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!
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).
- Cheese Reviews: It’s gotten to the point now where I am really starting to actively dislike Bluesky as an online space – the people who I followed over from Twitter are still nice, but there’s such a general air of #FBPE energy about the place (if you know you know) that it’s quite…miserable to be there, a lot of the time (this week I was blocked by 20 people for having the temerity to point out that, despite what a lot of people were pointing out because it got A Certain Type of Person clapping like seals, it was actually very, very improbable that the UK Government is in fact going to ‘ban Wikipedia’, and that if you read the court ruling you would pretty quickly understand this). BUT! There are still people making and doing fun and silly things, and for that reason (and, er, the fact that I need it for Professional Reasons) I will persist (SO BRAVE!!!). Anyway, this is one such pleasingly-frivolous project – Cheese Reviews posts, er, reviews of cheese. That’s it. Do you like cheese? FOLLOW THIS ACCOUNT THEN.
- 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!
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
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!:
