It turns out that I am in a bit of a hurry today – THINGS TO DO, PEOPLE TO SEE, YOU KNOW HOW IT IS (I need to get on a bus, it’s all glamour here in South London) – and as such I am going to eschew too much preamble in favour of both a question and an anecdote given to me by someone else.
First, the question: WHICH IS THE LEAST-FUN NATIONALITY IN THE WORLD? Genuinely curious to hear your answers here, please email me and let ALL your prejudices hang out.
Second, the anecdote. It happens that I know someone who was ‘lucky’ enough to be in attendance at the recent State Dinner for Trump at Windsor Castle. We caught up for lunch this week, and they gave me this gem which I hereby pass onto YOU, gentle reader – THIS IS WHY YOU READ CURIOS, THE VERY OCCASIONAL TOP TABLE GOSSIP!
So my friend kept vaguely tuning into the music being played by the royal orchestra during dinner, thinking ‘hm, this sounds like a film score’ or ‘hm, this sounds like a TV theme tune’. Turns out, as they were told by the military guy they were sat next to who was helping coordinate, that visiting dignitaries get to choose the soundtrack to dinner. Most choose classical or chamber music; Trump’s was all soft rock, TV theme tunes and commercial soundtracks. He literally is modernity made ‘flesh’, we can have no complaints about what we have wrought.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios and you should hear the anecdotes I’m *not* allowed to share.
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO TAKE THE OPPORTUNITY TO REMIND YOU ALL THAT NEXT SATURDAY (25TH OCTOBER) IS CRISP SANDWICH DAY SHOULD YOU WISH TO ORGANISE SOME SPECIFIC CELEBRATIONS, PT.1:
- Telephone: You may have noticed that I, er, put quite a lot of links in Curios each week (per the ‘about’ section, it’s not my fault there’s so much stuff on the web ffs); as a result of this somewhat…loose approach to ‘curation’ (lol!) it can occasionally mean that I don’t always have immediate recall for Stuff I Might Have Referred To In The Past. But! Thankfully I can rely on YOU (or at least some of you) to remind me, as in the case of this project. Mark Jay writes: “Ages and ages ago you included TELEPHONE, an art project that was inviting submissions. You asked if anyone contributed to let you know. I did.” Firstly, THANKYOU MARK – I can’t tell you how momentarily powerful I felt knowing that one of you had FINALLY followed my instructions (and, even, better, bothered to get back to me to confirm my power and influence; sadly it speaks to my crippling lack of ambition that I can’t think of better things to attempt to induce you to do than ‘make stuff and put it online’, which perhaps explains certain things about my ‘lifestyle’). Secondly (and, honestly, I could probably have gotten to this bit sooner), this is WONDERFUL! I have looked and I can’t find my original writeup of this, but, basically, this is the third iteration of the Telephone project to exist, and, per the blurb: “TELEPHONE is a game played by artists. It works like the children’s game of the same name. A message is whispered from person to person and changes and evolves as it is passed from player to player. In our case, we pass a secret message from art form to art form, so a message could become poetry and then painting and then music and then film, throughout all possible forms of art. We also assign each finished work of art to two or three other artists, so the game branches outward exponentially like a family tree.” So basically it’s like an artistic game of ‘consequences’ (ish), with each work being inspired by or somehow imaginatively/conceptually linked to one or more others, creating this sort of vast, branching network of…Jesus, it looks like hundreds or thousands of individual pieces of creative work, through paintings and poetry and videos and GOD KNOWS, all mapped via a nice interface that lets you zoom out a bit and see the shape of the thing…obviously there’s very little here linking the pieces beyond the VERY CONCEPTUAL which means that there’s a wide range of different types and quality of work on display and you won’t like all of it and not all of it, to my mind, really works as a digital piece, but I absolutely ADORE the concept here and I would urge you all to spend a little bit of time with this because it’s a very cool idea indeed and you might find a work or an artist who SPEAKS TO YOUR SOUL (lol there is no such thing).
- The Sora Watermarker: It’s been interesting watching Sora2 vids start to pollute the wider social web over the past couple of weeks, with the bouncing watermark becoming a familiar site, overlaid on videos of dead celebrities and, perhaps more worryingly, faked clips of people being detained on US streets (there was an insane instance this week where I saw someone posting a clip of a reporter being forcibly-detained by ICE agents on a US street somewhere which, when viewed closely, was clearly AI; when confronted about the fake nature of the clip, the OP said it didn’t matter because ‘even though it’s not real it’s still true’, which is a fcuking MINDFLAYING sentence when you stop to think about it and is probably the harbinger of some really positive things!), and this link is another which speaks to the rapidly-degrading epistemology of the now. Want to confuse people as to whether something’s real? Want to debunk something as AI-generated even when it’s not? Well, now you can with this handy link which lets you ADD one of those bouncing Sora2 watermarks to any video you like! Obviously there are lots of potentially, er, quite bad uses to which one could put this, but there is a part of me that quite likes the idea of waging a short-but-intense information warfare campaign against someone and reposting every single one of their Reels with this watermark thereby sort-of questioning their entire existence. THIS IS FINE, etc etc.
- Sketchy Boats: I’m not, it’s fair to say, an expert on international shipping or indeed what the signifiers might be of a vessel that is…perhaps not entirely above-board when it comes to its registration or its cargo, and as such I’m not really in a position to determine how useful this site is, or indeed how, er, ‘sketchy’ the ships it’s highlighting are. BUT! These minor caveats aside, this is an interesting project by one Christian Panton, who says on the ‘about’ page “This site exists because some ships are just… weird. They drift through international waters with murky paperwork, shady ownership, strange port calls, and a suspicious tendency to vanish from tracking systems. If you’ve ever looked at a vessel and thought, “That seems kinda sus,” you’re in the right place. Sketchy Boats is a living database of ships, each scored using a custom “sketchiness” scale. It’s not about hard accusations — we’re not claiming these vessels are doing anything illegal. But we are saying they might be worth a second look.Think of the sketchiness score as a red flag meter. Every ship starts at zero. Points are added based on a range of observed behaviors and risk factors. The higher the score, the more oddities a vessel has racked up — from disappearing from AIS trackers, to hopping flags every few months, to hanging out a little too long off the coast of sanctioned countries. Here’s the catch: none of these data points alone prove wrongdoing. Some are easily explained. But stack up enough of them, and you get a pattern. And patterns are interesting.” HMMM. In the admittedly-improbable event that any of you are investigative reporters with a beat covering ‘international shipping intrigues’ then WOW is this a resource for you. SEMI-RELATED SKETCHY MARITIME INFO! You wait 15 years for a link about international shipping crime and two come along in one week! This one is a “Real-time database of maritime sanctions from US, EU, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand”, for those of you who might be interested in such a thing. Honestly, I know it’s niche but there’s something amazing about the fact that I just clicked this and found out that there’s a Russian oil tanker off the North West coast of Ireland right now.
- Old US Rave Flyers: Along with, I imagine, every other tediously-predictable person who came of age in the late-90s, I had a wall or two plastered with old club flyers, which meant that this excellent Flickr collection of equivalent designs from the US and Canada gave me a pleasant frisson of nostalgia despite my obviously never having been to any of the places here advertised. Even if you don’t have any particular interest in this subculture, the various posters, flyers and handouts here collected are a SUPERB resource for students of design history or just anyone who really likes an incoherent mess of fonts and styles all shoehorned together with little or no care for aesthetic coherence (seriously, WHAT is going on with the font choices on some of these?). My one complaint about this is that, in the examples I’ve seen at least, there is a real dearth of terrible DJ names and far too many people called things like ‘Donald Glauer’ which suggests a real paucity of imagination among the North American clubbing crowd, but in general this is a GLORIOUS archive and a lovely set of images to get lost in.
- Up and Away: There are many novel control mechanisms that have been tried in game design, from the ACTUAL, REAL LIFE SKATEBOARDS employed in some of the more eye-catching arcade machines of previous decades, to the plastic Fender-analogue of the Guitar Hero series, to the inexplicable maraca-type…things that I remember coming bundled with an old Donkey Kong title at some point in the past, but I don’t recall coming across too many games that have employed ‘making increasingly-weird sounds’ as a means of guiding the action. UNTIL NOW! Up And Away is part of Hyundai’s slightly-inexplicable (how, er, how are you measuring the brand benefit here guys? Not that I think that’s what you should be doing, to be clear, I am all for companies just spunking a few grand on stuff BECAUSE IT IS FUN) ‘Artlab’ series of projects, some of which I have featured before, and is by Christine Kim, and is basically ‘Flappy Bird, except you have to make specific sounds to, er, flap’ – what’s nice (ridiculous) about it is that it changes the required sound every few seconds, which is why I just found myself humming, then saying ‘AAAAAHHH’ and then dementedly shouting ‘smacksmacksmack’ at my laptop at 746am. This is very silly and doesn’t REALLY work as a game, but it did bring a small, thin smile to my face which, trust me, is no small feat this morning.
- A London Modern Art Auction: OH TO BE RICH AND TO HAVE AN ENORMOUS HOUSE! To be clear, I don’t actually need either of these two things but was moved to covet a bit more wallspace and a few spare quid to bid on some of these works coming up at auction in Mayfair at the end of the month. SO SO BEAUTIFUL, some of these, honestly, not least the unused Paolozzi mosaic from Tottenham Court Road station which I am now coveting immoderately. Seriously, there are a couple of Picasso sketches in here with estimates under £6k which, ok, fine, I’m not an expert (DO NOT TAKE ANY ADVICE FROM ME) but sounds…’cheap’? Anyway, even if you can’t afford a Pablo it’s worth clicking and gawping at some of the beautiful 20thC works on sale.
- Web Design Inspiration: A, er, collection of webpages! Which someone somewhere in the world has chosen to clip and collate and present as ‘inspiration’ for anyone looking to design their own! You don’t need any further explanation from me here!
- Monomarks: Ooh, this is interesting – open bookmarking software (oh, ok, fine, ‘interesting’ is perhaps a stretch, but can you let me at least have ‘potentially useful’? ffs!)! “Monomarks is an open social bookmarking platform built on the AT Protocol. You can save, organise, and share links to interesting stuff while maintaining full ownership of your data.” Which is, fine, something that I can’t imagine any of you have been clamouring for, BUT which does have the interesting side-effect of letting you see anything that anyone using the service has themselves bookmarked, making the url here a sort-of rolling stumbleupon for the links favourited by a selection of strangers who are the sorts of people who would be interested in making use of open bookmarking software. There aren’t many people using at the moment, seemingly, but I really like the small window it’s given me this week into Another Web, and I am always a sucker for anything that help me scry the shape of the internet as experienced by other people. I mean, someone linked to this earlier and I am frankly fcuking baffled, but in a really good way – I honestly LOVE the fact that I can stumble across things that are utterly confusing to me like this. What does YOUR internet look like?
- 50 Cent But Inflation Adjusted: Not big, not clever, and also not ESPECIALLY funny, but I am very admiring of someone who bothers to follow through with what was quite evidently a throwaway thought that somehow got lodged in their brain. You don’t need me to explain this to you, right? Via Rob’s B3ta.
- The Hallowe’en Clock: This has apparently been going since 2013, and I confess I have a *slight* feeling I might have featured it before but, well, SOMETIMES THAT IS OK – this is a webpage featuring a clock which has been CARVED OUT OF A PUMPKIN and then subsequently coded into this live site; if you’re the sort of person who prolapses with excitement at the prospect of ‘cosy autumn’, who’s changed your social media handle to something ‘spooky’ like it’s the early-2010s all over again and we are still innocent and hopeful and ignorant of All The Horrors To Come, and who unironically gets excited about cinnamon-and-nutmeg-flavoured confectionery, then you might enjoy this as yet another bit of seasonal kitsch.
- Dinovision: I don’t mean to kick this description off with a note of disappointment, but I feel honour-bound to tell you that this doesn’t, to the best of my knowledge, have ANYTHING to do with dinosaurs and how their eyes work. I KNOW I AM DISAPPOINTED TOO. But! What it *is* is still pretty cool, I promise – this is a MASSIVE visualisation of images and how The Machine thinks they relate to each other, based on Dinov2, which is Meta’s image classification tool, and what that means in practice (for all those of you who, like me, nod and smile when people say sentences like that but don’t *really* understand what they mean) is that you can scroll around this constellation of points and click on any of them and see the image it relates to and then see OTHER images that the machine thinks are ‘like’ said image and OH GOD I love stuff like this, giving you a small window into the ‘how’ of all this stuff, showing you what the computer ‘sees’ (it doesn’t see) and how it interprets the signals it receives and classifies them…honestly, this is technical and knotty, conceptually, and I can’t pretend to have anything more than a VERY superficial understanding of what it is showing me, but, well, much like a pig staring at a passing high-speed train as I trough away in my fieldslurry, I am baffled-but-pleased by it. Via Lynn’s always-interesting newsletter.
- Guardian Foreheads: A new small project by the inexplicably-named Dave ‘Bagpuss’ Forsey, which posts images from the Guardian website where the paper’s image templates have fcuked up the cropping of someone’s head in the accompanying picture (this happens…more often than you might expect, given the (one imagines entirely predictable) frequency with which news stories feature people’s heads).
- Mute: Oh this is SUCH a good idea for a series of shorts – Mute has been going a while now, apparently, but it’s a new project to me, and it self-describes thusly: “a collection of one-take microfilms that report on the vagaries of human behaviour. Casting a deadpan, mordant eye over a variety of incongruous scenes, it sees the funny side of greed, conformity, futility, anxiety, desire and other traits of modern life. And MUTE is dumbstruck by all that it sees. “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness” said Samuel Beckett. Best to do away with dialogue altogether. And thinking about it, the obtrusive movement of the camera is something of a stain on the simplicity of a scene. And what about the distraction of cut-cut-cut editing? The MUTE Series has done away with all these things and pledges allegiance to three strict rules: RULE 1 no dialogue RULE 2 no camera moves RULE 3 only one shot.” Obviously I have to caveat this with my standard, dull “I don’t actually like films or TV really” bullsh1t, but I have watched a couple of these now and they were both ACE, so, well, consider this a recommendation. Aside from anything else this feels like a very ‘now’ project – given the era of INFINITE CREATIVE ABUNDANCE that looks set to be ushered in shortly-ish by AI video, etc, there’s something particularly interesting about applying constraints to creative endeavours, working within and around limitations as part of the work, which I think you will see a lot more of; a new wave of DOGME-style movements for the post-Machine era, maybe? Christ, Matt, you pretentious cnut, stop predicting stuff as YOU ARE ALWAYS WRONG.
- Flipbook Of The Rings: A pleasing trend of recent years has been ‘recreating a whole film as a collaborative frame-by-frame animation – we’ve seen it done with The Bee Movie and a bunch of other cult-ish titles, but this project, to do the same for Lord of the Rings, feels…frankly gargantuan in scope. BUT! It is being attempted! You can sign up here and get given your own frame to draw and which will then be inserted into the final film! Apparently this is going to need 100,000 individual drawings, which feels…low, honestly, but I guess the animation doesn’t have to be butter-smooth exactly. You can also browse through some of the completed frames which gives you an idea as to the range of styles that will make up the finished film – LOTR geeks are talented artists, turns out (or at least the ones participating in this are, which ought perhaps not to surprise me). WHY NOT TO CONTRIBUTE TO A VAST, POINTLESS ENDEAVOUR? Go on, the nights are drawing in, what else are you going to do between now and Christmas?
- Boomer Death Watch: ALL OF THE BOOMER DEATHS (or at least the ones in the past month) are collected here, so you can…I don’t know, so you can celebrate? Commiserate? Anyway, this takes a pretty broad church approach to who it features, meaning there will be a LOT of people who aren’t necessarily known to you (it’s been a bad week for Central European footballers, turns out), but it is thanks to this that I learned just now that Ace Frehley of KISS died yesterday so, well, let’s all take a moment to stick our tongues out suggestively in memorial tribute.
- Classy Melania: I am somewhat confused as to what the current status of Melania Trump is in terms of the ever-evolving mythology of the now; is she ‘cold, unfeeling, “I Don’t Care Do U?” Melania’ of the first term? Is she ‘resistance Melania’ secretly working to help Ukraine from within the White House? Or is she simply a former fashion model who has found herself trapped in the most gilded of cages and is simply drinking and drugging her way through the months til he dies and she can finally publish what will inevitably be history’s best-selling tell-all cash-in book? WHO CAN TELL?! Anyway, this TikTok account doesn’t answer any of those questions but does present a pleasingly-weird window onto the First Lady with surreal edits and some jazzy music and, honestly, just watch the first video on the page, it absolutely DESTROYED me when I first saw it last week and I just started crying with laughter again just now when watching it for what might be the ninth time and oh god I am tired.
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO TAKE THE OPPORTUNITY TO REMIND YOU ALL THAT NEXT SATURDAY (25TH OCTOBER) IS CRISP SANDWICH DAY SHOULD YOU WISH TO ORGANISE SOME SPECIFIC CELEBRATIONS, PT.2:
- David Alaba: If YOU were highly-decorated Austrian footballer David Alaba, you too would probably want a website promoting the fact that, er, you are highly-decorated Austrian footballer David Alaba. You might, though, choose a slightly-less madly-hubristic vibe than that in fact chosen by highly-decorated Austrian footballer David Alaba (I continue repeating this because the main thing to emerge from the website of highly-decorated Austrian footballer David Alaba is that a) David Alaba is a footballer who b) is very highly-decorated indeed) – but, seriously, I LOVE THIS! “THE LIFE OF DAVID ALABA”, proclaims the site on loading, and then offers a full-bleed autoplay video montage of said LIFE, which involves playing football, training and, er, apparently starring in a lot of poorly-shot sponcon-style clips in which highly-decorated Austrian footballer David Alaba has a haircut, highly-decorated Austrian footballer David Alaba does a photoshoot and highly-decorated Austrian footballer David Alaba prepares to drink a VERY IMPROBABLE hot chocolate which whipped cream (one imagines that highly-decorated Austrian footballer David Alaba’s diet tends heavily towards the probiotic). “A master of his craft, on and off the field”, the site continues, inviting you to see his accomplishments – and, look, it’s entirely reasonable to point out that, yes, highly-decorated Austrian footballer David Alaba has indeed achieved more than I have on the football pitch, but, well, WHERE ARE YOUR NON-FOOTBALL ACHIEVEMENTS, DAVID ALABA??? WHERE IS YOUR OFF-FIELD MASTERY??? WHERE IS YOUR LONG-RUNNING NEWSLETTER WITH A NEGLIGIBLE READERSHIP??? Anyway, I fcuking love this website, thankyou highly-decorated Austrian footballer David Alaba for its existence.
- Depressing UK Documentaries: Discovered by former editor Paul, this is a YouTube channel featuring a SHEDLOAD of old documentaries from UK TV from the 80s and 90s (it actually goes back even further if you explore the archive), lots of them from series called ‘40 Minutes’ and ‘World in Action’, covering topics such as bullying, AIDS hospices and, er, working at a cat sanctuary. Obviously your mileage here will vary, but if you’re in the market for either a bit of cultural time travel or just the opportunity to laugh at the outdated haircuts, attitudes, fashion and technology of The Past then this could be right up your street.
- Plot Explained: OH GOD THIS IS A GODSEND. Or at least it is if you’re like me and eschew TV and films but still have to exist in a world in which for many people they are both the primary form of entertainment that they like to consume and something that they enjoy discussing because FCUK ME is it hard to participate in a conversation about ‘stuff on telly that you have seen’ when you don’t in fact watch telly. Plot Explained is a site which will literally just tell you the plot of films so you can know what happens without having to sit through ninety s0dding minutes of fcuking video (am I…am I missing the point here? I fear I might be). It’s not 100% comprehensive – inexplicably it’s missing my personal favourite film EVER, Bad Boy Bubby (which you can watch in its entirety here, by the way, if you want a VERY STRANGE Friday evening) – but it does have LOADS of stuff on there; search by title, and when you find the film you’re interested in it gives you a short synopsis, a full, beat-by-beat rundown of What Happens, and then a bunch of links to further information if you inexplicably want to find out more. Honestly, this is potentially a GODSEND should you be someone who is regularly forced to endure stilted chat about ‘the new Mission Impossible’ with colleagues or family members you don’t really like very much.
- Human Commons: Well this is a nice idea which, charitably, will make the square root of fcuk-all difference to anything! Like creative commons licensing but for the post-Machine era, this is basically a putative set of labels which could be applied to any and all content online to delineate how, if at all, its creators are content for The Machine to fcuk with it or otherwise. “Humans Commons is a collective of individuals committed to shaping a future that benefits all of Humanity. In an age where artificial intelligence (AI) technology is advancing so fast, we believe it is crucial to create a clear, Human-centered framework for how intellectual property (IP) is used, shared, and developed. Our goal is to ensure that every decision made around the use of Human-created content is transparent, fair, and respectful of Human rights, while also considering the role of emerging technologies like AI. At the heart of Humans Commons is a set of licenses that help define how IP can be interacted with by both Humans and non-Human entities, such as AI systems and automated tools. Our licenses are designed to ensure that Human creators maintain control over their work while allowing for innovation, collaboration, and the responsible use of technology.” It’s a nice idea, honestly, and the degree of thought that has gone into the concept is evident from the range of licenses created and the granularity of their potential application, but, well, lol if you think this is ever going to make a difference to anything in terms of what gets ingested.
- The Daria Restoration Project: This has been around for a while now but floated across my field of vision for the first time this week – I wasn’t aware, but it turns out that the version of classic 90s emogothposterchild cartoon Daria that is available on streaming platforms isn’t in fact the original, and instead, due to Tedious Copyright and Licensing Reasons, a significant proportion of the music featured is different and, by all accounts, less good. So, in a move which is emblematic of all the BEST things on the web, someone decided to remake the originals with the original music reinstated, and has made them ALL available for download from this site. Ok, what you are getting here is links to download some VERY CHUNKY video files, but, well, THIS IS CULTURAL PRESERVATION IN ACTION! If you liked Daria then this feels like a potential present to yourself; if you have no idea what the show was, then I strongly recommend checking it out because it will confirm every single prejudice you had about the 90s (they are all firmly based in reality).
- Twin Towns: Via Giuseppe, this is APPARENTLY a map showing all of the towns worldwide which are twinned with towns in the UK – which, you know, is a cool idea and all and which I was prepared to love with all my blackened, shriveled little heart until I checked a bit and realised it is INCOMPLETE; it doesn’t, for reasons I can’t possibly imagine, include the VITAL FACT that Swindon is twinned with Ocotal in Peru (spending some of my formative years in that sh1thole of a town scarred me in many ways, but it does mean that I will forever remember the name of an apparently-unremarkable South American municipality, so I suppose that’s a positive), and as such I can’t give it quite the rave review I wanted to. Still, it’s quite amazing as a network of connections; it’s interesting to see where the gaps are as much as it is to see whether the biggest clusters occur. Not so many twin towns in Northern Africa, turns out, but lots in what seem like pleasing European locations, suggesting possibly a *little* bit of motivated self-interest when it came to the people who established and maintained these relationships. I do wonder what the residents of Ocotal got out of it, though.
- Vault: Another of those ‘not for me, but maybe one of you will like it’ links – “vault is a desktop app to collect and organize links, notes, and images. it’s open source, private, and everything is stored locally.” There’s a browser extension and a few other gubbins to make it a potentially-convenient notetaking/archiving tool for those of you who want to keep things free of the grasp of Big Tech or for whatever reason want to keep your ‘research’ local and private (WHAT ARE YOU HIDING YOU PERVERTS?).
- Fluid Glass Clock: A clock! On a website! With a lovely fluid glasslike effect when you click and drag! Pointless but sort-of pretty!
- The Mr Global Contest 2025: I had, I confess, COMPLETELY forgotten about the existence of Mr Global, the male beauty pageant which features both VERY HOT MEN and INCREDIBLE COSTUMES and each year celebrates the point at which these two things converge with their annual National Costume parade in which the various hunks catwalk their way before adoring crowds, wearing the very best of their national attire, and the results each year are FABULOUS and, well, this year’s are no exception. You will all of course have your favourites – I canvased a female friend and she said her groupchat’s picks were Ecuador, Paraguay, Thailand and Cuba – but I can personally say that I am in love with both Mr Nigeria (honestly, I could look at his smile ALL DAY) and, in particular, Mr Puerto Rico who seems to have wondered in from a completely different event but who also seems thrilled to be there). Honestly, these are SO GOOD – if you can, I recommend also checking out this thread on Bluesky taking you through the fits one by one, alongside some thirsty (but RESPECTFULLY thirsty) commentary, but this really is a link that I strongly suggest ALL of you spend the rest of the day ‘debating’ with your chums as it is superb fodder for a Friday afternoon groupchat lol.
- Six Degrees of Wikipedia: I feel quite strongly that this is not the first variant on this game I’ve featured in here, but, well, it’s a new one and so IT QUALIFIES! Type in any two concepts, people or THINGS (or at least any ones that can be found on Wikipedia) and it will quickly plot the shortest available paths between them; which is how I have now discovered that it’s possible to get from ‘fisting’ to seemingly ANYTHING in approximately three steps.
- The 1% Club: Matt Round is on a real tear of creative projects at the moment, and this, his latest, is SUCH a clever idea which really should be appropriated by…someone, for, er…something (look, I don’t have to do branded agencyw4nk anymore, you will forgive me if I am no longer so quick to come up with terrible commercial advermarketingpr concepts) – this is a website which only lets you access it if the device you’re accessing it on has 1% of battery. No more, no less (obviously, because your phone would be dead). THINK OF THE APPLICATIONS! No, really, do! This has so many neat little extensions – if nothing else, using it as a means of gating entry to an event that you don’t want anyone to document feels like a smart little way of using it, but I am SURE you can come up with your own clever little ideas (TRY HARDER).
- Maze Garden: Ooh, this is fun – a little game-toy-thing in which you can draw your own maze and then navigate around it in 3d, and then share said maze with others for them to solve… this is really neat, and the 2d-to-3d pipeline is quite impressive (or at least it was to me) given this is ‘just’ a browsergame. BONUS MAZE ACTION! I didn’t know that Wilson’s Algorithm was a thing, but, well, it is! Specifically, it’s “a method that makes maze-making as easy as following a recipe, and what’s more, it produces a truly random one — every possible maze of a given size has the same chance of being created.” This site explains it, and offers a practical explanation of how it works with a nice little visualisation, which is interesting and quite cool and will particular please those of you with a mathematical bent, I think.
- Loopa: OH GOD THIS MADE MY BRAIN HURT. I didn’t get on with this puzzle game AT ALL, but you might be less of a doublefigureIQmoron than I am. You just have to move the blocks around so that they sit in colour-matched rows – THAT’S IT, SIMPLE RIGHT? I hate this.
- The Collector: Ooh, this is fun – a game where you’re tasked with collecting ORBS and avoiding THREATS; you need to collect 50 ORBS in a single run to win, but that’s impossible at first, so you will need to buy power-ups after each successive run to improve your stats and to give you a chance of escaping. Simple, well-designed, pleasingly-drawn and oddly-satisfying fun, this, and an excellent way to spend 20 minutes while worrying how you’re going to afford Christmas this year.
- The Britney Spears Theme Park: This is not a game, it is ART. PURE ART! Honestly, I love this so much – load it up and FLY THROUGH THE ERAS OF BRITNEY! This is…too wonderful for words, from the way the audio fades in and out as you fly between STAGES OF SPEARS, to the fact that I just found a random 3d chaise longue littering the landscape, to the whole early-00s aesthetic of the digital space…seriously, I cannot stress enough how wonderful this is, and I am a) straight (or at least I was when I clicked the url, now maybe less so), and b) not a Britney Spears fan at all.
By Juul Krier
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Scavenged Luxury: A Tumblr that is basically all just vibes and aesthetics, rendered through both owned and curated images, just like what you used to get back in the day. A lovely throwback.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Geoffrey Laurence: Laurence is a North American artist whose work reminds me quite a lot of some of the fleshier bits of Schiele and Freud, more in terms of skin tones evoked than technical accomplishment, and I like it very much indeed and you might too.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The Man Who Owns The Right: Our first link this week is another of those you can skip if you’re not either in the UK or someone who’s unaccountably fascinated by the political waters surrounding our bemerded isle; still, if you are lucky enough to live in the UK, you could do worse than to read this piece in Byline Times which looks at Paul Marshall, owner of GB News, The Spectator and Unherd and a man who to a certain extent is effectively bankrolling the nascent far/alt/neo/hard right (delete per your preferred designation for these cnuts) from his own pocket because…well, WHO CAN TELL, but there is an interesting detail late in the piece about how Marshall’s been STRONGLY SUSPECTED of having liked some…PRETTY FCUKING IFFY content on social media which might suggest (MIGHT! No definitive claims here! LAWYERS NOTE!) that there could be some racially-motivated animus behind some of the positions espoused by the people he’s funding. Anyway, regardless of that stuff this is a grimly-fascinating picture of How Money and Power Networks Function; perhaps the most depressing thing of all was the extent to which I spent a lot of the time while reading this thinking to myself ‘well, yes, this is sh1t, but also this is Just How The World Works’, which…not going to lie, doesn’t feel great).
- What Comes Post-Bubble: Not a long piece, but a useful way of framing current discourse about The Bubble, whether It is real, and what might happen when It pops – the basic premise here is that a) yes, It is; and b) it probably won’t be as bad as 2008 (I have no reference for this, and have no idea how to assess this claim, but that is the line being punted in this piece); and c) that the tech will still exist after said bubble pops. It’s worth reading the whole article as it’s a useful counter to some of the sillier things being said about this (from “THIS IS THE END OF ALL THIS AI CRAP” to “BUBBLES ARE FINE, NOTHING TO SEE HERE”), but in particular this para near the end feels like a useful take away: “In that case, this is, in fact … relative to the long-term importance of AI … a boring, normal tech bubble. Sorry. Maybe we’ll get lucky and it will deflate not pop; but that seems unjustifiably optimistic. AI is sucking capital from other sectors, and that will make the pop pretty painful. Again, sorry. The long- and even medium-run gain will be more than worth it, but that won’t make it sting any less.” I maintain my longstanding view that AI is going to change the world for the better, in ways we can’t quite conceive of yet – but that it’s going to take 70-100 years to get there, and the period until that happens is going to be FCUKING BRUTAL for lots and lots of people, for lots and lots of semi-related reasons.
- The Future Noone Is Ready For: This is a link to an edition of Taylor Lorenz’s newsletter from earlier this week; the pertinent bit is the essay uptop, where Lorenz gives a brief rundown of a confected controversy involving annoyingly-goodlooking leftwing streamer Hasan Piker and allegations of animal abuse (seriously, it is all SO STUPID) and then goes on to explain why this sort of rubbish is something we are just going to have to get used to now because, as I have been saying for fcuking YEARS now, the ability to ascertain what is ‘real’ is now pretty much entirely beyond a vast swathe of people, and there’s a whole OTHER set of people who are actively being remunerated for spreading falsehoods (by platforms who continue, despite this, to trumpet their commitment to ‘information quality’ and the like). Honestly, Sora to this toxic soup and it’s hard not to get a *touch* freaked out. “AI will inevitably make all of this worse. Deepfake video generation tools are being rolled out en masse while media literacy plummets. Bad actors who are already comfortable manipulating real footage will begin fabricating videos of their targets or subtly altering them. AI will also make it easier to search, catalog, and weaponize every video ever recorded. Finding all available clips of someone making the wrong hand gesture, or wearing a specific color, or moving their body in a certain way could be as easy as clicking a few buttons.” We could…we could have done something to prevent this, you know! Oh well!
- Prediction is the Successor to Postmodernism: I feel I should be clear about this from the outset – THIS IS A BAD AND STUPID ESSAY FEATURING POOR-QUALITY THINKING AND ANALYSIS THAT WILL BE PAINFUL TO READ. But! I am including it anyway, because I think it’s useful to see exactly what sort of fcuking batsh1t, ‘stoned undergrad at 3am’-style screeds everyone’s favourite VCs Andreessen Horowitz (yes, they’re back!) are using to inform their ‘thinking’ these days. Basically, EVERYTHING IS A MARKET NOW and predicting the success of something is…er…art? Look, this doesn’t make ANY sense and I get the near-overwhelming scent of cocaine sweat from quite a large proportion of the text, but let me just reproduce this bit for you because FCUKING HELL THESE PEOPLE ARE IN SOME WAY DETERMINING THE FUTURE TRAJECTORY OF THE PLANET AND THIS SHOULD NOT BE THE CASE, LISTEN TO THIS FCUKING IDIOCY: “So what is an actually new art form? I don’t consider myself a contemporary art connoisseur, but I am pretty online. And there’s a definite art form emerging, which is public predictions that go really well or really badly. Another kind of art, which may make you mad, is NFTs and even more so Meme Coins. Because, 1) if suggesting something is art makes people Rite of Spring-level furious, you have something interesting; and 2), because they are a pure demonstration of public predictions as art, and the meaning of a thing being when you interact with it.” It would be funny if it wasn’t so, well, dumb. You know that (tedious and frankly lazy) line “A stupid person’s idea of a clever thing”? Well this is a very stupid person’s idea of DEEP THINKING. BONUS STUFF ON PREDICTIONS: it was curious to me, though, that this essay appeared around the same time as this paper on the ability of LLMs to ‘predict’ future events, and the degree to which they are approaching ‘expert superforecaster’ levels of predictive ability…
- What A Data Centre Is: A useful, practical explainer of exactly what a data centre practically IS – helpful given the extent to which that term’s being bandied around willy-nilly by people who, I’m willing to guess, don’t really know what the words mean beyond ‘big building, full of computer’. This is both an explanation of the what, and also of the ‘why’ in terms of ‘why they are actually environmentally efficient, at least compared to NOT having data centres’ – which, yes, ok, does make sense, but doesn’t answer the fundamental questions around whether this stuff is in fact a good use of what are, it’s becoming increasingly apparent, our RAPIDLY-DWINDLING environmental resources.
- Why China Builds AI Boyfriends: This piece is actually a comparison of the markets for AI companions in the US and China, and looks at how in the West the userbase seems to skew towards men seeking ‘girlfriends’ while in China there’s more of a focus on female users seeking male avatars to, er, pursue fictitious romance with. The stuff on the US market you will already know, in all likelihood – presuming that is you spend as much time ingesting news about AI companions as I do, which, on reflection, I actually really hope that you don’t – but the stuff on China, including some of the mechanical features embedded into companions which you don’t tend to get here; for example, “Duxiang’s AI WeChat Friend Circle allows AI partners to actively post on social media and interact with both users and other AI characters, mimicking real Chinese social media patterns. The company has even developed a wristband with Near-Field Communication (NFC) chips2 that connects to specific AI characters. When tapped on a phone, the AI character will appear on the screen to provide updates or show care, which builds physical connection in existing digital relationships.” Fascinating, if DEEPLY weird.
- The Sora2 Prompting Guide: I saw earlier this morning that ‘Pro’ Sora users are getting the ability to create 25s clips, which OH DEAR GOD OUR SHARED SENSE OF WHAT IS REAL (on which note, you can read some additional words by me on that specific topic RIGHT HERE should you so wish) – even if you don’t have access to the model, this prompting guide (by OpenAI, no less) is a really interesting look at How This Stuff Works Right Now, in particular the fact that super-granular instructions work better and it (still) helps to remember that it’s useful to speak to The Machine like it’s very dumb and very literal. Worth a look if you use any text-to-video models, to be honest, or if you’re interesting in experimenting.
- Protesting As A Frog: I’ve quite enjoyed the memetic revival of the frog over the past few weeks, this time as an avatar for the left rather than the chaosfash, and this piece, in 404 Media, explains a bit about how and why the frog costume has captured the imagination and why, in general, inflatable outfits are a smart choice for modern protestors – the reasons are slightly-grim, if i’m honest (you’re harder to gas! You’re harder to identify via AI surveillance techniques!), but it’s a really interesting snapshot (and, parenthetically, the contrast between what’s going on in Portland at the moment and the umbrella protests in HK a few years back is FASCINATING purely from an aesthetic point of view; I reckon there’s a decent and VERY PRETENTIOUS essay about What That Says About Modernity, should anyone fancy writing it).
- The Death of Going Viral: This NYT piece isn’t exactly surprising – I think I’ve been posting articles here about how social media is basically dead for 2-3 years now, and the recent news that posting volumes were dropping everywhere apart from the US felt…real and true, right – but it documents an interesting watershed moment which feels real; to whit, nothing goes ‘viral’ anymore, or at least not in the good, wholesome way. When was the last one of those? I reckon the skateboarding guy listening to Fleetwood Mac, probably – the last unproblematic, uncontroversial, ‘everyone just enjoys this and it is a nice, shared collective experience’ moment social media gifted us (the jumbotron couple don’t count as that was born out of schadenfreude rather than PURITY). This is partly an issue of platform fragmentation, and partly a factor of algochasing and altered incentives, and…is it sad? No, give a fcuk, obvs, but it’s an interesting reminder of that brief window in which virality was both a thing and not in itself a curse. RIP clients telling you to ‘make something go viral’, you are wiv da angles.
- What A Like Means: I loved this, on the semiotics of small social media signals – specifically, all the different ways in which people THINK they are communicating when the leave a like on a post or Reel vs all the different ways in which said communication is received by the person upon whom said like is bestowed. The conclusion, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that THERE IS NO COMMON LANGUAGE OF THE LIKE, and that to assume that someone will grasp your unique and nuanced intention when leaving one is, fundamentally, really fcuking dumb. “When one is liking an Instagram story, the action is usually done in a solitary fashion, and, because the social interaction is done in an isolated fashion, it cannot be imbued with a common and shared meaning. A wink across the bar is identified by others and is clearly understood as flirtation because the gesture is perceived by a crowd and exists in a social context. The Instagram Story Like is done under the veil of relative digital secrecy and does not have that common meaning. As danah boyd notes in her paper “Friends, Friendsters, and MySpace Top 8: Writing Community Into Being on Social Network Sites,” social choices made on platforms are “deeply influenced by the technological affordances of a given system and their perception of who might be looking.””
- Everything Is Television: Another reason for the death of social media, of course, is the shift in what the platform is – from something that is a network of people you know (to varying degrees) and interact with, to something that is effectively a delivery system for videos that it thinks you will like, and which you consume by just watching and without needing to do anything at all to keep the entertainments coming. This piece explains a bit about why that’s happens and offers some opinions as to Why It Is Bad – there’s a lot of stuff here about ISOLATION and how, fundamentally, telly is an isolating and solitary medium, and therefore making all media more tellylike (but even moreso given the hyperpersonalised nature of the social video feed) is necessarily going to lead to greater isolation – which I don’t know if I wholly buy, but which FEELS plausible and which I like because it’s another string to my ‘it’s not the fcuking phones it’s what you do with them you fcuking idiots’ Haidt response.
- Meet The Mould Truthers: Having mentioned Unherd earlier on in this section, we now have a link to the largely-unpleasant dogwhistle factory – apologies, but it’s an entertaining read and the link here is to the Internet Archive so you don’t have to feel guilty about giving them the click. In the wake of Jordan Peterson’s daughter confirming that he has some sort of mould-related condition (TIDY YOUR FCUKING HOUSE JORDAN YOU MAD HYPOCRITE CNUT), Poppy Sowerby writes about the weird cultlike community that exists around people who are CONVINCED they have been mould poisoned (or that others have – cf the sadly-bogus JK Rowling mould discourse) – this is basically a bit like morgellons, in that it’s something that it is very hard if not impossible to prove, but which people who buy into it get VERY invested in. This is interesting and funny but contains some tedious Unherd sneering at/about various things – so the people having a go at Rowling are ‘snivelling Redditors’ (because of course for Unherd Rowling is a ‘feminist campaigner’); ignore the editorial vibe, though, and it’s an interesting read.
- The Sims Got Easy: The Sims, now apparently on its 4th iteration, has, per this article, gotten easier and simpler to play over time – WHAT DOES THIS MEAN, THOUGH??? I found the premise/question here a lot more interesting than the essay itself, whose conclusion I respectfully think is, well, b0llocks: “As we’ve become more dependent on points, meters and scores in reality, The Sims has evolved into a regimented guide for life, rather than an opportunity to experiment with it. A 2021 Wired article detailed how a 27-year-old used his in-game experience to manage moving across the country for a demanding new job. “All I had to do was ‘gamify’ my life and pretend that I also had energy meters and progress bars in my daily life,” he explained. “As long as I continue to read and study, while making sure all my stats are in the green, then good things are bound to happen.” One TikTok user encourages her audience to live “like a Sim” for 60 days.” I mean, no – the answer is almost certainly because ‘EA are shameless profitmaxxers and as such realised that smoothing the gameplay edges so as to make it easier and therefore more appealing to casual gamers would significantly increase sales’ – or, perhaps, ‘because games now are either FCUKING NAILS or a piece of p1ss and nothing inbetween’. Still, the question made me THINK, and it may do the same to you.
- Host Kitchens: Fascinating reporting by London Centric, looking at the trend for ‘host kitchens’ – restaurants ostensibly serving one menu and cuisine whose kitchens are also being used to prepare meals from a totally different restaurant for the delivery market. Which, on the one hand, sort-of makes sense, but it does also speak to the…low-quality homogeneity of much of the product offering in big city delivery food these days, the extent to which a lot of this is less cooking and more ‘assembly’, and the question of what exactly it is that you’re paying for when you order wings from the latest viral place that’s been eulogised by one of those moronic TikTok cnuts (sorry, but foodTok is fcuking INSUFFERABLE).
- International Food Luxe: Sticking with the food beat, this is Jay Rayner in the FT talking about the weird world of international luxury franchise dining and the sort of world inhabited by people who will eat ANYWHERE as long as it’s a high-end chain they recognise from home and where they know that they can get the same wine they’re familiar with and the wagyu sliders the kids just LOVE. Obviously this is all kinds of gross, but it’s a good read because, well, who doesn’t love sh1tting on the mediocre taste of the international plute class? NO FCUKER, etc etc.
- The Myth of the Sommellier: I think I might have mentioned here before that, while I obviously LOVE BOOZE, I am not hugely discerning in what I drink and have a longstanding…relationship with the fine products of Casillero del Diablo – which, perhaps, is why I enjoyed this article so much. In it, the anonymous author points out that if you actually look at wine tasting competitions and the general practice of ‘discerning the objective quality of a vintage’, there is so much variance as to suggest that the whole thing is, well, b0llocks, and that ‘good wine’ is simply ‘wine that you like’ and that you should therefore drink whatever you like the taste of most. Which, well, YES, frankly (although if anyone fancies sending me a crate of Fragolino that would be lovely, thanks).
- How Sober Should A Writer Be?: Seamlessly segueing from one boozy piece to another, this is from the Yale Review and looks at (American) writers and their relationship with booze, laments the apparent decline in alcohol’s appearance in modern writing (it’s true that I don’t read anywhere near as many accounts of people getting all fcuked-up, which, let me say it, is a crying shame; see also, I haven’t read a really brutally-described hangover in years, which is another particular favourite novelistic trope of mine) and talks about a selection of writers and their relationship to the drink. It focuses in the main on Fitzgerald, who famously enjoyed a booze or two, and contains some wonderful observations on his drink-related writing: “Most of Fitzgerald’s missives involve some degree of “tippling.” In the course of one letter, he goes from “I am quite drunk” to “Oh Christ! I’m sobering up!” to “I am quite drunk again and enclose a postage stamp.” It’s a marvelous bit. It’s also not a bit. Reading On Booze can be painful. One is left wincing, watching such an exquisite talent toy with the weapon of his own destruction. It feels almost parasitic to enjoy this writing so much.”
- Project Pigeon: Would you like to learn about how, in WWII, pigeons were conscripted as, er, biological bomb guidance systems? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! Honestly, this is fcuking MAD: “They also worked with General Mills to design a system for translating the bird’s movements into mechanical steering guidance. Marian would cut the toes off men’s socks and slide the birds into them. They tied their legs with shoestring. After some trial and error, a final harness and steering system was developed with help from the General Mills engineer who had designed, among other things, the Toastmaster.” Astonishing (and, er, probably not one to read if you’re sensitive and the thought of pigeons being blown up upsets you unduly).
- Clever Hans: You may have previously heard the story of the counting horse which, it was discovered, couldn’t actually count but was VERY GOOD at working out when to stop tapping his hoof based on the excitement of his trainer; this is the LONG version. Clever Hans (for that is the horse’s name, turns out) had a LIFE, and this is a brilliantly-written account of both him and the motivated hucksters who were keen to pass him off as a cognitive miracle. Honestly, this is a joy throughout and full of cracking lines – the one about the elephant here, for example, is PERFECT: “A wealthy manufacturer and vigorous man, Krall’s family had initially grown rich from a successful jewelry business. If he lacked von Osten’s eccentricity, Krall matched almost exactly his predecessor’s obsessive dedication to demonstrating the intelligence of his horse. On his land Krall built a large barn for Clever Hans and two others, Mohammed and Zarif. Collectively they were known as the “Elberfeld horses”. Krall trained all his animals, including an elephant who proved to be a disappointment, intellectually speaking, to communicate and perform mathematical feats of calculation.”
- Fear and Laughing in Riyadh: Colleague and occasional Curios reader Helen Lewis (HI HELEN) got sent to Riyadh by the Atlantic to write up the recent comedy festival at which a host of UK and US comedians were paid apparently BIG BUCKS to go and give the Saudis a laugh BUT ALSO DON’T MENTION BEHEADINGS OR BEING GAY OR GEOPOLITICS IN GENERAL – this did the rounds yesterday, and rightly so because it is a fcuking CRACKING piece, genuinely hilarious in places but also dripping with the disdain that one should rightly feel for people like Jimmy Carr (although in fairness we do always forget that he worked for Shell before doing standup, suggesting his approach to who he’s willing to take cash from has at least always been consistently-amoral). Smart, sharp and really well-written, this should be on lots of end-of-year best of lists, and rightly so: “After 9/11, though, the House of Saud was becoming alarmed about what it had indulged—and exported—by giving the clerics such power. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi, as was Osama bin Laden, the son of a well-to-do family in the construction business. In 2003, al-Qaeda stopped being other people’s problem, as some of its terrorists carried out a wave of suicide bombings in Riyadh. Potential jihadists have been deradicalized in specialist prisons through intensive lessons in correct Islam—plus money for a dowry and maybe even the gift of a Toyota. “No Saudi official will admit it on the record that the Kingdom’s terrorist problem might boil down to sexual frustration,” Robert Lacey wrote in his book Inside the Kingdom in 2010, “but if a social system bans hot-blooded young men from contact with the opposite sex during their most hot-blooded years, perhaps it is hardly surprising if some of them channel this frustration into violence.” Bored young men in the Gulf once turned to jihad; now they have Jimmy Carr making jokes about dildos. This is called progress.”
- Howl, The AI Hipster Edit: Look, you might not THINK that you want to read a reworked version of Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’, recast so as to be an account of the ‘AI headed hipsters’ of the Valley and beyond, but I promise you that this is much, much better than you’d expect something with this description to be. No, really, it is! There is meter and cadence and FLOW, and I would honestly be very happy to lie on some beanbags and get very, very stoned while someone with a nice voice read this aloud to me, should anyone wish to make that very specific event take place. “I saw the best minds of my generation distracted by machines, shining-eyed delusional demo gods, rubbering through polished cities at dusk Capitalizing The Next Big Push to the end of Introspection…” – see? Honestly, it really does work, promise.
- Life In Prison to the Eras Tour: Joe Garcia killed a man in an altercation over drugs in 2003; he was released from prison on parole this year. He achieved a degree of fame a few years back, writing from prison about his love for Taylor Swift – here, the New Yorker commissions him to write about his time inside, framed by Swift and his attendance at a gig on the Eras tour; this isn’t the best writing in here this week, but it’s intimate and moving and honest and self-aware, and I really enjoyed reading it.
- Queen of Darts: A piece all about the OTHER darts championship – not the annual Christmas cirrhosis-and-gakfest at Ally Pally but the Dutch Open, apparently the largest in the world by number of participants. This is, honestly, GREAT – whether or not you like darts it’s just wonderfully written, contains some excellent anecdotes and characters and does a GREAT job of communicating the unique, weirdly-feral atmosphere of hedonistic, messy revelry that is THE DARTS. “This year, in 2019, 5,857 entrants have paid their 22.50 Euros to take a chance at some kind of glory while thousands more have come to swirl and gawk and cheer. And as I pop out of the tree line, there is that heat. Already, the patio of the De Bonte Wever is overrun by the clamor and the smoke of hundreds of dartspersons happily getting beer-drunk before noon. Inside, a complex of carpeted conference rooms has been made over with batches of plywood and partition walls covered in blue tarp. Before, perhaps, there would have been metal fold-up chairs. Drowsy lectures. Now, everywhere, there are the demarcation lines known as oches and dartboards, and, everywhere, there are children and women and men smashing darts into them, thwack thwack thwack, three at a time. There is a feel here akin to the World Series of Poker—the hope, the collective desire, is that a complete unknown will make a madman-run to glory. Players are surrounded by clusters of supporters, and as they wheel around after a victory they’re greeted with fist-pounds, back-slaps, skull-slaps, howls, and sighs of relief. “Da return of da legend!” comes, in a clipped accent, from atop the din of one such cluster. They are all here for you, enjoying the reflected flow of your temporary glow.” Thanks to reader Keith Griffin for sending this to me – thanks also to Keith for opening his email with the line ‘as a former vicar’ which, ngl, was an unexpected insight into the Curios demography that I really appreciated. Anyone else out there a person of the cloth, current or lapsed? ABSOLVE ME SOMEONE, PLEASE, CLEANSE ME OF THE FILTH!
- Me and My Censor: Finally this week, a beautiful piece of writing by Murong Xuecun from a few months ago, on China, social media, moderation, rebellion, society, fear and small acts of resistance as heroism – so so so good, not just interesting but with a really distinctive and pleasing voice. A really strong recommendation, this one, should you be inclined to trust me (WHY THOUGH?).
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS !:
