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
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!
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.
- Dogecore: NOT THAT DOGE DO NOT WORRY! This is (sorry) an actual online clothes shop, but OH MY GOD do I love the tshirts. Sadly this is very much not my aesthetic, but I sort of wish it was – honestly, if I could get away with wearing this I would wear it SO HARD. Also, the blog is pleasingly-unhinged. I like this very much indeed and maybe you will too.
- 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
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 ChatGPT Satanism Story: Oh I LOVE this story! So the Atlantic ran this piece about how GPT would, if asked about ‘Molech’, happily spin out and give all sorts of DARK INSTRUCTIONS about bloodletting and satanic rituals and oh me oh my! Except, it turns out, that what it was actually doing is regurgitating a bunch of stuff that it will have absorbed from the millions of words of neckbeard prose on Warhammer 40k forums, as explained in this follow-up piece in WIRED. ““Molech,” the variant spelling The Atlantic used, shows up specifically in Warhammer 40,000, a miniature wargame franchise that has been around since the 1980s and has an extremely large and very online fan base. The subreddit r/40kLore, which is dedicated exclusively to discussing the game’s backstory and characters, has more than 350,000 members…But perhaps the most convincing piece of evidence suggesting that ChatGPT regurgitated the language of Warhammer 40,000 is that it kept asking if The Atlantic was interested in PDFs. The publishing division of Games Workshop, the UK company that owns the Warhammer franchise, regularly puts out updated rulebooks and guides to various characters. Buying all these books can get expensive, so some fans try to find pirated copies online.” Anyway, this is all very funny but also reminded me of this excellent post by Rusty at Today in Tabs from earlier this week, which references Derrida but still manages to be broadly-comprehensible, which, well, isn’t always the case.
- 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!:
