Is there any more perfectly-on-the-nose IMAGE FOR OUR TIMES than the latest COP being delayed because the conference venue it’s being held in has literally burst into flames? If there is, please keep it to yourself because, honestly, I don’t think I can deal right now.
Meanwhile here in the UK we have been granted the SHOCKING INSIGHT that the people running our country during the pandemic were – and this is possibly going to come as a surprise! – useless egotistical cnuts whose vacillation and inaction and, in several cases, abject cowardice and craven stupidity, cost the lives of literally tens of thousands of people. Oh, and the person currently the media’s pick to be the next PM was a proud racist throughout his school days. Oh, and we’re going to be making life even less pleasant for people feeling global persecution because large swathes of the electorate have had their critical faculties removed by several decades of billionaire-financed right-wing propaganda and, latterly, Facebook Groups.
On balance, it’s been a CRACKER of a seven days, and I still haven’t started contemplating the inevitable Horrors of Christmas. SO! What better way to cope with All Of This Relentless Sh1t than by ignoring most of it entirely and retreating into the comforting mirrorworld of the web, where the 1s and 0s probably can’t hurt you (any more than they already are) and where you can pretend that all that exists is CREATIVITY and ART and INTERESTING WORDS and it’s not in fact all meat and gristle and hatred.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should read the obit at the end if nothing else this week, it really is a treat.
Still taken from an old TV show called ‘Edge of Darkness’ by my friend Josh
THE SECTION WHICH BASED ON THIS MORNING MIGHT BE GETTING DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO ALMOST CARING ABOUT CRICKET, PT.1:
- Search All The Epstein Documents: It’s testament to the typically BREAKNECK PACE OF EXISTENCE that the release of the Epstein estate documents by the House Oversight Committee now feels like it might have happened in approximately 2017 rather than, er, last week – SO MUCH HAPPENING, ALL OF IT SO POSITIVE! Anyway, should you still be keen to further explore the power and influence networks of an incredibly rich dead paedophile (a brief aside: I think there is something VERY WEIRD and deeply, deeply unpleasant about the inevitable ‘well actually’-ing that you get around stuff like this from people INCREDIBLY keen to litigate the technical differences between different types of noncery, and I am weirdly annoyed at the fact that certain corners of the internet seem determined to educate me as to the precise meaning of the term ‘ephebophile’ every time this sort of horror comes up. SEMANTICS ARE NOT THE DEFENCE YOU THINK THEY ARE!) then this is the motherlode – EVERYTHING in here which has in part already been tagged and filleted so that you can scroll down the right and click on whichever famous politician or plute you like to see all the different ways in which their names emerge in the Epsteinian web. This is, per the horde of documents themselves, an ungodly, disordered mess and it would take someone with more time and significantly more interest and dedication than me to pull threads from it, but dipping in and out at random does give a vague, top-level impression of the networks and the influence, and, without wishing to sound like (more of) a total wingnut here, it’s I think important to remember that beyond a certain level of wealth and power this is how EVERYONE works – not the noncing, thank fcuk, but the string-pulling and the levers and the favours and the intros and the manoeuvering and the tinpot machiavellianism.
- The Shadow of the Czar: Two caveats to this one: a) it’s an AI game/toy thing, so if that gives you feelings of immediate, kneejerk visceral horror then, well, grow the fcuk up, but also maybe skip this; and b) this will, should you be browsing on a laptop as old and wheezy as mine, fcuk your kit somewhere into 2026. Still! If you can make it work without your computer fan attempting to take off then you will find a REALLY interesting experiment in integrating AI tools into gamemaking; this uses a seed from ‘give us a picture, the AI will turn it into EXPLORABLE WORLDS’ tool Marble (see Curios passim), and it’s stitched a bunch of these together to create a small noir-ish mystery game; wander round the city, talk to people, solve clues…this is far more interesting than were it ‘just’ AI – there’s voicework and video and PUZZLES and stuff, and it feels a lot more in the vein of one of those ambitious-but-actually-quite-sh1t old CD-Rom games like The Seventh Guest (approximately three of you will get that reference, I think) than something AI (to my mind at least, anyway). As with all of this stuff, it’s not GOOD per se but it is really, really interesting and technically slightly-astonishing – if you’re curious, this post explains a bit about the workflow (and why it counts as actual creative work imho).
- Cloudhiker: I’m…possibly-unreasonably quite annoyed with myself that I don’t appear to have found or featured this in the few years since its creation (don’t worry, the self-flagellation and bloodletting will recommence just as soon as I’ve finished typing and my fingers have scabbed over again), given it’s basically RIGHT UP MY STREET. Cloudhiker is the nth attempt to bring back THE MAGIC OF STUMBLEUPON (even though we and the web have all moved on, and, in the very realest of senses, you can never, ever go back because the past is dead) – you can pick a bunch of categories that you’re interested in and hit a button and get taken to INTERESTING RANDOM WEBSITES, curated by…whoever’s behind the site, all tagged with your selected themes. Obviously I’ve only scratched the surface of this but it feels a bit like ‘Curios, but rated U’ – I don’t think you’re going to find any weird, niche bongo or upsettingly-schizophrenia-adjacent webcreators here is all I’m saying. Still, if you’re after a way of exploring DIFFERENT BITS OF THE WEB then this is an excellent jumping off point, and has reminded me that I really ought to bully someone into building me the ‘take me to a random Curio’ function on the website sometime soon. BONUS RANDOM INTERNET LINKS: I am in two minds about including this given Curios 100% ought to be in here and isn’t for some annoying reason, but I am MAGNANIMOUS and GIVING and as such will put aside my petty resentment and link to this actually quite good spreadsheet FULL of all sorts of interesting, curious, fun webby links, a bit like a backend featuring about 1% of the Curios corpus but without all the irritating words. A good place to start should you want to just annihilate an hour with webspaff and, honestly, who doesn’t? NO FCUKER, etc!
- BlueskyNews: Technically this is called ‘Stonking News’, but given the fact that that term is sadly indelibly linked in my mind to this I will instead give it a different name. BlueskyNews “monitors the Bluesky firehose in real-time, tracking all link posts, including World News, Regional News, and Gift Articles. We score each link post using a proprietary weighted algorithm that ensures the most popular, and freshly trending content is always picked up.” Obviously this is Bluesky so the news does rather skew the way you might expect, but, well, I’m fine with that because I’m an annoying lefty scold too! The main problem with this as far as I can see is the lack of diversity of sources, but that’s not so much a tool problem as a user problem (so, er, also a tool problemzzzzzzzzzzzzzz) -still, you can cut between different verticals (tech, gaming, sports – THE ONLY THINGS THAT MATTER, seemingly) and get a vague temperature check on what a tiny, largely-insignificant number of people on an isolated and probably-dying social network think is most important RIGHT NOW! Oh, and also this is obviously HORRIFICALLY-US-CENTRIC, or at least it will be when they all wake up – at 730am UK time it is currently the COVID inquiry and England’s batting collapse, as it should be.
- Panda Story: This a calling card for the skills of a digital agency called Digital Panda, which I normally wouldn’t bother with but it’s SUCH a beautiful piece of digital design and build work, which uses scrollytelling (I AM SORRY) to deliver some really quite gorgeous and fluid animation work as it tells a (n admittedly slightly-generic, but I’m going to forgive them because, well, it’s a fcuking ad for an agency not a short film) story of a PLUCKY YOUNG PANDA and its RESISTANCE against an EVIL CORPORATION…yes, fine, you get the gist, but I promise you that you will be slightly in awe at how beautifully coded and built this is, and how smoothly it all works; you really could almost make a cartoon in this style and with this sort of functionality (and, then, some more interactivity over the top) should you wish, which feels quite exciting. Also, despite my kvetching I quite like the panda character here, so there’s another reason to click.
- The Muzik Magazine Archives: Were YOU alive in the UK in the 1990s? Were you of an age where you got to take pills and dance in fields/carparks/converted warehouses and have long 6am chats about how actually you were all participating in an act of social collective resistance by getting boxed off your tits on ecstasy? CONGRATULATIONS YOU ARE NEARLY DEAD NOW! But also, you will REALLY like this astonishing archive of old issues of Muzik Magazine, along with DJ Mag one of the Big Beasts of dance culture in the UK at that period – I forget whether it was DJ or Muzik (it was Mixmag, turns out) which one year (1997-8) ran a front cover feature celebrating a particularly good new batch of ecstasy that was doing that rounds that summer with a picture of one of said pills in massive close-up and the tagline ‘Mitzus – The Pill That Saved Clubland’, something I think you might struggle to get past the regulator in 2025 – and a sort of time-capsule retelling of the evolution of the dance scene from fringe counterculture to firmly-mainstream concern within the space of a decade. These are full scans of each mag and so you really can go deep, but the covers alone are a really interesting bit of capsule timetravel and you can learn a lot about culture, fashion, language and, honestly, how ASTONISHINGLY male this was; like, there are no women ANYWHERE on these covers which feels…weird.
- A Small Time Travel Machine: This is a small webtoy spun up by Ethan Mollick as part of his testing of the new Google AI model, Gemini3, released this week; there’s more on that in the longreads, but I thought this worth including as an example of where ‘vibecoding’ (sorry sorry I hate that term too sorry) is at in late-2025; this was apparently all coded and tweaked within the conversational Gemini interface, which is…impressive honestly. The thing itself is silly – tell the machine where you want to go and what time period, and it will imagine a little textual vignette and a small image to illustrate it, nothing more – but it’s interesting that something that’s genuinely fun and diverting and moderately-interesting can just be majicked out of thin air like this (YES I KNOW IT’S NOT MAGIC YES I KNOW IT’S KILLING THE PLANET BUT SO ARE ALL THE REST OF US AND SO ARE YOU).
- The Nick Cave Exhibition: I’m not personally a huge fan of Cave the musician (HERESY, I know, but it’s simply never been my thing), but I have long been a sucker for Cave the novelist (while an adaptation of The Death of Bunny Monroe is currently on TV in the UK, I’ve always been of the opinion that the hugely-overwritten ‘wasp factory but appalachian and more biblical and mad’ novel ‘And The Ass Saw The Angel’ was his magnum opus, and I recommend it unreservedly to those of you who can handle prose that might best be described as ‘a bit much’) and in general I think he’s one of the most interesting artists of the past 50 years, and I know LOADS of people love him, so, well, here! “Welcome to Stranger Than Kindness: The Virtual Nick Cave Exhibition. An immersive digital experience that brings the creative universe of Nick Cave to life in unprecedented detail. This exhibition displays more than 300 objects, which span six decades of Cave’s remarkable career, providing a unique lens into the life of Cave, his artistic processes and the themes that resonate through his work. The new and exclusive audio guide features insights from Nick Cave himself, in conversation with curator Christina Back.” In terms of user experience this is a fairly standard ‘digital museum in a box’-type thing – you navigate around the museum ‘space’, you click stuff, you learn about it – but the contents and the multimedia elements here are interesting and if you’re a Cave fan (and you didn’t see this in its original Copenhagen installation) then I imagine that this will be a favourite.
- The Best Lighting Website I Have Ever Seen: In fact this might be my favourite little bit of digital design of the year. Click the link. Land on the page. Toggle the little switch in the top right that’s labeled ‘light’. MARVEL AT THE BEAUTY! Honestly, this is SO SIMPLE and yet so beautiful that I feel it ought to be taught at school – ok, I’m fcuked if I know exactly what it is meant to impart but it feels like it ought to be imparting *something*.
- Draw A Cool ‘S’: Prolific creator of internet gubbins Matt Round is on something of a productivity tear at the moment – hot on the heels of his fun ‘a book full of coding projects’ offering last week, this week comes a small, silly, but oddly-difficult challenge. Click the link and see how quickly you can draw the ‘cool s’ from memory. I think this was more of an American thing to be honest – I know the shape, yes, but I don’t recall there ever being any sort of playground cachet from being able to render it, unless there was a separate area where all the cool kids hung out OH GOD THERE WAS WASN’T THERE – but, regardless of your memory of it this is a pleasing 5 minute diversion and, honestly, take these while you can because it’s all going get really relentless again soon, I can feel it.
- Vector Swipe: A toy made by someone called Brent – HI BRENT SHOULD YOU EVER SEE THIS – which lets you type in an input and then, once the AI model (Llama, I think) has spat out its initial image you get to swipe left and right in the now-inescapable Tinder-style interface to further refine and direct it towards your desired destination. This is in no way useful as a way of actually making something specific, but it is quite a fun way of gambolling through odd bits of latent space, and the generator occasionally throws up some interestingly-weird outputs; I quite enjoyed playing with this, and it’s strangely-pleasing as a thumbtwiddling exercise should you be in the mood to do something other than staring dumbly at Reels while you wait for the bus and die of cold.
- R74n: SO MANY FUN WEBTOYS! Seriously, there’s a lot of frivolous hobbyproject coding here, from chef simulators to Actual Sandboxes and, my favourite, a tool which lets you ‘browse every single ant on earth’ which is utterly inexplicable but also, possibly ART.
- Memory Palaces: A beautiful site commemorating London’s old cinemas – this is SUCH a lovely history project. “From the early days of ‘animated pictures’ in the 1890s right up to the present-day era of multiplexes and community cinemas, London’s cinema history has spanned the whole breadth of the city. When cinema-going was at its peak in the 1940s every neighbourhood had numerous cinemas within walking distance of each other. At the heart of Memory Palaces is information about cinemas, past and present, in every corner of the capital. Photographs showing what they look like today accompany each entry. Instead of attempting a complete history of London’s cinemas, I’ve chosen to tell a single story that happened at each one. My hope is that as you read the stories and click through the connective links a whole picture of London’s picture palaces emerges – one that’s been more than a century in the making.” There is a lot of love and care here and it’s the sort of thing that I can imagine being a perfect ‘visit all the cool old cinemas’ project for the right kind of obsessional architecture buff (but maybe not until it doesn’t physically hurt your ears to be outside SO COLD).
- MorseMePlease: It’s not just me who reads the phrase ‘Morse Me Please’ as, well, filthy, is it? Good! Have you ever wondered ‘what if ChatRoulette or Omegle but with fewer unsolicited pen1ses being waved at you by men with poorly-explored boundary issues and instead LOTS more Morse Code? OF COURSE YOU HAVE! This is, basically ‘ChatRoulette But For Morse Code’ – you get matched with a stranger and you can talk to them about whatever you like, as long as said conversation happens exclusively via the medium of dots and dashes. Honestly, if you can turn THIS into a sexting/w4nking platform then I am slightly in awe.
- Blank Spaces: One of the regular ‘hacks’ (fcuk me do I hate that phrase) rolled out to help limit one’s phone use is to turn the display monochromatic – the idea being that the lack of bright, popping colours will disincentivise us to click on all those tempting icons. No idea if that works or not – why would I want to spend *less* time online?! – but if you like that idea but want something more, well, stylish, then you might like Blank Spaces, which basically redoes your phone’s UI to turn it into an ultraminimalist black and white scrolly text menu (oh, and you can set time-based app locks and that sort of stuff too should you need or desire). Yes, fine, I know that that means NOTHING to you but click the fcuking link and ALL will become clear. This is actually a lovely bit of design which I personally think should exist as a default option on all devices.
- Websites of the Year: Obviously the Tiny Awards are the ONLY annual website awards that count, but seeing as we like to celebrate digital creativity here at Web Curios (‘we’? Fcuk’s sake, sorry, NEVER AGAIN) ReadyMag’s ‘Website of the Year’ contest feels like the sort of thing that ought to be included. This year’s selection tends significantly more commercial and expensive than the Tiny Awards, but there are some nice picks in here – why, though, is the awards website itself so incredibly fcuking ugly? Seriously, click the link, it’s a horrorshow and I can’t quite understand how or why.
- Deflock Me: Only of interest to readers unfortunate enough to be living in North America, this site maps the location of (apparently) every single Automatic License Plate Recognition camera setup in the country (the name is because the largest provide of that software is a company called ‘Flock’) so that you can avoid them or mitigate your behaviour accordingly. Why? “ALPRs are a serious risk to your privacy and civil liberties. These systems continuously record people’s movements without a warrant, probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion. Your driving history is rarely confined to the town or city where the cameras are installed. It’s typically shared with thousands of other agencies nationwide (secretly). Once the data is out of your community, you have no control over how it’s used or what rules apply.” On the one hand I am a big fan of the fact that these sorts of datagathering and sharing projects exist; on the other, it does feel a *bit* like a somewhat cnut-ish stand against a very inevitable tide that is coming in at pace.
- The Billionaire Migration Map: Where do they come from? Where do they go? Well, according to this map of the world’s richest, where they are born and where they end up living, a surprising number of them choose to live in London or New York (or obviously they did until the advent of FULL COMMUNIST SHARIA LAW following the Mamdani win – hang on, don’t we have that here with Sadiq Khan too? And yet the billionaires stay? How confusing!), but also Paris and Instanbul and, basically, all the sorts of cities you might choose to hang out in were you richer than God. This is more ‘hm, interesting’ than ‘wow, revelatory’, but it’s good to be able to get a handle on which cities specifically are setting themselves up as comfortable financial havens for the world’s plutiest plutes.
- Birdfeed Live: COLLABORATIVE BIRDWATCHING! This is such a nice idea, honestly, and another really nice example of multiplayer thinking in website design: “BirdFeed Live uses a simple, real-time voting system that lets viewers steer the camera together. Every few seconds your browser sends a small anonymous vote for the preset you tap, and the server blends everyone’s choices into a single “crowd decision.” When a preset builds enough support, the PTZ camera moves there smoothly. No accounts, no tracking — just lightweight live voting.” This is just really soothing and I love the fact that there’s a small ‘expression of collective will’ element to the shot selection, and were it not for the fact that it’s currently the middle of the night in (I think) North America where the cameras are set up I would totally spend the next hour or so just enjoying this. BONUS BIRD: a free PDF of a 2026 calendar featuring drawings of birds that you can print out and enjoy should you so wish.
By Younguk Yi
NEXT UP, HAVE AN UPLIFTING HOUSE SET MIXED AND SENT TO ME BY BIZ IN SOUTH AFRICA!
THE SECTION WHICH BASED ON THIS MORNING MIGHT BE GETTING DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO ALMOST CARING ABOUT CRICKET, PT.2:
- The Hacienda Mixes: The second old-school clubbing link in this week’s Curios, this is a WONDERFUL selection of mixes from Manchester’s Hacienda, in many respects the birthplace of the 90s clubbing boom in the UK and Factory Records and NOSTALGIA blah blah blah…look, this is either a time capsule back to the days when you had hair and could stay up for three days straight without feeling like someone had taken your skin, turned it inside out, rolled in in sand and then zipped you back up inside it again, or alternatively it’s a curious museum of What Your Dad Might Have Danced To – either way, though, there are 11 sets here from the late-1980s and early-90s that are perfect timecapsules back to (what I imagine was – I am not THAT old) a riotously-fun time of high-quality ecstasy, mad-eyed scallies experiencing love for the first time and some doubtless-borderline-criminal promoters. Oh, and there was the music too, fine – what’s interesting about this, to my more modern ears, is now…almost tame it sounds, relatively slow, and also how hopeful – this is just bang-up happy party tunes, which might be WHAT WE ALL NEED IN THESE DARK TIMES. Double-drop and forget about Tuesday, er, man.
- Restaurants in Peace: Do you have a favourite restaurant that no longer exists? Mine are Terroirs near Trafalgar Square in London, a French place that had a counter bar where I used to get p1ssed and eat charcuterie with girlfriends and from which I still have a litre-sized bottle of wine with which I fell in love, and 108 Garage which briefly existed in Notting Hill and was for a short time my absolute favourite place in the world. What are YOURS? Actually this is a genuine question, I would honestly love to hear. Anyway, that is the premise behind this lovely project, started in 2019 and still going, which seeks to collect memories about formerly-loved restaurants that are sadly no longer with us; this is US-only and covers a dozen or so cities, but I would honestly love to see this expanded into a global project; I think (apologies for the w4nkiness here) that there’s something actually quite important about restaurants in terms of mapping the changing fabric and tastes of a city, and recording the ones that no longer exist is a useful way of helping to chart the shifting demographic realities of an urban environment (I SAID I WAS SORRY). I really do like this a lot.
- Narrative Constellations: OH YES this is good. “Narrative Constellations is a class at the School for Poetic Computation taught by April Soetarman with assistant teacher Lee Beckwith. The class is for artists and writers wanting to explore storytelling through choice, time, and location-based narratives across different mediums, from objects to spaces to sunsets. This website is a collection of participants’ work from the course.” This is lovely – don’t think too much, just click through and around and see where you end up, and you will find yourself exploring narrative experiences around (say) someone’s experiences of packing to emigrate from India to the US, or someone’s daily rituals around drinking, or ‘a heartwarming story of AI sabotage involving IKEA instruction manuals’. This whole site is a glorious portal to strange, small experimental pieces of art and storytelling and it is perfect.
- Life Under The Ice: Ooh, this is cool (also, if you’re the sort of person who spends any time thinking about things like ‘permafrost’ and ‘buried bacteria from millennia ago, pregnant with terrible promise and waiting to wreak generations-old havoc on our unsuspecting flesh’ then maybe skip this one as I feel it might give you the fantods): “Life Under the Ice is an exploratory tour through the microscopic world of Antarctica, created by Ariel Waldman. Each microbe tells a story of the weird and whimsical life in Antarctica that is otherwise invisible to the naked eye. Typically when we think about Antarctica, we think of a place that’s barren and lifeless… except for a few penguins. But Antarctica should instead be known as a polar oasis of life, host to countless creatures that are utterly fascinating. They’ve just been invisible to us – until now. Life Under the Ice enables anyone to delve into the microscopic world of Antarctica as an explorer; as if you had been shrunk down and were wading through one large petri dish of curiosities.” This is quite cool, although equally to the untrained eye everything here just looks like ‘tiny mass of cells’ – also, per my earlier snarky note about permafrost, I have just come across something which is labelled only as ‘microbe awaiting identification’ which has now made me think of ancient ice ebola coming to get us, so, well, THANKS, WEBSITE.
- ColourVenn: Ok, so I don’t totally understand what is happening here but I REALLY like the way it looks and, well, that’s what counts (or at least it is on this specific occasion). Basically this is a venn-ish representation of 128 colour combinations derived from an initial set of seven individual colours – which, fine, might not sound interesting, but I promise you will enjoy the way it’s displayed here and in particular the way you can flip the colourvenn round to see how the shades manifest based on their constituent parts (again, it will make sense I promise). No fcuking clue on all the maths stuff that is definitely going here, though.
- ColourPalette Pro: Another colour-related website that I don’t wholly understand! This is a VERY cool interface for making colour palettes, I think, designed to look like a synthesiser with KNOBS and SWITCHES and BUTTONS (aside from anything else, the graphical design on this – the shading in particular – is very satisfying and very tactile). There don’t appear to be any instructions here, and none of the knobs are labeled in a way that make sense to me, so I have literally NO IDEA what I am doing as I push and click and drag and gawp at the pretty colours changing – er, look, I appreciate that what I have done here is the linky equivalent of asking a dog to explain time, but trust me when I say that this is worth a look for any of you who understand colour or design or palettes or any of those things, or if you just really want to see what ‘a synth, but for colours’ looks like.
- Dust to Digital: A project to seek to digitise and preserve old audio recordings – this is a lovely initiative which has been going for years as far as I can tell; the linked page here is the sort of overview, but at the bottom you can find links to their Soundcloud and Spotify presences where you can listen to selections of the old songs in question, 20thC blues and bluegrass and jazz and folk and all sorts of old vinyl now existing as 1s and 0s on a server somewhere for as long as the power stays on…this is such a lovely act of preservation and a generally Good Thing, imho. “Our goal is to build a database complete with audio, discographical information, artist and composer biographies, song lyrics and notation. Our hope for this database is that it will serve as a musical Rosetta Stone for future generations by showing the links and cross-influences of the many musical styles captured on phonograph records in the first half of the 20th century. While the database is being constructed, we have been able to supply digital recordings to discographers, writers, and publishers such as Bear Family, Dust-to-Digital, Omnivore, Oxford American, and the Smithsonian.” See?
- The Phrack Archive: Ok, this is a small slice of digital history – a thin, niche slice, fine, but a slice nonetheless. Phrack is a hacker community zine of long-standing, and while I am pretty sure that very few of you reading this are in fact 1337 h4xx0r I think some of you might be interested in the broader culture and vibe contained in these (many) pages – from the homepage blurb, “For 40 years, Phrack has published papers that have reflected and shaped hacker culture. The knowledge shared in Phrack has laid the foundation for many fields of study, providing insight, a shared language, resources and tools, as well as context and history. Phrack is written by hackers, for hackers, and offers a glimpse into the world just beyond what most people see. Phrack is both a technical journal and a cultural document. Like all zines, it represents a snapshot of the scene at the time. We share not just our discoveries, but the stories of how we came to know things and the context in which we existed. We share our triumphs, failures, and lessons learned. By fostering a culture of communal idea sharing, we learn how to solve problems creatively, and make the most of our current situation.” I do honestly think that one of the very best things about the web is our ability to find and preserve communities like this; I know that digital decay is real, fine, but it does occasionally feel like we are at least attempting to build up a wide and deep corpus of at least recent history, which is…good?
- Dream Bank: Due to persistent and habitual marijuana abuse I don’t think I have actually had a dream since approximately…oh, God, decades? Anyway, while everyone knows that there is almost NOTHING less interesting in recorded history than listening to other people tell you their FASCINATING SUBCONSCIOUS SLEEPVOMIT, I appreciate that there might be some of you for whom an online repository of EVERY DREAM EVER might be of use – if nothing else it feels like a scrape of this plus some light LLMing could produce some fun results. “Welcome to The DreamBank, a collection of over 20,000 dream reports. The reports come from a variety of different sources and research studies — but NOT from dream-collecting Web sites — from people ages 7 to 74, and they can be analyzed using the search engine and statistical programs built into this site. The publicly-accessible dream reports in the DreamBank have been “anonymized”: the names of all non-celebrity characters, as well as some place names and other details, have been changed.” I just had a brief look in here to get a feel for the DREAMVIBES and found this, just to give you an idea of what you’re dealing with here: “When we left, the boy from “The Wonder Years” asked me to open my mouth to see if I was smuggling any people off the island in my mouth. I unbelieving asked him why. Then he pulled a head out of his mouth. Then it all stopped and I woke up.” Do YOU want to read 20,000 of these? WHY, JESUS?
- Three Body Problem Simulator: You will, of course – OF COURSE! – be familiar with the Three Body Problem in physics thanks perhaps to the massive scifi trilogy of the same name – basically it refers to the difficulty in predicting the movement of three bodies orbiting each other in space, but you don’t really need to know that to appreciate this little physics sim. To really get it going you need to expand the menus on the left and fiddle with the settings around ‘mass’ – then watch as you cause MASSIVE INTERPLANETARY CARNAGE (or, more accurately, just set the sphere spinning crazily). Like a better, digital Newton’s Cradle.
- All of the Do Lectures: The ‘Do’ Lectures are taken from a regular festival of thinking for designycreateystrategytypes that has been going for a few years now – this year’s talks are now all online, and while this sort of thing couldn’t be farther from my personal area of interest or my general vibe (you can perhaps imagine the extent to which a talk entitled ‘Build Your Brand, Change Your Life’ might appeal to me!) there are enough things here that sound vaguely-interesting, and I think enough of you operate in fields orthogonal to this sort of thing, that you might find this of some small use.
- Gay Water: How can you tell if water is gay? BECAUSE IT COMES IN A CAN THAT SPECIFICALLY SAYS SO! Gay Water is a brand which I think has been around for a few years now and which I cam across this week and which at first glance appears to have fallen through some sort of time portal from…what, 2016-7? An era in which brands putting out stickers that say things like “Racists Have Tiny D1cks” was considered SLAY rather than, well, the sort of empty sloganeering that might sell you a few more units but which doesn’t actually change one fcuking thing. BUT! Here we are! GAY WATER! Honestly, I am featuring this mainly because I confess the name made me laugh a lot, as did the nakedly-sexually-aggressive website copy, which immediately asks that you ‘enjoy 6.1” tonight’, and thanks to this I learned that apparently the term ‘gay soda’ has in fact long been slang for a vodka soda (has it?! I FEEL SO STRAIGHT) and that’s where the name for this hard seltzer comes from, and, honestly, I wanted to hate this but I can’t, however RESISTANCE-coded its brand feels to me here on the edge of the end of the world.
- Partle: A Wordle clone exclusively for the UK political sickos amongst you – a daily game where you have to guess the surname of the sitting UK Parliamentarian that the game is thinking of. Same mechanics as Wordle, absolutely fcuking impossible unless you are the sort of person who has a working knowledge of every single three-way marginal in the South East.
- Learn Cryptic: I think I have mentioned here before that I have never been able to get my head around cryptic crosswords AT ALL – I just don’t have that sort of brain, and I have never been able (or taken the time, fine) to work out all the rules and conventions and quirks that each setter puts in…BUT! Were I minded to learn (turns out, though, that I am not) then I would enjoy this daily game which offers you a new simple cryptic puzzle each day with clues to help you solve it; it explains the solution, too, so in theory with a few months of this under your belt you might be able to spend three hours failing to solve Cyclops in Private Eye but, you know, WITH A SENSE OF PRIDE.
- Storage Lords: Do you remember the GLORY YEARS (not, in fact, glory years) of weird Windows-based management/simulation games built in Visual Basic and which did the rounds on copied floppies and then on download sites in the early days of the web? Stuff that often involved you playing a DRUG BARON or CRIMINAL KINGPIN because they were all coded by children for whom these two things were the very pinnacle of cool? Well this is basically one of those, except it’s about, er, running an empire of storage units for profit and success! This, is, honestly, a LOT more absorbing than I expected it to be, and stole about an hour of my Wednesday from me, and I think you might enjoy it: “Your grandmother, Esther Cache is gone, she died peacefully at the age of 99. She has bequeathed unto you her modest self storage business. Abandoned and in disrepair, you must now take this empty shell of storage units and build a grand storage empire the like of which the world has never seen. You will need to manage your finances, upgrade your facilities, and deal with unexpected events as you strive to become the ultimate Storage Lord.” And who WOULDN’T want to become the Ultimate Storage Lord? NO FCUKER, etc!
- A Trail Tale: Ok, this is absolutely fcuking LOVELY. A project by one Andy Moliski, who explains it thusly: “In April 2022 I set out to hike the Appalachian Trail— a 2,200-mile wilderness backpacking journey from Georgia to Maine. To document the journey, we built a live-updated immersive web experience to illustrate the joys and hardships of distance thru-hiking. ‘A Trail Tale’ combines my interest in interactive media with my passion for wilderness backpacking to create a pixel art love letter to the Appalachian Mountains.” THIS IS SO BEAUTIFUL. The art, the music, the care and the love put into it…honestly, you will all adore this, I promise, it’s gorgeous. The interface isn’t super-intuitive, but it will make sense if you click around a bit; I can’t tell you how nice it is to have someone’s love and passion for something, in this case the general concept of ‘being outdoors and hiking and stuff’ turned into something so lovely – I really do adore this and I think you might too – and it looks like a Monkey Island-era point-and-click game, should you need additional reasons to click.
- Play Quake3 and Unreal3 Multiplayer: The final link here is QUITE AMAZING. The link takes you to a selection of live game lobbies – select the one you want to play in (each serves a different oldschool FPS title, the two in the title and Half Life), and BANG, within seconds you will be playing a multiplayer deathmatch game just like it’s 1999 and you’re on a surprisingly high-powered (for the era) gaming rig! I can’t tell you how amazing it is to me that you can now run this stuff in your fcuking browser, honestly – there is minimal lag (and I am on a potato PC with a shonky internet connection, trust me), and the lack of voicechat means I don’t have to hear the laughter and cries of ‘ahahaha die you useless cnut’ from the child who has just fragged me, and, honestly, this is SO much fun and I say that as someone who never really played multiplayer FPS and who is generally terrible at anything involving fast-twitch reflexes. Honestly, this is worth bookmarking, it is a LOT of fun and, crucially, FREE.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Lattice9: Not a Tumblr! But! We all accept that this section is now mainly indicative of ‘stuff that has vague Tumblr vibes’, right? What’s that? Noone cares? OK! Anyway, this is a great site which, while not a Tumblr (SHUT UP MATT LITERALLY NO FCUKER COULD GIVE A SH1T) very much has that sort of general ‘a vibe, conveyed by way of photography’ thing going on that certain Tumblrs used to back in the day. The vibe here being…er…medieval urban weeb kitsch? Yes!
- Stickertop Art: Ok, this really should be a Tumblr (SHUT UP SHUT UP) – it’s a collection of photos of the stickers that people (mainly programmers, designers and the geek-adjacent – I realised early on that while I am adjacent to this world I am not of it, given I only have one sticker on my laptop and that is one of those raised, embossed sticky labels simply reading ‘mong’) adorn their laptops with, and, honestly, I think this is very cool and actually really interesting and I think there’s an exhibition in this if I’m honest.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Hayley Gibbs: Hayley Gibbs is a UK-based artist working in stone; her work is gorgeous and the feed is wonderful succession of beautiful carvings, but I am also including her because she made this year’s Tiny Awards trophy and it was SO BEAUTIFUL and Hayley was an absolute pleasure to work with, and if you ever want something in stone commissioning then I can recommend her unreservedly she is ace and her technique is glorious.
- Paperholm: Charles Young is an Edinburgh-based artist who makes very small papercraft works, buildings and towers and turrets and the like, which are exactly as cute as you might imagine (‘cute’ sounds like I am damning it with faint praise; I promise I’m not).
- Yudho XYX: Pixel art which is exactly at that sweetspot between INCREDIBLY COOL and INCREDIBLY-UNCOOL, and as such is therefore ULTIMATE COOL (I don’t make the rules, that’s just how it works, sorry).
- Dirty Brum: Former Editor Paul alerted me to this, and he is right that it’s a wonderful collection of images of vaguely-liminal-feeling spaces around Birmingham, a place which, if the Brummies will forgive me, already feels pretty fcuking liminal as it is.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Some Epstein Things: I know, I know, it’s a US thing and we should leave it over there where it belongs (sorry, Americans, but that is how quite a lot of us feel about you, I hope you don’t take it personally), but, equally, as I mentioned at the top it’s worth taking a look at the fallout from this because it’s quite illustrative of How The World Works For So Many People In So Many Places and, well, because if you think that we’re not all basically linked into this same web then you really haven’t been paying attention to anything over the past decade or more. The link is to Ryan in Garbage Day doing an excellent job of rounding up the contours of US power that have been revealed by the US document drop, how it ended up spinning out into last week’s memetic fellatio tsunami (a phrase I genuinely wasn’t expecting to type as little as three seconds ago, the brain is truly an amazing thing!), and some of the wider links to the right wing influence network comprising ‘Tommy Robinson’ et al. Look, if you can read this and still not think ‘hm, wow, there sure are a lot of very rich people seemingly working quite hard to aid and abet both other rich people and some really awful ideas, maybe I should bear that in mind I hear someone talking about ‘the people’s voice’ and ‘organic political movements’ and maybe, just maybe, all of this is the real version of the buillsh1t the right has been peddling about Soros for an age?’ then, well, I don’t really know what to do with you. As an aside, Ryan doesn’t need the plugs but this is yet another example of why he is honestly one of the best writers about The Now writing anywhere in the English language – like, I don’t think anyone else quite has the same overview and cultural understanding as he does around globalised right wing movements and the weaponisation of web culture. SEE ALSO this superb piece of reporting about the truth behind the recent ‘GenZ’ protests in Mexico, which is insight I have seen literally nowhere else in the media and which is sort-of impossible to have without being as (with love) internet-brained as Ryan is.
- Dumbification: On reflection, my decision to use an entirely-nonsensical word to introduce this piece does in fact rather prove its point; hey ho! This has been quite a big discourse generator this week – Lane Brown writes in New York Magazine about whether America (and, let’s be clear, everyone else too) really is getting more stupid; there’s stuff about plateauing IQ scores which I have all sorts of skepticism about as a metric, but there’s also some significantly more interesting stuff in there about medium and message and form and function and, look, if you want something to back up your Haidt-fueled ‘phoneageddon’ paranoia then you can probably find it in here, but I think there’s something more interesting here in terms of the rot setting in around the era of rolling news, the need to create narratives to fill dead space, the shift from ‘news’ as ‘fact’ to ‘news’ as ‘entertainment’, the proliferation of content (sorry) that that engendered and the fact that that meant that all content had to compete harder for our attention, making everything necessarily simpler, faster and more sensationalist than it might otherwise have been…I found this hugely interesting, in part (obviously) because it reconfirms a whole bunch of my existing prejudices but also because it’s a smart, wide-ranging piece of writing that does a lot more than trot out the lazy ‘IT’S THE DEVICES’ line that I was expecting. It does blame the web a bit, though, which, well, I suppose is fair enough.
- The Amoeba and the Mathematician: This isn’t hugely long, but I very much enjoyed it as a framing device for ways of thinking about/with AI – have a read, I think it might prove potentially useful, especially if there’s any part of your life that requires you to think about ‘so, how do we actually use these things then?’: “Take a continuum that has an amoeba at one end and a mathematician at the other. The amoeba has the most interest in its immediate environment. It reacts strongly and quickly to the smallest stimulus. The mathematician has the least interest in his immediate environment. He is detached from temporal considerations and lives in an insular world of numbers. Somewhere between the amoeba and the mathematician sits the competitive worker of the future: the worker who reacts to a stimulus as an amoeba does, although with more thought, but not with so much depth of thought that he or she ignores the stimulus altogether.”
- Ethan Mollick on Gemini3: It’s fair to say that long-standing Curios favourite Ethan Mollick is more bullish than some on LLMs; it’s also fair to say that he knows what he’s talking about, and this overview of his experimentation with Google’s new Gemini model is both a good look at where the ‘state of the art’ sits and what it feels like to work with the latest frontier models, and also of how far it has all come in the three years (this month) since ChatGPT launched. I do think it’s rather easy to forget that in November 2022 we were being dazzled by something that could occasionally write very bad poetry and we are now quite sniffy about tech which can literally parse an entire library in minutes and provide you with an hourlong audio overview of said library (for example) – while there’s no doubt that the business side of this is weird, and the money house of cards is going to collapse SO spectacularly (on which note, I would not be betting on either OpenAI or Nvidia based on the past week, fwiw, but then again I am nearly always wrong about everything so maybe ignore me here), there’s also little doubt that the pace of improvement has been astonishing.
- Low-Hanging Fruit: AI and poetry have been in the news this week as a result of this paper suggesting that LLMs are particularly vulnerable to adversarial attacks delivered in verse (IAMBS VERSUS THE MACHINE!), but this piece in the LRB is more about language and how the repeated use of poetry as a public-facing benchmarking tool in the marketing materials of the big AI shops, OpenAI in particular, speaks to its use as a trojan horse to deliver the machine by way of SOULFUL, HUMAN LANGUAGE. “On the one hand, these branding decisions work to advance a claim about AI’s sophistication. It’s culture-washing with an edge of metaphysics. The association with poetry confers cachet, and implies a degree of rhetorical fluency. Yet something more is at stake here, something the tech companies cannot say but can make a lot of money by implying, which has to do with poetry’s long-held status as an exemplary intersection between writing, thinking and feeling. Hence the ‘emotional impact’ that OpenAI’s prompt asks for. The lyric poem, as Allen Grossman once put it, ‘is the genre of the “other mind”’. To showcase your large language model navigating that genre is to broach the kind of question more often consigned to sci-fi.”
- How To Make A Living As An Artist: A couple of caveats here: 1) I am obviously not an artist, and, per my recent half-hearted look at my year-end finances, it’s not wholly clear that I am making a living; 2) I am not wholly convinced that, for most people, it *is* possible to make a living as an artist, certainly not in the West in 2025. THAT SAID! This is a hugely-interesting and potentially-useful…manifesto? Set of guidelines? Both, really – basically a way of thinking about one’s practice in a way that is practical, market-oriented, brand-focused but not, crucially, deleterious to actually making work. This is a really useful and in many places insightful read, honestly, far beyond its potentially-intended audience; there’s a lot of smart thinking here about defining a market and defining oneself in relation to it which is applicable in far broader contexts than ‘just’ art – also, the person who wrote this claims to have made over a million in career sales so, well, they must be doing something right.
- The Ozempic PleasureSuck: This is SO interesting (or at least it was to me) – all about how the experience of being on GLP1 appetite suppressants is, for some at least, leading to a suppression of ALL appetites, a sort of generalised apathy and anhedonia (MY OLD FRIEND!) that dulls their desire for sex and socialising and creating…this is both an interesting (and slightly creepy, ngl – there’s a touch of ‘act one foreshadowing’ here, no?) and well-written piece, but also there’s something fascinating about the idea that ‘wants’ all exist in the same place to some extent, and suppressing one will somehow suppress all the others too…now I come to think of it I would really like to spend some time going deeper on this as it feels like quite rich creative territory but it is 1049am and I have a LOT of longreads still to go and so you will forever have to wonder what DEEP INSIGHT I might have bestowed upon you (the answer, obvs, is none at all).
- You Can’t Underestimate Everyone: One for the game designers, but also anyone who has ever designed ANYTHING with which the general public is expected to interact – this is game design shop Inkle detailing some of the ways in which player…let’s say player idiosyncracy (I obviously mean idiocy, but let’s be nice for a change) has surprised them, and all the different ways in which players have contrived to miss every single design cue, clue and signpost they’ve set up to explain How Things Work. Honestly, this is both interesting and also a cathartic reminder that no plan survives first contact with Other People because, in the main, Other People are Fcuking Idiots (not you, though, you are smart and discerning and SPECIAL and I love you most of all).
- The Sanitisation of Skate: Ok, this isn’t the sort of thing I necessarily link to in here, but bear with me as I think more of you will enjoy it than might immediately imagine. This is a piece from (superb) PC games website Rock Paper Shotgun in which JC Rodriguez, a gamer and skateboarder, writes about the history of the ‘Skate’ series of videogames (initially conceived as a more-realistic counterpoint to the super-fun but also physics-ignoring Tony Hawk titles) and how its shift in tone and style mirrors the shifting nature of skateboarding as it’s moved from underground pursuit to very very big business indeed. I really enjoyed the writing here – there are bits, fine, which might feel a bit baggy if you’re not fully invested in the skate personalities of the era and some of the minutiae of the games themselves, but the way Rodriguez conveys the…vibe, for better word, of the scene, and the ethos embodied by those who inhabited it in the 00s and how that ethos shifted, is rather lovely. I think, also, the story he tells about the changing narrative of the games – from being about ‘skating as rebellious outsider pursuit’ to ‘skaters can make bank lol’ – has an interesting parallel in the general shift in opinion around the concept of ‘selling out’ (from ‘the worst thing you can do’ to ‘I literally do not even understand the concept of which you speak, old man’).
- Teamwork, The Individual and Game Design: Seeing as we’re doing games (SEAMLESS!), this is a really good piece on the design decisions behind the recent football game ‘Rematch’ which is basically ‘what if football but also Rocket League?’ (if that means nothing to you then, well, congratulations on being an adult with age-appropriate interests), looking at how games (digital and non) need to balance the joy of individual brilliance and achievement with collective endeavour. As with a lot of the best pieces about gaming and game design, I think this deserves to be read by far more people than just those who are interested in game design.
- Irish Ayahuasca: Fin Carter writes for The Dispatch about Ireland’s burgeoning – and apparently, er, VERY SKETCHY – ayahuasca retreat scene, in which cosmic paddies pay several hundred euros a pop to sit in a field, take horrible psychedelics and then spend a few hours purging themselves in every single possible way; the kicker in this story is that there’s apparently quite a big trend for the dodgy shamans to then upsell additional trips and high cost while people are coming down off the first set, which while lucrative can have some…imaginably-iffy effects on one’s general sense of self and wellbeing. I can honestly say that the idea of spending three days being violently sick on Ayahuasca while in a damp field in Ireland while a ‘mystic’ called Bronagh tells me about what a special star child I am and tries to sell me a 3-for-1 on DMT sounds HIDEOUS, but, well, who am I to judge (give a sh1t, I totally judge) (also, I heard this week from a mate that he has a boss who is having a nervous breakdown in part because they are addicted to DMT. CAN YOU IMAGINE?!?!?! HOW DOES THAT HAPPEN?!?!).
- Imagine What This Tastes Like: Georgina Voss writes beautifully in Vittles about the trend for AI-generated food imagery and the weird uncanny-valley of dishes that almost-but-not-quite look real. There’s a recently-opened milkshake place round the corner from me whose fronting is an entirely-AI-generated vinyl wrap of CG fruit and excited children in the exact art style of ‘Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs’ and it is SO UNSETTLING, fwiw. “The MLMs which run through the computers that are here, now, don’t give a sh1t about the poetry of the steak, nor the work and skills that construct deliciousness: not the lighting experiments conducted by Cogo-Read’s team to encourage a tray of sugar-dusted croissants to bloom, nor the time food photographer Uyen Luu had to polish, by hand, five kilos of coffee beans after the client spotted one that was dull. Though AI image influencers boast of incantations of nostalgia warmth, editorial shadows and ultra-crisp texture to construct perfect pictures, the resulting images are flattened objects summoned from databases crammed with stolen photos. To me, the flavourless nature of synthetic images comes from the fact that, in order to make them anywhere near believable, one must discard that combination of skills and serendipity, telling the system loudly and slowly, ‘EGG. BROWN SHELL. SOFT YOLK. NOSTALGIC.’” BONUS VITTLES: this piece, about the fact that lots of people who work as chefs are not necessarily all that bothered about food, or cooking, by Mariam Abdel-Razek, is also excellent.
- The Fall: Spencer at Scope of Work writes one of his occasional, slightly-discursive essays, this one about paying attention to sensory experiences. You’ll need to sign up to the newsletter to read the whole thing, but it’s available to free subscribers and I promise you that Scope is a joy each time, without fail. This is honestly the sort of thing that I would NEVER choose to read but which I enjoyed immensely – Spencer has a particular cadence to his thought and writing which communicates care and craft in ways I can’t quite explain, and I find his pieces like this quite astonishingly relaxing, almost like ASMR in written form (please don’t let this put you off, there are NO MOUTH SOUNDS in here).
- Notes on a Failed Relationship: I never usually link to The Guardian here, mainly because I (wrongly) assume that that’s everyone’s paper of record and it’s what you read all the time anyway, but I will make a rare exception here. Ronnie Ancona and Alasdair Mcgowan are two performers who years ago both dated and had a BBC comedy sketch show together; this is part of a series in which the Guardian recreates a photo and asks the people in it to look back at themselves in said picture and talk about where they were then and where they have ended up since, and in this piece both Ancona and Mcgowan talk (separately, these read like interviews done entirely distinctly) about, in large part, their relationship with each other, as friends, as former lovers, as collaborators…I found this, honestly, almost impossibly moving and oddly-beautiful, the way they talk about each other and their relationship and the way they will always love each other is one of the most honest and illuminating and weirdly-human accounts of a long-dead union I have ever read outside a novel, and I confess that there were various points at which this made me Quite Emo. See what you think, but for me this is quite, quite wonderful, poignant and happysad and elegiac and all of those things.
- The World Sauna Championships: Look, I’m just going to give you the opening para. “Aquardens Apa, on the outskirts of Verona, is typically the epitome of tranquility. Natural thermal springs feed expansive indoor and outdoor pools. Vineyards on the foothills of the Italian Alps grace the horizon. There are steam rooms, saunas, and a snow alcove, where snowflakes waft down on visitors wishing to cool off after a sweating session. But for a week this fall, the thudding bass of electronic dance music emanates from inside the spa’s largest sauna.” YOU WANT TO READ THE REST, DON’T YOU? This feels like the sort of thing that the bigger Eurovision fans amongst you will be ITCHING to go to at some point (ie SO GAY).
- Hegel’s Cigarette: Ok, this is a year old (SORRY) but, well, I missed it last year and it is ace, so you can have it now instead. This is SUCH a rich piece of writing – you will need to consume it slowly – but also such a wonderful, stylish and poised essay, on the author’s attempt to discover whether it is in fact true that US tobacco brand American Spirit was named after something that Hegel once said. I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but, honestly, the answer is less important than the pleasure involved in having Hunter Dukes tell you the story. I mean, look, how can you not fall in love with sentences like these? “At some point in the early morning, having forfeited my grip on the laminate, I was squeezed onto a balcony between Klaus and a very tall Polish American man, who was telling us about an upcoming trip to Kerala, where he would seek ayurvedic realignment after a season of encounters with unmitigated evil in Berlin.”
- How LOL Feels: I feel that this is an underexplored area of enquiry, the attempt to attach defined meanings to loose, vibey linguistic relics of the disposable language era – this, by Harriet Armstrong in Granta, on the semiotics of LOL, the different ways it can be employed, in pursuit of attempting to nail how it feels both to use and receive, is superb both in terms of the questions it asks but also the way in which it attempts to define its answers; LOL as a small, daily attempt at bridging the digital divide and surmounting the insurmountable gap that exists between the inside of all of our heads all of the time: “This is what I mean when I say ‘lol’ sometimes. ‘Lol I love that song too.’ ‘Lol you’re on the train now? Is it busy?’ ‘Lol yes come over!’ This sort of ‘lol’ – less abjectly emotional than when I told my friend I was lolling on the bus about my bad personality – is soft and open, and somehow restrained. I am saying that, for some reason, this is important to me, but I don’t want to burden you or make things heavy. I just want to tell you what it’s like for me and to know what it is like for you.”
- Border Theories: Thoughts and observations elicited by an exhibition of objects abandoned on the US-Mexican border, and beautifully written in this essay by Marcos Santiago Gonzales. “On display: a spiral-bound notebook. The pages are warped by water damage. The paper near the metallic binding appears to be eaten away, lined with holes and tears. The front cover, made of plastic, looks melted; the colors are a faded swirl of blue, tan, and black—no doubt the result of a ruthless exposure to sunlight. Though unopened (perhaps even unopenable?), the pages appear blank. One can only surmise that the waves of a river or the soaking in a ditch washed away whatever stories, fragments, or ramblings were contained within them. Or maybe, just maybe, there was nothing yet written down on those pages. Blank pages of journal entries yet to be, poems in process, theories waiting for the right words to explain themselves.”
- Lemons: Curios favourite Emma Garland returns with an essay about death and watching someone die; this one in particular, for various reasons, has gotten under my skin. “I’d never seen someone that close to the end before, medically speaking. Your face looked like a death mask already, waxy and butter yellow. The shape of it was wrong. Jawline sort of crumpled in, as if the bones had been removed like poles from a tent. But it was the hair that shocked me most. It was like baby hair almost. White and wispy, pushed back off your forehead with a cotton headband so the sweat wouldn’t make it stick. Your hair used to be your thing. Five foot nothing with this giant mane, thick as a bramble bush and box-dyed plum. Utterly unruly, like you.”
- Remembering Alison Rose: Another *slightly* old (last month, forgive me!) piece, this time via Elle to whom thanks – I think that this might be the best obituary I have read all year, and it’s a strong contender for my all-time list. You do not, to be clear, need to have the faintest idea who Alison Rose was to enjoy this ASTONISHING bit of memorialising; you’d be hard-pressed not to get a half-decent obit out of Rose’s quite extraordinary-sounding life, fine, but there is some WONDERFUL writing going on by Penelope Green which elevates this to the status of a true classic. I promise you, this will have you gasping and cackling and wincing and then going to track down Rose’s own writing because Christ alive what a life and what a recounting of it.I mean, look, this is paras 3-5 – AND IT JUST GETS BETTER: “Ms. Rose was 41 when she arrived at The New Yorker. She was beautiful, bright and hapless, having careened through her previous decades between New York and California trying to find a place in the world. She had worked, or tried to work, as an actor and a model. She was nearly photographed for Vogue, but had a habit of canceling bookings at the last minute, frozen with anxiety and the aftereffects of binge eating. She typed manuscripts for Gardner McKay, the heartthrob actor turned author and drama critic. Later, she worked as a temporary typist in, by her count, 128 different offices. She had a disastrous long-term relationship with Bill Lancaster, a son of Burt Lancaster, the conclusion of which kept her sleeping on a roommate’s sofa for the better part of a year. Her psychiatrist prescribed Valium; her psychiatrist father prescribed speed.”
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS !:
