR SPORT. Many can’t – I struggle to imagine how exactly one might turn public relations into a high-octane contest, for example; head-to-head press release writing? A points-based crisis comms battle? Dear Christ what a miserable thought – but some professions seem TAILOR MADE to be turned into televised entertainment, such as the storied vocation of, er, WINDOW-TINTER! If you’re not certain what the fcuk that actually means, I’m talking about the people who are employed to attach microthin layers of tinted plastic to glass to act as a shield against glare, light, etc, and who, according to this AMAZING TikTok account, occasionally engage in PITCHED BATTLES to see who is the best at, er, affixing very thin sheets of plastic to glass. Look, you may not think that this sounds compelling, but click the link and come back to me sweaty-palmed after enjoying the nailbiting spectacle of two midwestern men pushing some coloured film REALLY tightly into the corners of a patio door. I feel that if I went to a certain type of bar in a certain type of semi-rural town in the US I would 100% see this on a bunch of TV screens while I drank.
  • Ocean Photographer of the Year 2025: SO MUCH DAMP BEAUTY! The annual celebration of excellence in underwater photography returns for its 2025 edition, with, as ever, some truly spectacular shots which are slightly-diminished by the fact that the website makes such a pig’s ear of presenting them – the navigation is horrible and requires TOO MANY CLICKS to see all the images, which, fine, is a pathetic and entitled complaint but also, look, I see a LOT of websites and we’ve been doing this stuff for 30-odd years now and I sort of think that in grand old 2025 you should probably have at least one of your fingers snapped if you let a site ship with this sort of UX (other oddly-violent and borderline-fascistic opinions are also available!). Anyway, my personal favourite is this one, partly because I am quite sleepy (did I mention I am quite sleepy) and I want to bury my face in it something chronic (inevitable piscine smell be damned).
  • Guardian Haiku: A cute project which attempts to pull haikus from headlines on the Guardian newspaper’s website – except there’s something a bit screwy in the code, which means that a lot of these are all wrong, syllabically-speaking. Still, it feels churlish to complain about something fun that someone has made that is fun and frivolous and so, well, I shan’t.
  • The World Map of Food: Ooh, I am a sucker for a hubristic, doomed attempt to create a definitive global guide to stuff! This is the attempt of one Djour, who I think lives in Philadelphia and works in food service and who, per his explanation, ‘hates food map ratings’ and so has created a map of what HE considers to be the best food in Philadelphia (and New York, and Jersey), and is now expanding to create a map of the best food EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD! This is a…well, it’s a frankly mad and impossible endeavour, leaving aside the subjectivity inherent in ‘best’, but hats off to the man for trying; the world map sources information from a bunch of different places, cross-referencing to come up with some sort of attempted definitive list; as ever I ‘tested’ it by looking at London and, honestly, it’s an interesting if VERY partial selection of places; wherever he’s sourcing this stuff from is an odd mix of the very fancy and quite new (Row on 5) and the…weird (Bradley’s Spanish Bar?!), but I quite like the fact that it feels oddly, idiosyncratically different, and so as such this is possibly worth a bookmark for next time you travel somewhere new and want to let some bloke from Philadelphia guide your culinary decisions.
  • Peak Jut: A website helping you find the mountains around the world with the biggest ‘jut’, which, look, I can’t help but parse as…a bit rude? Christ, I have been online TOO LONG. From the homepage, “Jut is a measure of a mountain’s rise above surroundings and impressiveness, considering both its base-to-peak height and base-to-peak steepness. Jut reveals dramatic landforms that traditional metrics such as elevation and prominence don’t do justice to—huge mountain faces, towering spires, sheer cliffs, deep canyons, and more…” So basically this is a ranking of how impressive-looking mountains are, which, on balance, feels like quite a cool way of thinking about it; fcuk height, fcuk ‘how hard is it to summit’, let’s just worry about ‘how mountain-y does it look, and how COOL?’.What’s reapply impressive about this – pointless, but impressive! – is the map which lets you click ANYWHERE in the world and get details of that location’s, er, ‘jut’ (nope, still sounds rude, can’t help it); no idea why you would want or need this, but, well, here it is!
  • Hallowe’en Radio: Ok, it’s a month early but it feels FCUKING AUTUMNAL and I am cold and so I feel justified in preemptively bring you this site which offers a bunch of different hallowe’en-themed radio stations offering ‘spooky’ music, old stuff, music from scary films…you get the gist. The site’s not been updated for a year or so but it still works – at least it does at the time of writing – so feel free to have a play (if nothing else the ‘atmosphere’ channel is something you could very easily unsettle friends and family with should you have access to a concealed, internet-enabled speaker and some gullible people in your life).
  • Blippo: Ok, this is once again an ACTUAL THING YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR – equally, though, it’s only a tenner and it’s REALLY interesting from the point of view of storytelling and narrative design, and I think a lot of you might find it curious enough to warrant a punt. Blippo is a…I want to say ‘game’, but it’s not, not really because the interactive ludic elements are very light; instead, it’s morelike a sort of sketch show or, maybe a semi-ARG, presented as a series of TV programmes from a strange alien universe, which, by watching, let you into a separate, parallel narrative world. Look, this is REALLY hard to explain – or at least it is for me – but despite the fact that I am really not interested in telly AT ALL I have really enjoy experiencing this this week; it feels to me a bit more like theatre or sketch comedy than it does anything else, and there’s something SO pleasing about the general vibe of all of the shows, and the performances are charming and fully-committed, and…Christ, look, why don’t you read this excellent…review? Explainer? Whatever, just read this and then see what you think.
  • Super Mario Bros Remastered: This requires you to DOWNLOAD STUFF – the original Super Mario game ROM, and then this ‘remastered’ filepack – and as such is *moderately* technical, but, honestly, this stuff is really easy these days and it feels worth learning about in order to access this EXCELLENT reworking of the original NES title; with it you can play the original Mario but with FUN NEW BELLS AND WHISTLES – the ability to pick different graphical styles, new playable characters, whole new sets of levels, A LEVEL EDITOR…! Look, if you have any sort of nostalgic tie to the original SMB then this will be catnip to you, I promise.
  • Colourmuse: Ok, this is HARD – too hard for me, with my old person’s reflexes and slow fingers – but you may find you have more success with this nicely-executed and conceptually-fun take on the bullet hell shooter; it does that whole ‘change the colour of your ammo to damage different enemy types’-thing which this genre loves and which to me always feels a bit like the ludic equivalent of rubbing one’s tum and patting one’s belly at the same time, but, per my earlier comment, I am sh1t at these sorts of games and always have been and you may be less of a malco loser than I am (but, if you are, please don’t gloat, it’s unseemly).
  • Bloquecitos: A nice, simple, ‘merge the pieces’ game – match tile groupings based on their patterns, try and keep going for as long as possible til the screen clogs up. This is very gentle and soothing and the music is just LOVELY, and you can happily lose 15 minutes on this so why don’t you go and take a break and I will be here waiting for you. No, really, I will.
  • Knotilus: Fibonacciplay! Per the explanation, “find the three solution sequences using any of the 12 numbers in the puzzle, where each number is the sum of the two preceding it as in the fibonacci sequence”. Which, now I read that back, is a HORRIBLE explanation for what is in essence quite a simple game, so why don’t you just work it out yourself? I have faith in you.
  • Jelly Well: Drag the jellies into groups of five or more to make them disappear. The physics in this is REALLY satisfying, but the best bit by miles is the sound effects. LISTEN TO THE ADORABLE JELLY SOUNDS!!
  • Mot’s Grand Prix: Jesus, someone’s actually built a full-on mini F1 game in Pico8, which feels like an insane achievement. This is far, far too hard for me – I have no idea what is going on, I can’t take the corners and I have no idea how the fcuk you’re meant to know when the turns are coming up because the resolution is so low you can’t see more than 10 ahead of you – but if you’re less ludicly-incompetent than I am then you may have more success. I am slightly in awe that this exists.
  • Chark: Finally this week, “what if chess, but a roguelike card game?” WHAT INDEED???? This shouldn’t really work at all, and will obviously upset chess purists no end, being as it is a horrible bastardisation of the classic game, but, equally, it’s quite fun and I found myself coming back to it again and again this week when I was meant to be writing an article about UK AI policy which, fine, may not be a HUGE recommendation (I would, honestly, probably have taken to grating my patella as a way of avoiding that particular task) but it’s all I have for you. No, come back, this is good, honest!

By Roger Ballen

OUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS CRACKING SELECTION OF UK FUNK, SOUL, JAZZ AND AFRO-ROCK FROM THE 70s AND 80s WHICH IS HONESTLY ABSOLUTELY ACE AND WHICH IS CURATED BY DJ WRONGTOM!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Craigslist Horses: Via Laura Olin’s excellent newsletter comes this Tumblr, which is about horses and, specifically, about ads for horses on Craigslist which apparently often feature horses with INCREDIBLY ODD PROPORTIONS. Could one of the Curios horse enthusiasts (you must be out there) please explain what this is about, please?
  • Context-Free Patent Art: “Art culled from a wealth of video game and tech-related patents and patent applications, presented without explanation.” This is baffling in every single conceivable way. WHAT ARE THESE PATENTS FOR? WHAT DO THEY DO? WHY DO THEY LOOK LIKE WEIRD ALIEN SIGILS?

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Rascal Salvage Vintage: The Insta feed of a junkyard in New Jersey, which occasionally features some EXCELLENT odd stuff; this week’s highlights include the head of Falcor the luckdragon from the Neverending Story film adaptation and an EXCELLENT giant fibreglass (I think) Batman head.
  • AI With Glock: It’s been a while since I’ve featured a good ‘weird/horrible AI stuff’ instafeed, so let me correct that with this one – there are lots of nice (horrible) little corners of latent space here, my personal favourite being ‘homunculi made of food, eating themselves’, but see which you like (hate) most!

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • Boriswave: An excellent piece in the Guardian, this, explaining the relatively-recent introduction of the term ’Boriswave’ into the mainstream political discourse of the UK thanks to Nigel ‘for someone who isn’t a racist myself, I sure am popular with a lot of people who really are very fcuking racist indeed!’ Farage and his ‘send ‘em all back!’ rhetoric from the start of the week, and what it can tell us about the way in which far-right online terminology and thinking get trojan horsed into the mainstream via the increasingly-unhinged frothing of columnists in the Telegraph and the likes of this frog-faced ambulant tumour. The main point to take away here is that the use of terms like this in actual, real-life political discussion offers you a very real example of how the right (in the UK, but also internationally) is now openly taking its positions and language from actual, proper bigots and racists and borderline-nazis on the web, bringing them into the mainstream and, by so doing, shifting the overton window even further towards the point whereby someone tries to throw all the foreigners out of it. This is depressing, but it feels like a really important point is being made here that isn’t really being discussed as openly as it ought to be.
  • Fascistic Dream Machines: Claire Wilmot writes in the LRB about the use of AI in the propagation of right-wing narratives online, and the way it is being used not to fool people into believing in spoofed video but instead to create visual proof of ‘what people feel’. The videos of hordes of threatening looking men arriving in massed ranks on British-looking beaches aren’t real and they’re not meant to be seen as real; they’re a vehicle for feeling, in much the same way in which racist cartoons or caricatures might have been 20 or 40 or, er, 110 years ago. I thought this paragraph was particularly telling: “This year, in the run-up to the 13 September rally, I spoke to new recruits on far-right Telegram channels. A woman from Norfolk explained that she shared AI images of young white women cowering under the gaze of leering migrants because ‘you can’t photograph them, or they’ll call you racist.’ A man in Leeds said he was creating images of blonde children smiling and holding signs that read ‘send them back’ because ‘this country belongs to our children, and they can’t speak for themselves.’ A Londoner spreading deepfakes of white women saying they don’t feel safe ‘because of migrants’ told me impatiently that everyone knows the videos aren’t real, but I was missing the point: ‘It’s about us showing everyone what’s really happening.’”
  • The Silicon Valley Politics Shift: Or, ‘how they all stopped pretending that they cared about anything other than money’, or ‘how actually social mores and prevailing attitudes are important because they can occasionally act as shame-based constraints on people who would otherwise, it turns out, fcuk the world in half in exchange for another few points on the stock’. This piece in WIRED by Steven Levy probably won’t tell you anything you don’t already know in terms of the shift in apparent political leanings undergone by Zuckerberg and the rest over the past few years, but I did think that it was interesting tonally, partly because of the fact that Levy, who’s been covering this stuff for AGES and knows these people reasonably well, gives them a pretty easy ride throughout and, as far as I can tell, seems to think the only reason that their current position and quisling attitude towards the existing US regime is wrong is because it might not be great for business long-term (morals? PAH!). The other thing that struck me about this was the complete unwillingness of Levy to at any point acknowledge that the tendency of outlets such as WIRED to treat these people as genius magic wizard savants over much of the past 15 years might *possibly* have also meant that their motives and behaviours weren’t scrutinised as much or as closely as they might have been because people exactly like him were too busy clapping like seals at how SMART and AMAZING their special billionaire tech pals are.
  • The Rise of the User: The third and final part of Ars Technica’s history of the web, this takes us through what we would probably recognise as the ‘modern’ web, the bit that we recognise from the late-90s onwards, and the various shifts in ethos that saw us move towards the concept of a user-centric, and user-defined, web experience; again, none of this will be new to you if you’re as online as I sort-of suspect your probably are, but it’s a really neat and usefully-concise potted history of How We Got To Here (sort-of), and makes you realise what a compressed timeframe this has all operated within; I know we’re all sort of vaguely aware of it, but it’s honestly mad to think that online video has only been a thing for 20 years.
  • Huawei’s AI Ambitions: A good piece in Rest of World on how Huawei is looking to take Chinese AI to (certain parts of) the world, positioning itself as the NVIDIA of the Other Bloc, and how it’s going to leverage the past few decades of Chinese penetration into Africa and other markets to effectively push their tech (and, by extension, to push OUT US tech). This is part of the broader conversation about how AI is very much becoming a new tool of power for the world’s major players, and that we’re seemingly pointed at a pretty binary state of affairs where you’re either on the US stack, signed up to Starlink offshoots per our own glorious recent deals with the Americans (weird how Mark Francois isn’t shouting about ‘vassal state’ now when he couldn’t stop saying that fcuking phrase during fcuking brexit), or you’re instead locked into Xi’s AI world. Is this good? What do YOU think?
  • A Profile of Ed Zitron: Regular readers of this newsletter will be aware I am not a huge fan of prominent AI naysayer Ed Zitron, mainly because I very strongly believe he’s audience captured himself into a state of tediously-repetitious fan service; still, I found this profile of him in the FT interesting, partly because of what it says about power in the new media ecosystem (say what you like about him, but this is an impressive degree of clout for someone who’s literally just spaffing out poorly-edited, self-indulgent 10k newsletters each week – WHERE THE FCUK IS MY PROFILE, FT, YOU CNUTS????), partly because the interviewer shares some of my misgivings about the author’s relationship with the subject matter and his audience, partly because it alludes to the fact that his PR company LITERALLY HAS AI CLIENTS FFS, and partly because it paints a picture of someone who really, really wants to be listened to and SEEN, something which was obvious a decade ago back when Zitron was just some English PR guy on Twitter who was mainly known for being an obnoxious d1ck who got into online spats all the time. An interesting character study.
  • India and Nano Banana: A Techcrunch piece about how India is leading the way in terms of usage of Google’s latest image generation technology; this is neither brilliantly-written or a stellar story, but it IS interesting in its depiction of different, specifically non-Western, attitudes towards AI tech; as ever with this stuff I am struck by the extent to which the discourse I am exposed to on the English language web is, in all likelihood, not that which is going to determine the eventual usage trajectory and future direction of this tech because, bluntly put, it’s the huge mass of people in India and elsewhere who are likely to matter more in years to come. Just because Bluesky hates it doesn’t mean d1ck, basically.
  • Tony Blair and AI: A good piece in the New Statesman looking at the Tony Blair Institute (the ‘think tank’ – or, more accurately, ‘thinky agency’ because they will literally do the bidding of whoever’s paying them) and its ceaseless promotion of the brilliance and importance of AI to the UK government, and the almost-certainly-coincidental fact that the TBI has also been funded to the tune of a quarter of a billion quid by Oracle founder Larry Ellison, someone who may just have one or two vested interests in ensuring tech that his company has a foundational interest in gets embedded at the very heart of government. This is excellent reporting, although I am honour-bound to point out that Private Eye have been writing about the Ellison>TBI>Govt links for two years now and so anyone who’s been reading that would know most of this already (so, er, get a subscription! Please!).
  • How You Make A TV Ad With AI: This is actually a case study by an agency called Tool, all about how they made a 45s ad for Land Rover using AI – what I like about this is that they talk you through what they ACTUALLY did, practically, step by step, and explain where AI was used, and how, and where it wasn’t good enough, and the work that needed to be done to bridge the gap between The Machine and the actual video footage; if you’re involved in ‘making content’ and you have people hassling you about AI and what you can do with it and how you can do everything 10x faster and cheaper if only you used The Machine PROPERLY, then you might want to keep this and share it with whoever’s doing the hassling by way of explanation that it’s not actually that simple.
  • How AI Is Fcuking Dating: As if it needed fcuking any further, but this is a compellingly-horrible portrait in New York Mag about all the ways in which people are (mis)using The Machine in their pursuit of someone to exchange mucus with – I can’t speak for you, but there are a couple of friends who keep me regaled with their Tales From The Apps (both women fwiw), and they have both shared examples of chats in which their interlocutor has CLEARLY been LLM-juicing their responses; in one particular instance it looked like the aspirant suitor had run my mate’s whole profile through Claude and was using it to lie about books that he had read, which is I suppose at least admirably thorough. It’s hard to know what to think about this – other than, you know, ‘this is bad!’ – because in theory the idea of talking to someone and getting advice about how to behave towards the potential object of one’s affections is…not per se bad! And yet as soon as that ‘someone’ becomes a black box token prediction engine, it feels…terrible! Still, I am slightly amazed that three years into this whole thing we’re yet to see (or, more accurately, I’m yet to see) anyone going full Diceman and entrusting their whole romantic existence to The Machine – if anyone fancies trying and writing up their experience then, well, you know where to send the link.
  • Building The Mr Beast Empire: I continue to be grimly-fascinated by Jimmy ‘Saddest Man Alive’ Donaldson and his seemingly-joyless pursuit of YouTube numbers and plutocracy (if you have yet to see the clip of him being punched by Mike Tyson, and exhibiting actual human emotion on-camera for the first time in his career, then you need to rectify that now), and this is a really interesting profile of him and, to a greater degree, his business operation, and the man he’s brought in to effectively be the ‘grownup’ and to maybe curb some of the mad spending and generally professionalise the whole setup. One of the oddest things, to my mind, about the manner in which fame has evolved in the 21stC is the extent to which it is no longer enough now to ‘merely’ be globally-renowned, you also need to exhaustively, exploitatively monetise every aspect of that renown across as many verticals as you can get away with; there are kids today whose greatest ambition in life is to be a globally-recognised brand which operates across multiple touchpoints (and you can guarantee that THEY WILL KNOW WHAT THOSE TERMS MEAN), which…I don’t know, feels bad?
  • A Massive Prototype Plane: Ok, this is a BIT dry, but I was slightly staggered by the fact that there is apparently a type of aeroplane in development which will be about a kilometer long (at which point I think we’ll all be forced to confront the fact that everything we know about physics is a lie, because there is no fcuking way in hell that something that size should be able to get airborne) and which will be used to transport wind turbine blades around the world, to unlock the ability to create even larger sources of energy. Which, you know, feels like a good thing! If you discount the massive energy cost of getting the fcuking plane in the air and across the world, but let’s presume that those will be amortised by the lovely green electricity generated by the megaturbines. This is honestly mad, and quite a large part of me expects that we never hear of this project ever again because it sounds simply too improbable for words.
  • The World Tramdriver Championships: Holly Gramazio writes in her newsletter about visiting the recent World Tramdriver Championships in Vienna, which, honestly, sounds like a CRACKING day out (also as a regular reader of Jana’s Zuckersüß newsletter, it looks like Vienna has some truly spectacular places to eat and so I have decided that I am going to visit at some point in the next six months because I really want some top-class cake). Anyway, this is charming and enthusiastic and gives you a real sense of BEING THERE, which is all you can ask for of an account of an eccentric, slightly-pointless event.
  • London’s Pigeon Rescuers: A really cute piece in The Londoner about the volunteers who spend time fixing the fcuked pigeons of the city. As someone who temporarily adopted a pair of feral little skyrats over lockdown, when they nested in my horrid, barren windowbox – I MISS YOU CASILLERO AND DIABLO COME AND VISIT ME ONE DAY – I have a possibly more tolerant attitude towards the vermin than most Londoners do, but even with this broadly-pigeon-friendly attitude I struggle to imagine doing as the people profiled in this piece do and giving up my time to tend the bloggers. Still, one of you may find yourselves INSPIRED to become some sort of avian Samaritan as a result of this, so, well, you’re welcome!
  • Gilbert & George: I feel like I have read a lot of profiles of Gilbert & George over the years, and as such some of the details of their life/work (it seems silly to use two separate terms, and it feels like there maybe ought to be a different, third word to connote a life that *is* the work) are etched into my memory; the habits, the suits, the assistants, the unshakeable air of Tory that the pair project, regardless of the nakedly-transgressive nature of much of their work over the years (however safe and establishment they might feel now), and yet I will never tire of reading about them, perhaps because theirs is a practice that feels very much of the 20thC and therefore very much something whose like we will never see again; people who make their life their performance their work, yes, but perhaps never people who will do so in such a weirdly-situational, isolated way. You don’t get G&G in a post-web world, is what I’m saying. I met them once on a Eurostar, when I found that I was sitting in their seats due to a mixup with the tickets; they were very nice about it, but I couldn’t help but feel that I had participated in a small, temporary installation and I ought to have been remunerated in some small way for my time.
  • After The Summer of Oasis: So after a whole three months of 90s nostalgia revivalism and a surprisingly-small number of deaths (although I still maintain that they’re simply not talking about a few dozen gak-related heart attacks), Ed Gillett in The Quietus looks at What It All Meant. This isn’t hugely-revelatory, but Gillett’s an excellent writer and there are some very good lines throughout the piece – the closing para acts as a nice encapsulation of the whole piece: “There’s a tragic circularity to all of this. A band rightly celebrated for their raucous working-class ideals and radical energy a generation ago are now content for a multinational ticketing company to price-gouge their fans to previously unprecedented levels. A pair of brothers famed for their straightforward common sense have seen that principle curdle, forming a rot at the heart of British life. Stunning songs about escape and transcendence are performed to an audience who’ve watched those same notions ground down to a nub, in a Britain unable to look beyond its own shadow. We dream, for two hours a night, of a world that we were once promised: a brief glimpse of what might have been, enabled and perpetuated by the very same forces that ensure those aspirations will remain forever unfulfilled.”
  • The AI Kids Take San Francisco: After last week’s piece on AI being THE ONLY GAME IN SF and all the kids doing the hustle and the grind, this is basically the same piece except more fun – this is a LOT more about some of the kids in question, who they are and what they want, and what they are doing and why, and while it won’t necessarily make you feel any better about anything (and while it REALLY feels like there are some quite strong gold rush parallels here, and we all remember how well that worked out for 99% of the people involved!), it will make you laugh a lot – crucially, and not something you can always say about pieces like this, it feels affectionate and kind throughout, and not like it’s mocking its subjects (so you don’t have to feel bad AT ALL for laughing at them).
  • Jump In: A short story by Kimaya Diggs about self-harm, sadness and eventually feeling better, this is honest and about as unplatitudinous as you can make something about depression and coming out on the other side(ish). This felt quite familiar in places, and it may feel the same for you too (this can be true even if you’ve never sliced at yourself with anything).
  • Happy Endings: Ok, this isn’t a GREAT piece of writing (I feel a bit bad saying it, but it’s not exactly the usual sort of thing I put in Curios, basically) but I really enjoyed it and thought it was a weirdly-joyful and hopeful-feeling piece of writing. In it, Gail Rice talks about her experience of hiring a male escort for her 70th birthday; this is the second part of this story, after her first attempt proved…unsatisfactory (the original essay is linked from this one, should you want to read both), and, honestly, it’s a really lovely thing to read (and I appreciate that that possibly sounds condescending, but I really don’t mean it to be – it is honest, it’s funny, it’s self-aware and it’s beautifully human).
  • Hanging With Dwayne Johnson: Blah blah blah I don’t watch films blah blah. Anyway, despite that, I OBVIOUSLY know who Dwayne Johnson is – while I don’t care one iota about the man’s cinematic output or indeed his previous wrestling career, I am a sucker for a well-written, high-access actor profile and this is an EXCELLENT example of the genre by Sam Anderson, who writes superbly. Obviously this is part of the promo machine for Johnson’s new film about wrestling – a SERIOUS film, about PAIN, that requires REAL ACTING and, accordingly REAL PROFILES that deal with SERIOUS ISSUES – but it’s SUCH a good interview, from structure to individual sentences, and the subject is an undeniably charismatic character. One thing, though – I did literally say ‘oh fcuk OFF’ out loud at the point where Johnson nopes out of the politics question, because, well, if you’re not a borderline-fash cnut in the US at the moment I think it’s probably quite important you use your massive public platform to say so, and if you don’t then it makes me think that either a) you are in fact a borderline-fash cnut; or b) that you are too concerned at preserving your bankability with the percentage of the country that are borderline-fash cnuts, neither of which strikes me as particularly cool.
  • The Living Phase:Ok, this is quite a hard read, and I appreciate many of you may not be particularly in the market for an honest, unflinching account of what it’s like taking care of a parent while they die of something slow and debilitating, of all the medical crap you have to deal with, and of managing carers, and dealing with hospices, and injecting the fentanyl and all of that fun stuff – don’t worry, you can skip this one and go straight to the end. If, though, you have any personal experience of managing someone’s death then I can’t recommend this essay by Dana Barnes enough; it is remarkably clear-eyed and it had me in pieces at various points, but it’s also the truest and most-relatable account of this process that I have ever read, and I think it’s a brilliant and brave piece of writing.
  • The Good Pervert: Finally this week, a gorgeous piece of writing by David Velasco about their remarkable friend, his life, his death, the art world, queer life and culture, decorum, gossip, society, snobbery…oh God, this is SO good and I want you all to read it. It has a particular chilly beauty I associate with Capote, which you may or may not get, but, regardless, it’s an exceptional piece of writing.

By Oana Stoian

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS !:

 

Webcurios 19/09/25

Reading Time: 38 minutes

 

DID YOU ENJOY THE POMP? DID YOU ENJOY THE CEREMONY? DID YOU ENJOY THE SYCOPHANCY?

Well it doesn’t matter whether you did or not, YOU DON’T COUNT. Only one man counts and he is now safely back in Free Speech Paradise Land having a different selection of lips applied to his perineum, while we wash the taste out of our mouths and hope that a few days of light suction will mean we’re spared the caprices of the mad king for a few months longer.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you’re right, it HAS been a long week.

By Henni Alftan

START THIS WEEK’S CURIOS OFF WITH THIS EXCELLENT, VAGUELY-CINEMATIC-FEELING MIX BY THE RELIABLY TALENTED DJ FOOD! 

THE SECTION WHICH BELIEVES IN FREE SPEECH BUT ALSO, FUNDAMENTALLY, THAT US LATE NIGHT COMEDY TALKSHOWS ARE THE MOST OVERRATED FORMAT IN THE HISTORY OF TELEVISION, PT.1:  

  • A Clock: We begin with something WONDERFUL. You may – or you may not be, what do I know, who the fcuk are you, etc – be aware of an artwork from 2010 called ‘The Clock’ by artist Christian Markley; in case you’re not, it’s a 24h piece of video art which is composed entirely of clips from films which are about the time, all cut together to create a whole day/night cycle from these moments in fiction, with the passage of time being marked by either the hour being mentioned in dialogue or shown on a clock on-screen. For both practical and art world reasons, the work is a touring piece which is only available to see in galleries, meaning your chance of seeing it is entirely dependent on it and you sharing a hemisphere at the same time (and your having the time and inclination to go and check it out) – which is why, to DEMOCRATISE THE ART, a mysterious person known only as THE CLOCKMAKER (look, if that’s what the want to be called) has seen fit to remake the whole thing, ish, based on this shotlist compiled by fans. To access the whole thing you have to pony up a fee – which, honestly, feels reasonable, this is a frankly-insane amount of work – but you also get access to a 10m snippet just by logging in as a free-tier Patreon member and I can’t stress enough how much I recommend it; this really is quite quite wonderful, and I am genuinely quite tempted to chuck THE CLOCKMAKER a few quid so I can return to this at various points during the day to see how it progresses. This is BEAUTIFUL and visually compelling, and despite there being no central narrative thread whatsoever it’s impossible not to start creating your own internally-coherent set of explanations for how the vignettes link, which in itself is its own nested act of storytelling…SO GOOD, click the link and enjoy.
  • Scan Your Can: There is no scanning taking place at this website; there are, to the best of my knowledge, no cans either (of ANY sort, should any perverts from the 1970s be reading this). Instead, this is a VERY strange little webproject – I don’t really know how to describe it to you, but, well, the point of Web Curios is at least to some small extent that I try and communicate this stuff to you, so, well, here goes! It’s basically a sort of branching…what, story? Meditative experience? THERAPEUTIC AID? No clue, but basically your job here is just to turn the volume up, listen along, follow the instructions, click the buttons and SEE WHERE IT TAKES YOU. As ever with stuff like this I have to offer a small warning – I have only followed one particular branch of this rabbit warren to the end, and while that didn’t take me anywhere horrible I can’t vouch that you won’t be at some point be confronted with anything unpleasant should you take a different path to me (but it doesn’t FEEL like it’s going to get snuff-y, in case that acts as some sort of vague reassurance). This is unsettling and weird, but in a good way.
  • Elitist Britain: Those of you reading this from the UK may be SHOCKED to learn that there is a strong, longstanding correlation between ‘having gone to public school’ and ‘being in charge of stuff’ – I KNOW!! This is a newly-launched website presenting data from the Sutton Trust which breaks down, sector by sector, the percentages of people in senior positions who were either public school educated or went to Oxbridge, giving you a neat breakdown of exactly which of the UK’s main industries are most riddled with oldschool elitist bias. There is, perhaps depressingly, nothing in here that’s likely to shock you – most MPs and members of the judiciary and members of the media classes were educated at elite institutions, which is something you have probably noticed if you’ve paid even a passing iota of attention to How Stuff Works here – and if I’m going to be critical (and why the fcuk shouldn’t I? What’s that? Because I’m a useless no-mark who doesn’t actually make or achieve anything? I mean, it’s a fair point but, well, I’ve started, so) I might suggest that the website’s, well, a bit dry, and not very compelling, and does rather present WALLS OF TEXT and quite a lot of very similar-looking/sounding data without quite making it shiny or interactive enough to capture the interest of the casual browser (to which the Sutton trust might reasonably respond that this is a serious piece of work and they didn’t have either  the time or money to waste on emblazoning it with all sorts of unnecessary digital distractions, which, well, fair enough really. Two things stood out to me, in passing: a) the ‘creative industries’ here are restricted to ‘tv and film’ and ‘pop stars’, which feels…well, a bit reductive to be honest; and b) ‘influencer’ is the most-democratic category of all when it comes to educational background, which is…both sort-of good and also interesting from the point of view of the idea of the creation of a new small business/entrepreneurial class and how that might track politically (back to the ‘we are all small business owners now’ chat from the past few elections, if that rings any bells). Anyway, there’s a bunch of potentially useful and interesting information in here if you either want to MAKE SOME POINTS about a specific industry and its closed shopness or if you just want to feel a bit impotently sad about the extent to which life outcomes continue to be determined by stuff like this.
  • Borrowed Time: Clocks! Again! This time a new clock every day, all rendered in LOVELY CREATIVE CODE! Today’s is inspired by The Matrix, all falling greentext; this one, inexplicably, is made of elephants. This has been going since March this year, there are 140+ individual clocks linked to from the main page, and, if you’re interested, there’s even a largely-nonsensical manifesto explaining that, er, “WE APPROPRIATE BEAUTIFUL images, scavenged from the infinite scroll of the Internet. Pictures distort time. We catch them as they swim by, and remix them. We are not thieves; we are alchemists.” Alright then.
  • Clyx: It feels like we are very much in peak ‘APPS TO FOSTER CONNECTION LIKE WHAT WE USED TO HAVE BACK IN THE OLD DAYS’ season – Clyx is *very* buzzy at the moment, but it’s essentially another in the ‘communities based on your interests that you can take offline’ family of apps; per the strapline, “We’re bringing online communities together IRL through themed moments inspired by their favorite internet obsessions” (which, let’s be honest, is SPECTACULARLY clunky even by the standards of this sort of terrible positional marketingw4nk). What this practically means is that it’s a combined events/map service which shows things that are happening, filterable by interest/event type (gigs! Talks! Knitting circles! You get the gist), which also acts as a ticketing and lowkey social portal? Basically like DICE but with better local discovery and more of a social layer, as far as I can tell – oh, and it’s very much aimed at WOMEN (it says so on the app page and everything) so I presume the hope is that it doesn’t get clogged up by gross men attempting to share pictures of their erections in a space very much not designed for that sort of thing. Is this good? Is it useful? Will it take off and revolutionise the whole process of going out and deciding what to do? I have literally no idea, why don’t YOU decide?
  • A Whole Bunch Of Things You Can Do With The Latest Google AI Image Tool: Via Lynn’s excellent roundup of AI visual toys and the like comes this really helpful set of instructions that outline a range of different things that you can do with NanoBanana, the irritatingly-named update to Google’s image generation AI (which you get access to if you’re a Pro subscriber to Gemini iirc) – this is both a LONG laundry list of ideas and potential use-cases and a set of instructions as to prompts you can use to render each, and while I know a lot of you will automatically react to this with cries of horror and disgust (I HEAR YOU FFS) I think it’s equally important, even if you have a strong, innate hatred for All This Stuff, to have an idea of what it’s actually capable of. Some of the ideas and examples here are really quite interesting – the ability to isolate elements in an image, for example, and to restore a partial image to its whole state, are godsends for people like me who always found Photoshop or GIMP (Dear God GIMP, what a fcuking horrible bit of software) a bit too painful to deal with. Also, if you have small kids then I bet there are a bunch of things in here that they will enjoy messing around with, so if you can stand POLLUTING THEIR INNOCENT MINDS WITH AI then it might be fun to let them experiment with some of these techniques.
  • Orifice: Regular readers will recall that one of the occasional annual highlights of the web calendar is the end-of-year roundup by Defector of ‘things we got stuck inside ourselves this year’, drawn from US medical reports – this is, sadly, not that (WAIT A FEW MONTHS MY IMPATIENT PRETTIES!), but it *is* a tribute to, well, people putting things inside themselves, put together by a design company called Heirloom. It is very pretty and it made me laugh. To be clear, this is entirely safe for work, but I can’t promise it won’t give you ideas.
  • Ditherinator: Upload a phot, turn it into a dithered black and white version of said picture! Lots of settings you can fiddle with to see whether you can make a pornographic photo of yourself look entirely-innocent via the medium of visual effects (maybe don’t do this, on reflection, I have no idea what happens to the images here).
  • Random: A selection of digital design and computation expermients by one Vasilis Van Gemert, which, per the explanation, “explore the visual effects of random numbers on colour, form and time.” These are divided into categories and subcategories – daily works, specific technical studies, etc – and then further within those; there is a LOT of work in here, it’s presented in a very minimal and unshowy-manner, and, if you’re interested in colour and digital design and specifically-constrained visual arts projects, along with automated creation based on code and algorithms, then I think you will find a lot to love here. Although I am utterly baffled by what is going on with the mini carrots and the peeled cucumbers here.
  • The Hot Air Factory: Would you like to know how much energy The Machine uses? Wouldn’t we all! Sadly, though, the people currently holding its reins don’t seem in any way inclined to tell us – could it be…could it be they’re hiding something? Could it be that the answers won’t make us feel good? WHO COULD POSSIBLY TELL?! Anyway, the Hot Air Factory is a rather cute prototypical idea by design studio Oio, which is designed to offer a practical evocation of the differential energy requirements of an AI model depending on what you ask it to do, the sophistication of the model in question, etc. The idea is really simple – it’s basically an local LLM on-device connected to a 3d printed fan, which produces different amounts of air based on the computational requirements you’re asking of the LLM at any given moment, the idea being that it offers you a nice, easy reminder of the fact that every time you ask something of The Machine there’s a concomitant energy cost (of course, that’s the same every time you type a query into Google, or open the tap, or order yet another bunch of tat off Amazon, but that’s not so zeitgeisty in 2025) – this feels like a cute educational aid or small domestic art installation waiting to happen, and while it’s prototypical you can get in touch with the people at Oio and express your interest in seeing a version of this available to get your hands on, should you so desire. Quite want one, ngl.
  • Chrono Trains: I LOVE THIS! Plug in any train station in Europe (those of you on other, less-good continents will have to go without, I’m afraid) and this website will show you exactly how far you can travel on the continent’s rail networks within a set period of time. Useful for those of you looking to see how easy it will be to flee the scene of a murder using environmentally-friendly means, or, er, just looking to plan a travel itinerary. Oh, AND it gives you links to buy tickets for the journeys it plans out, which is just perfect. I COULD GET TO MARSEILLES IN 8 HOURS FFS. What am I *doing* with my life? Why am I sitting in my pants in Vauxhall typing words about the internet when I could instead be about to visit Southern France and drink pastis and throw fireworks in the streets with wild Mediterranean abandon? I am TERRIBLE at being alive.
  • Adrift: A very poignant little website – you’re presented with a body of water, on which are floating a succession of small paper boats. Each boat is a message left by another visitor to the site, a small note expressing a doubt they currently feel. I have no idea who built this or where they are from, but the messages are all in English – there is something…quite desperately heartbreaking about these small messages from strangers cast out onto this digital sea, and your appreciation of this will depend largely on how unbearably-poignant you find messages like ‘can I make rent?’, ‘should I divorce my wife if she wants a third child and I don’t?’, or ‘were they ever really my friends?’.
  • Pendulum: It’s a pendulum simulator. Ok, fine, a DOUBLE pendulum simulator. Basically this is maths at its most hypnotic.
  • Secrets of Maps: This is cute – a little website which explains exactly how Google Maps works out a route when you ask it for directions, explaining a bunch of different mechanisms that *could* be used to determine the optimal route between two points on a streetmap vs the system that Google actually alighted upon. This ACTUALLY taught me something.
  • Meteora: Ooh, this is fun! Pick different cities, MAKE MUSIC FROM THEIR DATA! It’s…very minimal and won’t win any awards for its aesthetic presentation, but the basic gimmick – “This website uses openly available meteorological data (openmeteo API) to generate sounds depending on the weather of the location typed” – is a nice one, and there’s something pleasing about trying to make some sort of symphonic composition out of the fact that it’s going to be 80% humidity in Jakarta today. It’s fair to say that making anything…good out of this is proving challenging, but if you really like atonal drone music then WOW are you going to have yourself a fun time.
  • Pano Date: I have literally no idea why someone might want to find out the exact date on which a Google Streetview image was taken, but now, thanks to this tool, you can! Actually, on reflection, this feels like it could be the load-bearing plotpoint for a murder mystery, so if anyone happens to see this and has a revelatory moment that leads to them becoming the next Richard Osman, could you, er, maybe mention me in the acknowledgements? I DON’T ASK FOR MUCH FFS.
  • The Audubon Photo Awards Winners 2025: One of the more pleasing of the annual photo contests I feature in here, the Audubon Society, as you all OBVIOUSLY know, is the US bird enthusiasts’ club and this is their annual celebration of pictures of overevolved dinosaurs. My personal favourite here is the shot of the Savanna Hawk because, basically, it feels quite OF THE NOW, but, as ever, I invite you to pick your own.
  • Fcuk With Text: Type in any text you like and apply a dizzying range of effects to it which you can then cut and paste and use wherever else you might like (subject to formatting constraints). Want to render the phrase “I LOVE YOU SO MUCH I MIGHT DIE” in a font that screams “and if you don’t love me back ON YOUR HEAD BE IT”? This website will very much cater for you, in that case (but, er, maybe don’t do that, on reflection?).
  • A Wall of Gifs: A fullscreen scrolling canvas animation of old Gifs, pulled from the Internet Archives’ old Geocities collection, scrolling randomly from right to left and presenting a pleasingly-hypnotic visual slideshow of a very specific aesthetic. I like this a LOT, and would quite like someone to supply code to create something similar with different source imagery – I would LOVE to see this with nothing but, say, rotating sandwiches, for example.
  • Make AI Great Again: I think I mentioned something the other week about AI being effectively the new vector for p1ss-poor ‘satirical’ content online – now that you can use Grok or Veo3 to spit out videoclips of famouses (or at least AI-imagined versions of them), it’s relatively quick work to cobble together ‘amusing’ shorts featuring, say, the world’s leaders doing HILARIOUS AND IMPROBABLE THINGS! And so it is with this YouTube channel, which features seemingly HUNDREDS of YT shorts depicting, in the main, Europe’s leaders, and Trump, and Zelenskyy, in various vignettes – here, for example, is an HILARIOUS clip of Trump eating McDonald’s in bed (served to him by JD Vance in a maid’s outfit, which, ok, yes, I confess to sniggering at) while getting upset at Putin and Xi and Kim all hanging out without him. Is this funny? NO! Are people watching it? DEAR GOD YES! All of these have millions of views – fine, it’s YT shorts and so it’s getting a mad algo boost into people’s timelines, but still, those are some impressive numbers if you consider the amount of time and effort that’s required to make these. INTERNATIONAL SATIRE SLOP FOR ALL! Honestly, I can’t stress enough how much of this stuff there is out there – this is one of the bigger accounts, but you should see some of the Reform-coded stuff that’s doing the rounds in the anglosphere, with laughing Nige and a downtrodden starmer and oh God we’re going to AI that frog-faced cnut into Government aren’t we.
  • I’m Not A Robot: Friend of Curios (and Tiny Award 2025 judge) Neal Agarwal knows a thing or two about making Fun Internet Stuff – this is his latest MASSIVE HIT GAME, which sees you attempting to defeat a series of increasingly-involved and deranged CAPTCHAs to prove your humanity in the face of a skeptical web browser. This gets very silly very quickly and is FAR smarter and better-designed than it needs to be.
  • Moon Cross: What, do you think, ought to be our priorities as a species right now? Focusing on the environment and its preservation? Attempting to reduce the rampant inequality of opportunity and outcome present across the globe? Addressing the seemingly-inexorable rise of some pretty fcuking unpleasant right-wing thinking across the West? NO! You fcuking IDIOT, you fcuking RUBE, you fcuking MORON! Why would you think about any of those things when instead we could be dedicating ourselves to proving God’s dominion over not only the Earth but the cosmos, by, er, ERECTING A CROSS ON THE FCUKING MOON! That’s right, this is the website of a collective of people who seem to seriously believe that one of the things we should REALLY get around to doing is putting up a monument to the Christian faith on our single planetary satellite, to, er, “consecrate the heavens and remind humanity that God is the King of the universe.” Lads, is that cross going to be visible from Earth? Because if not I struggle to see how it’s going to be doing much ‘reminding’ all the way up there out of the way. Still, if you want to get involved, you can do so by volunteering (unclear what you’re volunteering FOR, mind; for a place on the inevitable lunar module? To hold some guy ropes while you’re up there?), proselytising (OF COURSE IT’S THE FCUKING EVANGELICALS FFS!) or, inevitably, by BUYING A MODEL OF THE MOON CROSS. Honestly, there really is no grifter like a Jesus grifter, bless their cnuty little faces!

From the NYPL Picture Collection

NEXT, WHY NOT ENJOY THE WONDERFUL NEW ALBUM BY NINAJIRACHI WHICH IS CALLED, IN PERFECTLY-CURIOS-APPROPRIATE FASHION, “I LOVE MY COMPUTER”! 

THE SECTION WHICH BELIEVES IN FREE SPEECH BUT ALSO, FUNDAMENTALLY, THAT US LATE NIGHT COMEDY TALKSHOWS ARE THE MOST OVERRATED FORMAT IN THE HISTORY OF TELEVISION, PT.2:  

  •  The Straight Acting Brotherhood: I feel I need to caveat this with a big NO JUDGEMENT tag – but, also, it made me laugh a LOT. The Straight Acting Brotherhood is a membership organisation, apparently international, which is designed to foster connections between men who like men…but only ‘straight-acting men’. If you join – and it’s $150 a month, or a one-time fee of $2500, a BARGAIN!! – you get access to, er, a network of other straight-acting men, all of whom apparently have GOALS and AMBITIONS and who want to CRUSH IT just like you; there’s a degree of confusion here as to whether what you’re buying into is, to put it impolitely, some sort of an international fcuk club of BROS (but, you know, also gay) or whether this is some sort of HIGH-PERFORMANCE ACHIEVEMENT RETREAT, or whether it’s both (not sure how the high performance achievement squares with the whole ‘meeting other guys for judgement-free boning’ bit, but webs), but you will apparently meet all sorts of other LIKEMINDED GUYS who are all CRUSHING IT. I think the reason that this made me laugh so much was in part the obviously-bullsh1t nature of the offering, and in part the utter HORROR of the accompanying images; seriously, just click the link and look how SAD all the pictures look, the lonely existences depicted, the poorly-lit pics, the apartments so sparse and spartan that, honestly, no gay man I have ever met would ever consider living in them… this is one of the more ridiculously-depressing things I have seen all year, and I think you will enjoy it a lot.
  • Boombox City: Readers of a certain vintage will doubtless remember the brief period in the 1980s when the UK was gripped with BREAKDANCE FEVER and every single town centre was for a time populated by pasty-looking malcoordinated teenagers spastically-flailing to a crackly copy of ‘Rappers Delight’ in a pale (literally and figuratively) simulacrum of ‘breaking’ (where I grew up there was a guy who did this who called himself ‘Crucial Colin’ (I am not making this up) who had cerebral palsy; you may not be surprised to learn that the local response to this endeavour was, by the standards of 2025, almost unimaginably-cruel. I still think about Colin sometimes, I hope his life improved); anyway, if you DO have a vague nostalgic memory of that era then you might enjoy this website, which celebrates the massive portable tape decks known as ‘boom boxes’ (GOD I FEEL SO OLD) used to soundtrack these performances; this website offers you a LOT of pictures of, er, massive old tape-based stereos for you to reminisce over while knowing in your heart of hearts that were you to try and breakdance now you would render yourself incapable of movement for DAYS.
  • 100 Lost Species: A site seeking to draw attention to species being lost through extinction – it presents you with artists’ portraits of 100 different species which we have already lost, with information about each (where it lived, when we finally killed the last one, etc etc), with the additional gimmick that you can only spend 100 seconds on the site before it kicks you off because DO YOU SEE TIME IS RUNNING OUT DO YOU SEE?? Which is fine but, well, it does rather mean that you just fcuk off and go elsewhere at that point and stop thinking about the site entirely; oh, and the ‘artists’ portraits’ are in fact AI generated, which, well, does rather feel ironic given the whole ‘environmental impact of the machine’ thing. Hey ho.
  • Ente: Do YOU want somewhere to put photos online? Would YOU like that to be open source and to have free hosting for upto 10gb of images? Would YOU like the probably-entirely-illusory promise that it will exist, and be free, ‘FOREVER’? Great! You might like this, then.
  • Dole/Kemp 96: I don’t imagine for a second that any of you have a particularly strong desire to remind yourself of Bob Dole’s 1996 campaign for the US Presidency, but, in case you do, it turns out that the campaign website is still online, preserved as though in amber, with all of the early-web stylings and design quirks you might expect (you can even download Bob Dole wallpaper, which, ngl, I am weirdly-tempted by) – I am linking to it here because of how incredibly, almost impossibly, quaint it all seems – not just the tech and aesthetic but the messaging, the complete absence of scare tactics or attack lines, no mention whatsoever of who they were running against, no apocalyptic predictions of the terrible events that would befall the world if you made the mistake of voting the wrong way…look, let’s be clear, the world was terrible in many ways in 1996 too, but fcuk me was it appreciably less shouty.
  • Internet Addicts Anonymous: Look, I am not suggesting any of you need this – I am not! – nor indeed suggesting you drop whatever you are doing right now (ok, not…not *right* now, you can finish your Curios first, obvs) and sign up to a meeting, but, well, if there’s anyone who might potentially be in the market for an organisation that helps people grapple with a…slightly-less-than-healthy relationship with the online world then I figure it might be one of you fcukers. Not me, though. I think this is actually a serious thing, although it’s slightly hard to tell from the website which equally looks like it might have been vibecoded yesterday – still, I can’t pretend that the section on ‘information addiction’ didn’t make me pause momentarily and, not for the first time, take a deep breath and something of a critical look at some of my more recent life choices.
  • The Story Arc Engine: An interesting little Google AI toy – again via Lynn – which lets you type in the name of any book or film you care to mention and which will, in seconds, offer you a plot-point breakdown of said book or film, showing you the various stages of story and plot development across five major narrative pillars; this is a neat little proof-of-concept showing what you can build with Gemini, but, equally, feels like something that might be useful if you’re studying screen or scriptwriting or if you’re FINALLY thinking of embarking on that novel at long fcuking last (stop talking about it, just write). If you’re curious you can find a bunch of other AI-enabled tools and toys built on top of the Google stack here – there’s a lot of interesting usecases here should you care to explore.
  • Better Word Counter: Built by Giuseppe to address a minor frustration with existing wordcount systems (I do admire someone who creates solutions rather than just, you know, whinging – how does one become such a person, do you think? Can it be done? And, crucially, can it be done without any effort, ideally via the medium of subliminal instruction while one sleeps? Asking for a friend), this basically lets you take a document that exists in multiple sections and quickly and easily work out per-section wordcounts alongside the running total. This is niche, but if you work on big, multi-part pieces of work that need to hit a defined word limit (eg academic papers, tenders, etc) this could be really useful.
  • Pin2Saved: It’s been fun watching Bluesky take up a specific and slightly-weird position in the media consciousness, simultaneously a DYING NETWORK but, also, a DANGEROUS HOTBED OF VILE LEFTIST HATE – should you be one of the decreasing numbers of people persisting with the site (I am too, I NEED MY INFOFIX FFS) then you might find this cobbled-together feature useful. Bluesky recently launched a proper ‘favourites’ function, letting users bookmark posts for later; previously there had been a vague etiquette trend that you would reply to a post with a ‘pin’ emoji to indicate that you wanted to be able to find it again later, and with this little webtool you can connect your account and automatically get the posts you pin-replied to reclassified as bookmarks. Which is a neat and useful little solution that I imagine will be germane to, at most, one of you, but, as you know by now, I LOVE YOU ALL AND WANT EACH OF YOU TO BE HAPPY, HOWEVER FCUKING NICHE YOUR INTERESTS ARE!
  • The ISS P1ss Tracker: Speaking of Bluesky (seamless!), this is an account which does nothing other than post regular updates on exactly how full, to the single-digit percentage, of p1ss the urine tank on the International Space Station is. This is, on teh face of it, a very mundane account to follow – updates are literally along the lines of “The p1ss tank on the ISS is now 61% full” – but, well, I can’t pretend I don’t like to occasionally be reminded of the fact that, many hundreds of thousands of miles above me, a metal container of human urine is hurtling around the planet, occasionally depositing a frozen mass of waste into the vast infinity of the cosmos, and maybe you will too. I am conscious, as I type this, that this is the second p1ss-related link in Curios in as many weeks, and I just want to take this opportunity to reassure you that we’re not pivoting here and it really is just a coincidence I promise.
  • Yawaraka Jazz: A YouTube channel featuring some EXCELLENT crackly vinyl mixes – these are seemingly all just done by one person from what I think is their house, God love them, and are WONDERFUL; seriously, bookmark this, it’s a wonderful selection of relaxing, beautifully-selected records and a generally soothing autumnal vibe, should you be in the market for such a thing (and look, it’s mid-September ffs, IF NOT NOW THEN WHEN???). Via Kottke.
  • Good Short Books: This is a smart idea – Andrew Marder writes “I like good books. I like short books. But finding good short books can be challenging. For most needs, sorting Amazon search results by sales rank or average customer review works well, but there’s no easy way to filter or sort by book length. Given a book’s ISBN, Amazon’s Product Advertising API lets you retrieve information such as the number of pages, sales rank, price, title, and author. I downloaded this information for NPR’s Best Books from 2013 through 2024. The visualization below shows each book as a point on a scatterplot, the x-axis displays the logarithm of the number of pages and the y-axis displays the logarithm of the sales rank. Click any point to see detailed information about the book, and use the filters below to explore books by year and topic.”
  • Idle Game Maker: SUCH a fun resource, this, if you have the time and the inclination. You know those ‘clicker’-type games, right? Well this lets you make your own – it’s surprisingly flexible, if a little technical, but if you can stomach the idea of basically ‘having to write the whole thing out as a txt file’ then you could create something potentially rather fun; in particular I love the idea of creating very personal, very bespoke clicker games as presents for people, as a small thankyou or tribute or acknwoledgement, or, and this is, I concede, VERY unlikely to appeal to any of you but, well, just in case, there is 100% at least ONE person out there right now for whom a proposal via the medium of idle clicker game would be the key to their heart and loins forevermore. IS THAT PERSON YOU????? Honestly, I now want nothing more than to hear of someone popping the question with one of these, can one of you weirdos make that happen please? FOR ME???
  • Dataguessr: A DAILY GAME! Each day offers you the chance to rank countries based on different criteria – so, for example, average hours of daily sunlight, say, or ‘how much people in each country trust each other’ (Canadians, OBVIOUSLY, trust everyone, the poutine-addled fools). This is a fun minute or so’s trivia, which, if you’re me, will render you seethingly-grumpy about how ignorant it turns out you are about stuff like this.
  • Clues By Sam: A daily online version of one of those ‘every sister has a dog; how many uncles does it take to remove the fencepost?’-style logic puzzles, this is actually really nicely-designed and I like the fact that it explicitly prevents you from guessing as you move through the questions.
  • Exquisite Monster: A READER WRITES! Thanks so much to Jonathan Harford, who sent this to me earlier this week saying: “It’s an adaptation of my favorite writing/drawing party game, Eat Poop You Cat: The first player comes up with a sentence. The second player draws a picture of the sentence. The third player writes a sentence describing the picture (etc. etc.). After all players have contributed, the full chain of mutations is revealed, to the merriment and delight of all. Such webapps already exist, but mine encourages folks to create the art however they like (instead of forcing phone users to fingerpaint and desktop users to mouse-draw). It also replicates the dinner party game experience with “Party Mode”, which is for playing with friends instead of just internet randos.” So, two things – 1) this is a really nicely-made toy which I can imagine being lots of fun with family should you be blessed enough to have such a thing; 2) WHAT THE FCUK IS ‘EAT POOP YOU CAT’? IS THIS A THING DO YOU ALL KNOW ABOUT IT? And if not, if it’s just a Harford family quirk, then, er, HOW DID IT GET THAT NAME? I am baffled.
  • Bopmatch: Ooh, this is fun – a quiz where you’re asked to match artists based on their relative popularity on Spotify. You’re presented with a singer, and your job is to guess another artist who you think will basically have a similar degree of appeal on Daniel Ek’s munitions fundraising platform. Thanks to this I just discovered the slightly-surprising fact that Lana Del Rey is apparently more popular than Beyonce – WHO KNEW?
  • Subway: I don’t really understand what’s going on here, other than that this is, basically, a really simple, ASCII-ish, simulation of the experience of going on an underground rail network; there’s a slight game element in play, which you can sort of work out as you play (you can pick things up and drag them, and there are certain objects which need to be taken to certain points on the map…), but, generally, this is just sort of puzzling and curious and odd and I don’t really know what it’s for or why it exists, but I enjoy it quite a lot and I *love* the genuinely-slightly-terrifying sound design (you will know what I mean when you hear it, promise).
  • Blind & Stumbling: Our final miscellaneous link this week is this…what is this? A visual novel, I guess, except it’s all pink and pixellated and a bit hard to read, and it’s basically about having a very, very bad trip, and to be honest it’s just sort of unsettling and quite horrible and I can’t in all honesty say I *liked* it, but, equally, I really did love it rather a lot. Can these feelings exist simultaneously? CLICK THE LINK AND FIND OUT!

By Amy Dury

OUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS LOUNGE-Y, LATINATE, LATE-SUMMER SET BY LINDA MIRADA!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • How Many Cigarettes: Also probably not a Tumblr! Still, if you’ve ever wanted a site that keeps track of exactly how many tabs get smoked during the course of a variety of popular films then WELL aren’t you in luck! This is GREAT; the current prize for smokiest film currently goes to ‘Heavy Metal Parking Lot’ (no, me neither), but you will be unsurprised to learn that Casablanca is right up there. Why not make it your aim to smoke along with a few of these? EMPHYSEMA FOR CHRISTMAS!!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • It’s China, Baby!: I feel I ought to be clear about this – pretty sure that this is Chinese state propaganda designed to dazzle us over here in the West with how AMAZINGLY FUTURE China is compared to our tired old ways, much in the same way as shouty irritant IShowSpeed’s tour of the country was explicitly engineered to showcase the inherent tech superiority of the Xi regime. That said, LOOK AT ALL THE MAD FUTURESTUFF! I particularly covet a 3d-printed pangolin, geopolitics of it all be damned.
  • Coscrafts: A company that makes cosplay artefacts for serious pros – I honestly thought people still made their own kit for conventions and the like, but I guess that’s a hopelessly-naive reading of a market that’s now worth an awful lot of money; anyway, if you want to see some REALLY impressively-crafted costume work – some of the wings on display here in particular are astonishing – then CLICK NOW.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • The Day the Right Took London: So this is something of a hyperbolic headline – the right didn’t take London, they just turned up for a few hours to befoul some of its more central areas before they hove off back to the safety of the provinces again – but the piece, all about last weekend’s Big Racist Turnout, is a good one and does a decent job of demonstrating that, for all the talk about ORDINARY PEOPLE and LEGITIMATE CONCERNS, said CONCERNS do seem to have an awful lot to do with the colour of other people’s skin, or their religion, or what country they are from, which does seem to me to meet several fairly central definitions of, well, racism. I’ve had conversations over the past year with people who have been very keen to tell me that it’s rude, patronising and unhelpful to call people racist when they are ‘concerned’ about the state of the nation and their  and their kids’ futures – please do tell me exactly what this is, then: ““We’re not racist. We’re standing up for our country. What’s wrong with that?” says Janice, standing beside her friend Kerry. Unlike most people I speak to, they’re from London, in Plaistow. Janice tells me she’s seen Plaistow change immeasurably while she’s lived there, as the area has become more multicultural. “We’re the minority,” says Kerry. “There’s a school just opposite us, and I don’t see no white kids going in there.”  I ask if that’s a problem. “Yeah, it is a problem” she says sharply, scoffing at the question. “It’s full of Muslims.” Janice concurs: “And you know how they breed like rabbits.” Plaistow has been called Britain’s most mixed community, often hailed as a testament to diversity. What Janice and Kerry would like to happen is “mass deportation.”” BONUS RACISTS! More coverage, this time in the New Statesman, which draws similar conclusions about the motivations of a significant proportion of the attendees. LEGITIMATE CONCERNS!
  • A Short Note on Racism: This, by Sam Kriss, is 10 years old; I can’t remember how it floated across my timeline this week, but it’s a very good piece of analysis of how ‘racism’ has become something so unconscionable that noone will admit to being it anymore, but which is still very much prevalent as part of society; “It’s strange. For a long time anti-racists have been trying to show that racism isn’t just an overt expression of hatred towards one racialised group or another, that it’s an unvoiced hierarchy structurally embedded in the fabric of society, that the construction of race itself is mutually inextricable from racism – and yet after all that, when someone performs the most basic, crude, open expression of racism, she’s unable to recognise it as such. In a way we’re the victims of our own success. In fact, it’s not hard to imagine a slightly more literate racist-apologist defence of Ms Duncan: of course, what she said was unacceptable, but it wasn’t really racist; after all, racism is a structural relation, and what’s one person’s simple prejudice next to the large-scale bigotry of an impersonal system?” Slightly (slightly!) depressing that a decade on it’s still perfectly-resonant, but, well, hey ho!
  • The Friendly Nazis Next Door: Excellent-if-miserable satire in McSweeney’s, depressing not only for the nailed-on quality of its subject matter and tone but for the fact that it’s applicable to both the UK and (oh, ok, a significantly greater degree as of this week) US at the moment. What a surprise that all the white reporters sent out by the right wing papers to report on the white power-adjacent march came back saying that they were all perfectly-reasonable people! Whodathunkit! “Everyone says that this new crop of American Nazis is really mean, but I, a white journalist, went out to talk to them for this profile, and they were actually really nice. I mean, sure, when I first met George Nathan Bedford Forrest Wallace on his compound, I was a little thrown off by his swastika hat, Confederate-flag T-shirt, and his pants, which had a crossed-out trans flag on each leg. All those hateful clothes made him seem a little mean. But when he opened the front door of his bunker for me, and I thought, See, this is a guy with manners. He knows how to treat a lady.”
  • On Diversity and Cohesion: Ok, this is dry and academic but it’s an interesting study whose conclusions are worth a read – basically this paper looks into the extent to which cultural/ethnic diversity maps against community cohesion, or the lack thereof, so basically looks to answer the question ‘are areas that are less culturally or racially homogenous suffer from lower levels of community cohesion than areas that are culturally or racially homogenous?’; the answer is, to simplify, “not when you account for economic deprivation, no”. Worth a look should you be in the unfortunate position of having to converse with people who say things like ‘yes, but all the muslims mean that we don’t have communities anymore’.
  • Reform’s Disaster Capitalism: Another dispatch from the Reform party conference, this time by Peter Geoghegan in the LRB; you’ll be unsurprised to hear that it’s another ‘look at the cranks!’-fest (you can, after all, only write what’s presented to you), but this is a little more in-depth than last week’s piece and does a better job of talking through the extent to which the rise of Reform links to all the pleasant sorts of ideas that have been outlined in the last few links, not least the extent to which the party, and its conference, embodies the sort of ‘nudge nudge, everyone thinks it!’ racism that, honestly, it really felt like we’d sort of gotten rid of at some point in the 90s (I appreciate that as a white man my opinion of ‘the state of racism in the UK over the past 30 years’ might not be worth much, in fairness).
  • All The Sad Young Terminally Online Men: Amidst the US administration deciding this week to go full McCarthy on the sections entertainment sector following its insufficiently-hagiographic response to the killing of Charlie ‘sure said a lot of really hateful things for a man who apparently wanted to bring people together via the medium of reasoned debate!’ Kirk, a picture has started to emerge of the kid who shot him; this is a good piece about the incoherence of much of hyperonline edgelordism in 2025, the idea that there *is* no there there, no centre to grab onto, and that the memes are just that, meme. The author gloms onto the term ‘salad bar extremism’, which I get, but I do wonder whether even this is giving too much coherence to the mad cultural soup kids (lol, all of us) marinade in every waking hour of every day. BONUS ONLINE CULTURE DISPATCH: Katherine Dee writes a great piece here about the need for ACTUAL reporting with ACTUAL understanding about these subcultures and places, and how that requires a cultural engagement with the idea of ‘the web’ that we’ve been terrible at for decades now: “Because the internet has become everything, we can’t rely on sweeping generalists. We need people who understand its specific dynamics in a real way. Not self-declared “Internet Understanders” — I keep seeing these ambassadors crop up, claiming to hold the keys to all things online, which is about as useful as declaring yourself a “Culture Understander.” What we actually need are researchers who study particular phenomena in depth: how algorithms shape behavior, how communities form and dissolve, the difference between political extremism and nihilism. Just as we need economists even though “the economy” touches everything, we need experts mapping the internet’s specific effects…What the flashier, “name brand” Internet extremism writers missed in the intervening years was critical. The phenomenon KiwiFarms calls “Zoomer sadism” — surreal, absurdist cruelty now endemic to so many online spaces, not confined to the right alone. The disembodiment and desensitization that define life for so many under 45. To their credit, some people in academia tried to capture this, but their work was forgotten or ignored.”
  • Magical Systems Thinking: A few people I very much respect, intellectually-speaking, are into systems thinking as a ‘thing’ and as such its a topic I have tried to read around more in the past few years, not least because I do think ‘systems’ as a way of conceiving of stuff is a generally useful framing. This is a very interesting piece by Ed Bradon, all about how systems are inherently metamorphic – that they are not static, and that they are changed and altered by the act of their functioning, and that to think of them as static is to fundamentally misunderstand their nature, and, look, while I am obviously QUITE far away from being the sort of person who’s responsible for, I don’t know, exacting large-scale systemic change, even I can see that there’s some useful thinking in here on how to make things happen within organisations or existing structures.
  • Is AI a Bubble?: If Zitron keeps saying it is, he’ll be proved right eventually! I jest, I jest, I broadly agree that if it’s not a bubble right now then it’s certainly looking increasingly-bubble-shaped (again, though, just to reiterate for all the people at the back exercising some very motivated reasoning about What It Will Mean When It Bursts – it doesn’t mean the BAD MACHINE goes away! It just means we get the BAD MACHINE *and* a whole load of economic pain!); that said, I know the square root of fcuk all about business and financing and markets and, well, money, so I found this analysis by Azeem Azhar to be a useful overview of where we ACTUALLY are in the bubble-y hypecycle based on a bunch of indicators used by actual economists. Now, for all that I often decry Zitron as an audience-captured antihypeman, peddling a particular line for an audience willing to pay him to hear it, it’s equally fair to say that Azeem has been…VERY bullish on AI since the beginning, and almost certainly has one or two financial positions that inform that outlook, and so I can’t in all honesty position this as entirely-objective analysis; that said, his conclusion is ‘not a bubble yet, might become one but might not’; read the piece and see what YOU think (and then, er, can you come back and explain to me what I ough to think, please? THANKS!).
  • Working With Wizards: Ethan Mollick returns with a post about working with the current best-in-class models from OpenAI et al, and the extent to which there’s now a point where, rather than doing the dialogue-style back and forth with the model to get what you want, you’re instead just better off just asking it a one-shot question and seeing what happens because, basically, the models are pretty fcuking good and will often do things in ways that are surprising and, in some cases, superior to the way you might have instructed them to. Except, of course, sometimes they’re not – and you will never know which version you’re going to get! Per the previous bullet, Mollick’s very much an AI booster and has rose-tinted spectacles about this stuff, but he’s also been consistently correct about ‘how to work with these things’ over the past 3 years and as such I am inclined to listen to him. This is worth a read if you do regular work with The Machine, or if you’d like to.
  • No Fun Entrepreneurialism: I have known and worked with various startup founders over the years, from the classic techbro stereotypes, all huel and 6am gym sessions and weekends spend coding and the slowly-encroaching realisation that even if you make a world-conquering SaaS product you’re still going to die alone, to the hypercharismatic late-00s version, all Indie Sleaze-coded with the fancy show-off suits and Page 3 model girlfriends (*cough* and the gak *cough*) – this piece looks at the archetype currently holding sway in Silicon Valley, specifically a very, very dedicated coterie of people who take the whole HUSTLE AND GRIND AND SLEEP IN THE OFFICE thing to the nth degree…look, if people want to spend their lives like this then, well, good for them, but I found it quite depressing that the people profiled in the article were doing this so that they could, if they were lucky, build the BEST POSSIBLE SCHEDULING SOFTWARE EVER or something equally-unprepossessing. Although, based on their apparent personality profiles, maybe it’s for the best that they’re not trying to change the world in more significant ways.
  • The GPT Divorces: One of the weird little interplatform integrations I noticed earlier this year is the fact that WhatsApp allows you to export an entire conversation (text only, sadly, no images or voicenotes) into GPT which you can then INTERROGATE – I tried it once and decided very quickly never to do it again given the HORRIFIC way in which it immediately started giving me advice as to how I might optimise my communications with this particular interlocutor so as to achieve a variety of potential goals. Which is by way of introduction to this piece, which looks at the apparently-growing phenomenon of spouses deciding to use The Machine as their personal relationship soundingboard, telling it EVERYTHING and asking it to suggest coping strategies for when a partner’s behaviour falls below the required standard. Except it turns out that what this tends to lead to is the person using The Machine being repeatedly told that their partner is a sh1theel, and said partner getting increasingly irked at the Machine-user for not actually bothering to materially engage with their relationship and instead outsourcing the emotional labour to some fcuking maths. The result? DIVORCE!
  • Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Talk: You may recall a few months ago I featured a podcast transcript in which everyone’s favourite contender for ‘worst human being currently alive’ opined that, yes, the Antichrist is very real, and as it happens it might in fact be Greta Thunberg – well, Thiel’s now doing a series of talks in San Francisco on related, apocalyptic topics, so naturally the San Francisco Chronicle sent someone down to check out the opener. WHY ARE THESE PEOPLE ALL LIKE THIS?!?!?! WHY ARE WE ALL MEANT TO PRETEND THEY ARE GENIUSES?!?!?! I mean, just listen to this sh1t: “The consensus was that the talk largely repeated the points Thiel had made in previous interviews on the subject — namely, that the Antichrist would use the threat of Armageddon, or some looming crisis, in order to consolidate control and create a “one-world government.” One attendee recalled Thiel specifying that this figure could not be a state figurehead like Chinese President Xi Jinping, because it needs to be more global. He couldn’t recall if Thiel suggested Thunberg would make the cut. One attendee recalled that Thiel’s discussion of the Antichrist was more about a scenario than an individual. Thiel’s Antichrist scenario is one in which a unified government suppresses technology to impose order, or armageddon, wherein AI takes over and ushers in the end of the world. “We’ll either have the one government that destroys technology and takes over, or you have the AI that destroys everything,” he said.”
  • Welcome To The Bop House: This is a piece profiling a bunch of creator-slash-model-type women who moved into a shared content house together, called The Bop House – you will have read similar pieces before, and, per se, beyond the particular names and personalities and DRAMAS here outlined there’s nothing super-new, but I did find the piece’s acknowledgement of the slightly-icky Lolita-ish nature of the presentation of lots of these women refreshing; this doesn’t get talked about enough imho, but there is a…slightly-weird, to my mind at least, tension between the increasinngly-politicised movement to ‘protect women and girls’ from the right wing, and the prevalence of content which is a) obviously sexualised even if not actual bongo; and b) very much presents as YOUNG. Aside from anything else, though, it’s another exhausting story of the commodification of young women’s bodies, the male gaze and the ceaseless drive to secure the bag – a tale so modern, a tale as old as time!
  • A Minecraft Reality Show: This absolutely blew my mind, both conceptually and in terms of its popularity; also, METAVERSE KLAXON! “It was November of 2023 when Ish, a 23-year-old native of Illinois, announced a new entry in his “Minecraft Civilization” event series. Over 8,000 of his fans rushed to apply to join. The prize: the chance to become one of 1,000 players invited to “simulate a realistic civilization” on one of two Minecraft islands hosted by Ish and his team across a more than weeklong event. These videos, often presented as “experiments,” defy typical YouTube video genre conventions. They’re not scripted beyond the initial scenario devised by Ish, nor are they truly “real” simulations of a digital civilization, because players that get invited to join the events are often self consciously roleplaying, yucking it up either as fictional characters or as heightened versions of themselves. The end result for viewers—after many months of edits from Ish’s team—is a carefully crafted episode of something like a reality TV episode, all filmed within Minecraft. Ish and his team spent nearly two years editing and polishing the video about the event, which was finally published in July. So far over 19 million people have watched the two-and-half hour feature film chronicling what went down on Ish’s two islands. Many are calling it “peak cinema” and one of the best YouTube videos in the history of the platform.” This feels like a future, if not necessarily THE future.
  • Christian Pop: The Post Office near my house is notable for two things; the incredible, almost-comedic, degree of disdain shown by the people working there for their customers, and the fact that they only EVER play Christian rock radio, which, while I am waiting to suffer the ignominy of a well-deployed eyeroll for having the temerity to, I don’t know, need a stamp, seems to alternate light-hearted chat about scripture and the need to just let the Big Guy Upstairs into your heart with some…honestly impressively-hooky tunes all about now salvation could just be yours if you just tuned into his special Jesus frequency (I am paraphrasing, but you get the gist I hope). Anyway, this article is by Joelle Kid, who grew up Christian in the US and as such was exposed to that particularly American sort of religiosity which sees abstention from fun as almost as important as the active performance of Christian behaviour. I loved this – as you read it, make sure to go onto YouTube and look up the bands and songs here referenced, you’re in for a TREAT: “Angela loved a band called Superchick. In a nostalgic mood, I recently visited songmeanings.com to remind myself of the (to me, entirely befuddling) lyrics of their song “Barlow Girls.” As a kid, I’d been confused by a line in the song that references boys finding girls attractive . . . if they resemble their mothers. Online, none of the commenters—the most recent of whom made their contribution in 2006—seem to have the same hang-ups I do about dating a boy who says you remind him of his mom. “It’s good that some artists are making songs about NOT having sex,” one commenter muses. Another wrote in 2002, “When i first hear this i phreaked out!! I was like OMiGOSH!! thats me!!!! this is an awesome song.” I was struck by a sudden memory of typing “OMiGOSH” into an MSN Messenger window, carefully making sure to emphasize that I was not taking the Lord’s name in vain through a sinful “OMG.” Feeling overwhelmed by the cringeworthy nature of this memory, I decided to leave the site.”
  • 57 Things I Love In London: This is Naomi Alderman’s list, sparked by last weekend’s protests and the feeling that London is better than that, actually; I don’t agree with all 57 things on here, but, well, that’s sort of the point of city lists like these, partly to crib from and partly to inspire you to think of your own.
  • Rungi’s: A piece in Vittles, all about the market which feeds Paris. This is SO good, and made me want to wake up at 3am to go and finger some offal: “To everyday Parisians, Rungis is a distant Cockaigne, a land of plenty that few have experienced firsthand. This is a business-to-business market – you need a professional membership to sell and buy – and even though the extension of line 14 of the métro in 2024 made Rungis much more accessible, there isn’t much reason to come here to browse produce you cannot purchase anyway. Most French people will only have a mediated knowledge of Rungis, often through TV, as journalists flock to it around Christmas to report on the deliveries of foie gras, smoked salmon, capon and truffled cheeses. Feeding 18 million individuals daily and supplying 60% of the Paris region’s fresh produce consumption, the market is a food behemoth like no other in Europe. But before it could reach its current levels of efficiency and become one of the foremost fresh markets in the world, it had to sever its centuries-old ties to central Paris, slaughtering the historical core of the capital in the process. In doing so, it has profoundly changed the relationship between Parisians and the food they consume. And all in the name of the modern city.”
  • Delivering Parcels in Beijing: An excerpt from Hu Anyan’s memoir, this is a beautifully-spare and simply-written account of what it’s like being a delivery driver in one of the world’s most populous places. I really really enjoyed this.
  • American Nukes in an English Village: A great bit of reporting in the Dispatch, about the US military base where they keep some of their nukes, and the oddity for locals of knowing that the bombs are RIGHT THERE. Pleasingly-eccentric and occasionally a bit threatening, the whole vibe of this is quite Scarfolk if you know what I mean. “Twentieth-century naturalists spoke of the fens to the north of Lakenheath as like Patagonia — and as otherworldly. This isn’t just the fancy of outsiders. I’m told of Facebook groups where locals post about booms they don’t understand, audible in Mildenhall and Red Lodge. Noises like the howls of wolves. And how, when you’re not used to hearing machine gun fire, it can sound very eerie at night.”
  • House Arab: Finally this edition, hands-down the best thing I read all week; Ismail Ibrahim writes about working as an Arabic-speaking fact-checker, and then not, for a US publication after October 7th. This is superb, honestly. “The operating orthodoxy was that police killings, CIA coups, black site torture, and institutional misogyny were aberrations, deviations from the American norm that would eventually be corrected when the arc of the moral universe, long as it is, finally got around to them. I insulated myself from this flavor of stupidity by rigorously avoiding news stories, though I knew that one day some Muslims who hated the West would kill some Westerners and I would have to bite my tongue and check some pieces that implied, but never outright stated, that Arabs were predisposed to bloodlust. I hated the West, too. I hated how Westerners were always asking to itemize the bill at dinner, how they never took enough responsibility for, say, inventing fascism and nuclear weapons, or for instigating the Bengal famine. They fought in stilted HR-speak, and shoved bland food into ruddy, clammy faces. My hatred never reached the level of murderousness, though it did put me in a tricky position. I couldn’t “go home” because I had no “home” to go back to; Egypt, where my family lived, was languishing under high inflation and military dictatorship, while the Emirates, where I’d grown up, was a land of indentured servitude. Besides, I wanted to become a novelist, and novelists lived in New York.”

By Stratco

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS !:

 

Webcurios 12/09/25

Reading Time: 40 minutes

 

You know how if you read a certain type of right-wing commentator, particularly in the UK, they will often talk about ‘The Blob’ – the insidious groupthink machinery of the DEEP STATE, infiltrated by THE LEFT and which prevents meaningful action on everything and which has somehow INFECTED all modern institutions of government and education and basically the entire infrastructure and apparatus of the country and which is insistent on infecting us with the WOKE MIND VIRUS? You do, right?

Do you ever think that, perhaps, the real ‘blob’ is instead the money and media complex which means that the assassination of a right-wing monger of hate and division half a world away results in endless handwringing across the English-speaking world on the death of civil discourse and the need to listen to the legitimate concerns of a group of people whose entire politicoeconomic viewpoint can be summed up pithily as ‘white people better’, and that the fact that said death is being weaponised and leveraged by all the classic racist voices in the UK right now perhaps suggests that there is a not-insignificant set of vested interests coordinating the trickling down of these pleasant viewpoints from the US right all the way through to the flag-frotting, red-faced patriots at the end of your road and the ones gearing up to MARCH ON LONDON tomorrow?

Eh? Oh, ok, fine, have it your way.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios and you can probably tell that I have had quite enough news for one week.

***BONUS TINY AWARDS SECTION***

WE HAVE A WINNER! – click here to find out who! Thanks to the (literally) thousands of people who voted, everyone who submitted sites or shared the link, everyone who wrote it up (including the nice people at It’s Nice That who did a lovely piece about the whole thing), and all of the judges and, of course, everyone who was nominated – the response really was overwhelming, and we look forward to doing it all again next year. THE INTERNET IS NOT DEAD! WE CAN KEEP IT ALIVE BY MAKING AND CELEBRATING STUFF LIKE THIS!

 By her afternoon

THIS WEEK WHY NOT SOUNDTRACK THE FIRST BIT OF CURIOS WITH THIS COLLECTION OF SOME OF ST ETIENNE’S BEST TRACKS FROM WHAT IS A FCUKING SUPERB BACK CATALOGUE? 

THE SECTION WHICH JUST FEELS SORRY FOR POOR REINALDO TBQHWY, PT.1:  

  • Website Launches: An admittedly VERY TEDIOUS-sounding url to kick off with this morning, but, as is often the case in life, beautiful hidden depths lurk behind an unprepossessing exterior (is this true, by the way? Or is this simply something that we ugly people tell ourselves to make us feel better? I’m starting to have my doubts, you know)! Website Launches is a very un-shiny website which does something quite exciting (‘exciting’ in an admittedly very narrow, very internetty sort of way) – apparently, via the medium of what I can only assume is DARK MAGIC, it tracks new urls being birthed onto the web, and here collects them for your perusal, categorised and filterable and VAST. Think of this as, I don’t know, the internet’s delivery room – look at all of the new websites, swaddled and mewling and puking and barely able to see out of their weird little ineffectual eyes! Erm, shall I stop with this metaphor? It’s making me quite uncomfortable, turns out. Still, though, the basic facts remain – this is, somehow (actually can someone explain to me how it’s tracking these and where it’s pulling them from? Genuinely curious) a list of BRAND NEW WEBSITES about anything you can imagine – so what can we learn from a cursory perusal? Well to start with it’s sort-of cheering to see how many new domains are cropping up each and every day, even if the vast majority of them appear to be business-related; MAN do a lot of people want to set up simple online shopfronts, turns out. It’s also clear that there is an awful lot of stuff being made with AI right now; so many of these are just sort of hollow, machine-generated placeholders, which, yes, is perhaps a BIT miserable. That said, if you look at the ‘personal’ section and check out the hobby projects or the ones that have an ‘unclear purpose’ you can find some genuinely nice things (a few of which are sprinkled throughout this week’s Curios), and, regardless, there’s something quite fascinating about seeing the web just sort of come into being like this, like (admittedly slightly crappy) galaxies flaming into existence before your very eyes. Oh, and yes, there is a LOT of very clearly shady stuff on here, SO much gambling and bongo being conjured into digital being every day – you are, of course, welcome to explore those corners as well, but I would do so whilst wearing some sort of heavy-duty antimalware shield and possibly only after securing access to a priest and a confessional for afterwards, because, well, I have no idea what you might find on there and, as ever, caveat emptor. Still, I love this, if only for the vaguely-anthropological ‘THIS IS THE WEB, THIS IS ALL OF US’ vibe of the whole thing.
  • Kong Studios: While I can admire the longevity of the Gorillaz musical project and the commitment to the worldbuilding bit, I never really got into them as a ‘concept’ – partly because I was never that much of a fan of the music overall, and partly because I was always slightly salty that Gorillaz got all the acclaim that I always felt the Deltron3030 project deserved a few years earlier (and which was 100% the genesis for the whole thing, down to the fact that it featured both Del and Albarn and was a scifi hiphop concept album) – but, weirdly, I *do* remember getting quite excited about the band’s then-cutting-edge website, featuring GAMES an ARTWORK and SECRET TRACKS and all sorts of fun stuff, which used to regularly crash every single work computer I would try and load it up on in the early-2000s and which, thanks to the magic of, er, marketing, has now returned, all spruced-up and de-Flashed and modern-device-compatible for the band’s 25th anniversary! This is really fun – partly as a relic of What The Web Used To Be Like, partly as a bit of digital archaeology, but mainly because Gorillaz always had an incredibly strong sense of LORE (sorry) behind them which the site expresses to the full; it leans into the whole ‘fantastical cartoon band full of freaks’ thing, and the Hewlett art style, and it’s FULL of fun bits and pieces for fans to enjoy, and it feels like it was made with love and care rather than by an agency sh1tting it out for the cash and, basically, even 19 years after it was originally shuttered it’s SO much better than most digital ‘portals’ for brands or artists that I’ve seen in all the years hence. Have a play, it’s fun (and the looping instrumental of Clint Eastwood that plays over the opening FPS section is annoyingly-earwormy).
  • Cyber City Orion: There will come a point when I stop being impressed by people coding cool in-browser 3d experiences, but I am not yet so jaded that I won’t let out a small ‘ooh, isn’t that *pretty*?’ when confronted with a shiny, navigable space to explore in Chrome. So it is with Cyber City Orion, which is, I *think*, just a little bit of show-off coding from whoever’s behind it and which lets you explore a small slice of a cyberpunk-ish city, both in your flying car and on-foot; collect some coins, spend them to unlock all four of the playable arcade games, play the games, smile, be on your merry way. The actual ‘interaction’ here is relatively limited (fly, walk, occasionally press ‘E’), but the style of this is lovely and it runs REALLY nicely even on my ageing laptop which barely wheezed at all as I gazed around the neon skyscrapers in slightly-baffled wonderment, and the little arcade games are…not totally sh1t! Christ, I’m not selling this, am I? Click the link and ignore me.
  • AI Bible Sagas: What, do you think, might God ask of us were He to suddenly appear to us in a collective vision? Would it be to stop the killing and the hateful rhetoric? Might it be to stop invoking His name in the promotion of hate and division? NO IT WOULD NOT BE ANY OF THOSE THINGS! Instead, he would INEVITABLY ask that we spend our time making video interpretations of the scriptures with the assistance of cutting-edge AI tools, and that we then place those videos on YouTube and aggressively monetise them to an audience of the devout! And lo, it came to pass! This is AI Bible Sagas, which is a channel seemingly on a mission to create AI-generated ‘films’ of all of the Bible’s books, produced (I think) by and for a Black evangelical audience – we’re currently still only on the Old Testament, but if you are keen you can see ‘The Book of Judges: The Movie!’ and ‘The Book of Joshua: The Movie’ for FREE right here (there are, beautifully, trailers for forthcoming Books, like this is the MCU or something). ”What are these films like?” I hear you cry – well, obviously I have only taken a slightly-cursory look, but from what I can tell if you’re in the market for a knockoff Morgan Freeman voicemodel reading the verses while some 6s Veo3 clips play shinily underneath the audio then, well, you are in for a TREAT. Would God want His words to be so aggressively-monetised as is happening here, with the ads on the channel and the frequent exhortations to donate to the owners CashApp?  I mean, who are we to say, he is ineffable, etc etc.
  • The Know Rogan Experience: Long-term readers will know that I don’t ‘do’ podcasts (except I spend all day listening to Radio4, so, well, that’s basically the same thing, isn’t it? FFS Matt!), but I was almost tempted by this one – Know Rogan is a series which basically attempts to UNDERSTAND THE PHENOMENON via listening to the fcuking shows. Per the blurb, “The Know Rogan Experience is a show where two podcasters with no previous Rogan experience get to know Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan is one of the most listened to people on the planet, whose interviews and opinions influence millions. He is regularly criticized for his views, often by people who have never actually listened to Rogan. So we listen to Joe Rogan, and, where needed, try to correct the record. It’s the show for those who are curious about Joe Rogan, his guests, and their claims, as well as for anyone who just wants to understand Joe’s ever growing media influence.” This might be funny, and it might be interesting, but, equally, I think one can learn anything anyone need ever know about Joe Rogan from this short clip.
  • Find The Archived Version Of Any Webpage In One Click: A Chrome experience that does literally that one thing – visit a url, and if it is dead (or, erm, if it’s paywalled) press a single button on your toolbar to open a version of the page on the Internet Archive (presuming such a thing exists). This is VERY USEFUL.
  • Digital Audrey: Do YOU like Audrey Hepburn? When her dead likeness was used in that intensely-creepy ad for, inexplicably, Galaxy chocolate bars, did you rejoice rather than recoil? OH WELL DO I HAVE A TREAT FOR YOU! Digital Audrey is…what is Digital Audrey? In the project’s own words: “Welcome to the official store of Digital Audrey, a collective art initiative dedicated to preserving and expanding Audrey Hepburn’s timeless charm and legacy in the realm of Artificial Intelligence. Our talented artists, passionate about Hepburn’s enduring spirit, create captivating digital art pieces using cutting-edge AI and digital techniques. The Digital Audrey collective seeks to share Hepburn’s elegance with fans, present and future, through our exquisite original artwork. We ensure that our creations are transformative and distinct, steering clear of any copyright infringement on her previous work. Our goal is to establish a minimum quality standard for all generative AI media that encapsulates Audrey’s essence.” What this seems to mean in practice is, er, a slightly-shonky-feeling website that seems to be attempting to flog AI-generated prints featuring Hepburn’s likeness – except if you click through then there aren’t actually prints, and what you’re in fact doing is paying $12.99 for a PNG. But WHAT PNGs! Please do take a moment to click this link and see the quality of the artworks you too could purchase – I mean, who wouldn’t want to own an image depicting what I can only describe as ‘Audrey Hepburn if genespliced with a young Melanie Sykes’? NO FCUKER, etc etc! Thanks to Eleanor for sending this to me – you will want to thank her too, trust me.
  • 100th Projects: I appreciate that this is a…somewhat-grammatically-idiosyncratic title for this link, but, well, I am preserving the original and to be honest I find it rather charming. Anyway, this is a personal site made by and hosting the small digital projects of (I think) one Tomoya Okada, who’s (again, I think) a Japanese digital designer who has over the past few years made 100 separate little digital…toys? Code experiments? Whatever, these are all linked to from this website, which has an oddly-peaceful feel to it and which subdivides all of the small works into different categories, from ‘growth’ to ‘playfulness’ and various categories inbetween, and, well, I just think it’s quite a nice way to celebrate a small body of personal work.
  • Ask Ralph: What’s the best and most useful and, frankly, most compelling use of AI technology that you can think of? Is it to have a companion on your phone that can give you sartorial advice from the very, very narrow perspective of a North American brand famed for pastel polo shirts and a generally preppy vibe? YES, YES IT IS! Thank God, then, for Ask Ralph, Ralph Lauren’s (sadly US-only, but even us non-’Muricans can at least get to enjoy the website) new, AI-powered digital pal in your pocket. “What might you want to ask Ralph about?”, I hear you cry – well, LET ME TELL YOU! Your little digital Ralphie will offer you “personalized styling and shopping guidance” – I KNOW, RIGHT? Also, “Ask Ralph will curate men’s and women’s Polo Ralph Lauren styles to fit your needs, offering complete outfit suggestions and a variety of pieces to choose from” – AMAZING! Oh, and when that palls, relax safe in the knowledge that you can use the app to “Discover the timeless World of Ralph Lauren with Ask Ralph’s expansive knowledge base, from our deep-rooted heritage to curated seasonal articles and more”! Truly, these are all things that DEFINITELY required a specially-designed chatbot built on top of a midrange LLM! I do wonder what exactly is in it for you if, say, your wardrobe doesn’t consist solely of RL-branded apparel – will Ask Ralph know how I should best pair my scuffed etnies and questionable slogan tees with a classic yachting jacket? I DO HOPE SO! I feel very strongly that a lot of the agency teams at Media Monks et al who spent the entire 2020-22 period flogging dead-in-the-water metaversal experiences to in-house idiots with budget have now pivoted to selling those same idiots pointless AI cruft and, well, I can’t say I blame you tbh, times are tough out there and you probably have children to feed. Although I suppose there’s a small outside chance that this is in fact the distilled essence of Ralph Lauren’s ACTUAL SOUL in app form, which would be sort-of cool I guess.
  • Pollar: This is interesting as a bit of a code/news experiment; Pollar is, as far as I can tell, a one-man news aggregation project designed to make news a bit more digestible and easy to consume online; it’s a Polish project focused on Polish news at present, but I think the creator has plans to expand it to other regions; the site’s in English, though, and you can get a sense for how it works and what it’s trying to do. As far as I can tell it’s basically taking a bunch of sources, using those to create summaries of main headlines with additional bulleted info sourced from the initial range of news sites; it also offers you outlinks to all the sources, categorised by whether they’re domestic or external and an ostensible reading of their political leanings. I think this is really nicely-done from a design and IA point of view, and I’ll be interested to see if the model is scaleable because as a clean interface and daily news overview I can imagine it being useful.
  • Britain Owes Palestine: My initial reaction to this was ‘I mean, probably, yes, but good luck getting anything done about it’, but then I figured that maybe I should be less cynical and just promote the initiative regardless of my personal belief in its likely success or otherwise. “The ongoing suffering in Palestine can be directly traced to Britain’s violations of international law between 1917 and 1948. We need your support in urging the British Government to formally acknowledge Britain’s role, issue a sincere apology, and provide meaningful reparations to the Palestinian people…We’ve submitted a legal petition challenging the government to account for Britain’s systemic breaches of international law during its unlawful occupation of Palestine.“ You can read the press release about the campaign here should you be interested – I don’t personally think there’s any chance of this being acknowledged in any meaningful way, certainly not by this administration and certainly not right now, but you might want to get involved and show your support, and, even if not, I learned quite a lot of history as a result of just reading around the site and the FAQ (although it’s possible that you’re less innately ignorant than I am and know a lot of this stuff already).
  • Explore Space: The solar system! Represented in your browser! All done in code! This is actually pretty impressive for a hobby project, and I like the fact that there’s a button that let’s you basically get into a virtual spaceship and then fly around the cosmos using WORMHOLES to travel vast distances like you’re in some sort of scifi epic (but, er, with quite simple aesthetics), a bit like Elite (but, to be clear, with no game attached) (I’m not selling this, am I?).
  • Savor: Despite being someone who is basically all skin, bone and bile, I rather like fats – or at least the good ones – and I am inherently wary of any and all substances that try and replace butter with ‘a delicious combination of long-chain polymers designed to produce a butter-like coating mouthfeel!’. Still, I must confess to having my scepticism momentarily put on pause when I found this GORGEOUS website for a company called ‘Savor’ which, as far as I can tell, makes VERY high-end, overengineered vegan butter analogues in a lab somewhere. What does this stuff taste like? Fcuk knows, but I challenge you not to look at the site and not want a croissant or similar viennioserie IMMEDIATELY – honestly, this really is a gorgeous piece of design and UX and the whole thing just screams ‘EAT ME’, kudos to whoever did the work here (did I mention I really want a pastry? WHY will noone deliver croissants to me on Friday mornings when I type this? I really should have sorted this out by now).
  • Tas360: I found this on Reddit – as far as I can tell it’s just a one-person project, which is LOVELY; basically the site collects a bunch of 360-degree photos of Tasmania for you to explore, all mapped over the island, letting you do a bit of virtual tourism somewhere VERY far away and VERY remote (not, I appreciate, for any of you reading this in the antipodes but, well, I imagine there are approximately three of you and so you will be forgiven if I don’t optimise the Curios reading experience for this particular sliver of my audience as opposed to the other seven people reading in London). Per the post on Reddit, where I found this, “For the past 5 years I’ve been lugging a tripod all over Tasmania – lookouts, wild beaches, walks, waterfalls, mountain tops – shooting 360° panoramas wherever I could. Just me, a camera, the Tassie sun (or rain), and my wife making sure I didn’t give up long ago, haha. What started as a hobby is now hitting a milestone: planned to post at 50 locations, but by the time of writing it’s already 52 (around 130 panoramas) – growing into what’s basically the first immersive digital atlas of Tasmania. There are still about 300 panoramas waiting to be processed – and if I don’t have to leave Tassie, there’ll be plenty more. On top of shooting, I also built the website myself – coding, design, stitching tours together. Took me months and months (probably more time than I care to admit), but now it’s all in one place, free to explore.” ISN’T THIS LOVELY? A genuinely laudable project, well DONE anonymous antipodean!
  • Alignment Alignment: Satire! About AI! SatAIre, if you will! Except, obviously, you won’t. Sorry. Anyway, this is a website mocking all of the various bodies and institutions all sucking at the sweet, sweet teat of AI hype and fear, specifically the ones focusing on AI safety assessments. “We’re constantly thinking about AI so that politicians and journalists don’t have to.Fiercely independent, we are backed by philanthropic funding from some of the world’s biggest AI companies who also form a majority on our board. This allows us to deliver policy solutions and legislation that can be implemented rapidly by lawmakers without the delay of democratic scrutiny, unless Trump has told them to stop regulating AI in which case our work is totally pointless…Early research on AI identified a major challenge: how to prevent an AI from pursuing unintended objectives. Even simple systems can quickly lead to unforeseen consequences, such as the thought experiment of an AI instructed to make paperclips that ends up destroying the Earth in service of its goal. That is the alignment problem. Solving the alignment problem is agreed by leading AI researchers to be the first step towards safe superintelligence. As a result, some of the smartest — or at least richest — minds across the world have started paying other people to think about this problem for them, leading to the rapid emergence of the AI alignment research field. According to the many different research centers writing reports about the alignment problem, their work is of crucial importance to humanity’s future. But the unchecked proliferation of researchers working on alignment has now led to a far deeper problem. Who aligns the aligners?” WELL QUITE. How funny you find this will be exponentially linked to how closely involved you are with this stuff – I like to think there is ONE of you for whom this will be the best thing you’ve seen all week (and, if that is YOU, I am sorry).
  • Eight Dating: What are YOU doing between the ages of 20:00-21:00 every evening? Eating dinner? Watching telly? Doing a hobby? Getting trussed up like a sexy latex chicken? It is, of course, NONE of my business, but if you’re at a loose end and if you’re single then maybe you would like instead to dedicate ONE hour of your life each night to, er, having videocalls with strangers in the hope of ending the loneliness for at least a few minutes. The way this works is that you record a short video intro to sell yourself; people can see this for ONE HOUR between 8pm and 9pm each evening; during that MAGIC HOUR, if you’re online then people can see your profile and, if they like it, match with you; if you match them back you are IMMEDIATELY thrown into an eight-minute videochat during which you will either find your are each other’s soulmate or (and there’s obviously NO WAY in which this would be the case, but, well, I’m just throwing it out there as a possibility) just make awkward small talk at a stranger while you worry about the angle you’re being shot at. This sounds, honestly, HORRIBLE, but I am also the sort of person who gets genuinely upset each time their phone camera accidentally frames their hideous countenance and so your mileage may very (and dear God I hope it does). Should any of you use this and somehow find the love of your live through it, please remember where you found it and invite me to the wedding (I have ONE nice suit and it would be a shame not to use it before I become too fat to button up the trousers in a few short years’ time).

By Hannah Panchenko

NEXT, HAVE TWO HOURS OF CRACKING JAZZ FROM THE, ER, JAZZ SHOW ON WINDRUSH RADIO!

THE SECTION WHICH JUST FEELS SORRY FOR POOR REINALDO TBQHWY, PT.2:  

  • The Elon Code: The web is not, it’s fair to say, short on people trying to make a quick buck – grifters and criminals and scammers and opportunists all vying to part fools from their money via the medium of ‘too good to be true’ promises and the general belief that averages mean that there are millions and millions of, objectively, very stupid people out there just waiting to have their wallets inspected. I’ve seen quite a few unbelievably-obvious scams over the years, but perhaps none that have amused me quite as much as The Elon Code. “But Matt,” I can almost hear you shout, “what is the Elon Code?” – WELL LET ME TELL YOU! Did you know that we all have it within us to be billionaires? And that all we have to do is unlock this latent potential by activating a part of the brain known, probably scientifically, as ‘the billionaire’s bridge’? WELL NOW YOU DO! Except, obviously, the knowledge of said trick isn’t enough – you need to know HOW to unlock it, and for that, obviously, you will need to hand over some actual cashmoney to these guys because, well, you can’t expect them just to give this life-changing knowledge away for free, right? Still, for a meagre $39 (for reasons they never mention, this is ‘discounted’ from $156 – SO GENEROUS GUYS!!!) you can access this TRANSFORMATIVE method for unlocking your potential. How? “Just 5 minutes a day of listening to this groundbreaking audio track helps your mind naturally attract money, success, and unstoppable abundance. No need for vision boards, hustle, or endless affirmations. The Elon Code does the heavy lifting for you through cutting-edge neural soundwave technology.” So, what, you just listen to some audio and then your life will just…get better? BASICALLY YES!!! Honestly, this really is amazing – if you have a spare 5 minutes I strongly recommend you click the big BUY NOW button on the homepage and enjoy the frankly AMAZING origin story about how the secret to the Elon Code was revealed to the ordinary Joe behind the website in his DARKEST HOUR by a MYSTERIOUS STRANGER in, er, an airport bar, who warned of DARK FORCES attempting to suppress this knowledge that could benefit ALL OF HUMANITY…Honestly, I know noone deserves to get scammed, but then I look at stuff like this and think, well, maybe some people do actually. This really is astonishing.
  • Islamic World 84: OK, I am not a Muslim but I am *reasonably* certain that this TikTok account doesn’t in fact have anything to do with Islam, and that, specifically, Orcas are not a central tenet of the faith or a recurring theme in the Qur’an. Nonetheless, that is what it’s called – the videos are a genuinely-baffling collection of clips purporting to show the final moments of a killer whale trainer at Seaworld or somesuch, doing acrobatics with the animal before, it is strongly-implied, meeting her grisly demise. The clips are all shonky as hell and they don’t really make sense, but the thing that absolutely compelled me about them is that they are ALL captioned with phrases along the line of “Jasseca last moment” or “Jasseca miss you” with lots of crying face emoji and, look, what can I say, ‘Jasseca’ fcuking ENDED me when I read it earlier this week and it is having much the same effect now. A few of the early vids actually show, er, Jasseca in the beast’s maw, but they seemed to pivot away from that aesthetic relatively quickly for what I presume were algorithmically-determined reasons. Anyway, er, PRAY FOR JASSECA!
  • Big Studio: Another in-browser navigable promo world! This one’s for a little agency called Big Studio and in it you can move a cute little rabbit avatar around a(nother) vaguely-neon environment, and, look, it’s just A N Other little pseudo-metaversal showcase but I like the aesthetic and I like the grain over the ‘camera’ that they have deployed, and I *really* like the fact that, if you so choose, you can make your little rabbit avatar get into a little car and drive around the scene because, well, it’s a small, pixellated rabbit driving what looks like a toy car in a manner vaguely-reminiscent of Richard Scarry by way of TRON.
  • Objects From Films: Via Andy, this is the website of one Marcus Merritt who has taken it upon himself to do pencil drawings of objects from films – not recognisable or iconic objects, but instead very, very mundane ones. You want a drawing of the TV from ET? No, you don’t, but one is here available for purchase nonetheless. Ever fancied seeing the photographic camera from, er, ‘Mr Vampire II’ rendered in loving detail in black and white illustration? OH GOOD! These are, honestly, a lot better than you probably think they are going to be, and there are a few I have momentarily considered buying before reminding myself of what I am likely to end up earning by the end of the year and what a fundamentally stupid thing that would be for me to do, financially-speaking.
  • Oboe: Learning! With AI! I am not quite sure what’s going on under the hood here, or why this ought to be a better experience than just asking the LLM of your choice to spin up a course for you on whatever topic you choose (to be clear, I am not suggesting for a second that this would be a good way in which to embark upon a course of learning, but, equally, I AM NOT THE BOSS OF YOU, more’s the fcuking pity) – anyway, you ask Oboe to spring you up a course on a topic of your choosing and it does so magically within seconds, whether that be on, I don’t know, the evolution of utilitarian thinking or croissant-making. Ask it a question – or pick from one of the prompts, just to get a feel for it – and you’ll get a bunch of ‘resources’ to learn from, including introductory outlines of the topic, a podcast, some bulleted notes, a 20 minute ‘lecture’… the outputs here, the podcast in particular, suggest it’s built on Google’s stack, but that’s just a guess and I can’t quite be bothered to dig into it; as for the quality of the ‘courses’ – well, it’s top-level cheap LLM output so it’s knowledge-shaped but largely hollow, and you would be better served by reading the Wikipedia entry in almost every single case I could think of. Still, it’s an interesting proof-of-concept if nothing else, and might actually be slightly more useful if it was working with a better model under the hood (but, still, I do not think learning via LLM is currently anything other than A Bad Idea, personally-speaking).
  • Bluesky As The Matrix: A weird throwback to that brief period last year when Bluesky was BUZZY and MAINSTREAM-ADJACENT and people were building stuff on top of it like nobody’s business; now it’s OLD HAT and, apparently, A CESSPIT OF ANTI-KIRK HATE (although, on that point, noone has attempted to show me the video of the guy’s neck exploding on Bluesky, whereas OH BOY TWITTER), but, in a throwback to simpler, more hopeful times, someone’s built this visualiser which pulls the Bluesky feed in realtime and presents it as a constantly-updating Matrix-style greenscreen visualiser. This is pleasingly-decontextualised and surreal, you can even click through to individual posts if you’re so minded – LOTS of Bolsonaro chat at the time of my typing this, fwiw.
  • Today’s Front Pages: I have no idea where these are being sourced from, but this is…ok, probably not EVERY front page in the world, but it certainly feels like a fcukload of them; scroll and get a sense of the world’s priorities today, or at least the media’s reflection of the world’s priorities. I love this so much; the shifting eye you get on what people think matters across the globe as you scroll, the weird juxtaposition of the global and the very local, the bird’s eye view you get of how a story is being packaged and reported (witness the…not-particularly-wide-ranging headlines about Kirk, for example, which is of itself an interesting bit of metamedia)…you can click on each of the frontpages to get a hi-res readable version of the document, but there aren’t any links through to the news sites themselves which is, if I can be churlish for a moment, a slight shame, but this is a really interesting site to bookmark and start your day with if you’re newspilled beyond redemption.
  • iPod Clickwheel Games Preservation Project: Realistically-speaking I can’t really imagine that any of you are a) going to own an iPod anymore; and b) going to have the time or inclination, if you do, to hack this code onto it so that you can once again play the complete collection of scrollwheel games developed for the original iPods back in the day. BUT! Should you be someone who has one of the devices, knows their way around Github and has ALWAYS wanted to be able to go back and play that weird version of Sonic they made for the iPod ONE LAST TIME then, well, MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU.
  • Warner Bros. Classics: THEY HAVE PUT ALL OF THE LOONEY TUNES CARTOONS ON YOUTUBE! Ok, what they have also done is compiled them into hour-long clipshows which remove all the credits and the rest, which feels a *bit* like cultural vandalism, but if you’re either a nostalgic who simply wants to hang out with Bugs, Daffy, Porky and the gang again (weirdo) or someone who would like to get their kids off the horrific, violent, nonsensical rubbish on the rest of YouTube and instead feed them some DEFINITELY NOT AT ALL VIOLENT cartoons featuring anthropomporphised animals beating seven shades of each other and blowing each other up then consider this your lucky day. There’s other, non-cartoon stuff on here, but realistically I can’t imagine any of you give two fcuks about 10 minute clips from films from the 50s so let’s just focus on Tom, Jerry and the rest.
  • Thicc Hornet: You may, if you’re a videogame person, be playing Silksong RIGHT NOW – if you’re not a videogame person and that word means nothing to you, though, you need know only that it’s a new game that was released this week after much anticipation, it’s meant to be very good, lots of people are playing it right now, and it features a central character called ‘Hornet’ who, in the original game, is a nicely-drawn but avowedly-sexless little sprite. Obviously, though, this is 2025 on the web and it is a truth universally acknowledged that there is no videogame character yet to be invented that said game’s fanbase won’t, to some degree, fantasise about boning. And so it is with Hornet, who, as you will learn if you will click the link, has been seized upon by the fanart community on Bluesky and depicted in a manner that I can only term as…lasciviously, obsessively callippygian. Look, if you click the link you are going to see a LOT of drawings of a vaguely-insectile humanoid with a VERY big bum, is all I’m saying. What you do with that information is none of my business.
  • Yellow Pee Monster: Ok, look, I just want to point out here that this is NOT MY THING and I am just putting here because, well, it’s weird internet stuff and that’s what Curios is for. Anyway. Back in the OLD DAYS of the internet, there was a briefly-active YouTube account which posted videos of someone – a man, OBVIOUSLY – urinating ALL OVER the public bathrooms of various places; bookshops, gas stations, coffee shops, restaurants, you name it, this man p1ssed ALL OVER ITS BATHROOM. Perhaps unsurprisingly, YouTube did not let these vids stay up for long; perhaps equally-unsurprisingly, someone somewhere decided that these videos needed to be archived for posterity, and so here they are, all collected on one site dedicated to the strange, uric reign of terror briefly conducted by one guy on bathroom attendants across North America. This is VERY odd, very gross (you don’t see anything other than first person, genital-free video of someone urinating, but WOW are they a, er, prolific and high-volume p1sser!) and, whether you like it or not, OUR CULTURE. Suck it up. But, er, only metaphorically, please.
  • Wet Gamin: Oh wow, this is VERY odd and very silly and also quite possibly ART. I found this via excellent gaming website Rock, Paper Shotgun, and am going to lift their description entirely because I am feeling lazy: “For most of his game-making career, Australian developer dweedes has projected an image of cheeky, punkish rebellion. His website WET GAMIN has accumulated a trove of experimental games over the last decade: short works by various freeware developers that exemplify a scribbly, DIY spirit…. ”I’ll put out games for free because it kind of lightens the load off my head,” he tells me as we chat over Discord. “I don’t have to market it, I don’t have to invest time in it. I just want to get the idea out, and then people can play it. There’s no quality target, so it’s fun for trying new ideas and throwing whatever you want out and not thinking too hard about it.”” There are a LOT of games on here – none of them are what you might call ‘good’, but I would suggest you click the link and give a few of them a go and see what sticks – they all have a very defined sensibility and vibe, and there’s a surprising amount of care and work that has obviously gone into them; I would strongly recommend trying out his unofficial sequels to indiegame juggernaut ‘Braid’ to see what this is all about (and also because Braid III made me laugh childishly on several occasions, which feels like high praise in this case).
  • Can Of Words: Daily wordmaking games! Done on Pico8! With a pleasingly-pixellated art style! This is an online demo for a full game, but it’s a pleasing taster and the full thing is less than the price of a coffee should you be motivated to get the whole experience.
  • Cineline: Are you able to guess the films from the clues AND put said films in chronological order? If you’re me, the answer is ‘no, of course not, I haven’t even heard of 90% of these let alone know when the fcuk they were made’, but I appreciate you may be more of a cinephile than I am and as such might enjoy it more.
  • The Discworld MUD: On the one hand, I feel I should explain that ‘MUD’ here refers to ‘Multi User Dungeon’ which itself is an oldschool (seriously, like 1990s) designator for ‘multi-user text-based virtual environment traditionally used for roleplaying and effectively a direct-line precursor to things like WOW and, eventually, Roblox’, but, equally, I have a sneaking suspicion that if anyone will know what a MUD is it’s you fcukers. ANYWAY, this was sent to me by a reader (HELLO OLIVER!) who said that he remembered it from his teens and was happy to see that it was still in existence. Have you ever wanted to engage in INCREDIBLY DEEP text-based roleplay in the world’s imagined by Terry Pratchett? Ever wanted to join the Watch, or meet Death, or chat with Vetinari? This, then, might be RIGHT up your street. The fact that this still has thousands of players is WONDERFUL to me – not my sort of thing, but I am thrilled that it exists. If you’ve never tried this sort of thing before but you like Discworld and, er, reading and typing, then you might fall in love here.
  • Polybounce: Can you guess how many bounces it will take for the ball to escape the shape (don’t worry, it will make sense when you click)? Not after the fifth level you fcuking can’t, this is IMPOSSIBLE. Still, weirdly compelling despite that.
  • DoomScroll: Scroll. Shoot. Kill monsters. Get power-ups. Survive. This is really clever, like a videogame boiled down to almost its most simple form; scroll forward, or scroll back, dodge the enemies, see how long you can stay alive – PURE LUDIC JOY! Also, thanks to the way it’s designed and the nice Doom-ish packaging, this is a lot more fun than the central premise might initially suggest – give it a go, I promise you will find it stickier than you imagine.

By Rachael Bridge

THIS IS A COLLECTION OF SEEMINGLY EVERY SINGLE DJ SET FROM BURNING MAN THIS YEAR AND WHILE A CURSORY BROWSE SUGGESTS THERE IS A LOT OF UNIMAGINATIVE FILLER EDM I HAVE ALSO FOUND A COUPLE OF ABSOLUTE FCUKING BANGERS (EG NUMBER 84 ON THE LIST) SO, WELL, HAVE A DIG, EVEN IF, LIKE ME, YOU WOULD NOW RATHER FLAY ALL THE SKIN FROM YOUR BODY AND TAKE A DIP IN THE DEAD SEA THAN ATTEND BURNING MAN GIVEN THE SORT OF PEOPLE YOU WOULD BE SHARING THE MESA WITH!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Remembered With Love: I do love me a Tumblr with a strong visual aesthetic, and this is very much such a Tumblr. What is that aesthetic? Oh Christ I am fcuked if I know, I might call it ‘girly gothic death angel’, but feel free to come up with your own.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Trucks and Tuks: Accompanying the book project of the same name, this is a collection of photos of decorated transport across South Asia – trucks and TukTuks, shot by Chris Herwig, all beautiful and colourful and occasionally brilliantly oldnew, if you know what I mean; there’s one shot of a truck crossing something desertlike which has the TikTok logo painted on its rear end for reasons I couldn’t possibly fathom.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  •  The Epstein Birthday Book: I know, I know, but if you haven’t looked at the actual document itself then, honestly, I really do recommend that you check it out (the main link here takes you to a folder of documents; you want the one labeled ‘Request No.1’). You may have seen the main horrorbits – the Mandelson ‘Yum Yum’, the Trump drawing and message, the INCREDIBLY-creepy cartoon of Epstein getting, erm, ‘attended to’ by a gaggle of poorly-drawn young women who, it is strongly implied, he recruited when they were schoolgirls…even if you’ve seen those, you don’t really get a feel for how intensely-fcuking SINISTER this all is until you see the whole thing, all 250 pages plus, in its original context. The very clear vibes here are, in order: 1) sycophancy – everyone here is bending over backwards to ingratiate themselves with the birthday boy, which is in itself uncomfortable; you don’t normally get to see people fawn like this, and it’s very…ugly when you do, turns out; 2) witlessness – I know this might feel like a superficial thing to say (and, well, I am nothing if not a millimetre-deep human!), but I was struck by how moronic so many of the authors sound…the idiot fratboy humour, the linguistic infelicities, the plodding lack of any sort of grace or style…look, I know that judging paedos on the quality of their prose is probably not really the done thing, but it’s always amazing to me when the rich and powerful are, again, inevitably, revealed to be schlubs; 3) complicity – there is NOTHING here that doesn’t make you think ‘wow, all these people really did know that Epstein was a wrong’un, eh’?, nothing that makes you doubt that, yes, this man really did have a very open penchant for sexual predation that was being openly endorsed and in some cases facilitated and shared by the people in these pages. It’s SO GRUBBY, honestly, and you don’t really get a sense of that without scrolling the pages in full (but also be prepared to take a shower afterwards, it leaves a lasting ick). Oh, and if you’re curious, Bloomberg’s analysis of the Epstein/Maxwell emails is also worth a look, as is the Epstein/Mandelson tranche. I know I say this more than is probably interesting, but fcuk me is the world of the very rich a murky parallel existence that you maybe don’t in fact want to examine too closely.
  • Reform’s Lunatic Fringe: UK politics now, and you may, if you’re over here, have noticed it was the Reform UK Party Conference last week – I was briefly tempted to go, for Journalistic Reasons, until I remembered what going to party conferences is like and how much they used to feed my Urge To Kill – and that the media spent a lot of time talking up the PARTY VIBE of the whole thing and the air of optimism around Nige and his ‘oddly appealing to massive racists’ bunch of mates. This is an account – which, it’s fair to say, is nakedly-partisan in its leanings, being as it’s by left-wing campaign organisation Hope Not Hate, but, well, I share their leanings so I am fine with the partisanship in this instance – of some of the more…fringe opinions on display at the Conference, from the 15 minute cities loons to the gold standard loons to the more unsettling racist loons…basically, there are no policies, all these people are cranks (apart from Farage, in fairness, who’s sadly very much not a crank) and if they get anywhere near power in 4 years time then WOW are we in for some Interesting Times (I am, though, going to stick my neck out and say that they won’t. Feel free to come back and remind me of this when they romp home in the GE29 and I am desperately revising my whole ‘I will never live in Italy ever again’ schtick).
  • The Idea of the West: One of the big trends over the past 5 years or so in rightwing online circles – and you can see this in pretty much every big grifter of the past few years, along with all the ‘classical statue in my pfp’ social media accounts trojan horsing racism into your TL with every doric column – has been the reification of the concept of ‘The West’ as innately superior to, well, not-’The West’ in terms of its ability to CREATE and FOSTER HUMAN EXCELLENCE, etc etc, most often used as a stick with which to beat the idea of ‘NON-WESTERN (ERGO NON-WHITE) THINGS BAD’ into your stupid, liberal head (also, by the way, worth noting the pace at which this has gone from ‘known fascist trope used by pointy-headed wingnuts on unpleasant forums’ to ‘something said by actual politicians and quoted in the pages of actual newspapers like it’s not a fcuking dogwhistle’ – GOOD TIMES!!!1111ohgod). This is a really good article that neatly explains that the concept of ‘The West’ is a very recent construct, specifically one you can trace back to just 150 years ago, that it doesn’t make any sort of coherent sense, and that in its initial conception it was conceived of something that “transcended the parochialism of family and nation”, and “was not to be a society (or society of societies) committed to democracy, individualism, or liberalism. It was instead a rejection of the hyper-individualism of the modern period, and it was an attempt to recover an older other-centered ethic that had been lost to a prior age.” Useful bit of corrective history, this.
  • What The Money Thinks Is Going To Happen: Ok, I feel I need to caveat this quite strongly – this is by quite some way one of the most chilling and bleak readings of the imminent future I’ve read in a long time, and certainly that I have shared here. Still , it MIGHT NOT HAPPEN! This came to me via friend and reader Julian (W_W), and is an interview with a hedge fund-type called Viktor Shvets about where he’s placing his bets right now and…well, let’s just say that Viktor’s not exactly betting on a better future for us all to enjoy. Some sample quotes for you: “Today is truly different, and our times are truly different. We will never again go back to what we would’ve called classified as a conventional traditional thinking, traditional investment styles. None of this ever is going to come back…If you think of wealth inequality, it’s so high and it’s progressing so quickly that I completely agree with the phrase that is being used quite frequently ‘you are either [in the] 0.1% or you are a peasant’…We’re starting to overproduce plumbers and electricians. By the time they’re fully trained, there will probably be too many…As the information age cascades through our society, gradually there will be no jobs, there will be no occupations, there will be no progression, both blue collar and white collar…” Look, it doesn’t get any more cheery than that, but I really would encourage you to click the link and read til you get to the bit where he outlines his broad ‘sectors to invest in’ thesis, which is, honestly, one of the most openly-morally-bankrupt things I have read in an age and sort-of almost admirable for its clarity. Anyway, look, it’s entirely possible Viktor is COMPLETELY MISTAKEN about all of this, and let’s all cross our fingers that he is because otherwise MAN are the next hundred-ish years going to be a fcuking chore.
  • The Death of the Corporate Job: This is a couple of weeks old and may have done the rounds a lot already, but I am including it because a) I enjoyed it (the writing is shit, but the premise is strong) and I think it’s true; and b) it’s exactly what I have been telling anyone who would listen (and lots of people who, if I’m honest, really didn’t want to be told) was the case for about 10 years now (there’s a reason I now mainly work alone). Do you do white collar work? Are you not quite sure what the point of it is? Maybe, er, maybe don’t read this one, on reflection.
  • I Hate My AI Friend: A year or so ago I featured a piece about initial impressions of the always-on AI companion pendant called ‘Friend’ which is designed to track your life and act as an all-knowing companion based on what it learns about you from listening to your conversations – here, in fact – and now the makers are confident enough to ship it out to actual media for review and…turns out media hate it! Partly this is because the device sounds, still, like something that the tech simply can’t yet deliver, but there’s something interesting about the fact that it’s the device’s ‘personality’ that still feels off (something which Katherine Dee focused on in her original assessment 12 months ago as well). I also thought the anecdote in the piece about the universally negative reaction to the device’s presence in social situations, even from people I would expect to be relatively tech-positive; it makes me wonder whether people who are into this stuff are simply going to swerve the ethical questions around it and just mask the fact they’re wearing AI surveillance kit in the first place.
  • The Slopcast Economy Is Coming: Or at least, some people want to convince you its coming. Despite the protestations of the people here interviewed by the Hollywood Reporter, though, I can’t personally see the market for AI-produced podcasts being anything other than near-zero, at least for the foreseeable future. Still, that’s not preventing the VERY optimistic people behind ‘Inception Point AI’ from blithely predicting that this is the future – your clue that this is all bullsh1t is the ASTONISHINGLY dumb quotes that pepper the piece, my favourite of which is the honestly-nonsensical “We believe that in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI, and we are the company that’s bringing those people to life,” a statement so utterly-moronic that were it attached to my name in digital perpetuity I might have to actually end my own life from shame.
  • More Fake AI Journalism: You might have seen the story about the presumably-AI-generated ‘reporter’ Margaux Blanchard who managed to secure bylines across a number of titles such as Business Insider before being exposed as…probably not actually a real person, and having those bylines scrubbed – this is a followup to that, which finds a host more similarly-iffy looking ‘journalists’ and suggests that they might link back to one specific guy who has some previous in this sort of attempted grift…This is a GREAT piece of reporting, and I like the fact that it highlights two important points here – the first, that this sort of thing can only happen if journalism is already pretty degraded and you as an outlet have basically stopped caring; and the second, that MAN can a motivated individual now really cause havoc thanks to AI combined with other people’s carelessness.
  • Chinese Cookbooks: This is very much written from the perspective of Chinese Americans, but I found it a lovely piece about the attempts to codify a cuisine, to translate it for different audiences, and through doing so to bridge gaps between generations of immigrants whose experience of both food and ethnicity is obviously defined by their upbringing and geography.
  • What Dating Is Like For Single Men: I know, I know, but in the interests of balancing out some of the ‘women are giving up because men are all trash’ pieces, I thought it might be interesting to read one asking men what they feel about all this (ok, fine, not the first one I have featured but I am a sucker for these pieces, mainly because they make me feel better about myself and, well, who doesn’t want that? NO FCUKER, etc etc) – the answer, per The Cut, is ‘lost and confused’, but, seemingly, not enough to stop behaving like weirdos. As ever with pieces like this, I want to grab literally EVERYONE involved by the shoulders and shake them and ask them ‘HOW DID YOU GET THIS BROKEN AND ODD???’. Or, er, maybe it’s MY inability to really feel anything any more that is at fault? COULD NOT BE TRUE, OBVS. Ahem. Seriously, though, read this and tell me that both of the men in this don’t sound really, really sad inside – I mean, personal brand? “Being a little corny is part of his brand — he posts himself dancing to Tom Jones and trying on cream-colored slacks. Still, it stung to go out with a woman who subsequently posted on Reddit that he was awkward and “kind of cringe” on their date. “I’ve always had that insecurity,” he said. Broadcasting one’s intentions? Being honest about your desires? That’s beta shit. “Nobody wants to see a dating profile that’s like, ‘I’m looking for love,’” a 30-year-old Fort Greene man told me. “What are you, a normie fcuking bot?”” NO ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS SHOULD THINK LIKE THIS OR EVEN HAVE THE VOCABULARY TO ARTICULATE SUCH FEELINGS!
  • The Rise of Anime: A nice-looking, if imho disappointingly lightweight, look at the insane growth in popularity of anime, specifically in the US but also globally. I thought this was an interesting read, but felt it failed to properly dig into the two main drivers of its popularity over the past 30-ish years, specifically its insane popularity amongst black kids and the growth of Crunchyroll (in fairness it does allude to both, but doesn’t give them the space they warrant).
  • Hanging Out In Roblox: A REALLY good piece in New York Magazine in which Sam Biddle spends a week hanging out in Roblox as an adult and shares his experiences. I’ve been of the opinion for a few years now that Roblox is going to have a Facebook moment at some point in the not-too-distant future where we collectively realise a) how many people use it; and b) that we don’t really know what they are doing there or what it is doing to them, and it’s hard not to read this piece without thinking that there is going to be some pretty largescale parental conniption coming down the line in a few years. It’s also, though, hard not to read this and to once again say ‘the metaverse already exists, and it is this, and everyone laughing at the Zuckerbergian bet from a few years ago might feel very silly when this generation grow up and want a more sophisticated version of these spaces to inhabit’.
  • The Review of Oz: Specifically, ‘a review of the reimagined version of The Wizard of Oz available to watch at The Sphere, and whether or not it is THE FUTURE OF CINEMA’. I think the critic gave this a VERY easy ride imho, and that the whole thing sounds, frankly, miserable and the very definition of everything being flattened into CONTENT, but it’s worth reading as a rundown of what the experience entails and what that might mean for how the past gets repackaged and resold to new generations.
  • The Great Magazine Archive: I am pretty sure I have featured James Hymans and his magazine archive – or at least part of that archive – in Curios before, but it’s 11:38 and I am running VERY late and don’t have time to check right now (or indeed for these sorts of pointless authorial digressions ffs Matt!), but in case you’re not aware of it already it’s possibly the greatest single archive of magazines anywhere in the world, and it currently lives in boxes and crates, basically, and it REALLY needs a philanthropist or brand to just basically pay to get it all digitised and preserved because MY GOD this is a cultural patrimony and an incredible history of media and humanity and it would be a genuine tragedy were this to decay and vanish. Can one of you get a client or employer to pony up the cash, please? Come on, at least one of you fcuks must have a job with access to proper money.
  • The Celebrity Yacht Cruise: This is a VERY odd piece in Vanity Fair, about a super-VIP shindig on a billionaire’s yacht – who went, who didn’t, who did what with whom…except it’s VF, and so it’s all puffpiece-y and largely circumspect, but it contains a GREAT chat with Martha Stewart and some lovely cruise ship commentary, and at no point does its author allude to or even suggest they have read DFW, and as such I enjoyed it VERY much indeed and I think you will too if you have even a passing interest in love/hating the very rich and famous. Also, can I just shout out Ellie Goulding for her ability to blag her way onto such things as this? To my mind it would be like Polly Paulusma suddenly appearing to play the US Presidential Inauguration, or Kid Harpoon being booked for MBS’s birthday.
  • Sex In The Bongo Cinema: I missed this last month, but this is a surprisingly-lovely piece of writing in which the author and her partner go to an actual sex cinema in, er, Huddersfield, and have a public fcuk in front of the other patrons; it’s one of the least-erotic things I have ever read (your mileage may of course vary), but it’s also surprisingly-sweet and kind about the place and the patrons, and, I don’t know, I found this oddly-heartwarming, which isn’t something I thought I would be moved to write about two people boning while a bunch of middle-aged men look on and attempt to wrangle themselves to tumescence and beyond.
  • Taking Offense: Have you read Miranda July’s ‘All Fours’? I bought it for a couple of friends of mine last year and spent the subsequent few months worrying that it was going to cause them to leave their husbands, but it seems to have gone ok so far. Anyway, this essay is a DEEP READING by Garth Greenwell of a specific sex scene in the novel and, honestly, I loved reading this SO MUCH, partly because it was a far more intelligent and interesting and wide-ranging interpretation than I could possibly have ever arrived at on my own, but also because it’s funny and interetsing and well-written enough to stand up as a piece of writing even if you’ve not read the original text. If you have read it, though, this is sort-of essential I think.
  • Wikipedia Persists: This has been, rightly, recommended everywhere since it was published; this is a LONG piece about how Wikipedia works, and why it works, and the mechanics of editing, and it is a brilliantly-researched and written piece about something which has become infrastructural without us really knowing how or why or ever intending for it to become so.
  • Intrigue on the Slopes: I found this piece in the Paris Review really interesting – it’s the account of the American delegation’s attendance at the annual Ski Club of International Journalists, which, the author assures us, “is as real as you or me. It exists not only in the fantasies of frustrated Swiss radio hosts and overworked Kazakhstani investigative reporters but in the Nock Mountains of Austria, the Karawanks of Slovenia, the Mangfall Alps of Germany, and other magnificent alpine ranges, where for seventy winters journalists from all over the world have gathered to ski and drink and bask in conviviality.” It’s been going for decades, it’s a bit of a jolly, and, with all institutions such as this, it is RIVEN WITH POLITICS. This account is funny, gossipy and one of the most mannered pieces of writing I have read in an AGE; there’s lots of STYLISTIC WORK going on here, and your mileage will largely depend on the extent to which you can forgive someone who’s not a writer in DFW’s league (sorry, but) running with VERY DFW-style tics such as referring to themselves as ‘Our Journalist’ – I enjoyed this a lot, despite its occasional overegging of the pudding, but I appreciate it might not be for everyone; honestly, though, this is basically a Wes Anderson film in article form if you ask me, and, now I think of it, he would film it BEAUTIFULLY (obvs).
  • San Fermin: Our final longread this week is Janis Hopkins writing about finding himself in Pamplona for the running of the bulls (and the festival of San Fermin, which the bulls are a part of) – I’ve linked to his writing before on a few occasions, and I loved immoderately; you can almost taste the calimotxo (and don’t you wish you couldn’t). Wins bonus points for only mentioning Hemingway in passing, too.

By Eric Stefanski

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS (AND THIS IS THE JIM E BROWN ALBUM, PLEASE DO CHECK OUT THE SONG TITLES!:

 

Webcurios 05/09/25

Reading Time: 38 minutes

 

HELLO I AM BACK I AM REFRESHED AND I AM READY TO STUFF YOU FULL OF LINKS ONCE AGAIN!

How have you been? For those of you in the UK, have you taken the rest of the country’s lead and decided to spend the past few weeks becoming massively racist (or, more troublingly, just becoming more comfortable displaying said massive racism via the medium of a hastily-scrawled cross)? For those of you in the US, have you spent them instead feverishly worrying at a Trumpian effigy in the hope that you can will him into the netherworld?

I, by contrast, have had quite a nice time catching up on sleep and generally not spending quite as much time online as I might otherwise have done, and occasionally wondering to myself what it might be like if I were to spend all these hours I waste on Curios doing something better and more useful and less-psychologically-damaging…and yet here I found myself once again at six am, girding my metaphorical loins, rolling up my sleeves and preparing to type as if my life depended on it. Why? FOR YOU FOR FCUK’S SAKE IT’S LIKE YOU DON’T EVEN NOTICE OR CARE IT IS ALWAYS FOR YOU ALWAYS AND FOREVER.

Not for them. For YOU.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you know where the unsubscribe button is (I love you, I need you, don’t leave me).

OH BY THE WAY THE TINY AWARDS WINNER GETS ANNOUNCED NEXT WEEK SO STAY TUNED!

 By Richard Vergez

OUR FIRST MIX IS FROM A FEW YEARS AGO BUT WAS NEW TO ME AND MOST LIKELY WILL BE NEW TO YOU TOO AND THE MUSIC IS GOOD AND BOTH SORT OF FOLKY AND FUNKY SO IGNORE THE FACT IT’S NOT ENTIRELY FRESH AND INSTEAD JUST ENJOY IT, IT’S GREAT, TRUST ME!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS IT’S GOOD TO SEE WE’VE FINALLY GOTTEN RID OF ALL THE SEXISM AND CLASSISM THAT HAS FOR YEARS MARRED UK POLITICAL AND MEDIA DISCOURSE, PT.1:  

  • Infinite Canvas: A nice, gentle link to ease you back into ‘it’ (or to ease ‘it’ back into you, depending on how you like to conceive of the whole Curios experience), this (via Lynn) is a really nice use of generative AI to riff on the whole ‘infinite canvas for collaborative play’ genre – the idea here is that there’s a seemingly-neverending world to be populated on this webpage made up of individuals squares on a grid – each square can be filled with a scene create by genAI, defined by whatever prompt you give it, and set up so that it’s forced to do a SEAMLESS BLEND with everything around it, so creating a neverending landscape patchworked together by the shared endeavour of us and The Machine. Honestly, this is really fun – pick a blank square, use your imagination and modify the standard prompt to get it to create something genuinely strange in amongst the Ghibli-ish noodlings that the AI seems to be instructed to default to…honestly, this is cute and feels like something that could be tweaked and reinterpreted around a specific IP or central aesthetic theme; come on, someone remake this but the ‘Dantean Hell’ version, TAKE SOME RISKS.
  • Tyko TV: OK, I think I might love this more than almost anything else I have seen this year. This is a project by one Tyko Say, a writer and illustrator from Prague who, as far as I can tell, has taken a frankly terrifying quantity of old VHS footage and chucked it up on this website as a sort of weird digital TV channel – per the VERY MINIMAL description here, this is ‘a video vault featuring hundreds of hours of VHS footage shot by Tyko Say in Prague’ – but that doesn’t really give you a feel for the ‘VIBE’ here, which I can best describe as ‘it’s 1994 and you have come home from a night out but you don’t want to go to bed yet and so you turn on the TV and it’s that weird part of the night where the normal broadcast seemingly gets taken over by slightly-unsettling and very unfamiliar stuff from central Europe which you don’t in any way understand but which you keep watching because, well, it’s oddly-compelling and there’s the outside chance that there might be a nipple or two if you keep watching’. There is, seemingly NO rhyme or reason to any of this – I have clicked through some weird music videos, a Christmas broadcast from the late-80s in the US, some sort of jazz-art freakout entitled ‘POETRY DOESN’T EXIST’…seriously, this really is absolutely wonderful and SO SO ODD; in the unlikely event that you ever see this, Tyko, could you email me and explain where the fcuk all this video comes from please? Anyway, this is GREAT and you could do worse than spend at least part of this weekend getting stoned out of your gourd and just enjoying the show.
  • Strolling Club: Via Kris, a small site that, much like the first one I linked to, presents a seemingly-infinite canvas which you (YES YOU!) the visitor can mould to your liking – each square of this digital space can be annotated (just click ‘add note’ in the top-left), meaning you can leave a small message along with an icon to whomsoever passes by and happens to read it; you can tell which squares have messages attached as they’re highlighted slightly, and you can read said messages by clicking the ‘read note’ icon, also in the top left. It’s a bit clunky and VERY lofi, but there’s something genuinely lovely about the way anyone at all can leave behind a small record of themselves and their presence – a thought, a link to a website, a poem, whatever they fancy, and I rather enjoyed wandering through this for a few minutes reading people’s short prose leavings, and you might too.
  • Beats By AI: You may not have been keeping a close eye – ear! Ffs Matt! It was right there! – on the evolution of AI music over the course of the past few months, but the short update for you is ‘it’s actually pretty good and can pretty much approximate a ‘tune’ these days, even though listening to any of it still gives you the weird feeling that’s a bit like the aural equivalent of eating sweets with very realistic but still identifiably-synthetic fruit flavourings, if you see what I mean (you do, don’t you?)’. So it is that this TikTok account now exists, which, as far as I can tell, posts nothing but songs in the modern country and western style, generated by AI, whose lyrics are…well, they’re filthy, in that very specific, slightly-childish American style. You want a song all about country girls, ahem, ‘pleasuring’ themselves with corncobs? WHY, YOU WEIRDO??? But, regardless of my distaste for your proclivities, you can find one here! You want a song about a cowboy resentful at the lack of fellatio in his life? NO, OF COURSE NOT! And yet, here one is!  This is obviously all sorts of terrible, the lyrics are the sort of thing I would have found HILARIOUS at the age of 13 but which I find…less-funny now, and the music is execrable (but, equally, no worse than a lot of actual modern C&W bilge if you ask me), but, well, someone is watching – lots of these have hundreds of thousands of views. Oh, and if you’re curious, people are making AI MUSIC SATIRE now too – click here for a very, very unfunny and incredibly-classist rap video about Angela Rayner! Or, maybe don’t!
  • More Explorable 3d Worlds Made by AI: It seems not a week goes by at the moment without another variant on the general ‘here’s some tech that sort of lets you explore a 2d scene as though it were a 3d world, with everything being spun up on the fly by The Machine!’ theme – this kit is called Mirage2, which does the same as the other ones you might have seen but with an additional degree of shine and polish; you can give it a prompt, it will imagine a scene with a character in it, you can then navigate within that scene in the manner of a rudimentary videogame. Still hugely impressive from a conceptual point of view, still very slow and clunky and not in any meaningful way ‘fun’ in practice, this is, though, getting more and more polished with each iteration of the tech, and it’s not hard to imagine a variant on this in a year or so that does a basic, browser-game level of interaction. Oh, and if you’re curious, here’s something similar by Runway which effectively explores the same sort of idea – this feels very much like something that is On Its Way.
  • GeoNav: OH GOD I LOVE THIS IT IS SO SILLY. GeoNav is a simple idea – what if navigating a website, but with geography? – made real. Per the site, “This is an experiment in using GPS as website navigation. For this, you will need to share your location when prompted. For shear portability, this site works best on mobile.” What does this mean in practice? Basically this is a webpage where your navigational ‘clicks’ (ie clicking on a menu item, or button, on the webpage) are tied not to mouse movements and inputs but instead by your GPS location – so to physically open specific pages on the site, you will need to physically change your location until you’re at the required GPS coordinates required to trigger the click. SO SILLY! But, also, SURELY something that you could do really fun things with from the point of view of a treasure hunt or COLLABORATIVE BRAND ACTIVATION, or maybe even something less soul-destroyingly commercial. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a collaborative ‘unlock the thing’ mechanic that required people to all congregate in the same space to activate, for example? OK, fine, that doesn’t ACTUALLY need this website to work, but hopefully you get the idea. LOOK IT HAS BEEN TWO WEEKS I AM RUSTY FFS.
  • A Map Of WebProjects: Leia S Chang makes small webart projects; this website is a map of them, based on the sort of project they are and the how they are built. Each of the projects linked to here is a tiny piece of digital art, and I rather like the way that Chang has arranged them based on certain qualities they share – there’s something quite cool about the information design here, aside from the works themselves. Have a click and a play.
  • The AI Darwin Awards: One for all of you who HATE THE MACHINE and think it is stupid and evil and must be BURNED lest it END US FOREVER (whilst I can broadly appreciate your concerns on this point, by the way, let me also just point out that the problem here is not, in fact, The Machine, it is instead us), the AI Darwin Awards isn’t really so much an awards ceremony as it is a list of instances in which people have made predictions about AI being ace and have subsequently been proven to be full of sh1t – AI-related hubris, basically. This loses points for not, in fact, having any awards anyone can win, but as a place to track examples of people being very, very dumb about technology this is possibly worth bookmarking – I do like the fact that they point out when submissions are ineligible and explain why, which is a nice touch and a commitment to INTEGRITY that I can get behind.
  • Rabbitholes: Ooh, I really like this – a super-clever little idea which basically just spins up another entirely-random (not, probably, entirely random) noun/adjective combination and then searches both wikipedia and Google for said noun/adjective to see what comes up; the really nice touch here is that the site is built on frames, so you can click the Google links and read the Wiki entry on-page, which is a small but significant bit of quality of life design which I think deserves a tiny round of applause. Through this I have just found out that ‘unwelcome alcohol’ is a surprisingly-fertile google rabbithole to which I am likely to return just as soon as I’ve stopped typing this rubbish for you disinterested ingrates.
  • The RA 1000: Resident Advisor has been going 24 years (GOD I FEEL OLD) and as part of some anniversary celebrations they have put up 1000 mixes on this newly-refreshed site and, honestly, if you want a potted history of the past quarter-century of electronic music and DJing and club culture then this is a pretty good jumping off point. I have only scratched the surface of the selection here, but even a cursory glance will tell you that it spans genres and tempos and styles and there really is something for everyone in here should you be bothered to have a bit of a dig and a search (and you really should, trust me, this is a veritable treasure trove of music).
  • Strudel: Speaking of music (SEAMLESS), Strudel is something quite cool-looking that is sadly technically a bit beyond me – basically you can code music live into the interface. They make it sound really simple, the gits, calling Strudel “a new live coding platform to write dynamic music pieces in the browser! It is free and open-source and made for beginners and experts alike. To get started: 1. hit play – 2. change something – 3. hit update” – but trust me when I say I found it a *bit* more complex than that. Still, if you’re less of a no-code moron than me (or, er, if you actually understand music, which obviously I don’t) then you might find some joy in this – oh, and if the phrase ‘livecoding music’ makes you feel vaguely-tumescent then you might enjoy this very cool clip of someone doing exactly that, very well indeed.
  • An Auction of Calculators: Would YOU like to own an ancient counting device? No? Well you SAY that, but click this link and I defy you not to covet one of the weird, grenadelike, one-hand calculating machines from the mid-20thC. See? IMPOSSIBLE. The auction starts in just over a week, so you have plenty of time to work out exactly which of the mahogany-encased Babbage machines you want to bankrupt yourself for (look, everything’s going to tits and you’re likely not going to live long enough to make full use of your pension, why not spunk all the nest egg on a fancy abacus? YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO!).
  • PoemCam: OK, this is code rather than an actual thing you can play with, but, well, MUST I SPOON-FEED YOU EVERYTHING? Jesus. Anyway, this github repo features code that will basically turn any webcam you like into an AI-anabled polaroid – it will take a photo, slowly ‘develop’ it onto a screen, and at the same time use the LLM to generate a short, appropriate poem to go along with it. OK, so the poem will inevitably be dogsh1t given The Machine is singularly incapable of understanding what ‘syllables’ are (for the same reasons it can’t do the ‘r’ in ‘strawberry’ thing) but there’s something rather nice about the idea here and I am going to keep wanging on about how you’re all missing a trick with your unwillingness to bring The Machine into physical objects because, well, I am right.
  • TinCan: Did you worry that we were running out of oldschool products to reimagine for the digital age? Did you think that Elon Musk’s attempt to rebrand ‘underground transport networks’ as ‘HYPERLOOP’ was the most-ridiculous example of tech people attempting to reinvent the wheel, but, well, worse? WELL SAY HELLO TO TINCAN!!! Have you ever thought to yourself ‘wow, I really want my kid to be able to talk to their friends, but I really don’t like the idea of them having a smartphone – there is literally NO SOLUTION to this problem!!!!’? No, of course you haven’t, you’re not an idiot and you are aware of the concept of ‘telephones’ or ‘dumbphones’. There must be, however, people for whom the concept of ‘a landline’ is so distant and antediluvian that it has been scrubbed forever from their minds, for how else can you describe the presentation of TinCan? IT’S A PHONE! BUT ON WIFI! WITH AN APP!!! Per the blurb, “Our super-magical WiFi landline for kids. It doesn’t have apps, texting, or games—just real conversation with friends, neighbors, Grandma, or whoever you add to your approved contact list.” OK, fine, the pre-approved contacts only thing is a new gimmick – although one which you could replicate by, I don’t know, being ex-directory – but there is nothing here AT ALL that you couldn’t also do with, er, a standard telephone. And of COURSE there’s a subscription plan – you can use the free plan which only allows you to speak to other TinCan devices, but if you pay a tenner a month you get the ability to use it like a normal phone, dial anyone you like and (and this is the bit that really fcuking ended me) CALL 911!!!! That’s right, unless you fork out for the premium subscription your kids won’t be able to call for an ambulance or fire engine from their MAGIC, SAFE INTERNET COMMUNICATIONS DEVICES! Seriously, this might be the most stupid thing I have seen all year, and I have seen a LOT of terrible AI stuff.
  • Yin and Yang Screensaver: Ok, fine, this doesn’t do anything, but it is very hypnotic and I could happily watch it for a very, very long time indeed.
  • The Comic Caption Swapper: This works far better than it feels like it should – this takes a pair of single-panel, captioned US comics and swaps the captions, meaning you get (for example) a Dennis The Menace cartoon captionswapped with, say a Far Side panel. While these can occasionally result in some moderately-amusing juxtapositions, what this mainly proves beyond any doubt is that the vast majority of syndicated comics in the US (where this is from) really aren’t funny in the slightest (I refuse to believe that ANYONE has cracked a smile at Heathcliffe since the late-70s). I would like this for VIZ, please.
  • Whose Penis?: Someone has made a ‘kids’ book about all the different interesting penises of the animal kingdom – which isn’t really my sort of thing, if I’m honest (although I confess to loving the word ‘baculum’), but the website that has been created to promote it is CHARMING and an object lesson in how a little bit of a sense of fun can go a long way in webdesign (the fruit machine game is a particularly fun gimmick that I would like to see other people replicate).
  • The Byte Archive: OK, this was entirely new to me but I get the impression that there might be a few of you for whom this is nostalgia catnip: “Before Hackernews, before Twitter, before blogs, before the web had been spun, when the internet was just four universities in a trenchcoat, there was *BYTE*. A monthly mainline of the entire personal computing universe, delivered on dead trees for a generation of hackers. Running from September 1975 to July 1998, its 277 issues chronicled the Cambrian explosion of the microcomputer, from bare-metal kits to the dawn of the commercial internet…This zoomable map shows every page of every issue of BYTE starting from the front cover of the first issue (top left) to the last page of the final edition (bottom right).” If you’re interested in the history of computing then you will basically prolapse with excitement over this (figuratively, please).
  • Paul’s Journeys: Ah, St Paul – the most modern of all the Apostles, being as he was a late convert to the Christian cause who then became its most vocal hypeman, desperately proselytising all over the world and sending letters and generally banging on about Jesus and his wonder in much the manner of a newly-minted vegan or swinger about the benefits of seitan/polyamory. Anway, if you’d like to explore some of Paul’s peregrinations via the medium of annotated maps that you can click into to see video depictions of the areas he visited and the peoples he met, along with reflections on his travels and their impact, then, well, ENJOY! This is cute but a BIT clunky; still, if you’re interested in learning about Jesus’ most annoying mate (hands-down, no question) then you will like this a lot.
  • Dusty Tabs: A Chrome extension which will, if you install it, slowly add digital ‘dust’ to your tabs the longer they’ve been open; dust which you can ‘blow’ off by blowing into your device’s mic. Why? WHY NOT WHY MUST YOU ALWAYS RUIN THIS WITH YOUR INCESSANT QUESTIONING???
  • The Pong Clock: A clock, where the displayed time is determined by the game of Pong frantically being played onscreen – this is VERY stupid but at the same time also weirdly quite smart, and EXACTLY the sort of thing that you should put up on one of the big screens in reception, just to watch everyone get slowly mesmerised by it as they inevitably will.

By Nona Inescu

NEXT, WHY NOT ENJOY A VAGUELY-AUTUMNAL-FEELING SELECTION OF OLD FOLK ROCK NUMBERS, ALL WITH THE REQUISITE CRACKLE, MIXED BY TOM ‘DAPWEARER’ SPOONER?

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS IT’S GOOD TO SEE WE’VE FINALLY GOTTEN RID OF ALL THE SEXISM AND CLASSISM THAT HAS FOR YEARS MARRED UK POLITICAL AND MEDIA DISCOURSE, PT.2:  

  • VTV: Indefatigable purveyor of Fun Web Ephemera Matt Round has created a BRILLIANT digital resource – an version of MTV where the selection is drawn SOLELY from the corpus of godawful novelty songs that have at one point or another had UK culture and the charts in a chokehold. Not only do you get the tracks – and their videos! – but you also get some rather nice MTV-style interstitial channel animations, which is a lovely touch. I’ve just scrubbed through a few songs and we’ve had that godawful ‘Sunscreen’ song by Baz Luhrmann, ‘King Tut’ by Steve Martin, and ‘Granddad’ by Clive Dunn, suggesting that the underlying corpus of dreadful ‘songs’ is very well-stocked. Joyful – conceptually, if not as an actual sonic experience.
  • The Atlas of Space: Space! In all of its INSANE ENORMITY! Here depicted in HTML, as a series of orbiting patterns which let you see all the various bits of the cosmos, or at least our galaxy, and how they interact. Click on the bits, learn more, boggle at the vast infinite canvas that makes up the firmament, quiver slightly in fear at your general insignificance in the face of the majesty of the ineffable, etc etc. Not quite as shiny as previous Google efforts in this, er, space, but still interesting and worth a dig.
  • Macrowave: Ooh, this feels fun, even as someone who thinks the CULT OF MAC is pathetic and annoying – basically this turns your Mac into its own radio station, broadcasting whatever’s playing out of your computer’s audio to whoever wants to listen in on the appropriate link. Which feels like the sort of thing you could have a LOT of fun with, albeit not necessarily appropriate fun – it reminds me of a time in my first ever job when we persuaded our colleague Martin to go into what we all knew was going to be a…’challenging’ appraisal with his phone on, having already called us up in one of the offices, so that half a dozen of us were able to crowd round the speakerphone and listen to him get threatened with the sack..look, it was a slow Tuesday. Anyway, you can all OBVIOUSLY think of more fun things to do with this – it’s a simple but smart idea, described thusly on the site: “Macrowave allows users to share their system audio with anyone who has the link. Listeners can tune in through native macOS and iOS apps or directly through their web browsers, making it accessible to everyone regardless of their platform.” Give it a go, this could prove interesting.
  • Rolling A Sandwich: Ok, this might be a perfect TikTok account. It is doing one thing and one thing only – each day it films a video of its owner ‘rolling’ a sandwich. You sort of need to watch one of the videos to get the gist – or, you know, I could attempt to explain it to you, otherwise what the fcuk is the point o…oh. OH… Ahem, ok, so the deal here is that each ‘sandwich’ is made up of 6 components; each component is decided upon by rolling a dice. So you might end up with a sandwich composed of, say, in order: mustard, ketchup, bread, ham, mustard, ham. Why is this fun to watch? I DON’T KNOW IT JUST IS ALRIGHT FFS. Beautifully, if you look at the account’s grid you can see that it tried a few other things in its first few days of existence and hit paydirt, meaning its owner is now trapped in the neverending audience capture cycle of never being able to evolve or iterate lest they lose the precious attention they have garnered – SUCH IS THE LOT OF THE CREATOR, chiz chiz.
  • Caricature Bot: What’s the going rate for the grifting caricaturists in Leicester Square these days (please feel free to replace ‘leicester sq’ here with your local tourist trap hellhole of choice)? Because I wonder whether this service is pitching itself quite right – the idea here is that you can, should you inexplicably desire, upload a photo of yourself to the website, pay $25 and get a caricature of yourself, as designed by AI, drawn by an ACTUAL ROBOT – or, rather, a robot arm/plotter-type thing, holding a pen. Given you could pop into the basement of the science museum a decade or so ago and get this done for free – or that you can go to pretty much any fading seaside skaghole in the UK and find a machine that, for a fiver, will do something VERY similar – it feels like the pricing here might be a little off; why not buy the requisite kit off someone in Shenzhen and then undercut this survive by, say, $7 on a .co.uk web address? GO ON DO SOME BUSINESS. Beautifully, some of the copy on the site suggests that you will receive a ‘numbered and signed collectors’ item’, which makes me wonder who the fcuk the imagined collectors are for some shonky robot-’drawn’ images of a bunsh of weird strangers off the internet. MAYBE THAT COLLECTOR IS YOU???
  • Synaptic Spiral: FRACTALS! EXPLORE THE FRACTALS! TAKE SOME ACID AND EXPLORE THE FRACTALS!
  • Nothing To Watch: This is a really nice bit of coding/dataviz for the film buffs; taking data showing the most popular 50,000 films, based on scores, from TMBD, this presents the posters for said films on an animated, scrollable grid, with the highest-rated films in the centre; this absolutely FCUKS my laptop every time I load it up, suggesting I probably ought to buy a new one, and so I’m not sure whether there’s any other taxonomical arrangement going on here whether by theme, etc, but it’s a really impressive piece of visualisation (if you computer stops wheezing long enough to render it).
  • Behold: A Kickstarter! Like it’s 2015 or something, and we haven’t lost all hope that things might get better, or in the revolutionary and transformative power of the web! Ahem. Behold is a smart-looking project that’s 3x funded with a month to go, so you can buy in with…some confidence that you might one day receive the thing you’ve paid for (I backed a graphic novel in, I think, 2016, which is scheduled for delivery next year – IT’S A LONG GAME, CREATIVITY), which basically sells itself as ‘a smart garden camera to help you see all the fascinating wildlife that lives in your backyard but which you never see because you’re asleep, or because the animals are fundamentally-terrified of you’. The gimmick, of course, is AI – the camera promises to ONLY identify animals, meaning you will never get accidental footage of the postman, or the stalker, or you taking a drunken garden p1ss at 3am, instead only capturing the critters as they pass. Obviously there’s no guarantee that the AI here will ACTUALLY WORK, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt because it is a very cute idea (but, to be clear, USELESS as a security cam, unless you’re expecting to be knocked off by the weasels).
  • The Greatest Books of All Time: HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM. Can you hear my skepticism? I am…wary of any ‘best of all time’ lists at the best of times, but especially ones that purport to have RIGOUR and ANALYSIS behind them because, well, I am not sure that you can apply said RIGOUR and ANALYSIS to something so entirely subjective as ‘best of’ lists. Still, the people behind this site are DEFINITELY trying to do exactly that – the way this works is that it keeps track of all the various ‘best book EVER’ lists being published all over the place and breaks them down, deciding whether they are ‘eligible’ lists and, if so, giving scores to their selected books based on a slightly-arcane weighting system. So, for example, if Pride and Prejudice appears as the ‘BEST’ novel across loads of lists it will score highly – but its exact score would depend on how those individual lists were weighted based on the breadth of the list, whether it’s the views of a selection of critics or just one person, etc etc. Your appetite for this will obviously vary – to me it smacks *slightly* of phrenology (don’t ask me to explain that, it just does) and weird obsession, but you might well think it a spectacularly-worthwhile and hyperrational endeavour. Anyway, per this, Ulysses is the best book ever, followed by ‘A La Recherche…’, which personally I think tells you ALL you need to know about the way in which this is being weighted.
  • State of Sound: A BRAND NEW ONLINE MUSIC MAGAZINE!! Per the blurb, “State of Sound is a new independent online music magazine. Aiming to provide the highest quality writing, we run the full gamut, from in-depth essays about music’s icons to articles about emerging independents, all with sensitivity to music’s connections to the wider world.” It publishes new essays on Saturdays, and, from what I can see, is aimed pretty squarely at the sort of person (man) who might occasionally buy MOJO (ie you are OLD). They don’t, sadly, pay contributors, which makes me rather worry that this is going to die a death within the year, but it’s equally possible I suppose that there’s a certain coterie of middle-aged people (men) who will be willing to write an infinite quantity of words about their favourite Dylan albums and why the Yardbirds were good actually.
  • Caperture: An interesting idea, this – an app (waitlist only at present) which will use AI analysis to assess the quality of the pics in your camera roll, advise you on which ones to ditch, and offer you tips on taking better photos based on what it ‘sees’ on your phone. Leaving aside that this sort of tech is 100% going to be built in as standard to every single OS from hereon in and that as such this app is doomed to almost-immediate obsolescence as soon as it comes out, this feels like a non-terrible idea.
  • Unheard FM: Oh, this is interesting – a Spotify-linked webapp that basically lets you brute force the platform into giving you playlists based on what YOU tell it you want rather than what its algorithm thinks you want. “Unheard.FM is a music discovery web app for Spotify that generates fresh playlists based on your rules, not your listening history. It delivers unbiased, non-sponsored content by focusing on what you want to hear.” So basically what this means is that you can tell it what genres – and subgenres – you’re interested in, what years you want to find music from, and it will generate playlists, which you can then edit, flagging particular favourite tracks to influence the app’s own algo to better understand your tastes. Will this be better than Spotify’s own MAGIC MATHS PICKS? No clue, I don’t use Spotify, but this might be an interesting way both of exploring new music in a different fashion and of training (or retraining) the algos that feed you tunes.
  • Rumicat: A TINY NEWSLETTER PLATFORM! Look, if you want to reach THOUSANDS then this isn’t for you, but if you’re happy sending an occasional note out to a small group of people then Rumicat looks like a lovely, simple, free way of doing so. Ok, there’s a subscription version for upto 5k subs at $5 a month – which feels really reasonable – but the main draw here is that it’s a lightweight, quick solution to let anyone newsletter to a small community with minimal barriers to entry, which feels like A Good Thing as far as I’m concerned.
  • The Larder Kitchen: Ok, so not technically an internetty thing, but I was charmed by this and it has a website so, well, here! Larderkitchen is basically a small plywood, er, kitchen unit, that you can basically fit onto the back of a bike as a trailer and carry with you, letting you set up a minimal cooking and serving station wherever you may wander. It’s a very cool bit of simple, functional design, and I really like the idea of being able to bring surfaces and a gas stove to the park so you can have a small, non-barbecue cookout – if I were a different sort of person with different sorts of friends (ANY FRIENDS) I would very much like one of these.
  • Draw Studio: A synthtoy! Draw the notes onto the grid! Change the tempo! Pick the instruments! Make a horrible, atonal mess of noise! This is fun, even if, like me, you find it impossible to make anything that doesn’t sound broadly horrid.
  • Just Holes: A Bluesky account which only posts photos of holes, but promises that they will never be NSFW. A promise I think we can all get behind.
  • Etteilla: A website dedicated to beautiful playing cards from the past. “The Etteilla Foundation is dedicated to preserving and promoting the rich cultural heritage of playing cards. We nurture partnerships with museums and cultural organizations, fostering a deeper public understanding and appreciation of the cultural significance, intricate symbolism, and exquisite artistry embodied in playing cards. We strive to democratize access to this unique art form, its history, and its secret role in occult practices by making the hundreds of decks we preserve alongside key historical documents freely accessible.”  OCCULT PRACTICES!!! To be honest the main draw of these are the wonderful, I presume vaguely-of-their-time-satirical, illustrations on the cards – I want to go back to an era in which the Queen of Spades was depicted as a hard-smoking, rolling pin-wielding matriarch with a fag on the go.
  • Google’s AI Storybooks: Use various bits of Google’s AI tools to create STORYBOOKS! Storybooks about anything you like! Obviously the results here are paper-thin and fail miserably as something you would actually want to give to a child (unless you hated them); HOWEVER, as long as you steer clear of the obvious guardrailing (you’re not going to get far asking it to come up with a kids’ picturebook version of ‘how to titrate 2CB’) then you can have a LOT of fun; childishly I just got it to create me something about the importance of regular bowel movements, just because, but I would imagine you can think of FAR better satirical targets for Google to get its teeth into.
  • Email WTF: A short game about what email addresses are valid and which aren’t. YES OK FINE BUT I BET YOU LEARN SOMETHING.
  • Circuits: Ooh, this is fun and made my brain itch slightly, in a good way – Circuits is a game where you are presented with a single word and need to come up with other words that can go either ahead of or after it to make a phrase. The gimmick is that you’re playing against other people in realtime, so not only do you have to come up with answers but you have to come up with answers that noone else has guessed yet, against the clock, to win the most points. This is an enjoyable way to spend a few minutes, as long as you remember to turn the infuriating music off and don’t get too annoyed when it doesn’t validate your EXCELLENT suggestions (look, it’s North American, they’re weird over there and don’t really understand language, let them be).
  • Headlines: Guess the missing words in the NYT headlines, from a limited selection – you can only use each word once per game, so CHOOSE CAREFULLY. I was slightly depressed by how good I am at this, and I don’t even read the NYT that closely – I am obviously just completely fcuking poisoned by MEDIA, which, well, feels about right tbh.
  • Reload Clicker: I go away for a few weeks and Matt Round makes not one but TWO fun webthings! This is a clicker game which I am not going to explain to you because, well, it’s a fcuking clicker game and time’s against me and FFS DO YOU NEED EVERYTHING SPOONFED TO YOU FFS?
  • Gary and the Infinite Forest: A SLIGHTLY-POINTLESS FRENCH BROWSERGAME! Gallic retailer Garance has for reasons known only to its marketing team decided that the best way to get people to shop with them is to build a, er, small, massively-derivative browsergame in which you control a bear, bounding up your screen, collecting…things…look, you know the drill by now, this is by no means original but it IS a fun three-minute distraction and, well, the bear’s called Gary and I am a sucker for that. Just say it in your head in a French accent – Gah-ree! C’est magnifique!
  • A Bird’s Minute: This is SO beautifully-designed and SO clever and, honestly, I am so impressed that it exists as a tiny little browsergame – this is basically a timeloop puzzle, which challenges you with WAKING THE CUCKOO (not, as far as I can tell, a euphemism). Per the blurb, “As the clock strikes noon, the cuckoo in the bell tower has not sung. One minute goes round and round, waiting for him. But will anyone wake him up? Get out of this time loop by making the most of the events that occur in it.” Honestly, this is LOVELY, please do try it.
  • The Interactive Fiction Awards 2025: Our final miscellaneous link of the week contains enough wordy ludic distraction to keep you going for a month – this is the (growing) list of entries for the 2025 Interactive Fiction competition, for, er, interactive fictions, or, as readers of an older vintage might be more comfortable thinking of them, ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’-type games. Some are built in Twine, some are classic text adventures in the ‘Use lubricant on stump’ style, others still have more experimental interfaces, but this is a selection of literally hundreds of interactive stories, some short and some long, of varying degrees of complexity, covering topics as diverse as space exploration, body horror, making breakfast and death (THE FULL GAMUT OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE!!!) – honestly, I have only played a handful of these but I am going to spend quite a lot of what I expect to be a violently-hungover Sunday exploring them in my pants, and I suggest you do the same (although you don’t need to be hungover, and you can wear whatever you like).

By Yoshihiko Ueda

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS A FOUR-HOUR EXTRAVAGANZA THAT I CAN BEST DESCRIBE AS ‘THE SORT OF MUSIC THAT MICHAEL KNIGHT MIGHT HAVE PLAYED INSIDE KITT IF HE WAS TAKING SOMEONE ON A DATE’, SHOULD THAT SELL IT TO YOU, SELECTED BY JAZ! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • The Lost Stones of ASDA: This has done the rounds a bit while I’ve been off, but in case you missed it this is a long-dormant Tumblr which has recently been resurrected, seeking to track down all the various monumental stones which, for a period of time, accompanied the opening of every new ASDA supermarket in the UK. Why did ASDA choose to briefly decide to provide hand-carved signs to each of its new shops? NO IDEA! Still, I can’t help but love this, not only for the very specific and pointless focus but also for the fact it went dark for 10 WHOLE YEARS before its owner decided to resurrect their quest. This is the sort of commitment I can very much get behind.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Serena Brown: Serena Brown is a very talented photographer working in the UK, taking pictures of local community life, and her work is excellent. The stuff here around women’s football and fashion is particularly good imho, but the whole portfolio is superb.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • The Third Algorithm: I did a talk while I was off (I AM AVAILABLE FOR SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS IF YOU WOULD LIKE A SHAMBOLIC, POORLY-DRESSED MAN TO TURN UP UNDERPREPARED AND SWEAR AT YOU ABOUT AI, THE INTERNET AND/OR THE FUTURE! MY RATES ARE REASONABLE!) during which I was asked a question about ‘the algorithm’ and my heart sank rather – not because ‘algorithms’ aren’t still important, but because it feels like asking about ‘the algorithm’ rather fails to understand how the conversation has moved on since the advent of LLMs a few years ago. Which, perhaps, is why I enjoyed this essay, in which Nicholas Grossman argues that we are now entering the third algorithmic age, after the Google search algoage and the Feed algoage, and that we should think about this in terms of the overall societal impacts that this will have – in much the same way as search and social have reshaped society, for better or ill (LOL!!), so will LLMs, and we should probably take more of a macro view of How That Might Look than we currently do. This isn’t the best-written or most-insightful thing in here this week, but it’s a useful framing of how previous algorithmic interventions have warped society and how the current new algotyranny is already doing the same without us seemingly paying much attention, which feels…I don’t know, bad, maybe?
  • You’re Sad Because You Make Nothing: To be clear, I don’t mean YOU – I am sure you’re happy and fulfilled and I don’t for a second want to suggest that you don’t make anything! I promise! But, well, I did very much enjoy this essay by Steffi Cao, in which she argues that many people’s MODERN EXISTENTIAL MALAISE might in some way be linked to the fact that they are not creating anything, making anything that lasts. Riffing off the recent-ish TikTok trend of (primarily young) people complaining that they didn’t dream about capitalism labour when growing up, Cao argues that, actually, labour can be inherently positive…just, maybe, not the labour that many of us are most engaged in/with: “You really don’t dream of labor? Any labor? I kind of think you do. I think you dream of creating something with your own two hands and cradling it with the satisfaction that it belongs to you alone, even if it is as small as making a meal for yourself and a friend. I think you quietly dream of making something that you can be proud of, so that the time spent in your flesh bag of a body isn’t solely remembered by digital transmissions of Excel charts and emails that legally belong to a corporation.” Making things on the web counts, by the way.
  • Your Ignorance Doesn’t Make You An Expert: This is very much about the US, and specifically about the weaponised ignorance being deployed by RFK and his MAHA bullsh1t – NO VACCINE MANDATE IN FLORIDA SOUNDS LIKE A BAD IDEA, ROBBY! – but you could also apply it to a LOT of modern ‘discourse’ and an awful lot of the polarised ‘debates’ (not debates – ‘debate’ to me implies some sort of informational underpinning to both sides of an argument, which doesn’t necessarily hold true here in 2025!) around any issue you care to mention. This is long, and a bit overwritten in places (lol pottle!), but there’s a lot to like in here (the division of internet personalities into ‘shout guy’ and ‘whisper girl’ is something that is going to stick with me), not least the reasonable way in which the author, AR Moxon, frames the central ‘ignorance as expression of expertise’ question: “Those who want answers to questions go seeking them by learning from those who know, and by observing, and testing, and sharing what they’ve learned. In so doing you know they are committed to learning. Those who want to maintain their ignorance about those questions start with their conclusions, and find the answers that support them, then refuse to acknowledge when these proofs are debunked, and refuse to accept that there could be greater knowledge than the knowledge they personally accept, and use their skepticism and ignorance as proof that not only is the knowledge not possible, but that knowledge categorically does not exist. In so doing, you know they are committed to ignorance.”
  • Welcome To The AI Propaganda Wars: One of those piece where you read it and think ‘well, yes, obviously this is going on, it would be foolish of me to think it isn’t, but wow does it feel bad when you read it all laid out like this’ – this is The Intercept writing about the Pentagon’s use of AI in its propaganda efforts, and the fact that this is very much now a global THING with China, Russia and, well, everyone else deploying LLMs in a race to flood more of the world with THEIR messaging and THEIR viewpoints. “SOCOM believes it needs technology that closely matches the reported Chinese capabilities, with bots scouring and ingesting large volumes of internet chatter to better persuade a targeted population, or an individual, on any given subject. SOCOM says it specifically wants “automated systems to scrape the information environment, analyze the situation and respond with messages that are in line with MISO objectives. This technology should be able to respond to post(s), suppress dissenting arguments, and produce source material that can be referenced to support friendly arguments and messages.” What I like most of all about this is the repeated refrain throughout of experts being quoted as saying ‘this might not work…’ – STILL, FCUK IT, LET’S DO IT ANYWAY JUST IN CASE.
  • What Music Do LLMs Like?: This is a really interesting bit of research which I am surprised hasn’t been picked up more widely, not least as it feels like the basis for some potentially-fun creative endeavours…Tyler Cosgrove decided he would ask all of the major LLM models what they ‘thought’ the best songs EVER were, and recorded the answers – there’s some really interesting stuff in here, including the odd wrinkles around later models seeming to ‘prefer’ tracks with numbers in the title, to the extent to which different models pitch normie vs esoteric…anyway, I think there’s an interesting/fun project here around creating different streaming stations based on the choices of each, or having LLM-curated shows, or a website that pitches the various LLMs’ ‘tastes’ against each other to determine which WE think is the better selector…anyway, I am sure you can come up with your own fun ideas, so PROVE IT.
  • E-Waste In India: A slightly-sobering look at the e-waste market in India, and the differing pictures of what ‘recycling’ looks like at the top and bottom of the income scale – on the one hand you have the robotics-enabled, shiny factory settings in which the big-business end operates, with workers in protective gear and lots of subsidies to promote India’s circular economy; at the other end you have 14 year old kids working 16 hour days in shacks, inhaling copper dust as they attempt to salvage the wiring from the innards of whatever tat you had dropshipped to you during some passing viral fad in 2021 and which has now made its way circuitously to the subcontinent’s landfills. This is fascinating, but won’t, be warned, make you feel any better about the real impact of ‘recycling’ as an activity. “In addition to India’s self-generated e-waste, the country became a destination for the material from abroad. Old appliances flowed in from the U.S. and other wealthier countries, matching a global phenomenon: By 2005, developed countries were shipping nearly a quarter of their domestic e-waste to lower-income countries. By 2009, India generated 5.9 million metric tons of hazardous waste domestically and imported 6.4 million metric tons more…Noor made 50 cents for picking through 10 kilograms of e-waste, which can take eight hours. She pays $120 a month to rent a flat next door for her family of five. Her son, 15, works at another trader’s warehouse in the next alley.”
  • Neuralink’s Patient One: I don’t think anyone reading Curios over the years can have any doubts about my feelings towards Elon ‘Apartheid Toad’ Musk – let’s be clear, I fcuking hate the cnut and he’s currently…ooh, third, I think, on my list of ‘people who I think would genuinely improve the world were they to cease to exist’ – but, equally, I think it’s important to be fair-minded about things and, much as it pains me, I do feel it’s important to point out when companies owned by terrible people do things that might actually be good. So it is with this profile – a puff-piece, fine, but still – of Neuralink’s first ever patient, who, at a distance of 18 months since having the experimental brain computer attached to his grey matter, seems pretty pleased with the impact on his life. Now obviously this is a sample size of one, ok’d by the Neuralink PR team, and we are FAR away from this being declared an unqualified success, but as someone who watched a relative lose their speech, their ability to move and eventually their life, as a result of a degenerative neurological disorder I can’t pretend that the potential for this tech to transform the lives of some very unlucky people didn’t make me get a TINY bit tearful. He’s still a racist cnut, though, let’s be clear.
  • Robot Dolls In South Korea: I know I have covered ‘robots as a solution to the coming crisis in elderly care’ in here before, but I thought this writeup in Rest of World about their use in South Korea was really interesting – this is all about how a range of robots called Hyodol have been deployed in with the country’s army of senior citizens to provide companionship and mental/emotional stimuli to the geriatric population, and how the older people in question are responding to them. It’s a largely-positive writeup – the devices seem useful, the patients seem to respond well to them, etc – but it also does a good job of flagging concerns around data, privacy and ethics, as well as what it means for the role of care assistants who are now having to assume the dual role of technician as well as careworker, because, OBVIOUSLY, there’s a cost-cutting angle here too. Welcome to all of our futures (lol, like we;re going to live that long!).
  • El Salvador: Over the years I;ve featured quite a few write ups as to how Bukele is doing in El Salvador, mostly focusing on the madness of his crypto endeavours – this piece, in the LRB, is slightly different as it focuses on the nuts and bolts of the government, how it works, what it has achieved, its ties to the US and its role as a sort of Trumpian outpost – there’s no mention at all of the crypto stuff, which in a sense tells its own story about how significant it has been in terms of ameliorating the lives of ordinary El Salvadorians (clue: not at all!), but it’s a really good rundown of the practical realities of the man’s rule, the slow, inevitable shift towards…slightly-more dictatorial trappings, and the impact on the day-to-day lives of the people who live there.
  • Making the Dutch Golden Age in Minecraft: Look, there’s not actually that much to read in this link, but there is an awful lot of imagery and video of people basically making really beautiful landscapes in Minecraft and, seriously, this is LOVELY and SOOTHING and a nice midpoint palate cleanse in amongst all of this week’s longreads, so ENJOY IT.
  • Speedrunning a Rubik’s Cube: OK, fine, this one’s not exactly wordy either, but it’s SUCH a nice example of digital storytelling by the NYT that I felt compelled to include it – it’s a small explainer on how professional Rubik’s Cube solvers (not professionals, obvs, but you know what I mean) do it, along with accompanying video to show you, in hyperslowed fashion, exactly how they achieve their record times. Honestly, this is REALLY nicely made, to the point that I found myself scrolling up and down to get a better view of Rubik’s savant Max Park’s finger movements as he worried at the faces and facets. Really, really well-done, this, possibly one of the most impressive scrollytelling (LOOK I AM SORRY BUT NOONE HAS COME UP WITH A BETTER TERM FOR THIS YET) things I’ve seen in years.
  • Inside Jesus’ Inbox: Excuse my MASSIVE self-indulgence here in linking to a piece by, well, me (and one that’s not even that long ffs, Matt you SHAMELESS hack), but it’s quite fun, I thought, and you might like it. My friend Scott has a very singular email address that he acquired 20 years ago; here, he talks to me about what it’s like owning Jesus’ inbox. Honestly, this is SUCH a good story and I feel, retrospectively, like a total d1ck for spunking it on a 900 word column rather than pitching it as a bigger feature chiz chiz.
  • The Myth of Phineas Gage: Anyone who’s ever studied neuroscience in any capacity, or spoken to anyone who has, will at some point have come across the amazing story of Phineas Gage who (and I am being VERY reductive here) basically had his whole personality altered as a result of the small-but-not-insignificant fact of having a massive, fcuk off metal spike driven through a significant part of his head. Except, as this fascinating article notes, it’s entirely possible that this didn’t actually happen quite the way the history an neuroscience books present it as having happened. This is a really interesting article, not only about the history of Poor Phineas (and photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who allegedly suffered a parallel incident and side-effects) but about how history is created, about sources and ‘truth’ and how we construct stories and narratives, and while this is very much About The Past it also feels oddly pertinent to the very weird now in terms of certainty and the vanishing likelihood of ever really experiencing it again at a species-wide level.
  • Walking Shibuya: Once again I point you towards the writing of Craig Mod, who in this essay writes about walking around Shibuya in Tokyo, a district which is apparently the source of many people’s mental models of what they think when they here ‘Tokyo’ – I loved this SO MUCH, mainly because of the way Mod writes about the way in which a sense of place is constructed, and the way in which some parts of a city can be entirely performatively ‘themselves; I thought this passage was a nice encapsulation of the whole: “In this sense, it was fascinating. Horrifying but also kind of … cool? Hordes, yes, but international in a way Tokyo should aspire to, and with a laudible placidity and straightforwardness to their desires. Nobody was lying. Everyone was authentic in their hunger. Tourists rapacious for overpriced knickknacks and waiting in line for substandard food. Tourists chowing down on white-bread egg sandos, guided by: a billion hours of staring at hand computers, flick-flicking through TikToks and Reels, the Algorithm rewarding the most garish over the most thoughtful, rewarding extremes over silence, travel-fluencers, a full realization of what happens when you scale late-stage capitalism through the lens of omnipresent technology with no guardrails. You get Center Gai in 2025. And Sam and I stood in the middle of it, stunned.” What’s perhaps most interesting about this is that I think you could pick any of the world’s top…what, 30, cities, and find a place (or places) within each that give you this very specific feeling. Is that good? No idea, it just is.
  • British Chaos Goes Global: Curios favourite Clive Martin goes long for VICE on what exactly has fueled the rise of the UK influencer, from the TopJaw cnut to the Ibiza Final Boss cnut (remember him? OH HOW QUICKLY THE WHEEL OF VIRAL FAME TURNS! He’s 100% coming to a second-tier fresher’s week near YOU very soon!) to all the other gurning MADFERRIT new lad cnuts clogging up the feed with the into-camera shouty exhortations to BRITISH BLOKEYNESS (it feels very male, this stuff), and what it is that drives both the creators and their appeal. “Perhaps one of the reasons Brits do chaos content so well is because of our long-established tribal lines and regional divides, with each local identity bringing its own brand of madness to the party. If you look at the work of vox poppers like Dilan Kurt and Stephen Sarpong, who go around asking the citizens of satellite towns like Ilford or Luton or Croydon where they were when Michael Jackson died—or what they would ask God, given the chance—you’ll find a kind of idiot ethnography, accidental moments of profundity from a cast of bewildered pensioners, Deliveroo drivers, and street drinkers, dispatches from a divided island. “Like all good sitcom characters, they have catchphrases,” observes Farrell. “Our parents might have quoted Basil Fawlty or Del Boy to each other, but we have Mikey Menace, because nobody watches TV anymore. “I remember hearing once that you have to have a recognizable silhouette to be a good stand-up comedian, and I think all these British Chaos characters have that,” continues Farrell.  “Someone like Dannyboy83 reminds us of someone you’d meet on a package holiday, being an absolute nightmare at the beach. They’re the sort of people that once might have just been a ‘local character’ in a pub in Stevenage, or wherever they’re from, but have become international celebrities.”” On the one hand, this is a great, readable piece and I love Clive’s writing; on the other, this is a very long-winded way of basically saying ‘cheap gak’.
  • Icecream Hysteria: I loved this longread all about the ice cream van business in the UK – honestly, this is charming and nostalgic and interesting and informative, and made me really, really want a 99. Also, I had totally forgotten about raspberry sauce being called ‘Monkey’s Blood’ in the North East.
  • Being on Bake-Off: I’ve never really gotten into bake off, but I am a sucker for a ‘this is what it was like being on a famous TV show’ expose’, and here Ruby Tandoh (who’s a far better writer than most of the people who end up on TV cooking shows, I think) writes about her experience of being inside the most famous tent on telly. This is a GREAT read, genuinely informative about the process of making the show but even moreso on the odd psychology of the contestant and the weird question of what it is that people WANT from these appearances and brushes with fame. This made me very, very peckish, though, so caveat lector and all that.
  • An Open Letter to Marge Simpson: I know this is on McSweeney’s and as such might technically be designated ‘comedy’ writing, but I found this really quite moving in ways I wasn’t expecting to. “It would take me thirty years to understand your context, Marge. The flawed euphoria of the mid-’90s. The dot-com bubble that wasn’t yet understood as a bubble. The notion that, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the “end of history” had been reached. There were no more wars between superpowers. Quality of life was high! Racism and sexism were relics of the past! Never mind that there wasn’t a single woman on The Simpsons writing staff for the first six seasons—by which point your character’s identity had already been cemented. Your dourness was an instrumental foil that allowed Homer’s happy-go-luckiness, Lisa’s idealism, and Bart’s moxie to shine. “Marge’s pain,” a longtime Simpsons writer once told me, drove her plot. In the eyes of the writing staff, you and your pain were the same.”
  • Princess Idiot: A short story by Grace Byron about friendship and growing up and sexuality and embarrassment and shame and and and. I thought this was beautiful.
  • The Domme Songs: I’m not personally a masochist (at least not sexually-speaking; one might argue about what my continuing to do Curios says about me, but, well, I’d rather one didn’t if I’m honest), but I found this account, by Michael Robbins in Harper’s, all about his relationship with his domme and the vague fact of the world falling apart, to be honest and brutal and sad and very, very funny indeed, and, honestly, even if you have no interest in reading about a middle-aged man having curling irons applied to the tip of his penis (“G burns the head of my penis with a curling iron (my idea; she didn’t want to do it; should have listened to her).”) then I can still recommend this unreservedly.
  • Ghost Kitchens: Finally this week a piece by Nikesh Shukla for Vittles about food and memory and grief, which for one specific temporal reason made me absolutely lose my sh1t when I read it on Monday and which I think might be one of the most beautiful things I have read all year. I promise you, this is a superb, heartbreaking piece of writing: “Most of the food spots you took me to years ago don’t even exist anymore. Like you, they’re long gone, consigned to memory. The thought hits me one summer morning, a few years after your death, when, walking to work down High Holborn, I realise I’m about to walk past the last place I saw you. I cross the road immediately, almost stepping out into traffic, not ready to confront your ghost, which is trapped forever at a bench in the window, urging me to try your bánh mi.”

By Malcolm T Liepke

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

 

Webcurios 15/08/25

Reading Time: 42 minutes

 

Have you detected a…a certain ennui about Curios in recent weeks? A degree of fatigue, possibly? A slight uptick in my mentioning how FCUKING TIRED I am?

No, of course you haven’t, because I am a PRO-FESH-YUN-AL (a professional *what* is, of course, open to debate) and I wouldn’t ever let the mask slip! But let me tell you I am fcuking TIRED, and getting up this morning was not, frankly, a pleasure, and as tends to be the case when I start feeling like this I have concluded that I need a SMALL BREAK from the web.

So basically what I am saying is that I’m taking a couple of weeks off gathering links and writing this, and will be back in September – you will have to find another overlong link-filled email to ignore while I’m away.

Still, I will doubtless return with all my spunk restored, so to speak, and you will benefit from this via the medium of TOP-QUALITY CURIOS for Q4 of the year, so, well, it’s basically all for you.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are breathing a sigh of relief right now at the fact that you won’t hear from me for a while, don’t pretend you’re not, I CAN HEAR YOU.

PS – voting for The Tiny Awards is of course open til September 1, so PLEASE CONTINUE TO TELL YOUR FRIENDS! Thanks again, by the way, to everyone who’s said nice things or posted about it or put it on their websites, and to all of you who have taken the time to vote, we really do appreciate it!

 By Kate Gottgens 

THIS IS THE LATEST MIX BY SADEAGLE, CORNISH VINYL JESUS, AND IT IS TRANSCENDENT IN ITS ODD BEAUTY! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS PRETTY SURE THAT WHEN IT COMES BACK EVERYTHING WILL BE FIXED, RIGHT?, PT.1:  

  • WPlace: This is very much one of those case where I could, were I a LESSER and LAZIER chronicler of internet ephemera (and, quite possibly, one more attuned to What It Is That People Actually Want From A Newsletterblogtypething), just drop this link here and go and do something more productive and pleasant with the rest of my Friday, so wonderfully rich and dense and FASCINATING is this week’s first link (sadly, though, I am not going to do that; I am instead locked in to type at you for the next five hours straight, aren’t you THRILLED????). WPlace is, basically, like Reddit’s /r/place (which OBVIOUSLY have a deep and abiding memory of, but in case not refresh it here), except with one simple but brilliant wrinkle – rather than simply drawing on a massive rectangular blank canvas, this time the world’s collected community of dedicated pixel artists has instead been invited to DRAW ON THE WORLD! So this time around the blank space to fill was the world map, and in the…I think week or so since this has been live, the entire globe has been COVERED with doodles, collaborative artworks, local graffiti, hyperspecific messages, artworks and chats, people shouting out elements of local pride, highlighting customs and gags and culture, getting involved in low-level local beef, protesting and campaigning and generally just spaffing messy, pixellated humanity all over this now-insanely-packed space. THIS IS HONESTLY ASTONISHING. Seriously – you know how one of the ‘nice’ things about the internet back in the beginning was the fact that it afforded us an opportunity to take a bird’s eye view of us as a species and to start mapping out the weird fractal interests and idiosyncrasies that make us up as a species, before we ALSO realised that, well, people are dreadful and inside the fractals lurk monsters? Well this is like that, but visual. Seriously, I can’t encourage you enough to spend some time here – zoom right out, pick a country and then zoom in there to see what people have decided to draw over it. I have just zoomed into near where I live in London, for example, where there’s a pixellated Bowie in Ziggy Stardust makeup in tribute to his Brixton origins, but there’s also a lot of Portuguese graffs because of Little Portugal in Stockwell, and down the river there are tributes to Chelsea and Fulham football clubs, and there’s your obvious postcode warfare…my old neighbourhood in Rome has been brigaded by Christians, seemingly, with a LOT of crucifixes and a surprising amount of Latin, the Middle East is…well, the Middle East is a mess, per the meatspace version, but a weirdly-poignant one…honestly, ALL OF HUMAN LIFE IS HERE (or at least a pixelgraffiti interpretation of all of human life, as depicted by children and the terminally online, but still) and it is SO WONDERFUL and were it not a terrible dereliction of duty I would spend the next four hours just staring at it. You can read a bit more about the project, how it’s quickly become a vector for youth protest, and how it has evolved over the past week here, should you wish.
  • Invitin: I think this has gotten a reasonable amount of mainstream press attention since I found it earlier in the week, so apologies if it’s now OLD HAT; still, it’s an amusing/terrible enough idea that I want to flag it just in case. Are you considering getting married? Are you worried about the rising costs and whether the need to tighten purse strings might mean having to forego the third wedding breakfast, the mariachi band or the Fair Trade gak station for the late-night crew? Well worry not, for DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGY has the answer! Invitin is an app that lets anyone who fancies raising a few quid to help with the nuptials make their SPECIAL DAY a ticketed event – yes, that’s right, you can flog entry to your actual wedding via the medium of a specially-designed app. Per the blurb, “Invitin is a French startup that allows couples to sell seats at their weddings to help finance their event. Buy a seat to attend weddings as a guest and discover a new way to experience weddings. More than just a celebration, these events transform into immersive experiences where elegance and unforgettable moments come together.” SO MANY QUESTIONS!!! How do you make sure that, er, the people who show up aren’t going to rob you all at gunpoint, or get a little too meth-happy during the vows? How can you, a guest, be certain that the smiling people welcoming you into their family for the day aren’t secretly sharpening knives behind their backs as they prepare to make you a crispy-skinned centrepiece for the cannibalistic ritual that will finally cement their union in the eyes of the Dark Lord Bhaal? YOU CAN’T BE CERTAIN! There’s some indication on the homepage that all hosts are ‘vetted’ (YES, BUT WHAT ABOUT THE GUESTS??), and that when you’re advertising your wedding as an event to attend that you can specify certain ‘criteria’ for potential attendees (“no convictions”), but, well, this doesn’t exactly seem watertight. Part of me thinks this has to be a joke, but WHO CAN EVEN TELL ANYMORE? I also enjoyed this copy from the ‘About’ Page – “This model particularly appeals to today’s young adults, who are sensitive to values such as transparency, shared experiences, and a desire to experience events differently — prioritizing emotion and human connection over rigid protocol” – AND WHO ARE ALSO DESPERATE TO SECURE THE BAG AT ALL COSTS – “In this sense, Invitin fully aligns with a current trend that combines digital innovation with a return to essentials: togetherness, collective celebration, and adaptability” – AND SHAMELESS VENALITY! Ridiculous, horrible, stupid and wonderfully-modern in the best and worst ways possible! That said, part of me thinks attending a stranger’s wedding knowing you will NEVER see any of the attendees again is a recipe for (admittedly one-sided) spectacular fun, so if anyone fancies giving this a go then please do shout.
  • GlobeTV: It feels like I ought to have featured this before, and yet, seemingly, not – anyway, Globe TV is a pretty amazing resource which lets you stream…seemingly thousands of international TV channels, for free, through a single site – pick your country, pick your channel of choice, hit play and BINGO, you’re transported to Cape Verde or Argentina or Zimbabwe or, in my case, to Naples, where I have just now been enjoying some breakfast music television courtesy of Kiss Kiss TV. This is awesome – fascinating, very often weird, culturally varied and the PERFECT thing to chuck on in the background when it’s 30+ degrees again in London and it feels like the walls are melting – weirdly it doesn’t feel quite as sweatily unpleasant when you’re soundtracking the misery with the sort of television you’re more used to seeing/hearing while you drink a bottled lager you’ve never heard of before, ineffectually swat at incredibly-fat flies, and attempt to peel the backs of your thighs from one of those slatted plastic white chairs.
  • Incepture: Would you like to see a bunch of slightly-confusing images inspired by NIGHTMARES? No, you probably wouldn’t, you’re here for a good time not a hard time after all, but I am going to give this to you anyway because, well, it’s been sitting on the linklist all week and I want to get rid of it tbh. The site’s blurb is, honestly, not a little unsettling, and reads a bit more like something created as part of an ARG for a forthcoming horror film than the personal digital art project that I initially thought this is: “My wife always says she had scary dreams. By showing scary graphics to her scary dreams (a kind of paradoxical therapy), I hoped it might ease them, even just a little. I don’t know if it’s true, but she once said, “Since I started looking at this site, I stopped having scary dreams.” But yesterday, she said again, “I had a scary dream…” This site will continue until it sees the light… and continue…” See what I mean? Unsettling. Still, the pictures themselves have yet to freak me out – one looks a little bit like a floating piece of toast, which doesn’t really have the requisite sinister OOMPH – but I quite like the vaguely-portentous vibe of the whole thing (oh, and the polygon hands – you’ll get what I mean).
  • The Media and Democracy Project: Two concepts not exactly in the rudest of health, globally-speaking, and certainly not in North America right now – this organisation exists to promote both, and is possibly most notable (in website terms, at least) for having a really comprehensive-looking directory of local news organisations, broken down state-by-state and, within that, down to county level, so that anyone who’s interested can find verified local news sources in whatever area they’re interested in. Should any of you be in the unfortunate position of currently living in the US and want to get involved with your friendly neighbourhood newspaper operation then you could do worse than digging through this and seeing what your options are.
  • The URL Lengthener: This isn’t the first preposterous, pointless website I’ve found which takes any url and makes it look suspiciously long, but it is the one with the greatest number of bells and whistles to specify exactly how malware-looking you want to make it. I particularly like the addition of in-url emoji to really make the whole thing scream ‘YOU WILL BE SO INFECTED IF YOU CLICK THIS’. Why not try running everything you send colleagues today through this, just to make the people in IT’s life marginally more exciting at the end of what I imagine has been a long  tedious week.
  • No More Hippocrites: I like this, and I agree with the importance of the message and all the rest, but I don’t think, in 15 years of covering this sort of stuff (lol, ‘covering’, like it’s actually a real journalistic beat and this is in any way important, get over yourself Matt gyac) I have ever seen an ‘interactive web documentary’ where the ‘interactive’ part really works or adds anything to the experience, and where it’s not just a bit of a gimmick that just takes you out of the narrative experience rather than delivering FULL IMMERSION. So it is with this film – all about the slow erosion of women’s reproductive rights in North America over the past decade, and how it’s come to pass, and how it’s affecting the real lives of real people, which is presented as a single film which you can pause to learn more about the background issues, or characters’ internal thoughts presented as diary entries…except it’s not really integrated *quite* well enough, and the fact that clicking anything takes you out of the documentary rather does sort of break the flow of the whole thing, and, generally, I think it would work better as a straight film. Not, I hope, that the people who made it will pay any attention to my fcuking opinion, worth, as it is, the square root of fcuk-all.
  • Send Keeps: Do you send people voicenotes? Do you sometimes wish that rather than being a near-immediate form of interpersonal communication you could instead create an entirely-parallel system which did exactly the same thing but…with…a…delay…of…multiple…weeks…before…delivering…your…message? Well you will LOVE Send Keeps (terrible name, honestly) then – a service which lets you send a voicenote…as a postcard! That’s right, this lets you drop in an image to create your postcard, record a voicenote which is then printed on said card as a QR code…the card is then posted to whoever you so desire anywhere in the world, who will then at some point in the future receive your card, scan the QR code and FINALLY hear your heartfelt voicenote about whatever the fcuk you want. Look, I get the fact that getting postcards is NICE, and that there is something potentially cute about the whole ‘delayed gratification’ aspect of this, but, equally, there is nothing remotely ‘cute’ or ‘craft-y’ about ‘scanning a QR code and using your phone to listen to something that could literally have been sent in Whatsapp’ and…oh god, have I LOST THE JOY? Do I need to GET THE WHIMSICAL MAGIC BACK in my life? Am I dead inside? I worry, I really do.
  • The Human Line Project:One of the most significant aspects of the reaction to the GPT5 rollout last week was the number of people who got salty about the change in model not because of issues of performance but because they didn’t…like the new versions as much from a personality standpoint. Which, honestly, doesn’t FEEL like a good sign from the point of view of ‘loads of people having really unhealthy relationships with The Machine’. This is a project looking to work to ensure that LLMs are developed in ways which don’t attempt to effectively make people fall in love with them – while we can all probably agree that, er, that ship left port a long fcuking time ago, we can all also agree that it’s a laudable if doomed endeavour. “At The Human Line, we are committed to ensuring that AI technologies, like chatbots, are developed and deployed with the human element at their core. We believe that LLMs are a powerful tool, but must be used responsibly. AI systems, especially emotionally engaging chatbots, can unknowingly cause emotional distress, particularly among vulnerable individuals who may form deep emotional attachments. Our mission is to raise awareness by collecting stories, conducting formal research, and driving forward ethical standards that prioritize human well-being. We are here to make AI accountable. Not to oppose progress, but to ensure that it benefits the public while not causing superfluous harm.”
  • Lizard: A website that does one thing – there is a button. Click the button. The website will say the word ‘lizard’. That is all this website does, but you tell me that clicking the ‘lizard’ button as fast as you can for a brief period of time isn’t immoderately-pleasing to your ears. You CAN’T.
  • Crapboard: This is interesting – like a sort of shared, persistent clipboard for the whole internet. Type anything you like and leave it there for others – or click ‘Dive’ and find other people’s textual leavings which you can, if you want, edit or add to yourself, creating a new entry edited from the first. This description is, I appreciate, muddy as all fcuk, and the site itself doesn’t do a GREAT job of explaining exactly what the fcuk it is, but there’s the kernel of an interesting little digital art project in here, a sort of collaborative, infinite, textual ‘exquisite corpse’-type game for us all to play together should we wish. DO YOU WISH? NB – I have no idea what moderation’s in place here, and while I am yet to see anything appalling on here I can’t guarantee that there isn’t anything so, well, caveat emptor as per.
  • Create Your Own Video Explainers With AI: Yes, I know, a clunky heading but this is called ‘Golpo’ and, look, I know none of you will stop scrolling to check that out, so at least this has the benefit of being descriptive. I wasn’t going to include this, as it happens, but the comments on Hacker News were so universally positive that I was swayed – basically Golpo lets you feed any technical documentation you have to The Machine and it will spit out a (seemingly-really-nicely-made) animated explainer video in the vague Khan Academy style, with a voice over synced to the visuals, and, honestly, these look…good! Except this is a commercial product and MAN do the costs look…steep; if you want to make videos in colour or edit your scripts you are looking at a chunky monthly sub, and I don’t think this is really viable for anything other than larger companies or institutions which might need to make a LOT of these – that said, it’s a really interesting idea and the best variant on this sort of thing that I’ve yet seen, so maybe worth taking a look.
  • Bindings: Do YOU make comics? Are YOU increasingly frustrated by all the avenues that you’d built up to promote said comics online over the past 10 years have slowly atrophied to the point of uselessness? Would YOU like an alternative way of becoming the next Jamie Smart? OH GOOD! Bindings might be of use, then – it’s basically a simple comics hosting and marketing platform that theoretically makes it easy both to host your work somewhere attractive and make links to that work easy to share across all the platforms you can imagine – not revolutionary, but I’m not sure how many decent alternatives there are for this sort of thing and as such I figured that there might be some of you who could make use of it.
  • Some Places To Find Non-AI Images To Use Online: I appreciate that I am quite possibly a LOT less anti-AI than a lot of you reading this – that’s ok! We don’t have to agree about everything! Our love is strong enough to withstand this! DON’T MAKE THIS THE STRAW THAT FCUKS THE DROMEDARY!!! – but even with my broad ‘no, look, some of it’s interesting, come back!’ hat on, I can agree that ‘illustrating your blogpost with a low-effort bit of AI rubbish’ is, well, not ideal. This is a nice, useful post by Jenn Schiffer where she shares a bunch of useful, free resources to find images you can use, rights-free, to accompany your online posts – bookmark this, maybe.
  • Find Your Faith: Want to get religion but feel a bit like, well, none of the off-the-shelf options really FIT YOUR VIBE? You like the vaguely-masochistic vibes of Catholicism but don’t think it quite gels with your FIERCE SELF? Are you feeling Islam its history and tradition, but struggling slightly with some of your most favourite things being, well, a bit haram? WHY NOT ROLL YOUR OWN, THEN???? Honestly, this app is in some senses a pretty-much-perfect encapsulation of THE AGE IN WHICH WE NOW LIVE – Find Your Faith is, seemingly, an app which lets you build your own version of spirituality like some sort of woowoo version of ‘Build-a-Bear’. “There are many great religious or meditation apps out there already. However, all of them are not tailored to who you are and what you’re looking for at this moment in your life. Whether you’re just starting your spiritual journey or want to go deeper into your current faith, Find Your Faith helps you discover a spiritual path that meets you where you are…We ask thoughtful questions about how you view life’s biggest questions and what brings you peace. These questions will give you clarity about what you truly think about life. Based on your responses, we help you find a tradition that fits you right now. Whether it’s Christianity’s Contemplative Prayer Tradition to Zen Buddhism, Stoicism to Sufism, we match you with one of 30+ paths based on what truly resonates with you.” So, basically, it’s ‘THE SORTING HAT, BUT RELIGION’. Have I bored you with my tedious rant about ‘the reasons why Harry Potter and specifically the concept of the sorting hat has genuinely ruined one, maybe two, generations of people’? No? You’re lucky.
  • Banana Portal: A reader writes! Owen Seay from Toronto got in touch to tell me about this, which, honestly, is SO perfect and a lovely illustration of what I am talking about when I get enthused about the potential for AI to enable digital creativity. Per the website blurb, “I painted a banana with watercolors and then, with no coding experience, I built an app for my banana using ChatGPT and natural language. Then I used ChatGPT again to build this random website so I could tell you about it—and show you.  Click the green Enter the Portal button at the top of this page then tap/click on the banana. Each tap on the banana reveals a new animation. Best on desktop. Impossible a few years ago.” This is silly, simple, utterly-pointless and something that, as Owen says, would have been impossible to create without coding skill just 18 months ago. It might be pointless, but that’s, well, not the point. I replied to Owen’s email to thank him for sending it to me, and he then in turn replied with a couple of pictures of him seemingly dressed as, er, a banana, on the streets of Toronto, telling people about his project, which, well, is a degree of commitment to promotion that I probably ought to apply to Curios to be honest. THANKYOU FOR YOUR SERVICE TO DIGITAL EPHEMERA AND BANANAS, OWEN!

By Maëlis Bekkouche

NEXT, FORMER EDITOR PAUL DOES A HIGH-QUALITY TRACK-FOR-TRACK REMAKE OF A RADIOHEAD MIX FROM 2000 WHICH IS HONESTLY ABSOLUTELY SUPERB AND I RECOMMEND TO YOU UNRESERVEDLY! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS PRETTY SURE THAT WHEN IT COMES BACK EVERYTHING WILL BE FIXED, RIGHT?, PT.2:

  • International Aerial Photographer of the Year: Via Jodi Ettenburg’s monthly compendium of Interesting Stuff comes this year’s selection of PHOTOGRAPHS LOOKING DOWN (look, that’s what I call them, deal with it), images of the earth’s surface taken from the air, images of swirling oceans and man-made grids and structures, chaos and order and everything inbetween; there are some great pics here but the website is an absolute shocker for an organisation ostensibly dedicated to, you know, presenting photos in a manner which might convince people to actually look at them. Oh, and as I have been saying for about 5-6 years now to the point where I really am boring myself at this stage, a lot of these are SO HDR’d as to look utterly fcuking CGI – that said, some of the images showing industrial scarring/structures are hugely compelling to me, and if you can be bothered to deal with the click-heavy thumbnail interface you can find some really striking pictures to enjoy in here.
  • Idial: This one comes via Jason at Kottke and is a GREAT resource for any of you who want a bunch of differently-eclectic local and community radio stations from across the US, all of which seemingly stream 24/7 based on the fact that they were live when I found this at 619am this morning; there are 24 listed on there at the time of writing, from California and Tennessee and Philadelphia and Memphis and New Orleans and all over North America, and I just opened up the stream from KFAI 90.3 in Minnesota and it’s playing…er, some fairly atonal sludge-rock dirge to be honest, but, well, it’s currently 2:49am there and I can forgive whoever’s programming it in the early morning for letting loose the esoteric leash for a while because, well, why not? Anyway, this is a fcuking awesome resource that you should bookmark for when you want some unpredictable eclecticism. Honestly, though, whoever’s doing the graveyard shift at KFAI, I salute you – this is some prime-quality weird stuff you’re playing right now, honestly.
  • Wolves: Friend of Curios, father of B3ta, deviant uncle to Fesshole Rob Manuel has MADE A THING! Earlier this week, The Guardian published a piece by George Monbiot which was given the headline “Britain’s surging deer population is causing an ecological disaster. I have a solution: wolves”; someone pointed out that “I have a solution: wolves” is a great line to append to ANY article, and so Rob built a bit of Javascript that does that one simple thing, but does so perfectly, and has made it available to YOU should you want to add a small element of lupine joy to the otherwise-awful process of ‘finding out what is going on in the world’. “You’re probably wondering if you can have the javascript yourself, and yes you can. To use it you need to create a bookmark and use the code as the URL. Will it work on mobile, probably not, but it works on my desktop Mac OS X, Chrome, and that’ll do me as I’m not trying to make a production level project here, just make myself laugh.” This is very, very silly and yet very, very funny.
  • Buy Outdoor Ads Anywhere For Basically Fcuk-All Money: Again, not ACTUALLY what this service is called, but wevs – this is potentially SO FUN! I think I have mentioned on here before that c.2011 Google ran a very short-lived project which allowed anyone to buy unused TV inventory on local stations in the US via the browser, giving artists and weirdos the brief opportunity to hack into the brains of very stoned Americans watching public access telly in, say, Illinois at 3:27am; well, this is basically like that except for billboards, and, as far as I can tell, it is REAL and LEGITIMATE and it works! Basically you sign up for an account and then get to select from a VAST quantity of potential sites around the world – there are a bunch listed in Vauxhall just down the road from me, but you can get placement in India or Venezuela or TOKYO, depending on how much you’re willing to pay; bus stops, metro ads, billboards, you name it, you can buy it through here. Which, obviously, made me REALLY want to bombard unwitting residents of, say, Bombay with exhortations to ‘MAKE YOUR ANCESTORS PROUD, READ WEB CURIOS’, or to suggest to the gentle burghers or Tajikistan that they might want to check out the world’s longest newsletter…I presume that there’s a not-insignificant degree of vetting going on here at some point in the pipeline to prevent you from doing anything violently-offensive, but I ADORE the possibility of this and all of the silly things you could do with it; if nothing else you could have some really decent low-level fun by putting up ads that say things like “John, I know you cheated and I will reveal EVERYTHING” in any reasonably-populous English-speaking city – PLEASE can some of you think creatively about how to use this for fun and frivolous (and definitely not life-ruining ways)? THANKS!
  • Beautiful Code Fish: I know that X is a horrible, barely-usable cesspit of racist rage these days – honestly, I occasionally keep an eye on the mentions of a Venerable UK Publication on there and the amount of frothing xenophobia and anger is…I mean, it’s quite troubling tbh, and if you were to go by what you see on the platform on any given day you’d be forgiven for thinking that the whole of the country had just decided to go full fcuking xenophobe by this point (we haven’t, it just looks like it when you go to a place on the internet that actively encourages and rewards being a massive fcuking nazi)…but, at the same time, there are occasional examples of GENUINE BEAUTY, and this account, I think from Japan, which posts what I can only describe as ‘gorgeous animations of things that look like weird fish except the fish are sort-of abstract and made of code’ and which I think you should take a look at because they really are beautiful. Do not, though, whatever you do, click the ‘For You’ tab, because, well, it will make you very sad indeed.
  • Alphabet Moon: This is cute – a tool which lets you type anything you like and have that message rendered in an alphabet drawn from photos of the surface of the moon. What’s nice about this, beyond the fact that, you know, you can generate the word ‘nonce’ from images of the actual lunar landscape, is the fact that each letter comes with its own little explainer of what the feature of the landscape is, how we speculate it was formed, and a little map of where it is exactly on the satellite’s circumference. Silly, but if you know anyone who LOVES SPACE then why not send them a love letter / ransom note (delete per whichever is the most appropriate) using this?
  • Reddflow: I can’t help but feel that there’s something a touch, well, menstrual about the name of this tool, but you might find it useful – it’s basically set up to help you find ‘hot, new’ communities on Reddit – ‘hot’ in this case meaning ‘fast-growing’. You can search for new /r/ pages by date of creation, number of subs, etc, so it’s theoretically an easy, useful way of keeping track of things that are bubbling up on the platform, keep track of stuff that’s getting a degree of community traction, etc etc. It’s also, inevitably, full of filth, so careful what you click on as it’s not always immediately clear from a sub’s name that it’s going to be wall-to-wall bongo.
  • Onions: A new investigation by The Pudding, asking the vital question ‘yes, ok, but what is THE most efficient way of slicing an onion if you want to get both small and VERY uniform pieces’ – as someone who finds an almost therapeutic joy in dicing things up really, really finely (this is not, I promise, in ANY way sinister, I just really like chopping! Honest! Is this too much protesting?) I was devastated to learn that I hadn’t in fact been optimising my chop; this may CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOREVER (or alternatively, if you care less about optimising one’s alliums than I apparently do, you can just enjoy the typically-neat way in which the dataviz here works – the little toggle that lets you switch between views of the onion in cross-section and the comparison between the sizes of the various pieces that would result from that particular style of chopping is really far slicker than in needs to be, kudos to whoever put that together).
  • Birthday Simulator: I didn’t initially ‘get’ this – possibly because I have for years now pretty much entirely-ignored my birthday and so don’t really know what ‘standard’ birthday celebrations or rituals entail anymore (no shade to any of you who still enjoy celebrating the fact of being one year closer to death, by the way – apart from those of you who demand that people spend a whole week paying special attention to you, you lot can fcuk right off) – but I sat with it for a bit and after the third nonsensical hoop I had to jump through it finally clicked as A FUNNY JOKE; this is, honestly, a neat little series of gags which escalates pleasingly as you go through it, and it will be even better if you share it with someone on their actual birthday (also, should you work for any brand even vaguely-associated with birthdays then there is a lot of, er, ‘inspiration’ which you could theoretically draw from this, just saying).
  • The Sky Where You Are: This site purports to be a representation of the horizon RIGHT NOW, wherever you are in the world; sadly (not sadly) the weather in London has been pretty uniformly sunny for most of the week (or at least the bits of it I’ve been forced to be in front of a laptop, chiz chiz) and so I’ve not had the chance to try it out when the sky’s been anything other than a shade of beatific blue and so have no idea if it’s a real thing or whether it’s fcuking with me.
  • Am I Being Persuaded?: I think I have wanged on enough over the past few years about the fact that our collective ability to have any sort of a handle on ‘what is going on’ has been pretty much banjaxed, and that it’s only going to get worse with the increased granular fragmentation of news and information and AI-generated stuff that’s indistinguishable from real footage and and and…anyway, you don’t need more of this from me is what I am trying to say, so I will just introduce this and leave it here without the additional tedious commentary. This is a Chrome extension which “analyses page content against the criteria set out in the book “Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity” by Sander van der Linden” – basically you install it and then click a button when you’re browsing the web; the extension runs an LLM query using Gemini which evaluates the content of the webpage based on a prompt which, presumably, contains the entire text of the book in question and attempts to gauge the extent to which what you’re looking at is defined by said text as ‘potential misinformation’. Obviously this requires people to a) know about it; b) install it and c) then use it, meaning it’s next-to-useless, but I like the principal of the thing and, honestly, there’s an argument for having something similar as a standard in-browser feature (leaving aside all the obvious questions about LLM reliability, how you decide on the determinant criteria underpinning the assessment, etc etc).  Worth a look as there’s something in this, even if not in this specific execution.
  • Wordslide: A daily word puzzle! Which, honestly, I found significantly-harder than I am comfortable admitting! Wordslide is basically a game in which every day you need to rearrange the letters in a grid so that it forms words both vertically and horizontally – you do this by sliding the letters along the rows and columns in a sort of two dimensional Rubik’s Cube sort of way. Does that make sense to you? It barely made sense to me, to be honest, but perhaps it will all click when you click the link.
  • Sub/Title: This, though, this is easy enough for even someone who knows nothing about cinema to get involved with – or at least it is in the early stages, before it starts to move beyond the basic, at which point I am STUMPED. Still, it’s a simple premise – you get given a selection of dialogue snippets from films and are asked to pick which of the movies the relevant line is from; each round adds another question and film to choose from, until by the end you have to match seven quotes to seven films. You can win ‘power-ups’ (a free pass, additional lives, etc) between levels, and the whole thing is generally just pretty fun, even for a cinematic moron like me.
  • Foodle: Guess the ingredients in the recipe! Except all the recipes are American, so you’ll never fcuking guess WHAT these mad fcukers cook with, given the fact that they famously consider ‘Cream of Chicken Soup’ and ‘potato chips’ viable ‘ingredients’. Still, if you can get on board with this and remember to spell in yank, this is a not-unfun WordleAlike for the foodies amongst you (lol foodies, honestly, some of these recipes are acts of actual fcuking violence).
  • Chronoodle: Put the dates in order! But in a slightly different way to all the OTHER ‘put the dates in order’ games I have featured on here in the past few years! Simple, fun and a pleasing addition to your morning games routine (what a ridiculous sentence for an adult to type, and yet, well, WE NEED THE LUDIC DISTRACTION. Bread and digital circuses, kids, and ignore the smell of smoke on the air!).

By Rebeca Fleur

OUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS A BRILLIANT SELECTION OF OLD GUITAR SOUNDS AND PSYCHEDELIA AND OTHER BITS AND PIECES (LOOK I CAN’T WRITE ABOUT MUSIC YOU KNOW THAT BY NOW) MIXED BRILLIANTLY BY LEOLYXXX! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY EMPTY THIS WEEK!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Man Cereal: Are you a MAN? Do you find it VITAL to be AS MANLY AS POSSIBLE? Are you thwarted in this by an inability to eat a sufficiently MANLY, ALL-MEAT AND EGG diet? Do you quietly crave girly, frilly breakfasts like, say, CEREAL? Well FEAR NOT, MAN! There’s a new brand out there that has you covered, which will let you both satisfy your craving for some sort of corn-or-bran-or-wheat-based breakfast indulgence whilst at the same time resting assured that your inherent masculinity isn’t being compromised by the sort of FEMININE ENERGY embodied by Tony the Tiger (that neckerchief is suspect) or the three twinks on the front of the Rice Krispies (oh come on). MAN CEREAL is, er, cereal! But with more protein! Because, of course, that is VITAL to, er, being a man! Oh, and it contains creatine too, because that’s VITAL as well. Honestly, I thought this was a joke but, well, it’s 2025 and of course it’s fcuking not.
  • Man In Bean: Are you aware of the giant metal bean sculpture thing in Chicago, by Anish Kapoor, which has been there for years? Are you aware that there’s a relatively-recent movement which claims (apparently sincerely – they say this isn’t itself an art project and that they really do believe this, although I remain…not wholly convinced) that Kapoor locked a baby inside the sculpture when he made it, which baby has since grown to adulthood and that as such there is A MAN IN THE BEAN! Obviously there is, er, not a man in the bean, but WOW do they commit to the bit – ‘amusingly’, serial Kapoor-troller Stuart Semple has obviously attempted to create his own monetised grift on this by offering an ‘AirB&Bean’ (LOL!) service selling artists’ replicas of a key to the bean for a tenner; you can read a longer piece about this here, if you’re interested, but, basically, I am going to keep watching this until they attack the bean with sledgehammers to attempt to FREE THE GUY.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • AI and the Future of the UK: Anyone who’s been reading Curios for any length of time is, frankly, a weird masochist, but will also have developed a reasonable perspective on the extent to which I am ever able to predict anything – which is, broadly-speaking, ‘not at all’. I got Brexit totally wrong, I got Trump #1 totally wrong, and the past 15 years of webspaff is littered with me confidently saying things like ‘expect to see this EVERYWHERE in six months!’ and then said thing never being seen or heard from again (although in my defence I was right about NFTs all along, and ‘web3’). The one area in which I am happy to claim a TINY bit of clairvoyance, though, is around the AI stuff, which I have been boring my actual IRL friends about for three years now, telling them how it was going to fcuk everything up and how lots of people were going to lose their jobs and a lot of money, and how, possibly, it might be a good idea for people to start, well, thinking practically about what it might look like if this stuff became widely-adopted and what society might need to do to mitigate its impact. Which is why, as I think I’ve said to the point of tedium over the past few years, I am so frustrated by the fact that no politicians seem willing to engage with these questions in anything resembling a serious manner, and noone seems to want to, or be able to, talk about things like ‘so, the jobs market, what ARE we going to do about that, then?’. Anyway, it turns out I’m not the only person thinking like this – thankfully, though, Sherif Elsayed-Ali is smarter than I am, and a more coherent mind, and has set down his thoughts in this really well-thought-out essay which outlines the things we ought to be thinking about at a policy level but, seemingly, aren’t – honestly, this is the smartest thing I have read about AI and What It Is Doing in ages, and, even if you think it’s all sh1t, you really ought to read it. Here’s his opening premise, should this help entice you to click. “Here, I argue for an intentional, public mission for AI in the UK that prioritises broad-based economic prosperity, democratic legitimacy, and long-term social wellbeing. We need urgent action to address dependencies on foreign technology providers and to prepare for the deep structural shifts AI will bring to work, education, taxation, and creative value. Today’s economic assumptions of widespread employment, tax-funded public services, and the commercial value of human knowledge and creativity – are all under pressure. As AI is replacing office and administrative tasks and absorbing entire knowledge domains, we must ask: What happens when many existing jobs lose economic value? Is our current education system preparing people for the world ahead? And if labour incomes shrink, where will the public purse find its future revenue? Further ahead, labour disruption is likely to extend to skilled and manual jobs as advanced robotics, imbued with AI, spread in the economy.”
  • AI and Palestinian Death: I;ve written in here before, I think, about the IDF’s use of AI in enacting the total destruction of the Palestinian state and a significant portion of its people, but this is a superb (and enraging, and desperately sad) overview of many (inevitably not all) of the ways in which AI has, and is, being used in the Israeli state’s systematic efforts to erase Gaza from the map; there’s something chilling about the way in which the argument is structured here, making the case that the lives of Palestinians are effectively data being crunched (not a pleasant term to use in this context, but its unpleasantness is useful I think) to feed and improve the same war machine that is raining robot death on them. I mean, look, this single para gives you a flavour, but the totality of the piece really does leave you reeling slightly: “The lives of Palestinians are under an incessant and far-reaching data dispossession apparatus. In the West Bank, Israel operates a vast database that profiles nearly every Palestinian. Feeding this database is an extensive network of cameras and smartphone applications that capture facial imagery of Palestinians at every checkpoint and interaction with Israeli soldiers, without their accord or enrollment. In East Jerusalem, CCTV cameras cover 95% of public areas, leading Palestinians to feel constantly surveilled, even inside their homes. In the besieged Gaza Strip, the data of Palestinians is captured through monitoring drone footage and, more recently, via a new mass facial recognition program where Israeli soldiers erected facial recognition cameras along the corridors they urged Palestinians to evacuate. In addition to the modes of urban surveillance, Israel relies on wiretapping, surveilling social media accounts, and infiltrating telecommunications networks to digitally extract data. Israel proclaims the ability to listen in on every phone call and store recordings from those calls—at a rate of millions per hour—on cloud platforms with “near-limitless storage capacity.” Israel uses a ChatGPT-like language model tool to make this information usable to intelligence officials, who can ask a chatbot, for example, if two people ever had an encounter. Because publicly available data in spoken Arabic dialect is difficult to come by on the internet, the language model was trained “on 100 billion words of Arabic” collected from intercepted private conversations of Palestinians.”
  • Online Prudery: Ok, that isn’t quite the headline, but basically this piece notes the interesting juxtaposition between the open web undergoing one of the periodic assaults by the morality police on people’s ability to freely express themselves around sex and fcuking (see the current payments-based war being visited on videogames by Mastercard and others, played out on Itch, Steam and other places) – can I just take a moment to point out that campaigns around this stuff are LITERALLY FUNDED BY THE FUNDAMENTALIST RIGHT IN THE US and that, if you dig deep enough, you’ll find the familiar, friendly countenance of an old Curios friend staring up at you, one Peter Th…eh? What? “NO MORE FCKUING THIEL, MATT!”? Oh, ok, FINE – and the fact that on a social media platform owned by a billionaire it’s currently possible to make nonconsensual nude images of any famous woman you like, and how that’s, well, fcuking insane.
  • Gary Marcus on the GPT5 Rollout Fiasco: After posting Ethan Mollick’s positive pre-release take last week, it seems only fair to post the countervailing take from Gary Marcus from post-launch, reflecting some of the, er, ‘teething issues’ experienced by OpenAI as it rolled out the new model to 100s of millions of users. As Marcus notes, it, er, didn’t go so well, with people being VERY unhappy that the legacy models they had gotten used to (and in some cases developed…troubling attachments to) were no longer available. The problem for OpenAI, honestly, has been one of mismanaged expectations – if you go around bragging about the fact that you’re basically a gnat’s pube away from AGI, don’t be surprised when people get annoyed at the fact that you appear to have been lying every time you release an update that doesn’t in fact deliver the aforementioned AGI – but Marcus makes some good points about the slowing rate of these incremental improvements. I maintain, still, that his correct assessments are not incompatible with continuing pessimism about what this is going to do to jobs and the economy (after all, it’s already ‘good enough’ for lots of stuff), but I enjoy reading these explanations of the why behind the limitations. BONUS MARCUS – this is another good essay by him on why, fundamentally, LLMs do not and cannot ‘think’ like people.
  • How People Work: On that ‘good enough is good enough’ point, this is the always-smart Dan Hon writing about exactly that. Dan, if you’re not aware, has a long history of implementing software inside large organisations, often government, and as such as a pretty good understanding of what a lot of white collar work actually entails within said large organisations; as such, Dan’s perspective on What AI Is Going To Do in these spaces is worth listening to, and this essay is very good on all the reasons why, practically, the ‘good enough’ that we have now really is ‘good enough’ for lots and lots of ends. The whole thing really is worth reading in full, but this is a near encapsulation of the central thesis: “It feels like the experience of people who produce above-average output, say, Very Good Writers, is along the lines of “I tried generative AI and it was terrible for me”. It could not do for me, what I wanted it to do. Or, more accurately, for the particular task, it could not do what was good enough for me. Good enough can easily be average. But sometimes it isn’t, and there are some people whose livelihood is based on the demand for better-than-average output. One clear sticking point here is the “good enough” — let’s put it the other way around. Average can easily be good enough. And I think an uncomfortable truth is that right now, in many, many cases, average is absolutely good enough.”
  • The Rise of the Warehouse Robots: While the dream of the humanoid robot companion continues to occupy the minds of some of the world’s worst people, there are probably slightly more immediately-impactful developments happening in the less sexy warehouse robot space – this is a really interesting article looking at Ocado in the UK and how it’s increasing the degree to which robotics are set to be used in its grocery packing processes, and the impact that this is set to have on human labour in the coming few years. Which, you know, on one hand is not a bad thing – being a warehouse packer is a hard, boring, manual and strenuous gig that doesn’t, I don’t think, confer a HUGE degree of professional dignity on workers, and so these gigs being outsourced to robots doesn’t feel per se like a bad thing – as long, of course, as there are other jobs available for the people who would previously have done these gigs to move into. Which, sadly, is where things start to fall down a bit, because it’s not hugely clear that there are. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
  • AI and Kids’ Photos: Look, I don’t want to freak out any of you with children – I don’t, honestly, I imagine you get enough of that from the meat and gristle and hatred of parenting itself – but this NYT piece is basically all about how in the post-AI era you might want to consider not putting any photos of your kids anywhere on the internet that’s in any way public and whilst I have no desire to engage in any sort of paedogeddon scaremongering here I’m also conscious that,  well, maybe it’s not entirely paranoid to be cautious.
  • Maybe It’s Not The Phones: I mean, look, of course it’s the phones A BIT, I’m not some sort of mad idiot; that said, it’s equally true that this year’s Jonathan Haidt-inspired MORAL PANIC about the impact of mobile devices and social media on children has possibly taken on a slightly-hysterical tone and might benefit from some slightly closer analysis. I really enjoyed this piece in the New Yorker which looks at some alternative theories around ‘why it feels like we’re all permanently distracted all the time’ and why the answer might be SLIGHTLY more complex than ‘the magical pocket distraction glass’ – you may or may not buy this overall, but I think it’s worth reading something that presents a slightly more sober alternative to all the frothy-mouthed ‘BAN THE DEVICES’ chat, not least because you literally can’t do that, sorry. This, in particular, I very much enjoyed, and think should be played back to the commentariat class at every opportunity: “If people aren’t losing focus or growing complacent, what’s the panic about? Complaints about distraction are most audible from members of the knowledge class—journalists, artists, novelists, professors. Such people must summon creativity in long, unsupervised stretches, and so they are particularly vulnerable to online interruptions. Instagram vexes them in a way that it might not vex home health aides, retail salespeople, or fast-food employees, to name the three most common types of U.S. workers. A larger part of the knowledge-class problem is that cultural creators, especially those in legacy media, fear that smartphones will lure their audiences away. In this, they don’t seem vastly different from eighteenth-century priests decrying novels for turning women away from prayerful obedience. Is the ostensible crisis of attention, at bottom, a crisis of authority? Is “People aren’t paying attention” just a dressed-up version of “People aren’t paying attention to me”?”
  • The Reinvention of the Gold Blend Campaign: Ok, this piece in AdWeek doesn’t mention the Gold Blend couple – note here to non-Anglos; the ‘Gold Blend couple’ refers to a long-running series of adverts in the UK advertising instant coffee, the central hook of which was a teasing ‘will they, won’t they?’ relationship between a man and a woman and which evolved over several years’ worth of adverts, until the final consummation of relationship and the end the series of ads was itself deemed to be EVENT TELEVISION to which millions tuned in – but it’s where I immediately flashed to upon learning that, apparently, brands are now jumping on the episodic shortform video bandwagon to promote their wares. Nothing new under the sun, etc etc.
  • Customer Service Sludge: On the very modern experience of being confronted with a customer service or complaints procedure that is so horrible, so miasmic, so fundamentally-painful that it feels like it has been designed specifically with the intention of causing you to throw your hands up in frustrated disgust and abandon the whole endeavour, thereby saving some fcuking cnuts a bit of money which adds up to a LOT over the course of millions of customers and transactions. This is one specific writer’s experience with Ford in the US, but the interactions here described will be painfully familiar to anyone who’s tried to complain about, or get a refund for, anything in the past few years. This feels (or rather, the explicit rejection of this sort of thing feels) like a potential campaign/selling point for the right brand, now I think of it.
  • A History of Clippy: Jay Springett’s occasional history of ‘weird little digital companions’ continues with a look at the genesis,life and eventual death of Clippy, everyone’s favourite terrible digital assistant which is now in the process of being resurrected for the post-AI age. I thought this was super-interesting, in part just as a history of product design and implementation but also in terms of how the next, inevitable wave of these sorts of things is going to end up looking and feeling and working, and includes some smart ways of thinking about/framing design and thinking around how they function and how we interact with them: “In my work recently, I’ve been dividing ‘little guys’ into kinds of digital agents by where they live: the inhabitant and the interloper. A Petz cat is an example of a pure inhabitant. It exists inside a self-contained environment or world. The user is an external force, interacting with it. Clippy, on the other hand, is an interloper. He doesn’t ‘live inside’ the Word document. But he also doesn’t fully live inside Microsoft Word’s interface either. He’s a sort of meta-entity. Not fully part of the world/document he was observing, nor the softwares ‘frame’. The direct descendants of Clippy are today’s copilots and other kinds of embedded assistants. But some are more ‘in the world’ than others. The other question that arises after ‘taxonomising’ Agents between interlopers and inhabitants is “Does the agent act on its own? or does it wait to be called?” I’ve been thinking of this axis as Proactive vs. Reactive.”
  • Rizz Is The New Taste: Ok, this is *quite* a vibes-y (ie not exactly rigorous) argument, but, well, you’re not here for rigour, are you? Anu Lingala writes about how charisma is the new dominant quality required for success in 2025, particularly post-AI – and when you think about it there’s a certain truth in the observation that The Machine, and by extension everything it produces, might be many things but it is also PROFOUNDLY anticharismatic, and that as such you might argue that demonstrating charisma is increasingly important for social capital. “The decline of socialization is permeating our culture, and in response, we place a higher premium on social connection. We seek temporal realness not only because we are desperate for evidence of humanity in an AI slop-ified world, but also because we are naturally drawn to the increasingly rarified experience of genuine human interaction — whether witnessing a livestreamed podcast conversation, dancing with hundreds of strangers at a concert, or sharing a funny moment at a dinner party. Critically, this also elevates the value of the interpersonal skills involved.” Although a friend of mine (who I won’t name lest his American clients see this) did say on reading this that ‘it’s just because so many Americans are simply really fcuking weird, socially, and it’s a them problem’, so ymmv.
  • The Wedding Cake Smash Thing: You may have seen this piece floating around the DISCOURSE SPACE earlier this week, but if not then it’s worth reading – not really because of the piece, which is a VERY LONG article about the apparent ‘trend’ for men to, er, smush wedding cake into their wives faces at a certain point in the ceremony, although it’s sort-of grimly interesting, but more because of the footage of this happening, culled from TikTok in the main, which is…honestly, I was fcuking horrified, ngl; I was expecting this to be vaguely-funny rather than nakedly-aggressive, and the violence of the gestures here properly freaked me out in places and made me hope quite strongly that none of the women in question were within 100 miles of their former husbands at this point because this is an entire semaphore school’s worth of red flags.
  • Small Ozempic Plates: On the restaurants in the US offering reduced-sized plates as a response to the fact that every fcuker is on a GLP-1 injection and doesn’t have an appetite anymore. Read this, and then think of the margins they must be making on these ‘snacks’: “Gary Wallach, a managing partner of Renwick Hospitality Group in New York City, believes it has become as common for diners to look for GLP-1-friendly menus as it is for them to seek vegetarian or vegan accommodations. “People ask themselves, ‘Is there something for me to get here?’” he said. He added bite-size options to all of his group’s restaurants as a result. At Lulla, an Italian restaurant in Chelsea, there is an aperitivo hour box that provides up to four people with nine snack-size items for $28. “It even includes a small piece of our homemade focaccia bread,” he said. At the Alderman in Times Square, there is a section where people can build their own snack board with items like smoked duck breast or nuts.”
  • Chili’s: This is all about US fast food chain Chili’s and its apparent resurrection as a HOT BRAND in North America over the past year or so – they don’t have Chili’s in the UK, and even if they did it’s unlikely I’d eat there, but I really enjoyed this piece for two specific reasons: 1) it does a brilliant job of explaining the details of a very specific industry and How It Works, and of explaining how large-scale systems can be optimised at scale, which, fine, I know doesn’t SOUND like a barrel of fun but which I promise you is very satisfying to read about; and 2) there is SUCH an interesting subtext of, frankly, intense snobbery about the whole piece, with the journalist and a lot of the higher-ups in the Chili’s foodchain being quite remarkably candid about the fact that this food isn’t FOR PEOPLE LIKE THEM – people who went to college, or who can afford the weight-loss injections – but instead for DIFFERENT people, poorer people, who calculate a meal’s quality with a greater emphasis on ‘calories per buck’ than maybe a higher-tier customer might bother with. Honestly, the tone of this really fascinated me and felt telling of quite a lot of things about modern (American, but not just American) society.
  • The Bus Drivers’ Party: One of the best things about good local reporting is when it tells you stories of sides of the city you live in that you have literally never heard of and which you’re unlikely to ever experience – so it is with this piece in The Londoner, covering the annual Bus Drivers’ Link Up, a party put on for the capital’s bus drivers who get to drink and dance and eat and party as a part of a not-for-profit community event. Honestly, this is lovely and will make you feel genuinely positive about London and what a great place it is and how amazing the people (mostly) are.
  • How Not To Build The Torment Nexus: Mike Monteiro writes a very, very good essay about why you don’t, actually, have to work for the bad company doing the bad thing, and you can’t really justify it if you do. I enjoyed this a LOT. “I’d argue it’s more ethical to do sh1t work at the Torment Nexus factory than to do good work at the Torment Nexus factory. But the most ethical move of all, of course, is to not work at the Torment Nexus factory at all. I just realize that’s easier for some folks than others. I do believe, however, that the majority of folks working at the Torment Nexus factory are there because they’ve convinced themselves that it’s ok to be there, or that the Torment Nexus isn’t that bad, or that their proximity to the Torment Nexus will protect them from the Torment Nexus. Or, quite honestly, they just don’t give a fuck. They’re getting their bag. After all, that Vision Pro sitting on your office shelf gathering dust didn’t pay for itself. To anyone who’s about to email me and let me know “they have a right to earn a living” please make sure to append “…in the manner to which I’ve become accustomed” to the end of that sentence because, honestly, that’s what you’re really saying. But no one has the right to live a hundred times better than anyone else. Equality also means this.”
  • On Eimear McBride’s Novels: The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride is one of my favourite novels of the past few years, and, while I didn’t enjoy the followup *quite* as much, it is still a superb, sustained piece of writing and a wonderful companion to the original book; this, in the LRB, is a great piece of writing by Clare Bucknall examining both books and the way in which they make sex a central reference point for character in very different ways. You will get most out of this if you know the novels, it’s true, but there’s enough good writing in here – and enough quoting of some of the gorgeous, lyrical prose from each of the novels – to offer something to you even if you don’t.
  • Is This The Worst Pub In The World?: Clive Martin visits some pubs in the Cotswolds to discover whether a particular boozer really is the national pub nadir. To be honest I would probably read Clive’s shopping lists at this point, but he’s on typically fine form here and pleasingly brutal about A Certain Type Of Person. “A few jars later, we head 20 feet across the road, but into a different reality altogether. Let’s put it in London terms: if The Rose & Crown is an honest Soho boozer, then The Bull is The Devonshire – a vast ‘concept’ pub that arrived in 2023 with an onslaught of hype and an associated aesthetic. Sister restaurant of Notting Hill gastropub The Pelican, The Bull is the place where Londoners feel safe, where they can use Apple Pay, drink recognisable beers and stride around in £500 boots without an arthritic sheepdog pissing all over them. If it were a brand, it would be Belstaff. If it were an artist, it would be Guy Ritchie. ‘Look at those beeeaauutiful espresso martinis,’ coos a lightly toasted lady at the bar, while a man who looks like Alex Zane has a protracted argument with his girlfriend outside. The whole thing feels very ‘David Beckham’, and that’s fair to say, because apparently, he comes here a lot. Already, The Bull is already deeply associated with celebrity, and we’re not talking about a drunken selfie with someone who used to be in Eastenders. ‘I don’t care if he is bleddy Brad Pitt!’ splutters Malcolm, a Charlbury barfly we’re introduced to. With his jetstream-blasted cheeks and teeth like Aztec temple ruins, The Bull doesn’t really seem like Malcolm’s kind of place. He agrees, but apparently, he is banned from his old local for cuckolding the landlord.”
  • The Many Last Suppers of Joseph Awuah-Darko: I FCUKING LOVE THIS STORY. The Joseph in question is a man who at some point in the past year decided that he didn’t want to live anymore – but also said that if anyone wanted to have dinner with him before he offed himself, he’d be up for that. And so, for over 150 dinner dates, Joseph has persisted, delaying death one meal with strangers at a time, as people who have found him via his very popular Insta page invited him to break bread with them on his way to the grave. Is this an art project? Is it a grift (although as the piece points out, it’s not exactly a lucrative one if so)? Is it someone simply squeezing the last drops of juice from life before the cast the pulped fruit away forever? WHO KNOWS??? This feels, honestly, like a novel or film rather than an actual thing, and it is a BRILLIANT story.
  • Nagasaki Before The Bomb: A series of vignettes of life in Nagasaki on the day the atomic bomb was dropped on the city; the moments before violent death, the quiet before the cacophony before, again, the quiet… these are devastating and the cumulative effect is brutal and very sad, but it’s also very well written indeed. If you’re interested, there’s an exhibition on the upper floor of the Newport Street Gallery at the moment featuring a lot of images of atomic bomb tests and the aftermath of the nuclear attacks on Japan, which is…well, it’s fcuking devastating, obviously.
  • Celibate: Jennifer Stuart has been celibate for a long time. She writes about it here. I thought this was funny and sad and it resonated with me in amongst the recent spate of articles about heteropessimism and the like – maybe it will resonate with some of you as well (though, honestly, sex is great so I sort of hope it doesn’t): “On a summer day in Houston, over the sound of sizzling, attention-seeking fajitas, I found out a good friend also hasn’t had sex in years. “Sex… what’s that?” she laughed as the fajita steam further moistened her face. A few months later, in New York, with zero fajitas involved, another good friend confessed to going years without sex. Both are attractive, smart, and vibrant women. The Bible says something like, “When two or more are gathered.” I think that’s about faith and sex trends. If the “Sex Diaries” feature in The Cut is a barometer, then every person with operable sex parts is having sex with at least three different people, sometimes simultaneously. Most of my millennial and Gen Z girlfriends are sex positive and talk openly in a way that was unimaginable when I was a twentysomething in the 2000s. But perception and reality are not aligned. Not only are women not having much sex, but we’re also not having pleasurable sex. In The Pleasure Gap Katherine Rowland writes, “Between low desire, absent pleasure, genital pain, guilt, shame, quiet self-loathing, and viewing sex in terms of labor rather than lust, it would seem that we have increased sexual quantity without improving sexual quality.” My sexual quantity has dwindled down to zero because I’ve grown tired of looking for sexual quality.”
  • Ferrari: Another from the LRB, this is Thomas Jones writing about the life of Enzo Ferrari and the history of the storied car brand, which is also the history of Italy in the mid-20thC. I loved this – partly because of wopcentricism, fine, but also because it’s just a superb piece of writing throughout (and I say that as someone who can’t drive and has no interest whatsoever in cars).
  • Sims Diary: Our final piece this week is a truly WONDERFUL bit of writing which is also one of the saddest things I have read all Summer – Devon Brody writes about playing the Sims and how the virtual lives of his digital creations comes to map and mirror and reflect and warp their own life and that of their friends, and their partner, and the extent to which escapism becomes avoidance, and…look, this really is superb, I promise, and you don’t even really need to know anything about The Sims to love it, I don’t think.

By Gideon Rubin

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

 

Webcurios 08/08/25

Reading Time: 36 minutes

 

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.

By Rain & Rivers

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.

By Felix Gonzales Torres

NEXT, A PLAYLIST WHICH SELF-DESCRIBES AS THE WORST EVER CREATED AND WHICH I AM INCLUDING MORE AS A TEST OF YOUR ENDURANCE THAN ANYTHING ELSE! 

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.
  • 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.

By Mihail Blinov

OUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS ABSOLUTE BANGER OF A SELECTION THAT CROSSES ALL SORTS OF GENRES WHICH IS BY STARCADE AND IS JUST GENERALLY A REALLY GOOD TIME! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

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.”
  • 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!:

 

Webcurios 01/08/25

Reading Time: 38 minutes

 

We’re not going to talk about w4nking AT ALL this week, don’t worry. Instead I’m going to get this intro out of the way and crack on with the links with maximum alacrity as, well, I think even by my standards this is…perhaps a touch on the prolix side and I don’t want to put you off unduly.

BUT! I will take a moment to say that the Tiny Awards shortlist for this year should be out next week and it is a CRACKING selection of amazing, fun, beautiful, frivolous and silly web projects to choose from this year, and, basically, consider that something to look forward to amidst all of the shouting cnutery.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios and you honestly wouldn’t *believe* how tired I am (except, on reflection, you will upon reading the car crash in prose that follows).

By Yun Jang

WE START THIS WEEK WITH THE EXCELLENT DEBUT ALBUM FROM LONDON POST-PUNK OUTFIT ‘THE DEAD ZOO’, WHICH I RECOMMEND TO YOU UNRESERVEDLY! 

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THE ~4H BETWEEN ME WRITING ABOUT TEA LAST WEEK AND IT GETTING COMPREHENSIVELY HACKED TO FCUKERY IS POSSIBLY A NEW RECORD, PT.1:  

  • Storyterra: This is *such* a nice little idea I’m slightly amazed that I’ve not seen anyone do it before – Storyterra is a site which basically presents you with a world map which you can click on to see ALL OF THE FILMS AND STUFF set in the location you have clicked on. Does that make sense? I think I may have had ~3h sleep last night for reasons that escape me, and so I can’t promise a whole lot of textual coherence here today – consider this me, er, getting my excuses and apologies in early. Anyway, what was I saying? Oh, yes, website! Storyterra! Culture tagged to a location! So you click on, say, Brighton, and it pulls up a sidebar of films and books set in said city (which, parenthetically, reminded me of the fact that Zoella wrote a book which WOW those were more innocent times) – it’s fair to say that it’s not a *wholly* comprehensive selection (Quadrophenia doesn’t appear to be in the Brighton list, for example, which feels like a fairly obvious miss) but, well, I’m not going to be churlish because it’s a one-person passion project by someone somewhere (you can read about the process of making the site here if you’re interested) and it only launched this week and it would be a bit cnuty to expect perfection and, well, if there’s one thing I’m not it’s a cn…oh, fine). I think it’s just a really nice way of exploring creative works set in, or about, a place, and might be interesting as a way of finding works that track to a trip you’re planning or holiday you’re taking, or should you have an inexplicable need to watch EVERY SINGLE FILM SET IN LIMA EVER. Why not make it a project to travel around a particular nation via the medium of film? Or, er, don’t!
  • A Bipedal Robot For £6k: Do you happen to have a spare £6k burning a hole in your pocket? Do you inexplicably not want to use that to say a hearty, financially-significant thankyou to your favourite newsletter writer? Would you instead like to spaff it all on a slightly-sinister humanoid robot from China which almost certainly won’t be remote-loaded with sinister malware and rip your head from your shoulders one night as you sleep? OH GREAT! You will, in that case, be really excited by the UnitreeR1, apparently the absolute bargain basement cheapest option in the world for anyone looking to start playing around with humanoid robot tech – obviously I have my suspicions about the degree to which what gets shipped to you from Shenzhen will resemble the all-dancing, all cartwheeling plastic pal depicted on the landing page here (and equally-obviously it’s just an inert bunch of polymers if you don’t have the programming chops to make it do stuff yourself), but, even so, an ACTUAL ROBOT THAT STANDS ON TWO LEGS AND YOU CAN THEORETICALLY COMMAND TO  JUMP OVER TRAFFIC is a hell of a thing to be able to purchase for what equates to less than a quarter’s London rent. I have, in general, been pretty bearish about the speed at which stuff like this is going to move beyond the madly scifi, but I can’t pretend I didn’t get quite a big futurefrisson from how accessible this is and the possibilities – there’s a vanishingly-small possibility that one of you oddities is EXACTLY the sort of person who might be up for getting one of these, so, should that be the case, do let me know how it works out for you (presuming the aforementioned head-removal doesn’t end up happening). Although actually I went to close the tab just now and the promo video had scrolled on a bit and was basically showing this thing shadowboxing with terrifying speed, so maybe let’s put the brakes on letting people their own personal robot ninja armies til the world’s a little less febrile.
  • Wave Glasses: I saw something doing the rounds on Bluesky this week, ahead of the Meta financials being published, mocking Zuckerberg’s statement on ‘superintelligence’ and saying that he was ‘washed’, and ‘a cooked CEO’ and ‘clutching at straws’ – Meta then went on to post numbers so terrifyingly impressive that it makes you sort of feel that these cnut have fundamentally just beaten capitalism. This proves two things: a) that while Bluesky is a useful platform for news, it is an irritating hotbed of dogsh1t takes and motivated reasoning from the spectacularly-wishful; and b) it’s probably worth taking some of the things Zuckerberg says moderately-seriously (although not the superintelligence stuff, fine). So, when he talks about smart glasses being the future, maybe don’t dismiss it out of hand – the Luxottica sales data suggests that a not-unreasonable number of people are happy to buy into that vision. Which is by way of VERY long preamble to Wave Glasses, a soon-to-be-released range of video-enabled glasses (NOT smart glasses, to be clear – there’s no AI, nothing fancy, just the ability to film and stream live) which have a couple of very specific features that it’s worth being aware of: livestreaming to any platform, from TikTok to Insta and everything inbetween, and – and this is the big, horrible one – THE ABILITY TO TURN OFF THE ‘THESE GLASSES ARE FILMING’ ALERT LIGHT! Yes, that’s right, it’s a CONSENT NIGHTMARE! Leaving aside that I am pretty sure that this would make them illegal in quite a few countries, the point here is that I think this stuff, at least this sort of basic-level filming/streaming device, is going to become increasingly common over the next few years, even without AI gubbins attached, and that there are going to be a LOT of knockoff brands flogging these on shonky marketplaces which will play fast and loose with issues of privacy, and we are probably going to have to get used to the idea of ‘you have the right to go about your daily life without some pr1ck filming you and putting said film on a social platform with a laughing, mocking voiceover’ pretty much vanishing in the next decade. WE WILL ALL BE THE COLDPLAY ADULTERERS ONE DAY SOON.
  • The Panama Playlists: You might need to take these with a *slight* pinch of salt – while a lot of the subjects here have confirmed that it is indeed their music being scrobbled here, others have suggested the intel’s not quite as perfect as it’s being presented; still, I *love* the idea and you might too. The Panama Playlists is a little project where…someone has basically trawled Spotify, exploiting its not-wholly-perfect security/privacy settings, to find details of some notable people and what they ACTUALLY listen to. It’s inevitably a US-centric thing, so all the people on it are North American – but there’s JD Vance, who likes the Backstreet Boys more than I might have expected, Marc Andreessen, who OF COURSE listens to Hans fcuking Zimmer, and Yann LeCun, who seemingly only listens to someone called Wayne Shorter…it’s all very tech/VC/politics in America, basically, meaning if you’re not a particular type of Yank you may not find the detail totally compelling…BUT THIS IS ALSO DOABLE WHEREVER YOU ARE, so should some enterprising person want to use this to do a deep dive into the listening habits of the Cabinet or the UK’s media classes then, well, I would very much encourage you to crack right on.
  • No Time To Discourse: I think this is a *beautiful* project and I like it very much indeed. No Time To Discourse is the work of Mark Sample, “a speculative atlas of climate disaster throughout North America. Wildfires, floods, droughts, hurricanes, the unrelenting heat. There are thousands of disasters, none of which have happened, all of which are happening, today, tomorrow, and tomorrow’s tomorrow.” What this means in practice is that the site presents you with a map of North America, covered in location pins – each of those pins is a short, speculative dispatch about imagined future weather events which may not yet have occurred but which, based on the current trajectory, seem pretty fcuking likely to crop up at some point or another. What I love about this is that the vignettes aren’t just factual – there’s a certain sad poetry to each of the small stories, poignant details (very much of the ‘…and the children never came home’ variety) embedded into each which make this a far more interesting and affecting piece of work than just making up meteorological details about a massive fcuking hurricane. Oh, and the tedious, whinging AI refuseniks amongst you will be pleased to hear that this is GOOD, OLD-FASHIONED CODING – per the About section, “No disaster is ever the same. Each of the millions of stories in No Time to Discourse is a work of fiction, yet each also attempts to capture at a human level the realities of climate disaster. The maps are powered by Leaflet.js and Stamen Design’s watercolor map tiles. The stories are procedurally generated through Rita.js grammars, based on extensive rules written by Mark Sample.” This is really rather gorgeous and I think it’s worth a few minutes of your time at the very least.
  • Own A Word: Of all the grifts, one of my very favourite has to be the ‘buy a star!’ or ‘buy a plot of land on the moon!’ grifters, selling ‘ownership’ of the very much un-ownable to the hopeful – well this takes that concept and RUNS with it, offering the…presumably VERY credulous the opportunity to, er, OWN A WORD! “But Matt,” I hear you ask, “how is it possible for an individual to ‘own’ a word? Is this a copyright thing? For surely there is no way in which any single person can claim meaningful ‘ownership’ of a wholly common, infinite good such as language?” AND YOU ARE RIGHT IT IS NOT POSSIBLE THIS IS AMAZING! This…this is a joke, right? This can’t be a serious thing. “Own A Word is offering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the first 1,000 visionaries to become Founding Word Owners™. This is not a sale. It’s a legacy. For those first 1,000 people who claim a word, you don’t just own it — you become part of the origin story of the world’s first symbolic word ownership archive….Only 1,000 will ever receive the Founder’s Mark. Will your name be one of them?” OH GOD THIS IS SO GOOD. Ok, so the ‘words’ they are offering on the homepage are things like ‘resilience’ and ‘hope’ and ‘strength’ (I did a quick search and seemingly ‘fistula’ and ‘prolapse’ aren’t available, which, let me tell you, is a real shame), which does rather suggest that this *is* real and aimed squarely at the “live, laugh, love, die” market. Want to know what EARLY ACCESS OWNERSHIP of a word will set you back? LET ME TELL YOU! Ownership (lol) of ‘Bountiful’ is a cool £250! Amazing! There’s a list of people who have already bought in on the site  which seems to suggest that six incredibly-stupid people have taken the plunge – will YOU join them? Beautifully the disclaimer at the foot of the site explicitly says, contrary to the ACTUAL SITE NAME, “Disclaimer: Word ownership on this platform is symbolic and emotional in nature. It does not imply legal ownership, trademark rights, or copyright.” Honestly, I almost want to applaud the chutzpah here.
  • The Auction of the Occult: I have a couple of friends who are…a bit witchy, it’s fair to say, and I can only imagine how excited they are going to be when they see this link (or how offended I will be when I realise they don’t read this sh1t) – this is a forthcoming sale via Sworders auctioneers, taking place in just under three weeks time, where lots include such potentially-cursed wonders as (and these are just the first few on the landing page, to give you an idea of how batsh1t this is) “A Dark Ages pentagram protection or magic ring” (estimated to go for as little as £80, which, honestly, based on the description sounds like a fcuking BARGAIN) and “An enamelled Evil Eye pendant” (yours for as little as £150), or, er, the right humerus bone of an actual dodo (£2k or thereabouts) – oh, and for the taxidermy fans amongst you there’s also an ACTUAL STUFFED LION with a pleasingly-derpy face for a few grand. Honestly, I am genuinely tempted by the pentagram protection ring so none of you fcuks outbid me please.
  • Neon Coat: The age of the influencer continues, for better or worse – this week saw the UK Government announce it was going to start engaging directly with ‘content creators’ on YouTube and TikTok to predictable harrumphing from a bunch of people who didn’t read beyond the headline and so failed to notice that said ‘creators’ were in the majority quite serious, specifically-focused journo-adjacent types rather than ex Love Islanders (again, Bluesky, home of the truly dogsh1t take). Still, there remain an awful lot of people who are hoping to make a living out of being beautiful on camera and being paid by brands and businesses to be beautiful on camera while adjacent to their building, product or logo – which is where Neon Coat comes in. This is basically a brokerage service which lets said brands and businesses post requests for work along with a rate for said work; creators/influencers can then use the platform to accept the jobs, do the work and get payment, all managed by the third party to minimise friction. This seems…smart, I think, although it is yet another thing that agencies will no longer be able to charge a 20% handling fee for doing badly. Anyway, this exists in London, so depending on what you do or who you work for this could be worth looking at (I was going to write something about ‘or if you’re an influencer’ and then realised that the chances of anyone shiny enough to qualify for this sort of gig reading Curios is…small. WE DON’T CARE WE DON’T NEED THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE *cries in ugly*).
  • WikiGalaxy: Via Giuseppe’s reliably-excellent newsletter about all things data and dataviz comes this rather lovely Wikipedia map – you will have seen the sort of thing before, but I think there’s something particular pleasing about the visualisation of this one, all the nodes vaguely wobbling as floating points, and shifting round as the data loads and more information pops into the map from the Wiki API. There’s also a clarity to the visual presentation of this which makes it, to my mind at least, more useful for the creation of Wikipedia-based ‘mind maps’ (sorry) than certain other examples I’ve featured over the years. Have a play.
  • Good Internet Magazine: I am simultaneously amazed and ashamed I’ve not featured this in all the years I’ve been writing Curios – how the fcuk it’s passed me by is a mystery, but, well, THE WEB IS VERY BIG. Anyway, Good Internet Magazine could not be more up my street if it tried – “Good Internet is a volunteer-run, not-for-profit print and digital biannual magazine for personal website owners and those interested in using the internet as a means of self-expression, art, and recreation.” Signing up is free with your email address and gets you access to the archive of stuff on the site – if you’re interested in the ideas around the small internet, personal websites and the use of HTML for personal expression then, well, you probably know about this already tbh why didn’t you tell me chiz chiz, but also this will be right up your street.
  • Tapestry: Ok, so I have just checked and I actually featured the Kickstarter for this 18 months ago – now, though, it exists as a REAL THING, an app (iOS only, the fcukers) which will pull ALL OF YOUR FEEDS INTO ONE CENTRAL MEGAFEED! Is that a good thing? I don’t know really, it depends whether you’re the sort of person who might struggle with the massive degree of context collapse you’ll get from shoehorning your Whatsapp groupchat about, I don’t know, your fantasy football teams, with your niche bongo RSS feed – basically though this promises to pull ALL OF THE THINGS into one place (or at least the ones that operate on open enough tech for that to be possible). For the right sort of information-addicted sicko this could be a compelling proposition, but, equally, it could be quite dangerous so caveat emptor and all that, and remember that it is possible to KNOW TOO MUCH (my old carpet face is testament to that).
  • Do Useful Stuff With PDFs For Free In-Browser: Yes, ok, this is VERY BORING, but PDF-wrangling software tends to be a) annoying and b) graffiti, and this appears to be neither, and given that feeding PDFs to The Machine is one of the better ways to get it to ingest EVERYTHING you might find it useful to have something that lets you both bundle a fcuktonne of them together and to make them less weighty, so as to better stuff the LLMs.
  • Flex: This is a BEAUTIFULLY-responsive font – no, really, it is! – which I was very impressed by – resize the browser window and you will see what I mean. “Flexflex is a typeface that responds to spatial requirements rather than imposing them. Built on a modular system, each letter can fit inside any given rectangular container and transforms continuously if its ratio changes. In theory, it’s infinitely flexible.” Very smart and very elegant.
  • Medieval Medical Recipes: The University of Cambridge has a collection of old books containing medical treatments from Times Past – while I wouldn’t necessarily recommend actually attempting to cure yourself of the ague using, I don’t know, a poultice of hyssop milk and the dew from a goat’s pizzle, there’s something quite amazing about reading through some of these and understanding quite how miraculous it is that we have managed to survive all these years considering how long we spent not knowing the first thing about anything (obviously we still don’t know the first thing about anything, no shade to the idiots from the past from this idiot from the future). “A wide range of ingredients – animal, mineral and vegetable – are mentioned in these recipes. There are herbs that are known today – such as sage, rosemary, thyme, bay and mint – as well as common perennial plants: walwort, henbane, betony and comfrey. Ingredients were often mixed with common products such as ale, white wine, vinegar, milk or honey, but medieval physicians also exploited international trade networks, using cumin, pepper, ginger and other spices in their formulations. There are also many strange and curious ingredients recorded in the recipes, in particular those derived from animals: the use of roasted puppy fat as a salve to treat gout, or the gall bladder of a hare as a component in a treatment for ‘web in the eye’.” Part of me wonders whether somewhere in a New Age, countercultural commune there might be people looking at this stuff and going ‘you know what, Derek, it’s a better bet than the vaccines!’ and, terrifyingly, that’s not an implausible prospect.
  • The 2025 Envelope Art Contest: Ooh, this is great – I had no idea that this was a thing, but each year, apparently, the estate of Edward Gorey runs a small competition inviting people of all ages to submit a drawing done on an envelope (apparently Edward Gorey had a ‘prodigious’ habit of making art on his letters – who knew?); that’s basically the only criteria, and I don’t think this gets a tonne of submissions, so if you want the chance to win…er…a nonspecific small prize, and your entry displayed at the Edward Gorey House Museum, then GET DOODLING.
  • Rail Art: Would you like the opportunity to design your own underground network? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! Draw the lines connecting stations however you want, and then enjoy the experience of putting trains on them and then, er, should you so desire, getting a little virtual passenger to make a little virtual journey, accompanied by actual sound effects of being on a tube…Look, I don’t really understand who this is for, but there’s something undeniably quite soothing about the general vibe – I get the feeling there might be a few TRANSPORT ENTHUSIASTS (look, I know you’re out there and I love you and accept you) for whom this could be compelling for a few minutes at least.
  • Yamê: This is a REALLY nicely-made artist website for French(?) musician Yamê – it’s basically a showcase for some of their videos, and a portal to their shop, and while the content is perhaps a *bit* thin, the design is absolutely beautiful – the artwork’s all cel-shaded, and the scrollyanimationthing it does, taking you on a bike through a selection of beautiful landscapes, is very nicely-done indeed; oh, and as a bonus, if you click ‘play’ in the top-left corner you get access to a neat little racing game (it’s just ‘pick a lane, try not to die’, but it’s nicely-done and, again, just *looks* lovely). Oh,and the music is ace too. THANKYOU YAMÊ!

By Ksenya Istomina

OUR NEXT MIX IS THIS CRACKING COLLECTION OF VERY, VERY OLDSCHOOL UK HIPHOP (87-93) WHICH I PROMISE YOU IS WORTH EVERY SECOND OF ITS  2H+ RUNTIME!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THE ~4H BETWEEN ME WRITING ABOUT TEA LAST WEEK AND IT GETTING COMPREHENSIVELY HACKED TO FCUKERY IS POSSIBLY A NEW RECORD, PT.2:  

  • The Beige Index: This was sent to me by Deshan Tennekoon (THANKYOU DESHAN!), and it’s a great project – a bit like the Bechdel Test (except, actually, not really), but for diversity of casting in film. The two guys behind the site took the top 250 films from IMDB as of 2022 and apparently watched them all to track non-white representation in the top-end of the cinematic canon, then ranking them and giving them a ‘beige score’ indicating how diverse the casting is. You can view this data over time, mapped against IMBD rating and in all sorts of other ways – while on the one hand it’s just a bit of fun datawork, it’s also fascinating to see how representation has changed over time. There’s actually a lot of thought and work that’s gone into this – it’s worth reading the ‘about’ section of the site to get a feel for the care and effort that they have applied to what could have been a throwaway gag.
  • The Virtual Zine Library: There was a period about a decade ago, in the heydey of Snapchat Stories and, latterly, the explosion of Reels, when I got quite excited about the application of the Zine-y aesthetic to digital canvases – there was an era when people seemed to be applying a degree of visual flair and creativity to the way in which they presented their little digital video collages, with text overlays and weird fonts and angles and gifs and all sorts of unnecessary aesthetic flourishes which felt both MySpacey but which also harked back to bedroom-produced band-focused minimagazines…and then, as ever, that sort of died out as The Fcuking Bell Curve exerted its inevitable pull, and the algo decided what the algo liked, and all that individuality got flattened out in favour of a more unified aesthetic base on What Apparently Works…anyway, that’s enough of my tedious old man cnuting – theV Virtual Zine Library is, er, a digital library! Of Zines! That you can browse and read! There are SO MANY in here, across so many categories – as you might expect this trends lefty, and cuts across social justice-type things (there is a LOT of activism-adjacent stuff here) but also features lots of niche interest stuff, hobbies, music…honestly, you could lose yourself in here for HOURS. Anyone can upload their own should they wish, which is a lovely touch – generally this is a fcuking GREAT resource and I am going to bookmark it for slow afternoons in the grey English winter. BONUS ZINE CONTENT! This is a lovely little newsletter in praise of the Zine as a thing, which you might enjoy if this stuff floats your boat.
  • Collection of Things: A website by one Soo Yeun, where they are recording…things that they have picked up. Maps, tickets, leaflets and receipts, scanned and uploaded here and presented without context, the dots of an existence that you can join up in any way you choose. What does it tell you about their life? Very little in practice, but just enough for you to imagine the rough shape of it, and their interests, and where they are, and what they get up to, and I love this, there’s something genuinely wonderful about these partial patchwork collages of fragmented moments in someone’s life expressed through paper ephemera, digitised and preserved because, well, why not? Via Kris, perhaps inevitably.
  • The Loewe Puzzle: A rare example of a mobile-only site in Curios, this one, and a luxe digital offering that I…don’t hate? Leather goods peddlers Loewe, who’d I only ever known of as shoemakers (but then again I am…quite a distance from being a target consumer of theirs, it’s fair to say), have made this rather nice little mobile site to promote their (apparently ICONICzzzzzzzzzzz) ‘Puzzle’ handbag in all its multifarious incarnations, and while all the site really lets you do is look at 20 different variations on the same basic handbag design (and, inevitably, click through to attempt to buy one), there’s something REALLY slick about both the interaction design here and the quality of the graphics, the photography and even the small details like the sound design and the little vocal stings; it may not surprise you to learn that I, er, didn’t feel compelled to explore all 20 handbags, but each one I did look at was accompanied by a different voice character with ‘comedy’ sounds, and it all generally felt cute and playful in a way that a lot of this sort of stuff often really doesn’t (in particular there’s a very fruity French ‘ooh la la’ which accompanies the polka dot variant which I confess to enjoying more than perhaps was seemly). I never usually like this stuff – and, to be clear, I still couldn’t give two fcuks about Loewe or their handbags – but this is really nicely-made.
  • Leaving Substack: Look, I am not here to moralise at you – I am not in any appreciable sense a Good Person, and I have no moral high ground from which to shout at you about anything – but I do feel it worth pointing out that this week Substack literally pushed an alert about an actual Nazi newsletter to a bunch of people (its logo is an ACTUAL SWASTIKA! It claims Jewish people are a sickness!);  recent high-flyers in the platform’s rundown of fastest-growing newsletters in the ‘History’ category include a charming missive whose strapline reads: “NAME THE JEW! We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children. 14/88”, one named “White Rabbits National Socialism”, and another publishing content such as “The Crusades were justified, necessary and need to happen again.” If you’re the sort of person who’s no longer posting on Twitter because Elon’s turned it a bit fash but you still have a Substack then, well, maybe have a think about that? Anyway, this is a useful little website explaining why the platform’s content policy is questionable at best, and offering you some useful alternatives to it in the form of Ghost, Beehiiv, etc (or if you wanted to go FULL GEEK you do what I do and get your whole email system run by a bloke called Kris, which I highly recommend as a solution). Oh, and as a bonus, here’s a good guide to setting up RSS readers by Molly White, because you really don’t need Substack’s bullsh1t network effect either.
  • Dear Client: Do you do freelance stuff? Do you have to send stuff to clients? Would you like a BETTER WAY? I rather like this idea to be honest – Dear Client effectively allows you to keep your finished work behind a paywall – a file transfer system where the downloader can only access the files if they pay up. The idea, of course, being to hedge against unpaid invoices and clients who drag their heels when it comes to the tedious business of ‘actually settling up in timely fashion’. It’s also, obviously, a GREAT way of defrauding people, but let’s not think too hard about that specific usecase. Per the blurb, “DearClient is a secure payment-on-delivery platform designed for creative professionals. It ensures your clients pay before accessing your files—guaranteeing payment, saving time, and enabling smooth, professional delivery. EU-hosted. GDPR-compliant. No AI. DearClient is built and hosted securely in Germany, with privacy at its core. No AI. No training. And no rights claimed—your files stay fully yours. Files auto-delete after 30 days, forever.” I think this could be useful. BONUS FILE TRANSFER SYSTEM: for those of you who got your knickers in a twist over the whole WeTransfer AI controversy the other week (IT IS NOT WHAT YOU THOUGHT IT WAS, BUT WEVS) you might like SwissTransfer as an alternative – it’s like WeTransfer but, er, Swiss! Which may or may not mean ‘nazi gold’ – OH GOD IT IS SO HARD TO BE ETHICAL IN THE HORROR OF THE NOW.
  • Free Sewing:  Do you sew your own clothes, or would you like to? OH WOW DO I HAVE THE WEBSITE FOR YOU. “FreeSewing is open source software to generate bespoke sewing patterns, loved by home sewers and fashion entrepreneurs alike. Industry sizing is a bunch of lies. Join the slow fashion revolution and enjoy clothes that fit you,” runs the blurb – also, and this feels quite clever, “all of FreeSewing’s sewing patterns are made to measure. We don’t scale or grade patterns. Instead, FreeSewing drafts a design into a pattern made to your measurements. That happens in real-time, in your browser.” To be clear, I know the square root of fcuk all about either clothesmaking or sewing and so my ability to sensetest this is…limited, but it’s maintained by a Dutch person and is rigorously open source and has that sort of no-frills look and feel that in my experience tends to connote projects that are just generally For The Common Good, and as such I feel reasonably-confident recommending this to any of you who want to make with the bobbins. Also, and I feel childish saying this but, well, we’re reaching the portion of the morning (0916, in case you’re curious – you’re not, are you? Literally no cnut cares about what time it is as I type this sh1t) when the fatigue is starting to catch up with me and, well, the person who maintains all this has a BRILLIANTLY Dutch name which I very much enjoyed and that is a reason to click in and of itself.
  • DetectAI: Were you fooled by the bunnies this week? Don’t feel bad if you were, this particular game is nearly up, I fear, and we really won’t be able to tell real from faked video by the end of 2026. What happens then? WHO THE FCUK KNOWS! That’s probably fine, though, right? Anyway, this is a new experimental tool that attempts to answer the ‘was this an AI image?’ question – while it doesn’t do anything seismic and it’s certainly not foolproof, it DOES offer an easy single way of running some of the basic checks you should apply to an image when attempting to discern if it’s real or machine – a bit of light analysis, some reverse image searching, that sort of thing. It won’t be foolproof, but it’s a non-terrible first pass to help you prevent making dumb mistakes like this.
  • Neocities Backgrounds: Are YOU in the market for a retro-themed website a la Geocities or MySpace or suchlike? Would YOU like to be able to choose from 2000 different backgrounds you can use as a starting canvas? GREAT HERE THEY ARE ENJOY THEM.
  • StrumTube: I’ve not tried this myself – I think I might have mentioned before here that I had a few years learning classical guitar as a kid which proved to me that a) I have no talent for classical, or indeed any other, guitar; and b) girls do not fancy boys who play classical guitar, or at least not the ones who looked like me and played it badly – but the reviews wherever I found it seemed broadly positive and I figure there might be some of you learning guitar who might find it helpful; basically you plug in any YouTube song you like and it will pull guitar chords for it out of the ether AS IF BY MAGIC! Except it does use AI, which means a certain percentage of you will have to decry it as evil; so it goes (but, honestly, this attitude, let me repeat, is SO FCUKING BORING, please give it a rest you dullards).
  • Vomit Clocks: Not, for the avoidance of doubt, anything to do with ACTUAL vomit – or at least it doesn’t seem to be – this is instead a website dedicated to mantel clocks which LOOK as though they might have been crafted from, er, sick (although, honestly, if your sick looks like these clocks I would get yourself to A&E sharpish because it looks like you might have lost some fairly vital internal bits and pieces). “The Vomit Clock Museum is a digital museum cataloging the history of object-embedded resin clocks, colloquially known as “vomit clocks.” These acrylic resin clocks, typically produced in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, provoke intrigue and curiosity from those who behold them. Some revile them, some love them – either way, these clocks are a time capsule into the style and home decor of decades past—an interesting and vibrant slice of mid-century Americana.” I LOVE the fact that it invites you to ‘sign up for the vomit clocks newsletter’ – how much vomit clock news can there reasonably be?? – and, in general, the single-minded dedication to what are, objectively, some VERY ugly timepieces.
  • Tilde Town: HOW have I not featured this before?! And yet, apparently, I have not – BAD MATT, TERRIBLE WEBMONGING! This has been going for 11 years!!! “we are a community of around 3000 users making art, socializing, and learning on a linux server”, says the blurb, and this is honestly…weird and charming and a bit impenentrably-geeky, but it’s worth digging around because if you’re into the folkier end of the sort of links I post in here, the lofi community-type stuff, then this might resonate with you – maybe YOU will want to get a plot in Tilde Town and set down roots? It’s quite hard to explain, but, basically, think of it as…a sort of digital village, maybe, or a small webring of tiny digital gardens all hosted in the same place; this is a blogpost by its creator from a few years after its creation which gives you a bit of a feel for what it is and why it exists and the vibe it embodies. I like to think that at least one of you will find something lovely in here.
  • Animated Aberrations: Shardcore has been tinkering with The Machine again, asking it to produce horrible, fcuked-up anatomical illustrations that conjure Victorian-era chimeras of experimental science and weird etchings with a dash of horrorbongo…and then animating them, and presenting them as a horrid little pamphlet. I need to probably put quite a strong warning on these – they are QUITE UNPLEASANT and I can’t pretend a few of them didn’t make me go ‘oh, oh, no, please’ and grimace in slightly-repelled fascination…but THAT’S WHAT YOU’RE HERE FOR, RIGHT??? Eh? Oh. Sorry. Quite NSFW, just in case that wasn’t wholly-clear from the preceding description.
  • Face Of Robin: In the absence of any decent browsergames this week – WHAT THE FCUK WHERE ARE MY GAMES FFS – I instead present to you what I think is one of the oddest sites ever submitted to Curios by a reader. This is the home of Robin – or, more specifically, Robin’s face – and a bunch of weird, creative, silly, pointless, moderately-unsettling webprojects that Robin has built. I am going to give you the opening ‘manifesto’ as I think it sets the tone quite nicely – “Everyone needs a symbol, a stamp, an identifying image which is undeniably theirs. This is me, this symbol is me, and it is The Face. This is The Face. In and of itself it means nothing, it is not an anti war icon, it is nor a pro life image, it simply is The Face. The ultimate goal of The Face is to be seen by everyone. The Face will someday be a universally recognizable icon which means nothing. Please try not to over analyze it. It’s just The Face. The Face is unmistakably mine, and The Face will be there looking at you long after I’m gone. The Face is how I present myself to the world. And to the world I will present myself. As you can see, The Face has been all over, here, and there. I encourage you to take a face from the site, and take it everywhere. May my face bring you as much comfort as you need as it has given me much more than I deserve.” Do you…do you get the vibe? As Robin said when he wrote to me, “I have a couple of projects that I’ve been tinkering with for a while and thought I’d send them along for your consideration. Number 1 – The Wordle Creations Archive – I’ve been taking the Wordle word every day this year and been making little web things every day using a variety of AI and web tools. Some are interesting and some are not. Number 2 – – Pure Moods Web player – Remember Pure Moods? I sure do. I decided there needed to be a website that lets you hear the infomercial and play the tracks on the web.” Basically this is MAD AND WEIRD AND DEEP AND CONFUSING AND SILLY AND QUITE POSSIBLY ART, and I love it. Also, I think the dress featuring The Face Of Robin might be one of the most unsettling articles of clothing I have ever seen in my life.

By Nhu Xuan Hua

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS BY STAN FONTAN AND HONESTLY I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE FCUK SORT OF MUSIC THIS IS BUT I AM GOING TO CALL IT ‘ETHEREAL SPACE DISCO’ BECAUSE I CAN! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Emmet Green: Emmet Green is a photographer whose work I like and I have featured in Curios in the past; this is a Tumblr collecting some of his photos, and the work is excellent I think, portraits in the main but not exclusively.
  • The Side Effects of the Cocaine: This is a comic about David Bowie being VERY VERY VERY high on gak in Berlin – the period when he lived with Lou Reed and famously kept bottles of his p1ss in the fridge because he was worried that otherwise the FBI might somehow siphon it out of his toilet and use it for NEFARIOUS PURPOSES. It is…quite mad, but, then again, considering the subject matter that feels kind of appropriate I think.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • The Perpetual Stew: This guy on Instagram is doing a FOREVERSTEW – he’s at day 99 at the time of writing. HOW LONG WILL THE STEW STEW FOR??? Zac – for that is the stewmaker’s name – offers daily updates on the stew’s progress and its taste profile, and if you want to track what’s actually gone into it someone else is doing it at this website; what I will say, though, as someone who, modestly-speaking, makes a fcuking GREAT stew, is that this looks FAR too thin to actually be any good, and this is the problem with using a slow cooker in general. For additional stew-related tips, feel free to email matt@webcurios.co.uk and I will HAPPILY engage in brown food chat.
  • Seraphinne Vallora: You will doubtless have seen the p1ss-poor Guess campaign in Vogue featuring the AI model – well, this is the agency responsible, or at least their Insta account, which features a succession of madly-proportioned Amazonian pouting lustily into the camera; if we’re going to do AI models (and we inevitably are!!!) can we please, please do it better than this?  And can someone do something about the preposterous racks The Machine seems to insist on bestowing on every single one of these ‘models’, NO WOMEN ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE THIS. Although I suppose that didn’t stop every fcuking art director from about 1988 onwards insisting on ‘shopping everything to fcukery, so I guess that ship sailed several decades ago.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • In Search of Bad Vibes: As we pass the anniversary of the Southport riots, anyone living in the UK and paying passing attention to The Media cannot have failed to have noticed the prevalence of ‘POWDERKEG BRITAIN’ narratives being pushed – and, in many cases, actively prompted and encouraged, by certain sections of the right-wing media and a few massively racist cnuts like Matt Goodwin, all about how THE NATION IS A SIMMERING POT WAITING TO BOIL OVER WITH JUSTIFIABLE RAGE, etc etc. In this piece, Georgina Sturge attempts to take a slightly more measured look at The Vibe, and to determine whether it is Indeed Bad – I thought this was a thoughtful and smart piece of writing that does a good job at presenting both a realistic picture of a country which is not, it’s fair to say, in the rudest of economic health but which equally, by most available measures, is not anywhere near as fcuked or miserable or angry as a certain set of vested interests appear incredibly keen to paint it as. Her conclusion is, broadly, that while we’re not actually all miserable, angry and unhappy, it very much FEELS like we are – hmmmmm, I WONDER WHY THAT MIGHT BE, SIGNIFICANT SWATHES OF THE RIGHT-WING PRESS??? “In 2022, economic commentator Kayla Scanlon coined the term ‘vibecession’ to describe what was happening in the American mind. While the economy was recovering well post-pandemic, consumers still felt insecure and pessimistic about the country’s finances and their own. This happens because even when, for example, inflation levels falls after a period of increase, people are still unhappy with having to spend more than in the recent past to consume the same amount. What is happening in the UK now also looks like a case of bad vibes.” As an aside, by the way, if you want a neat example of the power of repeated messaging at scale, take a look at polling these days and what people cite in voxpops as their ‘concerns’ – it’s not immigration any more, it’s ‘boats’. Astonishing.
  • The Long Shadow of Southport: While we’re on the topic, this is an interesting piece by journalist James Parris, who made a documentary about the year anniversary of both the tragic child murders and the subsequent violence for Channel 4 and who writes about his experiences of filming in the area (for Unherd, which, as ever, gives me a slight ick to link to) – this is well-written, balanced and fair, I think, and doesn’t attempt to gloss over either some of the local anger or the way in which that anger has been stoked and manipulated by (again!) certain vested interests; this section in particular felt true to me: “Does Keir Starmer understand that this is a problem of the emotions, just as much as a problem of policy? Boss writes that “the greater the ambiguity surrounding one’s loss, the more difficult it is to master it”. What has the Prime Minister delivered but greater and greater ambiguity? In May, Starmer gave a major speech on immigration, presumably designed as an exercise in listening with a capital L. “Fair rules,” he said, “…give shape to our values.” Without them, he claimed, “we risk becoming an island of strangers”. Two months later, however, he doubled back and said he deeply regretted saying “island of strangers” at all. The people I have met over the last nine months believe they are already living on that island of strangers: estranged from an older, better version of England. It does not matter that the country they mourn is half-remembered and half-imagined. What matters is that they feel the loss deeply.” Frightened, uncertain people being sold a vision of a glorious past that never was by racists with something to gain – it’s a tale as old as time!
  • The Magic Avocado: It feels like generational wealth discourse has taken something of a back seat over the past few months – or maybe it’s just that I’ve tuned it out, who knows – but I thought this was a really excellent piece by MF Robbins about the reasons why people in, say, their 30s now feel so disadvantaged, financially-speaking, compared to their parents, and why their parents’ generation often don’t quite see things the same way. The title comes from the tired old canard about millennials and their RUINOUS avocado habits that preclude their ascent of the housing ladder, but the actual article is far better than that suggests – it’s clear and (with the caveat that my maths and general understanding of, well, money, isn’t great) I think that the broad sums work in terms of the argument being made; this is a really good piece that sets out clearly why there might be such a difference of perception, and what the reality is (tl;dr, it’s the house prices!!!).
  • Some Thoughts on Age Verification: It’s been one of those weird weeks when the Americans have briefly turned their attention to the UK to point and laugh at us thanks to the…less-than-stellar rollout of the age verification portion of the Online Safety Act; this piece by James Ball gives a decent overview of what some of the problems are with age verification, and while I don’t personally agree with all the things he says here (I am personally significantly more relaxed about the ‘slippery slope’ aspects of this stuff than he is, for example) I think there are a number of points in here that are worth thinking about – fwiw, though, I think until there’s a unified, pan-platform approach to this stuff it will all be practically unenforceable anyway (unless there’s a move towards digital ID, which feels quite a long way off and would be unlikely to get through Parliament in any case, I think). Oh, and for anyone reading this who bought the whole ‘AND NOW KEIR STARMER IS GOING TO BAN VPNS!!!!!’ hysteria, it is literally a bullsh1t story based on quotes from a backbencher in 2022, do some fcuking due diligence ffs.
  • The Sweeney Discourse: Despite being an ostensibly ‘red-blooded male’ (copyright: every British tabloid newspaper ever), I remain immune to the charms of Sydney Sweeney (it was the same for that other pneumatic blonde American who was the internet’s sweetheart 15ish years ago, if anyone can recall her name) – there are, though, enough people who REALLY like looking at her that attaching Sweeney to your marketing campaign guarantees you some decent eyeballs, which you can REALLY boost by adopting an ‘edgy’ strapline (‘good jeans’/’good genes’, which in the context of Sweeney’s right-wing coded aesthetic and MAGA-adjacency…well, you can imagine) which is 100% guaranteed to drive some SPICY ONLINE DISCOURSE. This is a good article by Charlie Warzel in the Atlantic, looking at how the campaign was basically PERFECTLY PITCHED to create chat, how the right and the left are both complicit, and how, basically, noone wins except for American Eagle, Sydney Sweeney and all the awful people who like shouting at each other on the internet. For what it’s worth, by the way, as someone who has worked in advermarketingpr, I would strongly suggest that EVERYONE involved in this knew exactly where it was going to end up and that the campaign was greenlit with the expectation that it would create exactly this sort of chat. THANKS, ADVERMARKETINGPRCNUTS!
  • Texts as Toys: This is VERY LONG – perhaps too long (pottle!) – by Venkatesh Rao, but I rather like the general thrust of the argument; to whit, when considering LLMs and ‘working’ with them, at least on exploratory/thinky stuff, it’s helpful to think of them as ludic partners, and the relationship with any text that you give The Machine or receive from The Machine as a fundamentally-playful one. “Our expectations of AI end up mismatched with reality not because it is particularly poor as a modeling medium, but because the misregistrations arise from its toy-like nature. AI models are “wrong” about reality in the same ways toys are “wrong” about reality. A model of a real rocket, for example, might be highly realistic in some ways. With the right kind of trick photography, you might even be fooled into thinking it’s the real thing. But then if you examine other aspects, you’ll find weird “mistakes.” It is made of plastic, not metal! The human capsule is way too small to hold humans! To have the right expectations of AI outputs, we must approach it not just as a modeling medium, but as a toy-like modeling medium. The misregistrations are going to be the misregistrations of toys. Not those of serious adult modeling technologies like maps and mathematics.”
  • Reactions To An AI Project: I thought this a really interesting post. I featured the ‘Living History’ project a while back – you may remember it, it basically took elements of the British Museum’s collection and added an AI layer to let you both explore it, discover linked elements and interrogate the pieces in question. Turns out it wasn’t anything official by the museum, it was a hobby project by Jonathan Talmi – who in this essay recounts his experience of going viral in the museums space, and what the reactions to his work were. I thought this was a really good reflection on people’s responses to the work, and the kneejerk ‘AI IS BAD SO THIS IS BAD’ response of so many people, which is increasingly shrill and unthinking and, honestly, lazy – it’s really worth a read if you’re interested in how uncritical a lot of the ‘discourse’ in this space is at the moment.
  • A Baker Contemplates Her Own Obsolescence: I really enjoyed this essay – a discursive piece about the author’s feelings about AI, the ethics of using it, and the reality of our environmental impact on a day-to-day basis. Bronwen Wyatt is a baker, and, along with many other professions, AI is making incursions on her profession – whether to create images of impossibly beautiful cakes to accompany blogposts, to tidy up recipe copy, to convert ingredient measurements. In this piece, Wyatt acknowledges the environmental issues currently causing so many people to push back against GenAI tech, and, without dismissing them, makes some excellent points about why maybe it’s not quite that simple and we are not quite that pure.  “I do not think it is possible to maintain an ethical boundary between the use of generative AI and other types of machine learning, as these models are increasingly interwoven in nearly every technological tool we use. I think many of us tend to think of AI as a monolith, rather than a dizzying array of instruments. My father-in-law used generative AI for voice banking, which would eventually reproduce the sound of his voice when he lost it to ALS.  If your primary concern is AI’s carbon footprint, then you can take steps to mitigate that, such as avoiding using generative AI to make videos, which does draw a great deal of energy. You might also consider other actions that would have a far greater impact, like eating a more plant-based diet.”
  • The Substack AI Report: Or, ‘the not-wholly-surprising data about the extent to which writers on Substack are using AI’ – basically if you read enough of the mid-ranking crap on the platform (and Dear God, do I read some crap) then you will quickly become familiar with Substack Voice, which betrays…certain common hallmarks of writing which has at least been given the once-over by The Machine. This post, from Substack itself, notes that nearly half of the writers they spoke to used AI in their posts – which is…a lot! THIS IS THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM YOU KNOW!!! If the Nazis aren’t enough to put you off, maybe this will be?
  • Inside the Collapse of Builder.AI: You may remember Builder.AI – a VERY hyped startup which got LOTS of funding and then imploded spectacularly earlier this year when it was revealed that its magical AI website-and-app-building tech was, in fact…a lot of Indian engineers pretending to be The Machine (there’s an old joke about ‘is it AI or is it 100 Indian engineers in a trenchcoat?’; surprisingly often, it really is the latter!). This is a great and exhaustive rundown of the companies growth and spectacular flameout in Rest of World which will appeal to fans of Theranos, Juicero and the like – will we NEVER learn? Rhetorical, btw.
  • How Spotify Distorts Genre History: It feels a BIT unfair to pin this solely on Spotify to be honest, but everyone seems to be lining up to give them a kicking at the moment and, well, Daniel Ek takes money from art and gives it to bombmakers, so fair enough really. Really, though, this is a story about the generally incomplete status of digital archiving and cataloguing, and the realisation that we seem to be slowly coming to that we might actually have lost an awful lot of our past cultural patrimony due to media decay and a failure to realise that nothing lasts forever. This is really interesting, and it feels like there is a decent campaign idea in this for the right brand if you ask me (it’s not hard to imagine some fashion labels that could work within this space, for example). “Regular listeners to streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon will recognise the sensation of songs served up on auto-play getting steadily more generic from one track to the next, offering crowdpleasers in the hope of keeping people on the app. While services like Spotify give the appearance of infinite choice, in operation they revert to the familiar. When this is applied to an underground movement such as drum ’n’ bass, important parts of its history go missing or get mixed up. Ragga jungle hits like Uncle 22’s “Six Million Ways To Die” or Trinity’s “Gangster” are elusive. Searching for Shy FX and UK Apachi’s landmark anthem “Original Nuttah” points you to an inferior 25th anniversary remake on a different label. The work of many innovators such as Danny Breaks, Krust, DJ Crystl and Peshay is often listed with a release date well after it first dropped, giving the impression that drum ’n’ bass rose to prominence years after it actually did. Some of this confusion is caused by the ad hoc business arrangements and magpie sampling practices of the early 1990s, where tracing (and proving) the ownership of particular tracks is difficult. Combined with the layers of data analysis and gatekeeping at a corporation such as Spotify, however, and independent music becomes marginalised in favour of the sanitised, commodified and establishment.”
  • The TikTok Detectives: This does feel sort of inevitable – after the past five years have brought us the Facebook groups discussing ‘which guys in which towns are incorrigible fuccbois on the apps’, after West Elm Caleb, after the boom in true crime podcasts and everyone seemingly thinking they are fucking OSINT demon, and the mad frenzy around the disappearance of poor Jay Slater, it doesn’t feel surprising that private detectives are having their moment on TikTok, bringing all of the glamour of ‘seventeen hours staking out what may or may not be a cheating husband’ to a vertical video near you. Is this healthy? I DON’T THINK SO! Still, fair play, I would watch the sh1t out of this, so I should probably wind my neck in: “Like all good crime novels, the best stakeouts have numerous twists and turns. Lisa Allen-Stell, who runs her own agency, Pink Lady Investigations in California, recalls being hired on a two-year contract by a married man who wanted to make sure that his mistress—who was also married—wasn’t in a third relationship with his married best friend. Keeping up so far? It turns out that the best friend was spending most of his time with men, not with the mistress.”
  • GenZ and Location Sharing: I don’t have regular enough access to GenZ/A people be able to ask them about this, but maybe you can confirm or deny whether this is true – do kids these days like sharing their location with each other on apps all the time? Is this a thing? Or is it just a few kids in SF, written up by the Chronicle as though it’s representative of an entire generation? ENQUIRING MINDS NEED TO KNOW, basically because if it *is* true then my slightly-jokey ‘privacy is dead forever’ comment up there is probably not actually a joke at all.
  • An Interview With Adam Curtis: I know, I know, but Curtis is always good value, and this chat with him by Tom at The Idler is just a really interesting conversation which covers all sorts of ground and, I think, gives you a far better flavour of Curtis as a person than is usually the case with these things. I have met Adam on a couple of occasions now, and all I can say is that he is NOT what I expected him to be (in a nice way). Also, in this he points out that all the furore about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica was, in the long-term, massively-unhelpful to the quality of thinking about social media and its effects, which is a point of view I will defend all day (‘Cadwalladr should be ashamed’ is my tl;dr viewpoint on this, and has been for time).
  • Disneyland of the Dead: On London’s cemeteries, and Highgate in particular, and the peculiar challenges involved in maintaining and preserving places where dead people rest. I loved this, although I maintain that Brompton is London’s best cemetery by miles, even if it can’t boast Marx.
  • Rats: Thankfully nothing to do with the James Herbert novel which I read at a really inappropriately young age and which gave me some…very confused ideas about sex when I was a child; instead, this is a WONDERFUL essay in the LRB, all about rodent behavioural scientist John B Calhoun, whose frankly-insane experiments into ‘rat society’ were the indirect basis for the child-traumatising 80s classic ‘Mrs Frisbee and the Rats of NIMH’ (the real heads know). This is SO interesting, I promise – I mean, look, tell me this doesn’t make you want to read more? “In 1947, having left the Rodent Ecology Project, Calhoun set about building a quarter-acre rat city, mimicking the layout of downtown Baltimore, in a field near his home in Towson, Maryland. The enclosure was divided into sections connected by alleyways, with one large ‘dining room’ in the middle providing unlimited food and water, and nest boxes in each corner. Calhoun released ten rats into his city – five males and five females – and for the next 27 months observed their behaviour from a watchtower. He noted every birth and death, and many thousands of social interactions. He conducted autopsies on the dead and periodically recorded the weights of his rats and the number of wounds on their bodies. It took him a decade to collate his data, but when The Ecology and Sociology of the Norway Rat was published in 1962 it was recognised, Adams and Ramsden write, as ‘the most comprehensive and complete account of rodent behaviour ever produced’.”
  • A Petition To A Council: A scifi short story, riffing on AI, the singularity, immortality and humanity and emotion and loneliness and and and…this, byJustin Smith-Ruiu, is smart, sharp and funnier than my description probably made it sound, and I think it’s excellent.
  • Amerikanka: Our final longread of the week is a republication from 2004 – Sarah Orman writes about taking a trip to Russia in 1997, and it is so PERFECTLY of its time and so evocative, and I promise you you will love this SO much, honestly.

By Maggie Rose

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

 

Webcurios 25/07/25

Reading Time: 39 minutes

 

HAVE YOU SECURED YOUR ACCESS TO BONGO YET???

Yes, that’s right, today is ‘if you want to look at people fcuking on the internet from a UK IP address you need to prove you’re over 18, or alternatively use some very simple software to fool the pornographers into believing you’re actually browsing from Haiti’ day! How are YOU celebrating?

I spent a bit of time checking in on how X was doing with its obligation to ‘protect young minds’ from the terabytes of filth spaffed across every single corner of that benighted site and, well, let’s just say that I expect That Fcuking Man to be receiving a Strongly Worded Letter from Ofcom at some point in the not-too-distant (which, er, he will ignore! Because the regulator has no teeth in the face of plutocracy!).

Anyway, YOU don’t care about any of that because none of YOU are shameless disciples of onan – and, er, neither do I, because I’m not either. Glad we have that cleared up.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you probably wish I hadn’t let with an intro that was basically about w4nking and, if I’m honest, so do I at this point.

 By Paul Davis

WE KICK OFF THIS WEEK WITH AN ENTIRELY NON-OBSCURE RECORD BUT I MAKE NO APOLOGIES BECAUSE THE NEW ALBUM FROM TYLER THE CREATOR IS ACE AND YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO IT NOW! 

THE SECTION WHICH CAN ONLY IMAGINE THE NUMBERS NORDVPN IS DOING WITH UNDER-18s IN THE UK TODAY, PT.1:  

  • Draw A Fish: There aren’t, I don’t think, enough web experiences that afford one the opportunity to BECOME A GOD; I’m firmly of the belief that our online lives would be improved significantly if only more websites existed to allow us to explore the power fantasies denied us by the tedious, futile mundanity of corporeal existence (HI! HAPPY FRIDAY! I’M HERE FOR A GOOD AND UPLIFTING TIME!!!!). I can’t pretend that Draw A Fish will have you feeling *quite* like some sort of deity, but if you’ve ever thought ‘you know what? The creeping sense of existential dread I feel every morning upon opening my eyes and remembering who I am and what I am about to experience might be somewhat lessened by the illusory feeling of control over a small, unaware being which owed its existence entirely to my whims’ then a) I would strongly consider some sort of therapeutic intervention, that is not a normal thing to think or feel; and b) you might well enjoy Draw A Fish, you sick weirdo fcuk. Ahem. So, basically, this is a very simple fish simulator in which you create a digital piscine pal and drop it into a shared aquarium with everyone else’s fish to see how it fares – the twist, though, is that you create your fish by drawing it – there’s some sort of rudimentary image recognition going on whereby your design will be cross-referenced against some sort of platonic ideal of ‘what a fish is meant to look like’, and its swimming ability and survival prospects will be affected by how much it looks like, say, a tench vs looking like a pair of slightly-sodden pants. I LOVE MY MISSHAPEN AQUATIC SONS! Ok, this is pretty simple and there’s not a whole load of sophistication happening here, but I think there’s something really rather interesting in the base level idea, and it got me thinking how fun it might be were this to be extended slightly to animals beyond fish – wouldn’t it be fun to make something which takes the base premise and then affords people the ability to create an entire digital menagerie and ecosystem based solely on their doodles? YES IT WOULD BE FUN. Still, until someone builds that to my exacting specifications, I suggest you click the link and try and draw something toothy, terrifying and streamlined – you will inevitably end up creating something vaguely-goldfishlike, but it’s good to have aspirations, even at 710am.
  • Emojitracker: A RESURRECTED WEBSITE! Emojitracker was a very web2.0 proposition developed WAAAAAY back in 2013 and scraping data from Twitter to populate its rankings of popular emoji use worldwide; obviously Twitter is now X and now useless, with its API access rendered prohibitively expensive and populated by nazis, scammers, pornographers and the genuinely mad, all presided over by that horrible racist apartheid toad, but, in a rare moment of positivity for 2025, Emojitracker is BACK! “Emojitracker is a tool tracking all the emojis copied from Emojipedia and GetEmoji in real time. The latest version of the Emojitracker shows the most popular 1,000 emojis both globally and across select countries”, explains the blurb – obviously the way they’re pulling data means it’s perhaps not *wholly* representative or accurate, but absent any sort of data from the big social platforms which would render this a little more statistically representative it’s not a terrible proxy, and there’s something undeniably-interesting about the ability to see which emoji are most popular and how that varies from country to country. At present the big red heart is leading the global rankings, with the green checkmark an inexplicable second, but I’m far more interested in the country-by-country variations in popularity; both the UK and US have the cry/laugh emoji in second place (the most basic of all the emoji, do not attempt to dispute this), while in India the heart/hands symbol has the country in a weird chokehold with the ‘bandaged heart’ symbol also showing up high in the rankings, a fact which has momentarily made me feel quite emo about everything. Special mention to the Brazilians, who, while also succumbing to the heart’s supremacy, have the oddly-sexy ‘biting lip’ emoji in second place which is exactly the sort of unbridled symbolic eroticism that you might hope for. Anyway, part of me thinks there’s something halfway-interesting you might be able to do with this from the point of view of FUN AND INTERESTING ANALYSIS or even some superficial brandw4nk, should any of you be interested in exploring this further (you won’t, though, will you? Lazy fcuks).
  • Mirage: Ooh, this is fun – Mirage is basically an in-browser AI filter which takes your camera feed and adds a layer of GenAI sparkle to what it ‘sees’, turning you, variously, into a cartoon version of yourself, a Minecraft version of yourself, some sort of horrible parody of one of the characters in Frozen…basically it’s a tech demo for software which, the implication is, revolutionise SFX and the like by simply rendering in realtime, and it’s undeniably VERY impressive, even if I was deeply hurt and depressed by how OLD all the cartoon versions of me look (I AM NOT THAT WRINKLY EVEN IN REAL LIFE FFS, WHY DOES FROZEN MATT LOOK LIKE FCUKING METHUSELAH???). There’s quite a big (and…quite unpleasant) uncanny valley vibe to all this, with quite a few of the different filters making you (or at least me) look like the waxen-fleshed horrorshow mocaps of The Polar Express, but, equally, there’s something undeniably compelling about how it just…works, in your browser, without sending your laptop into an existential crisis, and I think a music video filmed like this might be fun in a low-budget, slightly-shonky sort of way. Give it a go, I promise you will be impressed – oh, and if you want to see something horrible, make a lot of exaggerated mouth movements and stick your tongue out, it goes VERY weird when trying to cope with rendering teeth and the rest, and you will be pleasantly-horrified by how unholy the results are.
  • Dad Water: So this isn’t actually a particularly interesting link – it’s a website promoting a drinks brand, the site does the square root of fcuk all and it’s not even particularly nicely-designed. BUT! THE PRODUCT IS CALLED ‘DAD WATER’ FFS! WHO SIGNED THIS OFF? WHO DECIDED THAT ‘YES, WE WANT OUR REPELLENT-SOUNDING DRINK PRODUCT TO HAVE A NAME THAT SOUNDS LITERALLY LIKE OLD MAN P1SS’???? Seriously, is this a ‘lost in translation, two nations divided by a single language’ transatlantic misunderstanding thing? Can any North Americans reading this explain to me how you can read the brandname ‘Dad Water’ and not immediately think, just to reiterate, of DAD URINE??? Is it…is it a ‘me’ problem? I really hope it isn’t. Also, just as an additional kick in the ribs to one of the worst pieces of branding I have seen in a long, long time, the drinks sound DISGUSTING – it’s basically watery, flavoured ‘tequila drinks’, which are also uncarbonated, suggesting they will taste almost but not exactly like a cocktail overfilled with ice which has been left til its so dilute any suggestion of flavour is homeopathic at best. Oh, and possibly my favourite bit of this is that the various different flavour options have ACTUAL HUMAN NAMES? “What are the names?”, I hear you ask; well, they are “Tom, Steve, Rodney, and Gary” (ngl, I do actually rather love this – “pass me another can of Gary” is something I am slightly-sad I’m unlikely to ever be able to meaningfully say.
  • Lovejack: How’s your personal search for love and companionship going? Have you managed to find another meaty sack of neuroses and anxiety with whom to stare into the looming, apocalyptic future? LUCKY YOU! For anyone, though, still struggling to find another human being with whom to share experiences and mucus with, and who’s simply exhausted an enervated by the “ROAST!” enthusiasts on Hinge, the sexual incontinents on Tinder or the normies cosplaying as fetishists on Feeld, there is an EXCITING NEW DATING PROPOSITION to momentarily raise your hopes before doubtless crushing them again a few days later. Lovejack is a dating app with a simple, singular gimmick – your profile is just five words, and a photo, and NO MORE. You can change those five words as often as you like, and there are daily prompts for inspiration, and you previous selections are available as a profile’s ‘history’, letting anyone theoretically interested in you check back through your previous five words to see whether you’ve said anything potentially-worrying like, I don’t know, “I Like Bleeding Dogs Dry”. Conversation is centred around these prompts, the idea being that you will ask people about the stories behind their slogans – but, as far as I can tell, messaging is limited to five words and you’re encouraged to voicenote people instead. I…I don’t hate this as a concept, I have to say – the idea of being forced into some sort ot verbal creativity appeals to me, though I have a vague sense that this will only really work for people who have a true Poster’s Soul and won’t really fly for normies; that said, if you’re the sort of person who can read “W4nk or cry? EXISTENTIAL DILEMMA!” and think “yes this is my soulmate” then this could be for YOU (no idea if this is available in the UK or not or indeed if more than approximately three people are using it, fyi, but, well, why not give it a go?).
  • Tea: This, though, is a fcuking TERRIBLE idea which feels like a lawsuit (or worse) waiting to happen – the premise behind tea is, seemingly, “there are a lot of really bad men out there on dating apps; why don’t we create a women-only whisper network that will allow for the sharing of details and stories about said BAD MEN to protect women everywhere from being messed-with on the apps by these appalling actors?”, and, honestly, if you can’t immediately understand why that is a genuinely-awful idea then, well, what the fcuk is wrong with you you moron. Would YOU like there to exist an app where anyone can go and tell the world you’re a heel, a d1ck, a bore, a dullard or significantly worse, seemingly with impunity, and have that information attached to you for evermore? I posit that you would in fact not, but, well, here we are! Obviously I am a man and I get that my experience of navigating the world and dealing with threats, etc, is significantly different to that experienced by women, but, equally, this sounds like an all-round Bad Idea: “Already swiping for dates on Tinder, Bumble, Match, or Hinge? Tea is a must-have app, helping women avoid red flags before the first date with dating advice, and showing them who’s really behind the profile of the person they’re dating. Users can access a nationwide forum of posts and can set alerts for a man’s name so you never miss any tea about your potential date, ex, or partner, and so you can make sure they are not a cheater. Users can anonymously ask for dating and relationship advice to find support and empowerment from our community of verified women.” US-only, as far as I can tell, and hopefully something that will be consigned to the dustbin of history very soon.
  • Tender: This, though, this I like – a single-note gag, but a REALLY NICE ONE. Tender is an app – iOS only – which works like a dating app except instead of being fed a series of pictures of potential new partners, it instead only serves you images of YOUR beloved, and only lets you swipe right; basically it’s nothing more than a photo carousel of someone you care for, but, well, it’s a cute idea, and it plays pleasingly with the very online concept of the WIFE GUY in a manner I find pleasing. WELL DONE, anonymous internet stranger who created this, for making something genuinely nice!
  • Google Without AI: This might be worth bookmarking should you be getting sick of the increasingly-ubiquitous AI summaries infecting every corner of the Google experience; this is basically a layer atop Google search which adds a string to all your queries meaning that all the AI summary cruft is stripped out, along with sponsored links, and you in theory get the PURE SEARCH EXPERIENCE. This…just works, and while it’s not super-exciting it’s not a bad idea to pin it somewhere as the base version of Google becomes ever more useless; you can also pretend that you’re doing something to prevent the traffic apocalypse that’s going to see 75% of the web disappear as traffic, and therefore revenue, falls off a cliff (you’re not, though, you’re just sitting, Cnutlike, as the digital waters lap gently at your knees).
  • Calligrapher: This site will create SIGNATURES! Give it a name, pick from one of a selection of different handwriting styles, and watch as it crafts something plausibly-human-looking on demand. What’s interesting about this is that it’s doing it on the fly somehow – each new signature is seemingly rendered from scratch rather than just being a fixed expression of some under-the-hoor parameters, and it’s quite interesting (ok, I am stretching this slightly but it is early and I am VERY tired) to see the different ways in which the ‘handwriting’ presents. This is unlikely to have any practical application whatsoever unless you need to create several hundred unique, fictitious signatures at pace (and, if you do need to do that, would you mind taking a moment to drop me a line and explain what the fcuk you’re doing with them?).
  • Roofball: This is VERY North American and will require you to have quite a specific type of house/roof – equally, though, it feels that you could probably tweak the ruleset to apply to a whole host of dwelling types, so you can almost certainly adapt this for your bungalow in Tring (NB – I don’t, of course, know where any of you live, so in the unlikely event that it *is* in fact in a bungalow in Tring, rest assured that this is pure coincidence and I am not in fact stalking you with a view to one day wearing your epidermis like some sort of bloody, millimeter-thick dressing gown. Honest). Roofball is a WHOLESOME GAME FOR ALL THE FAMILY, played with an American football or rugby ball, and a roof; as far as I can tell this is just something that some guys in the US invented while bored, which they then decided to make a website for and which has developed a small but dedicated community of enthusiasts around it – there are TOURNAMENTS and LEAGUE TABLES and, well, it’s just sort of charming really. If nothing else I recommend watching the explanatory video, which has incredibly-pleasing ‘37 views on YouTube’ energy to it (also, WHY ARE ALL THE MEN IN IT SO FCUKING ENORMOUS? DO THEY EAT NOTHING BUT STEAK AND MILK???? Based on this, I very much do not have the physique for a roofball career).
  • Alto: Do YOU have a Mac? Do YOU use Apple Notes? Would YOU like something that will turn said Apple Notes into an ACTUAL WEBSITE with (basically) a single click? GREAT! “Alto turns your Apple Notes into a website.You can create a blog or a website. Or just share few notes with your friends or colleagues. Every Apple Note becomes a page on your site. You can use text, images, audio, video etc.” I don’t have a mac, I don’t use apple notes and as such this is literally meaningless to me, but, well, I do this for YOU and YOU might find this useful in some weird way.
  • Walkie Talkie: Via Ben Templeton, this is a nice idea which feels like it could be used for FUN PURPOSES (or, alternatively, for some sort of miserable advermarketingpr activation) – this is designed for museums, galleries and other cultural institutions, and is basically a simple and easy way of creating audioguides. It features text-to-speech tech which means you can easily turn written materials into audio collateral, and features a simple ‘make a QR code which links to your specific audio, and then do that loads so you can basically create a QR code trail guiding people through an exhibition or space or similar’ mechanic – as it’s designed for institutions, anything beyond the most simple and basic execution requires payment, but I can see this being potentially useful for anything which has physical visitors; it feels like it could be INTERESTING AND FUN in the right hands, basically. Could those hands be YOURS? I have no clue, who the fcuk are you?
  • Kenney: Would YOU like to make videogames? Would YOU like an entirely-free library of assets that you might use to do so? OH GREAT THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT THIS IS!!! Look, I am not a gamedev, aspirant or otherwise, and I haven’t explored this too deeply, but, as far as I can tell, it is just a NICE and GENEROUS-SPIRITED endeavour which is basically a godsend for anyone looking to spin up an indie game.
  • A Lovely Bit of Satisfying Interactive Animation: This is a showcase website for a company called, annoyingly ‘h’, which does digital interaction design and which here has put together a GORGEOUS little visual demonstrating their chops; click the link and play with the little digital Rube Goldberg contraption and watch as it all moves and clunks and animates with such DELIGHTFUL style, and, if you’re me, find yourself thinking ‘I wish every website in the world had this sort of cute and charming approach to interaction design’. Obviously if that were the case then the entire web would run at the speed of basically treacle and it would be incredibly annoying, but it would also be SO pretty and, well, nothing works properly anyway anymore so why not make that ineffectual frustration PRETTY at the very least?
  • A History of Now: Via my friend Rishi, this is an interesting, beautifully-designed and VERY CHEWY website which basically addresses the lightweight concept of, er, TIME and HUMANITY’S CONCEPTION THEREOF via the medium of a lot of text and a nicely-animated scrolly timeline; look, I appreciate that this isn’t exactly a fulsome explanation but, well, YOU click on the link and check it out and come back and tell me exactly how you’d attempt to explain this in a pithy 100 words or so. SEE? IT’S NOT FCUKING EASY, THIS CURIOS LARK. Oh, fine, ok, here’s a little overview that will hopefully communicate a bit about what’s going on here: “The central and vertical line represents human history, with earlier years above and later years below. As you scroll down and peruse the following essay, you are moving forward from more ancient to less ancient, all the way up to the present day. The large black numbers record passing decades. You are looking at a timeline. As you scroll, contemporaneous estimates of the size of the past and future will come into view and pass by. These are the red horizontal lines. Every time a prominent historical figure or scientist made a numerical prediction concerning the length of the past and/or future, it is recorded here, with the predictor’s name, the year their prediction was published, and the numbers they proposed all appearing in red.” This is really interesting, if a touch dizzying.

By Levon Biss

I HAVE SPENT A LOT OF THIS WEEK LISTENING TO THIS OLD CAMERA OBSCURA ALBUM AND YOU MIGHT LIKE TO GIVE IT A LISTEN TOO BECAUSE IT IS, OBJECTIVELY, FCUKING GREAT! 

THE SECTION WHICH CAN ONLY IMAGINE THE NUMBERS NORDVPN IS DOING WITH UNDER-18s IN THE UK TODAY, PT.2:  

  • Eclectic 24: OH GOD THIS IS SUCH A GOOD RADIO STATION! I *think* this came to me via Dense Discovery, and it is SUCH a find – Eclectic 24h is just an online radio station, but it is SO well-programmed; it runs 24/7, it’s all the product of human track selection and curation, and if while obviously I can’t presume to know your music taste or What You Are Into, the past hour has included songs by Ashley Henry, The Femcels, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Little Simz, Aretha Franklin and Jungle, which, honestly, should sell it to you unless your a total cloth-eared cnut or some sort of weird, grindcore-only obsessive. Honestly, this really is worth bookmarking.
  • Playlist Maker: A READER WRITES! The mysterious – to me, at least; I imagine he’s less of a mystery to his friends and family, although I suppose that’s not a given – Adam Rowe writes to tell me about this EXCITING NEW TOY which lets you plug in any thread from Reddit which features people suggesting or sharing songs and automatically pulls said songs into a Spotify playlist for your delectation. Per Adam, “I feel like I’ve seen like a dozen people re-invent this sort of tool over the years and it always gets paywalled or disappears eventually… Anyway, this one seems to have debuted pretty recently, so enjoy it while it lasts!” – YOU HEARD THE MAN, ENJOY IT YOU FCUKS.
  • Energy Usage: ANOTHER READER WRITES! Honestly, occasionally it feels like…some of you out there are real, and you ACTUALLY CARE! Not often, admittedly, but sometimes! Thanks to Guillaume Slizewicz, not only for struggling through the horrible prose of Web Curios in what I presume is their second or third language, but also for sending me this site which basically tells you what mix of energy is being used to power your browsing. I have NO idea how this is being calculated or where Guillaume is drawing the data from – could you, er, drop me a line and explain if you see this? – but I really like the idea behind it and the very simple, almost ASCII-ish presentation of the data. Apparently the server that’s powering my browsing right now is running off 76% nuclear energy, which is…good?
  • Telescope: Ok, this isn’t live YET but should you wish to add yourself to the waitlist then you can do so at this link – Telescope is a forthcoming app whose whole gimmick is CURATION, with the idea presumably being that they are frantically signing up TASTEMAKERS behind the scenes who will regularly post stuff they are into for you and others to slavishly copy so that you can eventually turn your life into a plastic simulacrum of that of someone you feel a weird, possibly-creepy sense of inferiority to; presumably there’s an affiliate marketing layer built in which is how the site, and the curators, will make bank. Personally speaking I can’t think of anything more miserable than having a steady stream of ‘BUY THIS AMAZING NOTEBOOK’ bullsh1t being peddled by an infinite number of pyramid-selling Substackers, but, well, maybe you’re the sort of consumerist fcukpig for whom this sounds like catnip and, well, who am I to judge? NO FCUKER, etc (but know that I am, regardless).
  • Am I Ugly?: To be clear, I AM NOT ASKING YOU TO TELL ME THE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION I ALREADY KNOW AND IT IS WHY I AVOID MIRRORS. No, this isn’t me fishing for compliments (it really isn’t, I promise, I know I look like a tired piece of string), but instead a subReddit devoted to people posting photos of themselves and asking the community to give them an ‘honest’ assessment of their looks – oh look, here’s another one, called ‘Looksmaxxing Advice’, which is full of people asking for tips on how to, er, ‘maxx’ their looks. Why am I featuring these objectively-miserable corners of the web? Because they are canaries in the coalmine for Our Relationship With The Machine – if you scroll through the posts (all seemingly genuine rather than hotties chumming for praise), there are a …troubling number that begin with some variant of ‘ChatGPT told me I am a 5, what can I do to improve my maxillofacial proportions?’ Does that sound positive? NO IT DOES NOT! And yet, as ever, here we are! This is obviously downstream of incel culture and rather confirms one of the longreads from last week about the ways in which all sorts of Channish vocab and ideology have infected mainstream thinking. Honestly, I feel I need to caveat these links because it’s quite hard not to come away from this and just feel quite…deeply…sad for these poor kids. No 13 year old ought to be posting selfies to strangers and asking them how unattractive they are, but THIS IS LIFE NOW.
  • Underwater Photographer Of The Year: SO MANY PHOTOS OF DAMP THINGS! Here’s the blurb: Enjoy “the feast of awarded images from the 2025 Underwater Photographer of the Year contest, following our largest ever entry. Please devour the photographs, but also savour the accompanying backstories from the photographers. It is a truly international spread, these winners come from photographers from 30 different countries. As it says on our tin, we’re an underwater imaging contest, and while this is a niche discipline, UPY always surprises with its diversity of imagery. Of course you will see natural history pictures of amazing ocean wildlife, but these are alongside swimming pool shots of Olympic athletes, a view of camels from inside of a water butt and a rarely seen, let alone photographed shipwreck, from more than 100m below the surface. Each image tells you something more about the seven tenths of our planet’s surface that is underwater.” Look, these are all great and I want to commend them all to you, but if I had to pick a personal favourite it might have to be this spectacularly-grumpy looking lad.
  • AI Hallucination Cases: One of the less-remarked areas in which AI is increasingly fcuking our collective sh1t up is in the law, where a growing number of cases are seeing nonexistent past judgements being cited as a result of people literally asking The Machine to help them construct their arguments; this is a simple but slightly-perturbing database of examples of this phenomenon. “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 (230 cases identified so far), it is a work in progress and will expand as new examples emerge.” Honestly, if you consider that this is only a partial account of this phenomenon it’s…not a little troubling. INJECT AI INTO EVERYTHING WHAT IS THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN OH FCUK! BONUS LEGAL AI HORROR: this is a good piece explaining all the ways this is going to fcuk sh1t up.
  • Split Things: You know when you were a kid and you were forced to do art despite having a really bitter anger towards the subject because you draw like Helen Keller, and some teacher told you that actually drawing is really easy and all you need to do is take an image of whatever it is you want to render on paper and divide it up into small squares and just focus on drawing one of those squares at a time and after you have done that you will magically have drawn an actual picture and it will have been SIMPLE, and you try it and you realise that it was all an EVIL LIE and despite you having followed the teacher’s instructions to the letter your resulting picture looks like a fcuking potato and you feel like a sad, pathetic failure? What? That’s, er, not a universally-lived experience? Ahem. Anyway, this tool lets you upload any image you want and apply a grid over it, presumably for the exact purpose of letting you practice drawing it. Or something. Honestly, I have no fcuking clue what this is actually for, but this is my best guess.
  • Hyperchat: This is, annoyingly, Mac-only and so I haven’t been able to actually try it myself – as such, I accept no responsibility if it’s some sort of weird virus-laden malware or something (but I am pretty sure it isn’t). Hyprechat is a really interesting idea – basically it lets you talk to a bunch of LLMs simultaneously so that you can compare their outputs against each other in realtime. If you’re someone who works a lot with AI and is constantly trying to work out which model is currently best for which type of task, this could potentially be useful (although I imagine that it’s only using the free tier of each, which possibly makes the comparison less useful); equally, if you want to conduct some quick-and-dirty comparisons on Share of Model (LOL SNAKE OIL!)-type stuff, this could again be helpful. Basically there’s a bunch of different uses to which you could put this, but I can’t really be bothered to enumerate any more of them and so I will leave it to you to come up with some more. GO ON, THINK OF SOME.
  • ArtVibes: A project by the National Museum of Art in Washington DC, which allows you to explore the collection based on the vague idea of ‘vibes’ – pick your adjective, noun and verb, and the site will create a curated selection of work from the museum’s collection JUST FOR YOU based on said words, using an LLM to effectively ‘interpret’ the words and pick visuals that somehow embody the qualities you’ve selected. Annoyingly you can only select words from a preapproved list, robbing me of the chance to find out exactly which artworks The Machine thinks best embody the terms ‘suppurating corpse exhale’, but the collection’s large and high-quality enough that you will always get served some really interesting works, even if the whole thing feels a little more like a pointless gimmick than I am sure they were hoping for when they commissioned it.
  • Tooooools: Not sure if that’s the correct number of ‘o’s, but, well, I don’t think it’s important so let’s just run with it. Tooooooooooooooooooooooools (better be safe than sorry) is a website that lets you fcuk with photos in some simple but pleasing ways – upload an image or some video, it renders in simple, lo-res black and white, and you can then apply a bunch of different filters and fx to it based on some easily-selectable presets; your mileage will vary based on the extent to which you enjoy, er, lo-res black and white images with high grain, basically, but I think this is rather fun and I enjoyed messing with it more than I expected to.
  • Rexpaint: Look, I am just going to leave the explaining to the people who made this, because it is very much Not My Thing: “REXPaint is a powerful and user-friendly ASCII art editor. Use a wide variety of tools to create ANSI block/line art, roguelike mockups and maps, UI layouts, and for other game development needs. Originally an in-house dev tool used by Grid Sage Games for traditional roguelike development, this software has been made available to other developers and artists free of charge. While core functionality and tons of features already exist, occasional updates are known to happen. Unlock your retro potential; join thousands of other REXPaint users today!” This is…quite involved, but I think potentially rather fun if you have the patience to learn the ropes (and, er, the desire to create some pretty complex ASCII art, which I appreciate probably applies to one of you at most. IS THAT ONE WEIRDO YOU????).
  • The Evolution of the Scroll Bar: Have you ever thought to yourself “you know what I would really like? I would really like a webpage that offers me a visual guide to the evolution of the design of the scrollbar”? If the answer is ‘yes’ then a) I suggest possibly aiming a bit higher with your wants in future, you deserve better; and b) ENJOY THIS WEBSITE which does exactly that thing (but nothing else, so don’t get your hopes up).
  • Halucidations: I really like this – a silly little project by one Kyle Johnson, which spins up a different motivational-style quote each time you ask it to. I’m not sure whether these are pre-written or whether there’s some Markov Chain thing in the background, but these are GREAT in that they vaguely have the shape of something halfway-meaningful but, if you take the time to actually read them and think about what they are saying, they are in fact entirely nonsensical. “Hold hands with the unknown”, reads one I have just been served; “Chase the horizon until the sky turns inside out”, reads the next (actually I really like that). Honestly, depending on who you are and what your Insta feed/friends are like, you could have a very fun few days posting this stuff and seeing who points out that you are posting meaningless w4nk and who just spams the ‘prayer hands/high five’ emoji in response to all of this. Want to find out which of your digital friends and acquaintances is a double-figure-IQ moron? This is a GREAT litmus test.
  • Please Fix This Site: I rather like this – via Andy, a site whose gimmick is that it is VERY badly designed, to the point of being actively annoying, but which you can, should you be annoyed enough, pay small sums to improve in small ways. Pay them $5 to fix the kerning, another to add round corners to the elements… you get the idea. Amazingly a couple of people have been so irked by this that they have actually shelled out to fix the fonts and remove the marquee scrolling, which goes to show that some people REALLY fcuking hate bad design. I think this is FUN and you can probably steal the idea wholesale for the right client (BUT DON’T DO THAT).
  • Find The Coldplay Adulterers: Ok, so as a THING the whole Coldplay Adulterers story is now very, very played out and dead, but, well, I am a completist and as such am going to give you this site anyway despite the fact that you have all moved on to whatever this week’s obsession is – this is a very simple game which tasks you with finding the canoodling couple in the crowd by scrolling around and seeing who pops up on the jumbotron. It’s not, objectively, particularly fun after the first three seconds, but it’s interesting because it was seemingly coded ‘entirely’ (pinches of salt apply) by The Machine, which suggests that we can look forward to a new era of fast-turnaround ‘satirical’ projects inspired by world events – these things are going to be the new ‘short-lived ‘topical’ parody accounts on Twitter’, aren’t they? Fcuk’s sake.
  • Clu3: ANOTHER READER WRITES! Honestly, just to be sincere for a moment, I really do love it when people send me things they have found or, even better, made, as is the case with this game sent to me by its creator Julia Kozlovskaya, who writes: “Clu3 is a modern-era edition of the traditional game Codenames, where humans team up with AI in a game of associations. I built this game because I was curious if AI can understand humans’ abstractions and if we humans, in turn, can understand AI reasoning. I think Codenames is quite an interesting playground for that!” I really like this – you need a friend to play it with, but the basic premise where you try and guess the words contained within the category The Machine suggests to you is genuinely quite fun, and I like the inherent weirdness of trying to ‘get’ what it is ‘thinking’ of. Give it try.
  • Cobble: Fcuking hell, ANOTHER reader link. THANKYOU EVERYONE I LOVE YOU ALL. This is made by one Wilf Ashworth, who explains the rules: “1. You’re given a set of letters (such as “ZXCVBNM”); 2. Come up with two words that use all the letters (like “convex zombie”); 3. The shorter the words, the better. The rules are simple but it’s really tough to get an optimal solution.” He’s not lying – Wilf only sent this overnight, so I have had literally two minutes to check it out before I started typing 166 minutes ago, but I can confirm that today’s puzzle is fcuking nails. Still, if you’re a WORDCEL like me you will likely find that this scratches part of your brain in a particularly-pleasing way.
  • Rat King: OK, I bounced off this slightly because it really doesn’t fit with the way my brain works, but I can see that it is objectively a smart little game which I think a lot of you will LOVE; Rat King sees you control two rats simultaneously, each navigating its own single-screen puzzle; you need to avoid threats and collect coins and NAVIGATE YOUR WAY TO FREEDOM; honestly, this slightly fcuked my brain in half when I tried to play it last week – and some more instructions would honestly have helped no end – but I think for the right person (ie someone smarter and significantly more spatially aware than me) this could be a lot of fun.
  • Dark Star Fury: Our final game of the week is a classic side-scrolling shooter in the vein of R-Type or similar – you know the deal, move around the screen, don’t get shot, shoot everything, collect the powerups, pew pew boom boom; this starts out insultingly-easy but then gets bullethellish towards later levels, and is a LOT of fun.

By Nguan

OUR LAST MIX OF THE WEEK IS THIS SUPERB SELECTION OF TRACKS COMPILED BY POLCARI AND WHICH LOWERED MY HEARTRATE BY A SOLID 30 BPM WHEN I LISTENED TO IT EARLIER IN THE WEEK! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Madzuka Maison: Look, I’m going to be honest here – I don’t have the faintest fcuking clue what this is or what is going on, but I fcuking ADORE whatever is being done to these images (some of which are bongo-adjacent, in case that motivates you in one direction or another).

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Auto Parts Store Tina: Tina is in China, I think. Tina is selling car parts on Instagram. Occasionally Tina attempts to do so by singing pop songs (I don’t mean to be mean, but…not well) where the lyrics have been altered to be all about, er, Mercedes Benz gaskets. This is deeply, deeply strange, but, well, GOOD LUCK TO YOU TINA and I hope you’re not doing this against your will.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • Kemi Badenoch: While you might not think that a profile of the leader (although not for much longer, I wouldn’t imagine) of Britain’s Conservative Party would be of interest to anyone not in the UK, I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys a bit of political schadenfreude; this profile of her, and her time in charge of the party is absolutely brutal, both in terms of its own assessment of her failings but also when it comes to the briefings given by her colleagues which pepper the piece. It’s fair to say that Kemi’s not exactly well-loved by the party at present, perhaps unsurprising given her p1ss-poor performance at PMQs and, well, everywhere else, and this is unsparing in its assessment of exactly how and why she is failing. If nothing else, this particular anecdote is going to follow the woman to her grave, which, well, LOL! “At the first meeting of the shadow cabinet in the aftermath of the election defeat, Badenoch launched a broadside about Rishi Sunak that was later leaked to the Times. She called Craig Williams, Sunak’s parliamentary private secretary, a “buffoon”, and pointed to Sunak’s disastrous gaffe over “D-Day” as the source of the Tories’ downfall. The next day Badenoch posted on X: “It’s a shame our discussions in the shadow cabinet were leaked yesterday.” It was the first act of her leadership campaign. Badenoch’s comments to the shadow cabinet that day may not have been off-the-cuff remarks. A private notebook from the £1,240-per-night Dorchester Hotel seen by the New Statesman – filled with handwriting that seems to match Badenoch’s own – contains a scribbled mind map that outlines the points she made at that shadow cabinet meeting, from the word “buffoon” to a note: “Unforced Errors — D-Day”. The words mirrored her criticism of Sunak’s gaffe, which was later leaked to the Times. The notebook also contains affirmations about public speaking linked to the heading “Personal Improvement”: “Breathe, breathe, breathe”; “Pause, Pause, Pause”; “You are a serious person who does big things”; “Pivot to attacking Labour when uncomfortable”; “Remember you are the standard bearer of the right”; “Don’t let people think you are easily wound up”. Badenoch’s team says that “Kemi does not believe she has lost her notebook”.” LOL!
  • The Destruction of American News Media: It’s been…slightly-odd watching newsletters that I began reading because they were generally part of the same ‘weird sh1t on the web’ beat that I sort of engage with pivot over the past few years to becoming quite serious and valuable commentators on What The Fcuk Is Happening In America – Ryan at Garbage Day has consistently been one of the smartest analysts of modern media and its relationship with / use by the North American (and beyond) political establishment, and Rusty at Today in Tabs has similarly become a smart and increasingly-essential voice on the madness across the Atlantic. Here he writes a succinct, smart and factually correct piece about how the US media world has effectively been gutted by a selection of rich men, which, weirdly, isn’t an argument I’ve really seen articulated properly before but which is very obviously true – from Curios favourite Peter Thiel to Elon’s whimsical decision to take the planet’s de facto breaking news service and turn it into a nazi bongo playground, the past 15 years have been a story of money deciding that it doesn’t actually like people having access to information and deciding to throttle said access because, well, it can! Is this a good thing? IT DOESN’T FEEL LIKE IT!!!! Thank God we have AI to make everything be…oh.
  • Scapegoating the Algorithm: Or, ‘why the fact that noone knows everything and is a moron’ can’t be blamed exclusively on social media and why it is a bit lazy and reductive to do so’ – again, this is VERY North American-focused but the argument it makes maintains internationally, I think; it’s worth reading the whole thing as it’s sober, coherent and convincing, but this summarises its points neatly should you want a precis: “We should have considerable uncertainty about the causes of complex social and political outcomes and trends. Nobody can test the effects of removing these social media platforms from society wholesale over a long period of time. Moreover, platforms themselves are diverse, and even the same platforms have evolved in complex ways, making them inherently challenging to study and generalize about. Nevertheless, the current balance of evidence does not support blaming America’s epistemic challenges on social media. First, many of these challenges predate social media and can arise independently of it. Second, the uneven distribution of such challenges across nations and political cultures with comparable rates of social media use suggests that social media alone is not what’s causing them. And finally, our best large-scale experiments show minimal effects of social media platforms, which aligns with decades of research into media and social learning.”
  • London Tax Evasion: A good friend of mine has been trying to get HMRC to investigate some VERY OBVIOUS fraud by a London nightclub ‘impresario’ (his name rhymes with Mallex Stroud, in case you’re curious) for several years now, and was basically told by HMRC a few years ago that, basically, if the fraud in question runs to less than about £5million quid the likelihood of it ever being properly investigated is basically 0 because there is simply too big a backlog of cases and not enough investigating officers to do the job properly (in vaguely-similar news, you need never buy a bus ticket in Rome because there are about 40-odd ticket inspectors across the whole of the city’s transport network and only about 20 are ever working at a time, meaning the odds are VERY much in your favour) – this is a piece by the increasingly-essential team at London Centric looking at the very, very obvious tax dodging happening at a variety of tatty Central London souvenir emporia, which is simply being allowed to happen because…noone cares? There’s noone to look into it? This is excellent, unflashy and important journalism which is sadly all-too-rare in 2025 but which deserves your support if you can afford it because it is exactly what the Evening Standard should be doing but isn’t because its owner is too busy fellating the monied classes he is so proud to be a part of.
  • The Latest From The Traffic Apocalypse: I alluded to this earlier, but all those of you who skip straight to the longreads (I DON’T MIND, HONEST *cries*) will have missed that – anyway, this is a good overview from 404 Media of the current state of ‘how Google’s AI stuff is impacting direct web traffic’ and OH BOY are the results fcuking dreadful news for anyone whose business model is predicated on ‘getting humans to navigate to a webpage’ – the piece cites new US research by Pew which shows that “Google users who encounter an AI summary are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who don’t encounter an AI summary. To be precise, only 1 percent of Google searches resulted in the users clicking on the link in the AI summary, which takes them to the page Google is summarizing.” Beyond this headline stat, there’s also a good overview of all the ways in which The Machine is fcuking up the epistemological water table and slowly but surely eroding the general sense of consensus truth that we’ve attempted to build up in the era of mass media. WHY ARE WE DOING THIS TO OURSELVES FFS? Oh, sorry, we’re not ‘doing it to ourselves’ – we’re having it done to us because, seemingly, a whole bunch of the world’s richest men have become fcuking morons who don’t seem to understand the importance of, you know, ‘facts’. THANKS, PLUTES, YOU CNUTS.
  • Why Reddit Is Increasingly Vital: I’ve only ever been a very superficial Reddit user, but it’s indubitably true that the site has become an increasingly-important pillar of the mainstream web in the past decade; this is really good piece in New York Magazine that examines why. Basically the answers are, variously ‘actual people posting actual people thoughts and experiences’, ‘AI scraping’, ‘bongo’, ‘really committed moderators that make the whole thing actually work properly’ and ‘forums are and always have been the best expression of the internet, actually’, but the whole piece is worth reading. “In 2005, Reddit looked a lot like it does now, a list of links on which users voted up or down. By 2008, it worked a lot like it does now, with comments, sub-Reddits created and run by the community, and the rise of self-posts — threads without links, created to talk, argue, or share things directly. To a user in 2008, Reddit was legible as a forum of forums, a new and centralized take on the sorts of scattered web communities where people used to spend a lot of time on a much smaller internet. To a user in 2025, this can make it feel like a throwback. We’re further from Reddit’s founding than Reddit’s founding was from the creation of the web browser. It still basically operates within structures and norms established on dial-up bulletin-board services and email lists: communities sorted by interest, volunteer policing, and threads upon threads of text.” Can we all agree that all this was just BETTER before you were able to post images and video, and we should basically all go back to bulletin boards? No? Oh, fine, please yourselves.
  • The Private Fiefdom as Planetary Project: Ooh, this is right up my street – long-term readers might have noticed over the years that I like linking to pieces about the various schemes dreamt up by the ultra-rich to create their very own libertarian tax haven paradise communities (which, depressingly often, also tend towards having a…non-standard approach to age of consent legislation!); this is an EXCELLENT article in the LA Review of Books, which looks at the history of this longstanding dream of the plutocrat class, and some of the more baroque examples of people attempting to set this sort of thing up (and, inevitably, failing). English readers can enjoy a special bonus at the point where you realise that JACOB REES MOGG’S FCUKING DAD is one of the architects of all this sort of thinking, which makes his son’s ceaseless flag-shagging nationalism somewhat-amusing by contrast (except there is nothing funny about the Rees Moggs and their continued existence). “James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg would interweave these two threads in their 1997 book The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, recently reissued with an introduction by Peter Thiel. That book turned investment strategies for high-net-worth individuals into a political theory of private sovereignty. “As new, more market-driven forms of protection become available,” Davidson and Rees-Mogg wrote, “it will become increasingly evident to the large numbers of able persons that most of the supposed benefits of nationality are imaginary.” They envisioned a time when the individual entrepreneur would be able to navigate through and across various jurisdictions at will, in the process rationally calculating his or her “protection costs,” which is what recent commentators have termed jurisdictional arbitrage. Newer versions of private sovereignty build on those ideas and also draw inspiration from Burning Man, although most of their manifestations up to this point more closely resemble Billy McFarland’s ill-fated Fyre Festival. (If anything best captures the likely reality of individualistic private communities walled off from society, it is a $500 soggy grilled cheese delivered in a Styrofoam package.)”
  • Bringing Sexy Back: I didn’t *love* the writing in this piece if I’m honest, but I found the central conceits interesting – in it, Kate Wagner writes about the ways in which surveillance culture and the repackaging of every facet of human experience as both ‘content’ and the opportunity for a reaction take has had a flattening effect on eroticism. I think there is something VERY TRUE about the thesis at the heart of the piece (and actually it dovetails with some of the things I felt about a piece a little further down about dating as a woman), and it was hard not to feel a little sad at the world we’ve built in which every single human interaction has to be prefaced with the thought ‘ok, but if someone writes this up or films it and puts it in a Reel is this going to end my fcuking life?’ “There is an online culture that thinks nothing of submitting screenshots, notes, videos, and photos with calls for collective judgement. When it became desirable and permissible to transform our own lives into content, it didn’t take long before a sense of entitlement emerged that extended that transformation to people we know and to strangers. My ex sent me this text, clearly she is the crazy one, right? Look at this dumb/funny/cringe Hinge profile! Look at this note some guy sent me, is this a red flag? Look at this random woman I photographed buying wine, coconut oil, and a long cucumber at the supermarket! I think these kinds of posts sometimes amount to little more than common bullying, but they are on a continuum with a puritan discourse in which intimate questions, practices, and beliefs about queerness, sexuality, gender presentation, and desire are also subjected to days-long piles-on. In both instances, the instinct to submit online strangers to viral discipline is given a faux-radical sheen. It’s a kind of casual blackmail that warns everyone to conform or be exposed; a way of saying if you don’t cave to my point of view, redefine yourself in my image of what sexuality is or should be, and (most importantly) apologize to me and the public, I will subject you to my large following and there will be hell to pay. Such unproductive and antisocial behavior is justified as a step toward liberation from predation, misogyny, or any number of other harms. But the punitive mindset we’ve developed towards relationships is indicative of an inability to imagine a future of gendered or sexual relations without subjugation. To couch that in the language of harm reduction and trauma delegitimizes both.” BONUS CONTENT ABOUT SEX!: This essay touches on similar themes and contains the quote ““Isn’t it all sort of a good thing that Gen Z is having less sex? Isn’t sex an inherently traumatic and dangerous act, and it’s better that people are avoiding that?” which made me momentarily leave by body in horror.
  • Autism or Ar$ehole?: Laurie Pennie is one of the seemingly MILLIONS of people to have received an adult autism diagnosis of late, and here writes about the recent Gregg Wallace furore, and, specifically, why ‘being autistic’ does not actually mean ‘is more likely to show people their genitals, unbidden’; I am, I confess, *slightly* bored of the recently-diagnosed wanging on about it all the fcuking time, but I thought this was a good essay and, beyond Wallace, addresses some things which I thought were interesting and worth thinking about: “Lately I’ve been thinking about who, exactly, gets to be weird in this world. A backlash is building against the neurodiversity movement, in no small part because so many newly-diagnosed autistics are women, girls and non-binary people who, like me, were missed in childhood. The standard explanation for this is that women and girls are ‘better at masking’. We did such a good job of pretending to be nice, normal girls that we fooled everyone, which means the medical system gets to tell us that it was all our fault we were written off as difficult, toxic, embarrassing, insane, denied the help and understanding afforded to men and boys. Not long ago, experts still talked about autism as ‘extreme male brain’ syndrome. Men are still far more likely to be diagnosed and receive essential early care than women. And the small number of cultural reference points we have for autism- a diagnosis that now incorporates what used to be called ‘Asperger’s’- are almost exclusively white, Western, mathematically- minded men and boys from well-off families. Sometimes that character is played for comedy- Sheldon Cooper- or for tragedy- A Beautiful Mind, Rain Man. Awkward, brilliant men whose contributions compensate normal society. They are tolerated because they are talented. But talent is only tolerable depending on your demographic.”
  • The Coming Delivery Drones: This is a piece in the WSJ about how tech is basically going to take over food delivery – I don’t care about the technology particularly and I didn’t find the piece hugely interesting, but I am including it because it’s an example of a style of tech reporting that I fcuking hate. Read the piece, and note how many times it alludes to the people currently doing these jobs, the hours they work, how little they are paid, how badly they are treated, and how they’re doing these shifts because THAT IS ALL THERE IS FOR THEM TO DO – did you spot it? THAT’S RIGHT IT DOESN’T TOUCH ON THIS AT ALL, or indeed on what will happen to these people if they get profitmargin-effiiencied out of existence. Is this the great new era of capital-positive journalism ushered in by that cnut MechaBezos? THANKS JEFF!
  • Diary of a Popcorn Seller: A lovely working diary in Vittles, depicting what it’s like to be one of the people who sells toddler-sized portions of popcorn to the cinemagoing masses; there’s something lovely about the behind-the-scenes look at the weird quirks of any job, particularly something we’re all ostensibly familiar with but which (if you’re like me, at least) we probably haven’t given any thought to whatsoever. I would, though, have liked some additional detail on who exactly are the sick fcuks who order ‘nachos’.
  • I Drank Every Cocktail: Not me, you understand (although if anyone fancies taking me for a Martini (gin, twist) anytime soon that would be nice, cheers), but Adam Aaronson who has apparently finally completed his years-long quest to drink every single cocktail named on the International Barternders’ Association official list; this is SUCH a charming read, honestly, and has the added bonus of being a GREAT source of really good cocktail bars in a bunch of places around the world, which if nothing else made me REALLY want to go and get absolutely hammered on expensive, very cold booze (this is not, in fairness, a rare feeling for me).
  • Meet The Normans: Web Curios favourite Clive Martin is back, writing in VICE about a new tribe he has chosen to christen the Normans (after the now-defunct ponced-up greasy spoon of the same name that elicited so much DISCOURSE a couple of years back) – I very much enjoyed this, partly because Clive’s writing is always a joy to me and partly because there were a couple of details that really spoke to me. The detail about Everpress tshirts and their inexplicable pivot to seemingly only stocking tees with graphics that ape the logo of a Manhattan pizzeria (annoying for a man who used to buy his tees from there but now can’t because, well, they all look like that) is well-observed, and the naked disdain displayed for Top Cuvee, a wine bar and ‘restaurant’ so staggeringly-inept and overpriced that its continued existence feels like some sort of personal affront to taste and decency, cheered me no end. Basically this is this year’s ‘here’s a bunch of people to irrationally hate, and yes they DO all hang out in London Fields’ piece par excellence.
  • Fighting With Swords: Sandrine Rastello writes about learning to fight with ACTUAL SWORDS – weirdly I have seen an uptick in the past few years in people talking about learning to swordfight (from literally noone to, er, about three people – THIS IS A TREND!!!!), which might be something to do with the general nerdification of everything (look, nerds, YOU WON. Can you, er, stop fcuking everything up for everyone else now please?). Anyway, this is very entertaining about ‘what it feels like to pick up a heavy, pointy bit of metal and to try and hit another person with it’.
  • The Trouble With Wanting Men: Jean Garnett writes about dating – Garnett is American, and is very much a MY LIFE IS MY MATERIAL writer (she’s previously written about the breakdown of her marriage after they went poly, so, well, you get the gist), and, honestly, while I broadly agree that ‘dating is rubbish, especially for women, because a lot of men are rubbish, or gross, or rubbish AND gross, not to mention occasionally genuinely terrifying’, I also couldn’t help feeling throughout that, well, Garnett and her friends are also part of the problem. Here’s a thought, everyone – WHY NOT STOP FCUKING OVERTHINKING ALL THIS STUFF??? Maybe just, you know, go out with people and sleep with them and just see how it goes? Is that a thing that people still do? Am I being hopelessly naive and PATRIARCHAL here? I can’t even tell anymore, honestly.
  • Grifting My Way Through The Influencer Economy: I had to read the first paragraph a few times as the style didn’t quite gel with me at first – and I genuinely despise reading articles on Electric Literature, there’s something about the site design which I find actively repellent – but it clicked after that and I ADORED this; this is an excerpt from a forthcoming memoir by…’influencer’? ‘Internet personality’? Fcuk knows, but it’s by Aiden Arata and it’s about being a low-tier influencer on a junket and it is horrible and great. “The Sunset Strip is one of those Los Angeles neighborhoods where no one from Los Angeles actually goes. It’s embarrassing, overpriced, preserved in the amber of the early 2000s, all giddy consumption and dead-eyed sex appeal. It’s where the girls stay in the LA episode of Sex and the City, and where the boys cruise in the opening credits of Entourage. There’s the Coffee Bean where Perez Hilton once regularly camped out to draw cm stains on paparazzi shots of struggling women, and the Hustler store, and a jarring number of sixty-year-old men with ponytails and fake British accents who won’t date above twenty-five. The Sunset Strip was the natural choice for an eight-bedroom, nine-bathroom, $24 million party house, which was, in turn, the perfect place for a sponsored influencer wellness retreat.”
  • Everything Else: This was shared on Bluesky by Jana of the excellent Zuckerbaeckerei, and it is my favourite expression yet of why exactly “you look like you enjoy holidaying in Dubai” is possibly the greatest and most devastating insult of the 21st Century. Honestly, this, by (by Caitlín Doherty in the New Left Review), is superb: “On Friday and Saturday evenings, the Dubai marina fills with yachts. A few tentative prows at first, circling the flat, hot bay, then a dozen more slide into view and multiply; a shoal filling the Gulf. Dull pulses of remixed pop songs float through the sand-laced air, intermixed with a call to prayer, the growl of motorbikes and staccato birdsong. On a dark promontory, erected between the artificial island and the ziggurat skyline of the city-state’s downtown, an enormous stage flickers into life, sending waves of fluorescent pink across the lilac sky. I watched from my room’s balcony, looked up the price of a ‘luxury’ dusk cruise: around $30 per adult. The hotel was populated by families from Moscow, Munich, Milan and the -stans. They seemed, for a certain value of the word, normal. For all its reputation as an entrepôt bolthole of a shady international elite, Dubai is a simpler proposition, one embodied by the sight in front of me, of countless revellers playing at the lifestyle of oligarch wealth, saving up for a year to be waited on by modern-day slaves for a fortnight.”
  • Sugar Mummy: A short story in the latest edition of The Fence, by Eva Wiseman. This is really, really good, in a pleasingly-understated way: “She reapplied her lipstick with a ring finger. Adam F was one of the men who liked to feel a little anxious in her company – occasionally she would let her gaze linger briefly on a figure just beyond his shoulder, and he would grasp at her hand and ask what she wanted for Christmas. ‘You’re so sweet,’ she’d reply, turning her whole weight to face him. They found her on the picture app, messaging mid-afternoon about her skirt, or eyes. Sometimes, when she asked a question in the photo caption, it felt like throwing dog food into a lake – up they would come, to feed on her youth.”
  • C’mon Billy: The last longread this week is once again from Granta, and is about a friendship that doesn’t exist anymore; I found this beautiful, and almost unbearably sad, and I loved it and I hope you do too.

By Alicia Czechowski

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

 

Webcurios 18/07/25

Reading Time: 35 minutes

 

Whoever you are, whatever you’re doing, regardless of the degree of fundamental dissatisfaction with your current lot in life, at least this week of all weeks you can bask safe in the knowledge that there are a couple of people right now having a worse time than you are – because it’s the schadenfreude that makes life worth living, right kids?

Thanks, then, to the Coldplay Adulterers for their selfless dedication to making everyone else feel grateful it wasn’t *them* on the jumbotron – should we maybe have a whipround to cover the doubtless-punishing divorce settlement that’s about to be visited on at least one of the two handsy music haters?

No, on reflection, probably not.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you, of course, have NEVER done anything that would result in absolutely ruinous consequences had you been spotted doing it on a very large screen at a stadium concert, oh no siree.

 By Elisabeth Mcbrien

WHY NOT ACCOMPANY THE OPENING SELECTION OF LINKS WITH AN ALBUM THAT ALWAYS REMINDS ME OF HOT LONDON PAVEMENTS AND SUMMER STORMS – STRANGE GEOMETRY BY CLIENTELE!

THE SECTION WHICH IS INCREASINGLY CONVINCED THAT THERE’S SOMETHING QUITE SINISTER ABOUT THE INCREASING POPULARITY OF CARTOONS AS SEX OBJECTS, PT.1:  

  • The Perplexity Browser: Yes, I know, sorry, this isn’t a particularly fun or frivolous way to kick off this week’s Curios, but, well, IT’S NOT ALL FUN AND GAMES (is any of it?). AI company Perplexity has become the latest company to attempt to change the way in which we interact with the web FOREVER via the introduction of a new browser which basically adds a semi-agentic AI layer to the browsing experience, which, per writeups elsewhere, “enables users to ask questions, perform tasks, and conduct research in a single, unified interface. The browser integrates a built-in assistant that can compare products, summarize content, book meetings, and transform complex workflows into simple, conversational experiences.”  Ok, so it’s unlikely that YOU will be able to try it right now – it’s waitlisted with priority to paying subscribers to Perplexity – but nonetheless it’s worth knowing about because THIS STUFF IS COMING. Alongside the Perplexity browser, overnight OpenAI dropped in-GPT agentic support; you can read about it here, but the promotional puffery declares that it will “significantly enhance ChatGPT’s usefulness in both everyday and professional contexts. At work, you can automate repetitive tasks, like converting screenshots or dashboards into presentations composed of editable vector elements, rearranging meetings, planning and booking offsites, and updating spreadsheets with new financial data while retaining the same formatting. In your personal life, you can use it to effortlessly plan and book travel itineraries, design and book entire dinner parties, or find specialists and schedule appointments.” All this along with the continued rumblings that OpenAI is also going to release a browser sometime soon, with the idea being that this is going to be the way in which we interact with information online – we won’t visit websites anymore, we’ll just let our little agentic slaves wander off into the ether and do things on our behalf. Which ought to give any of you whose incomes are in any way tied to ‘getting actual humans to look at things on the internet’ some slightly-uncomfortable moments – traffic is FCUKED, everyone! Obviously it’s worth remembering that, per most of this stuff, none of this is *quite* cooked yet – the agentic stuff will be slow and buggy and not something you ought to rely on to do anything important, and the browser stuff won’t yet be essential…but, as with all of this stuff, give it a year or so and it quite possibly will be, which doesn’t feel like a long time for a lot of people to work out how to entirely-reconfigure their business models in the face of this new, disintermediated digital reality. Hadn’t we all decided that moving fast and breaking things was not in fact a good way to let companies behave? Eh? Oh.
  • Kimi: Sorry, another SEMI-SERIOUS AI THING – promise I will be done with this soon, though, and we can get on with the frivolous (and there’s something REALLY filthy at the end as a reward for all those of you bothering to read the tediously-newsy bits uptop – I KNOW WHAT YOU LIKE). This is Kimi, a new, free-to-use Chinese AI model which basically offers (or purports to, at least) a ‘deep research’-type functionality in the vein of OpenAI’s o3 offering, and which at least on the face of it looks like a pretty serious contender – it’s fast, it’s got all the multimodal gubbins that we have come to expect, it can support upto 50 files of source material at a time…that said, though, when I played with it earlier this week it quickly became apparent that this is a mendacious little fcuk and will spit out completely-invented material with a glee unmatched by any of the actual, paid-for, top-end models; as such I can only recommend it as a fun thing to poke around with rather than a free alternative to the big players. I’m including this at least in some part because it’s a useful reminder that the AI market is currently VERY much a two-tier one, and if you’re not using the paid-for version of these things then, frankly, you’re getting a second-rate experience and none of it works very well. Which, in turn, feels like a small-but-not-insignificant canary in THE COAL MINE OF SOCIETY – I’m genuinely curious to see what sort of interesting, fun inequality wrinkles end up springing up as we move to a world in which your access to Smart Digital Helpmeets is gated by your spending power (as well as your access to, say, accurate information about what the fcuk is actually happening at any given moment – oh God, the fun we’re going to have!).
  • The Tourist Map of Literature: Have you heard? READING IS THE NEW HOTNESS! Although actually, per this event I went to the other week out of a sense of morbid curiosity about THE NEW SEXY LITERATI, what the new hotness *actually* is is apparently watching a bunch of relatively-recent Oxbridge graduates and new-wave influencers read fragments of their execrable first novels to an audience of floppy-haired, ruddy-cheeked contemporaries, which basically feels quite a lot like how a certain corner of publishing has always worked. Anyway, my bitter, unpublishable muttering to one side, READING IS COOL YEAH?, and if you agree then you will possibly like this tool, which basically does that ‘map affinity based on people’s tastes’ thing and lets you plug in any author you like and then display other authors whom readers of your selection also enjoyed, with a rough ‘the closer the names, the more readers of X tend to like readers of Y’ functionality. The dataset’s taken from Gnod, which I have mentioned here various times before I think, and it’s comprehensive enough that it recognised all the obscure people I threw at it with nary a pause – feed it your favourites and see if it throws up any interesting new authors for you to fail to read on your summer holidays.
  • Cow Stars: I want to be very clear on this link – I WOULD LIKE YOU ALL TO CLICK ON THIS PLEASE. Don’t worry, the entire experience will take you, at most, a minute or so, and it requires a total of 8 clicks from start to finish to see the whole thing – but for reasons I genuinely don’t understand AT ALL I found it weirdly quite deeply emotional. No, honestly, I’m not joking, this SPOKE to me and may speak to you too. And if it doesn’t, you’ve only wasted a minute of your life that you’d otherwise have spent watching some inane cnut filming themselves having an opinion at you so, honestly, you’ve no right to complain. Stop it.
  • Life In Weeks: Back in February I featured a project by Gina Trapani which was basically a week-by-week visualisation of her life, annotated to show significant events – now someone’s made a tool that lets you do the same thing without any of the pesky ‘needing to know how to actually make something’ skill requirements. “See your entire life laid out in weeks. Past, present, and future — all in one colorful view. Gain perspective on how you’re spending your most precious resource: time…Color-code the seasons of your life — childhood, college years, jobs, and places you’ve lived. Define and document the meaningful periods that have shaped who you are today…Highlight the moments and memories that matter — achievements, transitions, encounters, or trips. Make each important memory in your life visible on your timeline.” This requires a degree of self-interest and a desire for archival memorialisation that I simply don’t possess, but there’s a chance that one of you reading this will be more interested in recording the details of their doubtless-glorious existence than I am and for whom this will be the chance to FINALLY render the glory of their life and achievements in a nicely-designed digital package – if YOU are that person, you are WELCOME.
  • Explore The Onsen: An interesting bit of AI-enabled digital worldbuilding, this, via the consistently-interesting treasure trove of creative AI work that is Lynn’s newsletter; this is, basically, a 3d world which (and, look, you’re going to have to bear with me here because if I’m honest I’ve got no fcuking clue as to the tech here or How It Was Actually Made, but that’s not going to stop me having a vague guess based on my luddite’s best guess because, well, I’m a middle-aged man and we don’t admit ignorance EVER; you’re welcome!) I think has been spun up from photos of a Japanese Onsen (hot springs where people go and bathe and hang out, if I remember correctly from all the wasted hours playing Yakuza games) and which you can wonder round in your browser, guiding your avatar about in a manner that will be instantly familiar to anyone who remembers all the short-lived and UTTERLY POINTLESS branded metaverse experiences of 2021-2 (RIP all those branded metaversal experiences, you are wiv da angles now, but THINK of all the agencies whose bottom lines you propped up over that glorious period!) – what’s interesting about this, I think, is not only that it’s been generated semi-automatically, but also that there’s a degree of object recognition in-world that’s not always present with these things – walls are ‘walls’, you can’t walk through cars, bollards block your progress…obviously these are not, objectively, exciting details, but it’s impressive if, as I think is the case, their in-world ‘physicality’ is being determined by The Machine based on what it ‘thinks’ the things are…am I making any sense? I feel I’ve slightly lost the run of this one. Can you tell I didn’t go to bed til 1am and am feeling a bit wobbly? You can, can’t you? Let’s not talk about it anymore.
  • The Fcuking Bible: Is there anything that can’t be rendered INSTANTLY HILARIOUS by the semi-random injection of profanity? Well, yes, obviously, but MOST things are simply funnier when you throw in a fcuk or two, and the bible is no exception; obviously I’m not attempting to make fun of anyone’s religion here – why bother when it’s already all so ridiculous? – so much as draw your attention to the fact that ‘thou shalt not kill’ is, objectively, a less powerful commandment than ‘thou shalt not fcuking kill’. Look, I don’t make the rules, I am simply a COMMUNICATIONS PROFESSIONAL (lol!) of two decades experience who knows whereof they speak. Anyway, this is a bot on Bluesky which posts fragments of the bible, unaltered other than for the injection of a strategically-placed ‘fcuking’ – these don’t always quite work, but, well, I can’t help but feel that there is something beautiful about lines like this one from the Gospel of Mark: “But Jesus took him by the hand, and fcuking lifted him up; and he arose.”
  • NeuralOS: Oh, one more AI thing (SORRY!) while we’re here – NeuralOS is an odd little project which I don’t really understand the point of, and which as such is perfect for inclusion here – it’s basically a variant on the whole ‘play around inside a version of Minecraft/Doom/Quake that’s being imagined on the fly by The Machine’, except in this instance what’s being imagined is a computer desktop complete with a browser, file manager and the rest… Obviously there’s no ACTUAL desktop, no actual files and no actual browser, as you will discover as soon as you try and navigate to a website and realise that the thing is just sort of attempting to imagine what typing ought to look like rather than actually registering keystrokes, but it’s a strange and eerie feeling to be navigating a familiar user interface that starts to surreally bleed out at the edges like an OS designed by a particularly-spun-out Dali.
  • HTML Day 2025: Do you LOVE the web? Ok, fine, I appreciate your relationship with it might be somewhat more complex and ambiguous – love and fear and hate and need and horror and sorrow and strange, reluctant arousal, all in one unnameable sensation of repelled dependence! You…you all feel like that, right? – but for those of you who, broadly, feel more positive than not about the fact that the internet exists, HTML Day is coming! This is the second time this is being run – Laurel Schwultz and Elliot Cost, the organisers, see it as ”an annual celebration of HTML. It’s a day to gather IRL in places around the world to write and learn HTML.” This year’s celebration is on 2 August, and while I appreciate that it’s not *everyone’s* idea of fun to spend a Summer saturday in what I presume is likely to be some…quite dark spaces, tapping away on a keyboard, I am also reasonably certain that at least one or two of the weirdos reading this will think ‘you know what, that is EXACTLY what I want to do with my free time, fcuk you Matt you patronising cnut’, and it is YOU, my funny little code goblins, for whom I include this link. NO YOU’RE WELCOME PLEASE NO GIFTS (send gifts).
  • Lettervoxd: This is a GREAT little project tracking the usage of obscure, unusual and rarely-uttered words in films over the years. Writes its creator, “Lettervoxd is a tool that extracts esoteric words from about 25,000 movies from the past century. It lists (nearly) every one-in-a-billion word that can be found in the giant corpus of subtitles I downloaded from Open Subtitles.” The only possible way in which this could be improved would be if you could see associated clips of the words being uttered on celluloid, but I appreciate there are very good ‘do not sue us’ reasons why this isn’t the case – still, if you’ve ever wanted to know exactly how many films in history have seen characters utter the word ‘vituperatively’ onscreen (ONE! IT IS ONE FILM!) then this is probably the greatest resource you will ever learn of and you may as well kill yourself now because there are no more worlds left to conquer.
  • The Baldwin Library of Children’s Literature: This is an insane resource – some 10,000 children’s books (North American ones, at least) digitised and hosted on the Baldwin Library’s website; obviously there are too many to ever give you a proper rundown of What It Contains, but if you’re interested in design there’s SO much interesting material here from the covers over the years, and, for the truly curious, there are some odd little gems; I just lost three minutes reading the strange and frankly-sinister tale of ‘Straps The Cat’, for example, which contains the honestly threatening line “He did eat many strange things from time to time. You will see” which made me wonder whether Straps morphs into some sort of child devouring beast by the end (I will never know, though, because I need to keep typing chiz chiz). Anyway, SO MANY OLD KIDS BOOKS SEE WHAT YOU CAN FIND.
  • The Jay Rayner Restaurant Map: Jay Rayner, for those of you who don’t know, is a UK restaurant critic; at the Observer for…fcuking ages, he recently got poached by the FT but remains one of the best food writers in the land and one who, by dint of his longevity in the role, has reviewed a LOT of restaurants. I’ve featured a Google map of his reviews in here before, but this is a GREAT additional layer to that tool built by a nice person named Jan (I mean, I assume they’re nice; I don’t actually know but let’s all hope I’m right) which lets you apply a light search layer to the corpus of reviews – select your date range, select your town, decide whether you only want the TOP PICKS or if you’re willing to try the second-tier selections and BOOM, you get a really useful list of Rayner-reviewed places to pick from. Worth bookmarking, this, for those times you’re forced to leave the comforting environs you call home and venture into the inhospitable wasteland that is The Rest of the UK.
  • Live Soccer TV: Not, I’m sorry to say, a shonky streaming site (you can find your own ones of those), but instead a website listing seemingly EVERY SINGLE FOOTBALL MATCH HAPPENING IN THE WORLD – seriously, I’m not joking, if you want to learn about third-tier fixtures in the Uzbek league then this is the site for you. Should you be the sort of person who likes the idea of going on holiday and then wasting large swathes of it by standing in a crumbling stadium watching low-quality sport alongside a small audience of committed, lonely lunatics, then this will be a GODSEND – my top pick of today’s games is Lafnitz vs Khor Fakkan in the UAE, for anyone interested.
  • Woop: Are YOU someone whose profession requires them to have a shiny, full-bleed portfolio site? Do YOU want something that looks marginally less sh1t than a Squarespace template? GREAT! You might, in that case, want to check out Woop, which, at first glance, looks reasonably-priced and quite shiny for anyone with a visual enough body of work to show off.
  • NYC Subway Simulator: Have you ever wondered what would happen to the underground transport infrastructure in New York if some lunatic suddenly decided that there should be 3,000 trains on the network simultaneously? Oh man, you will LOVE this website, in that case. “BuildMyTransit.nyc is a web app to design, visualize, and simulate New York City subway systems. Perfect for exploring “what-if” scenarios,” reads the blurb, and while it’s not a very shiny simulation it does let you press a button and add another 10 random trains to the network with a click, thereby letting you see exactly how much you can fcuk up the commute of several million very angry virtual Manhattanites. Turns out you CAN have too much public transport.
  • Light Pollution Map: Amazingly I don’t seem to have featured this before in all the years of Curio-ing, perhaps because I am a committed urbanite and as such haven’t experienced actual darkness for approximately 30 years (this is untrue actually – a few years back I was in rural France and looked up at the sky circa midnight whilst very, very stoned and had a proper, terrifying ‘I HAVE SEEN GOD AND HE IS MAGNIFICENT’ moment as I perceived the majesty of the actual milky way with my naked eyes; I then fell over backwards with vertigo, which did rather detract from the revelatory majesty of the moment); still, if you’re someone who’s keen on seeing the stars then you could do worse than use this to plan some trips to gaze at some long-since-dead balls of gas blazing in the inky firmament.
  • Pixel Piranhas: A Chrome extension which, if you activate it while looking at a webpage, will send a swarm of small digital piranhas to chomp their way through the page’s pixels, slowly but surely devouring them until no trace remains. Why? I DON’T KNOW MAYBE IT IS ART (it’s not art).

By Liv Sage

NEXT UP WHY NOT ENJOY THIS FUN MIX OF BREAK-ISH PARTY HOUSE BY PALYPALYPALY? 

THE SECTION WHICH IS INCREASINGLY CONVINCED THAT THERE’S SOMETHING QUITE SINISTER ABOUT THE INCREASING POPULARITY OF CARTOONS AS SEX OBJECTS, PT.2:  

  • Offal 2: I featured Offal in here a year or so ago, in the guise of its weird, Chris Morris-esque podcast audio zine thing, but it is not just an audioart project; it’s also an occasional literary magazine, so occasional that it’s only now that the second edition has been published. This is an Actual Thing You Have To Buy, but the team involved have an excellent nose for good writing and weird vibes, and also the connections to persuade some genuinely-talented writers to get involved; I’m going to give you the full blurb here because it will give you a decent idea of what the general flavour is and whether it will be for you (IT OUGHT TO BE WHAT THE FCUK IS WRONG WITH YOU, etc etc): “Highlights include author Richard Milward’s manifesto for living a ‘liberated lavvy’ (written in Polari, the almost-forgotten gay slang), a dialogue-free play by Tom McCarthy, an essay by Daniel Pinchbeck, plus fragments of fiction from Labeja Kodua Okullu, Kirsty Allison, Henderson Downing and Timothy J Jarvis. Also featuring Offalism (A Manifesto), a guide to cooking the mythical Three-Angel Roast, a poem about Margate called ‘The only way to change things is to shoot men who curate things…’, and a 1953 speech by Allen Dulles, first director of the CIA, warning of Russian psy-op campaigns.” See, doesn’t that sound great? Buying a copy also gets you a bunch of fun additional stuff – audio downloads of the show, and a poster of Aphex Twin lyrics (which for a certain, very specific type of middle-aged Creative Director – I SEE YOU – will basically induce an erection so hard it can cut diamond) and, basically, if you can spare the cash then I recommend this unreservedly because MAKING STUFF IS GOOD and we should all try and support people putting stuff like this out in the world. So there.
  • Taiyaki: I can’t pretend that I am not INTENSELY curious about this – specifically about the manufacturing process, and exactly how bad the finished products will look and feel. Taiyaki is a company which uses THE POWER OF AI (sorry) to take any photo you feed it and turn said photo into a 3d model, which they then promise to turn into a pendant-type thing, in either ‘gold’ or ‘silver’ to hang on a chain or charm bracelet or somesuch. I am going to guess that what is happening here is 3d printing and then gold/silver-plating, but the website is…light on specifics; still, I fcuking LOVE the idea of making a genuinely-horrific meme-based charm bracelet for a special someone, or one featuring nothing but a succession of small silvered representations of my head depicting me in various stages of deep psychic distress, and I sort-of want this to be…good? Is that ok? Can one of you take the plunge and try this for me and let me know? What’s that? ‘Fcuk off, Matt’? Oh, fine, please yourselves.
  • Self: I am, it’s fair to say, not a man who spends an awful lot of time on self-interrogation and self-improvement, but I appreciate that this is not a universal position and that there are many, many people out there for whom the ceaseless pursuit of personal amelioration is a lodestar in their life (lol, why, WE ALL DIE ANYWAY) – it is for YOU, self-improvers, that I include this link (and for everyone else who likes to laugh at this sort of meaningless bullsh1t). Self is…actually, I’ll leave it to them to introduce themselves: “Self App is a space where you can rediscover and return to your True Self…Learn to tell your own aspirations apart from society’s expectations and understand what you truly want….Self App is not just another motivational app. It’s an interactive ecosystem that helps you build inner freedom and find strength within yourself. From illusions about yourself to a healthy interaction with reality. From internal chaos to clarity and balance. From doubts to actions that align with your true self.” HOW, I hear you scream, HOW CAN I ATTAIN THIS SORT OF ENLIGHTENED STATUS? I’m glad you asked – BY TALKING TO YOUR PHONE! Self promises to track your feelings, your self-worth, your relationships, and quantify all this information to give you TANGIBLE, MEASURABLE SCORES for seemingly every aspect of your emotional existence – beautifully, there’s a screenshot on the homepage that literally reads “your dissatisfaction is currently 2/10”, which is some truly SPECTACULAR w4nk. It’s unclear to me whether there’s an LLM layer to this, but my gut says ‘of course there fcuking is, Matt, it’s that sort of dumb grift.’ Still, maybe I am missing out and in a year’s time you’ll all be laughing at me from your super-optimised eyries of zenlike calm while I continue to sit here in my pants typing word after word to an audience I could count on the fingers of two hands (and still have fingers left over), but, you know what? I doubt it.
  • The Realtime Crime Index:  Ok, it’s not QUITE realtime – there’s obviously a lag on the data of a few months – but it’s quite the datacollection job to present annual US crime statistics on a rolling basis like this. It covers violent crimes or property crimes, each category broken into constituent offences so you can look at murder numbers, say, or burglaries; it also offers you an at-a-glance, year-by-year tracking comparison so that you can see how the rates are trending; in a rare moment of slightly-cheering news from the otherwise-fcuked US it seems that most crimes are actually down year-on-year – EXCEPT FOR THE ONES BEING COMMITTED BY THE STATE!!!!111111eleventy.
  • The World Dog Surfing Championships: Even for a man as jaded, cynical and fundamentally-unhappy as I am, the sight of a grinning dog on a surfboard is a thing of joy; if you’d like the opportunity to look at a lot of photos of canines doing very un-canine things then this is the website for YOU. Some observations: 1) the actual World Championship event takes place on 2 August in California (OF COURSE CALIFORNIA), so if you’re not planning on spending the day in a darkened room for HTML day then maybe you can do this instead?; 2) one of the dogs on the homepage appears to not only be surfing but also WEARING SHADES, which, honestly, is possibly the best thing that I am likely to see today. The only thing that could possibly make this better for me would be were if the website were styled in the acid look of Rude Dog and the Dweebs (real heads know).
  • Explore the Bayeaux Tapestry: Another link via Lynn’s ‘Things I Think Are Awesome’, this is an HD megapixel representation of the Bayeaux tapestry which you can zoom around and peruse up-close to your heart’s content; there are some of you, I’m sure, who will be interested in both the craft and the history of this, and the representation it offers of a significant moment in Anglo-French history; for me, though, the main draw of this is the ability to search the thing for the people with the best, most ridiculous facial expressions – there are a LOT of very, very good faces in here, and a lot of examples of what I like to call ‘The hyper-expressive crinkly Charlie Brown mouth of misery’, which is a reference you all OBVIOUSLY understand.
  • The Rock Identifier: Do YOU like rocks? Would YOU like access to an app which will tell you, er, what your rocks are? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! If you can’t tell your feldspar from your granite, your igneous from your metamorphic, your…actually, no, fcuk it, sorry, I am completely out of rock-related words to riff on here, this is going to have to do. Is it just me, though, or are rocks having something of a moment? On reflection that might well be the most stupid thing I have EVER written, sorry about that.
  • The Big Picture 2025: Photos! BIG PHOTOS! BEAUTIFUL BIG PHOTOS! The annual photo contest showcasing beautiful images of nature from around the world returns for its 2025 incarnation – you don’t need me to tell you that some of these are jaw-dropping by now, but I would like to point out a few spectacular examples. The shot of the octopus eggs in particular is one of the most insanely-alien images I have ever seen in my life, ever, and there’s an image of some…wasps? in the final category that moved me more than I expected to be affected by what is basically a picture of a couple of dead insects on tarmac.
  • Design Thinking: This is a comic in newsletter format, and it’s about the business of being a designer, and, look, I have no idea whether the gags land or not but I get the impression that at least a few people reading this are vaguely-designish and as such there might be one person for whom this is basically MY LIFE in crudely-drawn stickman four-panels and, should you be that person, consider this my gift to you.
  • Wordsearch Drum Machine: A new submission to the ongoing 10k Drum Machines project which I featured in here a while back; this is a particularly-wonderful, very silly variant on the central theme (to whit: make drum machines), which uses the text from public domain novels to create drum patters from scratch. Pick your text – it defaults to Moby Dick, but you can choose from a few others in the dropdown – set some words to act as element triggers (so, for example, every instance of ‘love’ triggers a snare), set the pace at which you want it to work through the text and then GO! It obviously produces a largely-unlistenable mess and is totally useless from the point of view of actually making anything musically viable, but, well, THAT’S NOT THE POINT. What is the point? Go away, you’re no fun.
  • A Brand New C64: Readers of a certain vintage and who grew up in the 1980s may have fond memories of the Commodore64 with its tapedeck and surprisingly-decent selection of games and its oddly-textured plastic fascia; obviously, though, that was 40-odd years ago and, objectively, literally everything about playing games now is better than it used to be in the past. Except, of course, that now you are OLD and close to death and most of the fun things in your life are behind you and, in the main, that which remains is set to involve a slow trudge towards decay and senescence during which everything you have ever cared about will be ruined or die; so why not pretend it’s still the past and that you can still make something of your life, by investing in this newly-announced pristine-looking remake of the original machine? “Commodore has returned from a parallel timeline where tech stayed optimistic, inviting, and human. Where it served us, not enslaved us. We’re here to bring that feeling back – retro • futurism, transparent tech, digital detox, real innovation. This is the first real Commodore computer in over 30 years, and it’s picked up a few new tricks. Not an emulator. Not a PC. Retrogaming heaven in three dimensions: silicon, nostalgia, and light. Powered by a FPGA recreation of the original motherboard, wrapped in glowing game-reactive LEDs (or classic beige of course).” You can download all the ROMs you want, wirelessly, meaning you can play Sid Meier’s Pirates until 3am just like you did when you were 11. Or, you know, you could not exhume the stinking nostalgiacorpse of your past. Either/or really. Anyway, this is pre-release but you can sign up to indicate your interest – the pricepoint’s looking like $300, which, honestly, feels like a LOT, but equally I reckon this will sell out very quickly indeed.
  • Aguayos: I love this project. “In 2020, millions of people made their way across Latin America and the Caribbean, driven by the search for safety, stability, and a chance to build a future. The UN 2020 International Migrant Stock captured these weaves of migration, showing how they thread a larger cultural fabric: Latin American and Caribbean identity” – the website visualises these, representing them as ‘Aguayos’, a form of fabric-based storytelling from Andean cultures, creating beautiful, simple patterns from data that tell the stories of people moving between countries and cultures across the continent. Really rather beautiful, this.
  • Folio: I know that there are lots of people out there who were very dismayed at the demise of ‘read it later’ tool Pocket, so this is for YOU – basically Folio does the same sort of thing, letting you save interesting stuff you see online in a single place for you to read at a later time of your choosing. This is available on iOS and Android, as a webapp and as a Chrome extension and is worth a look if there’s a significant Pocket-shaped hole in your life.
  • Regina Hardon: I like to think I am a reasonably-open-minded man – a friend of mine who’s on Feeld recently shared a screenshot with me of someone she’d come across (not literally) who was into cast play, and I batted nary an eyelid – but the music of Regina Hardon, which I discovered at 626am this morning, really did stun me into a kind of shocked silence. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY FILTHY. I mean really, really filthy – I can’t even begin to transcribe any of the lyrics to recent single ‘Instructions’ because, well, it feels…wrong. Just know that Ms Hardon is perfectly comfortable deploying ‘fist’ as a verb and leave it at that. I was initially convinced that this is an AI vocal, but I checked with Shardcore, a Man Who Knows, and he seems to think it’s a human singer – if you’re the sort of person who was bang into the C0ck Destroyers as a vibe (RIP) then I think that this will VERY much be your thing. Honestly, though, I am not joking about this, it honestly made me blush and that NEVER happens (but it also contains a Minecraft reference, which spun me out slightly if I’m honest).
  • Crowdle: Can YOU guess how many people are in a picture using just your eyes and intuition? WHY DON’T YOU FIND OUT??? Crowdle is a daily puzzle game which presents you with 5 photos of, er, crowds of different sizes and invites you to estimate how many humans the photos depicts – you get points based on how close you are to the exact number. That’s it, but, well, what more do you want? Fcuk’s sake.
  • Daniel Linssen’s Typing Challenge: A typing game! This one’s got a fun wrinkle, though, in that rather than typing words you’re attempting to move around a sort of gameboard, avoiding threats and nimbly jumping around the board from, er, U to F. This is fun and challenging in a slightly-different way to variants on this theme you might have seen before.
  • Kickoff League: ‘What if football, but chess?’ is a question that I can’t imagine has troubled you particularly, but should you be curious to know the answer then Kickoff League will help. This is a REALLY fun puzzle game which tasks you with scoring goals in a predetermined number of kicks – you have different types of players whose range of movement mimics that of specific chess pieces, they can move or kick the ball (but moves and passes/shots must alternate), and it has the excellent quality of forcing you to stop and think and plan, and as you play there will come a point where it all just clicks which feels GOOD. You will like this, I think.

By Rafael Santiago

THE FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS THIS GORGEOUS AND LIGHTLY-FUNKY SELECTION OF TRACKS MIXED BY SORCEROR WHICH I HAVE PLAYED A LOT THIS WEEK AND I THINK YOU WILL ENJOY VERY MUCH INDEED!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Ulan Bator: I have absolutely no idea what the fcuk this has to do with Mongolia, but I very much enjoy the CGA/EGA screenshots and the aesthetic that they embody, so, well, who cares about the name? NO FCUKER, etc.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Animation Fella: This is interesting (well, it is to me – your mileage, as ever, is likely to vary considerably); as recently as a month ago it was posting not-very-good animated skits, seemingly produced using slightly-shonky ‘write the script and we’ll work them up using poorly-animated avatars that look like they’re from 2007’ software. Then Veo3 came out, whoever’s running this discovered it, and the past 6 videos on this account are…genuinely quite funny clips in which a recurring bigfoot character, inexplicably blessed with a scouse accent, does a kind of influencer-style series of reportage videos; the two ‘from Glastonbury’ are genuinely funny and once again demonstrate that if you can write a half-decent script and have a vague idea how to pick shots and edit a short piece of video we’re now at the point when you can make stuff that’s…legitimately quite good? All slop is AI, but not all AI is slop – I think it’s important you start believing this, because it is true.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • Palestine Action: We start the longreads this week with a genuinely excellent piece of writing by Huw Lemmey about the decision to brand Palestine Action, a UK campaign group which has since 2020 taken direct action to protest the role of British military and defence contractors in the ongoing suppression of the Palestinian people, a terrorist organisation – as you imagine, Lemmey is not exactly pro this decision, but the argument he makes around why it is wrong and why he feels morally compelled to say so is, I think, beautifully-written and expressed, and very elegantly written indeed, and may also be the first time I’ve mentioned Quakers in 15 years of writing Curios. Honestly, this really is very good indeed. BONUS CONTENT ABOUT PALESTINE: Omer Bartov, a holocaust scholar, writes in the New York Times about why it is a genocide actually.
  • The Ensh1ttification of American Power: I can’t help but wince every time i read the word ‘ensh1ttification’ these days – it’s been over- and misused to a point that I am starting to find it genuinely enervating (see also ‘slop’ and ‘techbro’) – but that’s not to say that it’s not an occasionally-useful term; this piece in Wired does a good job of providing an overview of all the ways in which the first months of the current US administration have fundamentally undermined the practical and cultural power of the nation, and how its actions have pushed formerly-close allies of America to begin to consider decoupling themselves from the country and the systems tied to it. This won’t tell you anything you don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but it’s a decent summary of a snapshot slice of geopolitics as of July 2025.
  • Why The Grok Stuff Is Quite Dangerous Actually: Gary Marcus here writing about why the past couple of weeks have made him slightly more scared about the potential impact of Bad AI than he was previously – this is worth reading, both as a neat recap of a lot of the Grok stuff and also as a practical guide as to Why This Is Bad. Simply put, an AI whose own creators seem incapable of preventing expressing opinions that are on the continuum from ‘hateful’ to ‘actively bordering on advocating racial violence’ should not be being deployed anywhere, let alone in contracts with the US military, or inside heavy machinery, let alone the ‘millions’ of bipedal robots that Musk envisages being part of the global workforce by 2030 (although that’s obviously never going to happen, being as it is a classic Muskian lie to gull the markets) – and yet, here we are!
  • Spending Time With The Sexbot: Oh, and seeing as we’re ‘doing’ xAI, this is The Verge reporting on its interactions with Ani, the ‘sexy waifu AI persona’ (dear God, even typing those words is a deeply-miserable experience) which launched for top-tier Grok subscribers this week, and which is designed to basically offer the user an endless stream of virtual handjobs if said user manages to attain a sufficient ‘romance level’ (no, this really is in the code) in its interactions – it is, predictably, sad and grubby and the sort of thing that countless teenage boys would lose hours in masturbatory fantasy to, and…is that ok? Doesn’t *feel* ok.
  • AI Is Like Trains: Oh, ok, it’s nothing like trains – but this essay is, I think, a really smart and helpful way of thinking about AI deployment and use across society, based on the historical example of the way in which railway infrastructure has been embedded across the world, how that compares with infrastructure for cars, and what we can learn from these two examples about how best to think about how and where to deploy a technology with similarly transformative potential. “We’ve been here before. The railways were not universally welcomed. They upended traditional communities. They accelerated migration to low paid, dangerous jobs in cities. Many people tried to keep railways out of their town or village. The London & Birmingham Company was formed to promote the building of what we now call the West Coast Mainline on 17th September 1830, just two days after the opening of the world’s first passenger railway. Almost immediately, a protest meeting of country landowners was held along the route in Towcester, which voted unanimously that the railway would do “great injury” and was unnecessary as “there is already conveyance for travellers between London and Birmingham every day at the rate of ten miles an hour”. Someone at the meeting said that the railway would “spoil our Shires and ruin our Squires”.  But they couldn’t stop the railway, because the railway was useful. By 1860, railway mileage had grown 10,000% – both squires and shires were expendable.”
  • The Media’s Pivot to AI Will Not Work: I’m increasingly convinced that the reason noone (or the majority of people) don’t seem able or willing to have a sensible conversation about The Machine and What It All Means is, er, not that I’m a tedious, one-note bore who’s long-since alienated all of his ‘friends’ with his tedious Cassandralike carping about the coming jobspocalypse, but instead is like climate change – it’s just too horrible to look at up close, so people don’t really want to engage with it too hard. This piece in 404Media is a rare example of what I think is an honest, factually-accurate and unsugared take on what this technology means for media, and why any attempt by media to ‘embrace’ it is going to end in death. This is both a great piece of writing/arguing, and, in some senses, a hopeful one, at least insofar that it’s core tenet is ‘keep on making good stuff for a defined audience and you will be ok; maybe not rich, but ok’, which, I don’t know, feels about as rosy as it’s possible to get in terms of The Future of Media at present.  “So AI is destroying traffic, ripping off our work, creating slop that destroys discoverability and further undermines trust, and allows random people to create news-shaped objects that social media and search algorithms either can’t or don’t care to distinguish from real news. And yet media executives have decided that the only way to compete with this is to make their workers use AI to make content in a slightly more efficient way than they were already doing journalism. This is not going to work, because “using AI” is not a reporting strategy or a writing strategy, and it’s definitely not a business strategy.”
  • I’m Done With Social Media: Caroline Crampton writes about being an author and being told that she HAD to use social media to boost her profile and potential sales, and realising that, in 2025, that advice is mostly fcuking bullsh1t and, in the main, you drive fcuk-all in the way of sales from posting to socials in the modern era. This won’t, in all likelihood, be news to any of you in the beknighted worlds of advermarketingpr, but it’s a useful reminder that the ‘build your business via the power of freely posting on social platforms’ gravy train left the station several years ago and is now a steaming wreck at the bottom of a rather deep ravine. I felt this passage, for example, very strongly: “The more I thought about it, the harder it became not to view the so-called creator economy as a blatant pyramid scheme underwritten by some of the worst corporations in the world. The way to succeed is to get in early, then become an aspirational figure to those who come along later. I’m being deliberately blunt to make my point. If you enjoy watching happy videos of dogs and uploading pictures of your holidays for your friends, I’m delighted for you. If making videos and sharing them online is your hobby, all power to you. As part of a viable creative career, though, where a living wage and sustainable workload is the goal, social media now feels to me like a long con that just hasn’t been exposed yet.”
  • Sell Your Face For £40: Or, more accurately, sell an ultra-detailed scan of your face for £40 so it can then be licensed for use in videogames and DEFINITELY NOT bongo. This is a really nice piece of reporting from The Sheffield Tribune, who sent reporter Misty Lamb along to local company Sapiens, which is seeking to build a database of diverse, representative humans whose likenesses can then be used either as-is or as composites in videogames or other digital media. Would you sell your face for £40? Honestly, if someone offered me £20 I would bite their fcuking hand off.
  • How Incel Language Infected The Web: I really enjoyed this – an extract from a forthcoming book on the impact of social media on language, specifically looking at the way in which terms from the bowels of subReddits and the Chans have ended up gaining mainstream traction over the years, from incel to the more esoteric mogging and maxxing. “These terms spread partially because the algorithm thrives on negativity and partially because they confirmed our existing cultural outlooks. Phrases like “doomer” and “it’s over” spoke to our disconnected reality, while “brainrot” held a mirror up to our online addictions and “wagecuck” reflected our growing disenchantment with the American dream. And since apocalyptic statements are good for engagement, the phrases eventually became a part of the zeitgeist, emergently reinforcing our pessimistic points of view. Words are memes, and memes are trends, but all are also ideas.” I do believe very strongly that while we’re currently of the opinion that it’s Facebook and Insta and TikTok that have shaped the current version of society we’re living in / suffering through, the truth is that the truly significant platforms have been Something Awful and 4Chan – Lowtax to Trump is a straight line.
  • China’s Incel Videogame Sensation: Tangentially-related, this is a NYT report on a game doing numbers in China – called ‘Revenge on Gold Diggers’, the title effectively puts players in the shoes of a man getting his own back on all the ‘cold-hearted’, ‘venal’ women who exist only to drain a guy of his money and VITAL ENERGIES and oh God this is deeply, deeply miserable. “The interactive game, which debuted in June to enormous success, temporarily topped the charts on Steam China, the local version of the global gaming platform. Its tagline, “Who killed love? It’s the gold diggers who killed love,” has electrified Chinese social media. Players, cast as “emotional fraud hunters,” navigate romantic relationships, searching for deception while guarding their wallets — and their hearts. One of the most liked comments on the game’s community board calls it “an elegy for our generation of Chinese men.” Another declares, “Men must never retreat — this is a fight to the death.””
  • Hanging With Manu: A rare link to the Guardian here – if you’ve not read this, you really must. Emmanuel Carrère writes about his time on the French Presidential plane, and the wider Macron hang, around the recent G7 summit – honestly, this is such masterful writing it made me quite jealous. The access is impeccable, the style superb, and it’s both very informative and pleasingly-gossipy, giving you a genuine feel for the (sorry, but) general *vibe* of these sorts of things, and the principal players, and what it’s like to exist on the periphery as one of the anointed scribes tasked with preserving the actions of these ‘great’ men and women (and make no mistake, there is no question of Manu’s own conception of his own greatness!). Honestly, this is exceptionally good.
  • The Battle Over Iran’s Flag: I confess to having known the square root of fcuk all about the origins of the Iranian flag, or indeed the fact that there are current a few competing versions in existence depending on which particular faction or diasporic group you might belong; this is a really interesting overview of the story behind the banner, and finishes with a call for a whole new flag for a whole new era – I quite like the idea that national emblems need refreshing every few years, which as someone who thinks the Union Jack is VERY UGLY and who can’t help but associate the cross of St George with barely-disguised racism (sorry, but I can’t shake the memories of the Combat 18 lads outside Stamford Bridge when I was a kid) I can’t help but think we should all take this sort of attitude.
  • I Printed My Instagram Feed for a Month: Ok, this is quite slight and not that long, and it’s basically just someone talking about what it was like attempting to wean themselves off the gram by printing their feed out and reading it like a newspaper instead, which is obviously both wildly performative and slightly-mental, but, equally, there was something quite interesting about this in terms of the effect it had on the way she read, and her relationships with the friends inside her phone, and I think there might be *something* in here for someone, though I can’t for the life of me begin to imagine what or indeed who.
  • Overtourism in Japan: Web Curios favourite Craig Mod writes movingly about what TikTok and Insta fame does to small cafes and other venues in Japan, and how individual shop owners try and inure themselves against the mad vicissitudes of algofame. I found myself nodding throughout – everything Craig says in here can be applied to the wider modern world: “ At risk of oversimplifying: Most “problems” in the world today boil down to scale and abstraction. As scale increases, individuals become more abstract, and humanity and empathy are lost. This happens acutely when the algorithm decides to laser-beam a small shop with a hundred-million views. If you cast a net to that many people, a vast chunk of them will not engage in good faith, let alone take a second to consider the feelings of residents or owners or why the place was built to begin with. Hence: The crush, the selfish crush. Overtourism brings with it a corollary effect, what I call the “Disneyland flipflop.”8 This happens when visitors fail to see (willfully or not) the place they’re visiting as an actual city with humans living and working and building lives there, but rather as a place flipflopped through the lens of social media into a Disneyland, one to be pillaged commercially, assumed to reset each night for their pleasure, welcoming their transient deluge with open arms.”
  • Benidorm’s Patriots: Róisín Lanigan writes from Benidorm on the strange phenomenon of the Orangemen on tour, the Irish, Scottish (and occasional Scouse) who decide to go to the Costa del Sol to celebrate the glory of the Union and sing songs about Fenian blood; this is a fascinating portrait of a very weird subculture which feels odd and outdated when seen in its natural habitat but which becomes genuinely, mind-bendingly surreal when transplanted to 35 degree temperatures in the Iberian sunshine. Contains some EXCELLENT descriptions of men whose hue of face you can just *imagine*, and this paragraph is typical of the understated but…very…pointy depictions contained throughout: “Among the people is Jimmy, who has brought his flute and later says his real name is Mark. Originally from Scotland, he enlisted in the British Army and eventually found himself in Essex. “I’m an army boy,” he says. “I’m a Loyalist.” After two failed marriages, he moved to the Isle of Sheppey. This is his fourth trip to Benidorm this year. “I used to go to Belfast but it was too much hassle,” says Mark, or Jimmy, who has travelled here alone.”
  • Rejection: Another LRB piece, this one a review of last year’s book of short stories by Tony Tulathimutte called ‘Rejection’, a book I absolutely loved but which I can’t possibly recommend to anyone because it is so utterly horrible to read (whilst being very well-written indeed). This is an excellent overview which explains its strengths and its weaknesses, and which will give you a good guide as to whether you want to read it or not (and, er, if any of you do, I *may* have access to a PDF proof which I *may* be able to email you if you ask me. But, er, PIRACY IS BAD).
  • My Adorable, Wholesome Little Guys: I’m not sure if I’ve ever included the same author’s work twice in a single Curios, but, presuming I haven’t, Huw Lemmey (AGAIN) is the lucky, lucky inaugural winner of this particular distinction – he will never know, but I imagine he would be THRILLED to find out. Here he writes about the TV show ‘Heartstoppers’ and how its emblematic of a certain trend in modern popular culture to find homosexuality acceptable as long as, well, it doesn’t dwell too much on the ‘sex’ aspect of it – as a straight man I can’t really speak to this with any authority, but I found it both interesting and true-feeling; it certainly feels, from a media culture point of view, that something like Queer as Folk would perhaps find it harder to find an audience in 2025 because of the level of discomfort that it feels viewers might experience at its depiction of what it is actually like when men fcuk, and that there’s a strange modern association between ‘goodness’ and ‘purity’ which feels…retrograde in the extreme: “Of course, depictions of queer life need not be miserable, but the idealism on which Heartstopper is built feels curiously narcissistic. Conflict, unethical behaviour, cruelty and unkindness are things we all do and are all subject to. But Heartstopper belongs to a different political-cultural moment, where a crude concept of ‘representation’ is a moral and aesthetic good in its own right (never mind that literature is one field where white gay men have hardly been underrepresented). When it comes to queerness, “representation” often means “an image of myself I’m comfortable seeing”, and anything else is a compounded oppression. It was described in the Gay Times as “the queer graphic novel we wished we had at high school” and has won its plaudits precisely for its idealistic representation of gay teens. But it’s an idealism that has confused representation for endorsement to the point where even heavily signposting inappropriate behaviour is not enough; good queer characters must remain unblemished innocents who don’t do bad things, and bad characters must remain alien.”
  • 27 Notes On Growing Older: So after saying at the tail end of last year that ‘XX notes on YY’-style posts were in the main twee and patronising and generally pretty fcuking annoying, it now seems that I am featuring them all the time – I am going to ascribe this to people seeing my criticism and modifying their writing accordingly rather than my being either a massively-inconsistent tw4t or becoming increasingly-sentimental in my approaching dotage. This is Ian Leslie writing about, er, growing older, and, honestly, I really enjoyed this – not cloying, not sentimental, not attempting to TEACH YOU THINGS, this is just a series of nicely-observed and well-written vignettes from middle age. “The short story I think about most is The Swimmer, by John Cheever (later a film). It’s a golden Sunday afternoon in upstate New York in the 1960s. The well-to-do residents of Westchester are out in their gardens sipping cocktails. Neddy, a fit man in early middle age, decides to swim home from the party he’s at by way of his neighbours’ pools, just for a laugh. As he progresses from one pool to another, being made drinks as he goes, the weather and the mood start to get colder and darker. He finds himself being treated with inexplicable hostility and pity by once-friendly neighbours. Bewildered, he finally arrives at his own house, only to find it empty and abandoned. We sense that in the time it took Neddy to swim through a few pools in a mildly drunken haze, whole years, even decades, have passed. We also sense that Neddy is ruined in some way – that he has ruined himself. I’m not ruined, not yet, but Neddy’s bewilderment speaks to me. I only set off a few minutes ago. The sun was still high in the sky.”
  • In My Zombie Era: I am not always a fan of Sam Kriss’s writing, but I fcuking LOVED this – this is about cultural stagnation in the modern era, the why behind the feeling that it’s all warmed-up leftovers from lavish banquets past, but what really sold this to me is the hyperstylised opening and closing sections which, honestly, I think are really really fcuking great. Your mileage may vary, and I am pretty certain that there are those of you who will hate this with a burning passion, but I am a sucker for these sorts of sustained stylistic exercises and this one really works imho (although I was troubled by the fact that I didn’t have to strain AT ALL to understand it, which possibly speaks to some…deficiencies in my lifestyle and media diet).
  • Carousel: We close out this week with two short stories in the new edition of Granta. Carousel is the longer of the two, and it didn’t *quite* click with me until about a third of the way through at which point I realised it might be genius. It’s also quite a hard read in terms of What It Is About (loss, both of mind and everything else), but it’s a very, very good piece of writing indeed by Leopold O’Shea.
  • Happy Ending: Finally this week, Hope Newell writes about a woman who, while her girlfriend is away, gets a job in the ‘massage parlour’ at which she works. That’s all you’re getting by way of description for this one – it’s honestly superb, and you will enjoy it more if you go in cold.

By Liza Sivakova

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: