Blah blah blah blah Glastonbury blah blah blah.
I can’t imagine any Curios readers who are currently on Worthy Farm will be opening this week’s edition (although a special, all-caps HELLO YOU POOR FCUKS to anyone attempting to read this on a crushing comedown and three hours’ sleep on Saturday or Sunday morning!), so rather than writing some sort of opening whinge about how jealous I am not to be there I am instead going to share with you a HEARTWARMING THING that happened to me last Sunday.
So I was on my way to a gig on the Southbank and was stopped by a pair of kids with a DSLR who, very politely, asked me if they could take my photo for their college portfolio because – and I need to quote this in full because I still can’t quite get over it – they liked ‘my look’.
Ok, so the vast majority of you have no fcuking clue who I am or what I look like or how I dress, but let me briefly fill you in – I am emaciated and weird-looking and I dress like sh1t. BUT! It turns out that if you steadfastly refuse to change the manner of your dress for 30 years, the arc of fashion will slowly and inevitably bend to the point where, without even doing anything, you are accidentally ON-TREND for the first time in your natural life, without really trying! IT IS MAGIC! Now I know what those people who refused to take off their flares in 1972 must have felt like during the brief period of 70s revivalism in the late-90s.
Anyway, this is just to say THANKYOU to the two children – fcuk knows what they were studying but it definitely wasn’t fashion – for making me feel, briefly, like someone I very much am not. If you were taking the piss, kids, thanks for not making it obvious.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you probably want to know where you can get these threads but I am NOT TELLING.
THE SECTION WHICH UNDERSTANDS THAT DOING CANNES AND THEN GLASTONBURY IS A PUNISHING BACK TO BACK BUT WHICH WOULD LIKE TO POSIT THAT DOING ALL THREE PARTY CONFERENCES IS ACTUALLY A MORE SIGNIFICANT TEST OF ONE’S STAMINA, PT.1:
- Sensay Island: Ok, so on the one hand this is obviously a bullsh1t PR stunt for some awful bunch of AIcnuts (PUT THAT IN YOUR COVERAGE REPORT) and so ; isn’t *really* worth writing about; on the other, it’s *such* a perfect setup for a piece of DYSTOPIAN FICTION that I would be amazed if the central premise wasn’t ripped off for a solid ‘4.7 on IMDB’ bit of moviemaking at some point in the next six months or so. “WHAT IF GOVERNMENT, BUT MACHINE??” is the basic question here – this company, Sensay (HI, DREADFUL AI CNUTS!!!), which makes ‘chatbots’ and as such doesn’t have a moat and, one might argue, may as well just have some marketing fun with the AI dollars it’s somehow managed to scare up, has seemingly BOUGHT AN ISLAND (I am secretly quite a big fan of PR stunts that start with ‘buying an island’, ngl) and set up its own AI-based system of governance on set island, based on a bunch of ‘agents’ (prompted LLM instances, let’s be clear) which all have personalities based on GREAT LEADERS THROUGH HISTORY (which is the PR play here – ‘look how clever our chatbots are they can literally cosplay as Seneca!!!’). Per the blurb, “Sensay Island is a sovereign micronation in the Philippine archipelago governed by an AI Council modeled on the greatest leaders in history [and, er, Laurence of Arabia for reasons that aren’t adequately explained anywhere]. Powered by Sensay’s proprietary Wisdom Engine, our government blends Stoic reason [AUTHORIAL NOTE – OF COURSE THEY LOVE THE STOICS, JESUS FCUKING CHRIST WHAT IS IT WITH TECHCNUTS AND THEIR WEIRD FETISHISATION WIITH STOICISM???], human-rights compassion, strategic foresight, and scientific curiosity into every decision. We exist to prove that ethical AI and human dignity can thrive together — forging policies that protect nature, nurture innovation, and elevate every resident’s potential. From renewable micro-grids to open research labs, Sensay Island is a living laboratory where the impossible becomes ordinary and progress is measured by wisdom as much as by technology.” What does this practically mean? Well, the island is ‘governed’ by a council of bots ‘based on the personalities’ of a bunch of famous leaders from history, it’s currently being set up with the idea that ‘visitors’ will be able to start arriving next year, with a phased launch for ‘research residencies’ and, eventually, citizens…BUT I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS! What infrastructure currently exists? What workforce is there to carry out the edicts of the AI council? Is there human override? WHAT IF DIGITAL SUN TZU DECIDES THEY NEED TO PURSUE A NUCLEAR STRATEGY SO AS TO KEEP PACE WITH THE INCREASINGLY-BELLICOSE WAY OF THE WORLD IN 2025, EH, WHAT THEN? Anyway, this feels, as I said, like absolutely PERFECT B-Movie fodder, so expect to scroll past the adaptation of this story on Netflix c.2027.
- The Murmuration Map: A 3d map displaying animated data showing the movement of starlings as they roost, so-called ‘murmurations’ which will be familiar to anyone who’s spent any time in Rome, or indeed who’s been online at all in the past 15 years or so (murmurations being one of those phenomena that seem to have a sort of ‘eternal september’ quality to them, with footage of balletic bird displays going viral every 2-3 years as a new cohort learns about the behaviour, the word and the beauty of the spectacle). This is an interesting project and a nice little website which makes me feel…a bit funny, because, as you can tell both from the URL and the little on-site disclaimer, it was built by AI. This is a site that’s been spun up by Chinese agentic software Manus, the current best-in-class agentic solution (or at least it was last time I checked) which basically is the closest we have to a working ‘hey, machine, go and make X for me’ tool – now obviously there’s no way of knowing exactly how much human expertise was required to corral the vibecoded agentic output into working order, but it’s still slightly incredible to me that this whole site could literally have come from a single prompt – and hence my slightly-weirded-out vibe. This is exactly the sort of site I love to feature in Curios – it’s data! It’s pretty! It’s vaguely-curious and slightly-whimsical! – but, well, it’s not been made by anyone. Does that matter? On some level I know it doesn’t – after all, the idea is the thing, right? – except, well, it *feels* like it does. Gah, I am going to have to come up with A Curatorial Line about all this stuff at some point, probably.
- All The Cannes Entries: A friend of mine who was in Cannes last week described it to me thusly: “I had a great time but on reflection it felt like it might have been the end of something rather than the beginning.” Which I thought was rather poetic and, probably, rather accurate (yesterday’s Ogilvy news being yet another noisily-hammered nail into the general concept of The Big Agency) – still, it doesn’t mean that lots of you won’t be expected to pretend that it still really matters and that it really IS still a place that celebrates THE BEST AND MOST CREATIVE STUFF IN THE WORLD (lol you make fcuking adverts you cnuts gyafc), and so to that end you might find this presentation, containing what I think are ALL the Lions entries, a useful resource. Except selfishly and annoyingly whoever has pulled it together has set the security settings so that you can’t download the document or make a copy of it, meaning you’re actually going to have to read the whole fcuking thing if you want to get INSIGHTS out of it as you can’t simply chuck it at the machine and as it to give you the highlights. Can you be bothered to do that? Lol, no, of course not, but if you still have interns then WOW are they going to have a horrible post-Glastonbury!
- Taper # 14 – Sonnets: I have included Taper, the digital poetry journal, in Curios before, and this is the latest edition for Summer 2025, which focuses on the Sonnet as a form of poem and which features works by 20 poets, all playing with the idea of the ‘sonnet’ in some way – whether by presenting it as fridge magnets, say, or small pieces of semi-interactive fiction, or a sonnet-making machine…there’s LOADS of stuff in here and every single one I have looked at is an interesting experiment in what you can do with words and code, not unlike the HTML Review but specifically-poetry-focused. You can read more about the individual works and the overall aim of the issue by scrolling to the bottom of the linked page, and I generally recommend you spend a bit of time with this if you’re in any way interested in words, poetry or the intersection of code and art/literature (which you are, aren’t you? AREN’T YOU???).
- Wiki Radio: Venerable creator of Fun Internet Ephemera Monkeon, whose work I have featured on here at various points in the past 15 years or so, returns with a lovely little project – this is basically a radio station playing you all of the audio files being uploaded to Wikimedia commons by dedicated chroniclers of humanity. Monkeon writes: “Inspired by WikiTok, I thought I’d make something to discover sounds uploaded to Wikimedia. From political speeches and bird noises to genuine bangers, it’s mostly wholesome, though I cant guarantee it won’t play you something horrible once in a while.” So while I’ve been typing I’ve enjoyed some Hebrew chanting, now there’s a poem called ‘Cornhuskers’ from a century or so ago…this is lovely, and one of those web projects which reminds you momentarily about the vast, mad variety of humanity and the world and which consequently give me a tiny bit of general universe vertigo (but mostly in a good way).
- My Boyfriend Is AI: A subReddit featuring ostensibly-sincere people talking about their relationships with their AI companions. Look, I don’t want to ju…no, sorry, I have to judge a *bit*, I can’t help it. Beyond the obvious ‘WOW SO WEIRD’ that you get on landing, the main feeling I get from reading through the threads is firstly one of mild surprise – I would have expected there to be significantly more obviously-made-up-for-potential-clout stuff in here, but it all seems…oddly-sincere? And then after he surprise comes the sadness – honestly, as you read through the posts the sensation that comes through most clearly is that all these people are very, very, very lonely indeed (which, I suppose, is not hugely surprising) and simply don’t…connect with, or relate to, the corporeal world in a wholly-satisfying manner, and have very real emotional needs that aren’t for whatever reason being fulfilled in meatspace and which they are obviously turning to The Machine to have met, and, honestly, this just gets more heartbreaking the longer you dig into it. Sorry, this isn’t really ‘funny’ so much as ‘oh god oh god this feels bad man’. Oh, and if you want an extra dose of ‘oh ffs the future’ then you might also ‘enjoy’ this sub, which is for people seeking to pull themselves out of a chatbot addiction (whether romantic or otherwise). I don’t, honestly, think that anyone is taking this stuff quite seriously enough in terms of the numbers of people who are going to get wrapped up with these fcuking things.
- A Small ASCII Mirror: Not technically ASCII I think so much as Japanese characters, but this is a neat little ‘mirror’ toy – turn on your webcam and watch as it provides you with a lo-res representation of your gurning face onscreen. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT?
- Charles Leclerc: Formula One is a sport whose appeal baffles me, but I appreciate its soap operafication (yes, it is a term) via the Drive To Survive TV show has broadened the appeal of its tedious carpuppets – this is the personal website of one such FAST MAN, a certain Charles Leclerc, who I know the square root of fcuk all about (and, to be clear, I do not care to learn more), and I am including it because it scrolls SO MADLY that I was almost charmed by it. Seriously, you think you’ve seen mad parallax on a website? Think again, this is next-level stuff (and liable to induce motion sickness if you go too fast).
- JoyJam: I have a good friend who is quite senior at Spotify, who I am pretty sure won’t read this – hi Luke! – and who assures me that Daniel Ek is a pretty normal and decent guy, and that he’s definitely not someone who’s been turned mad by all the money and whose basically-humble Scandi nature keeps him grounded…Equally, though, Daniel Ek has just invested 600million-odd quid into a company that makes literal murder machines, and so, on balance, fcuk Daniel Ek and fcuk Spotify (sorry Luke!). Anyway, that’s by way of introduction to JoyJam, which is AN Other music platform which you might want to check out if you’re searching for a new alternative streaming platform – it’s in beta, but there’s a bunch of planned stuff in the app about FAN ENGAGEMENT and ARTIST ACCESS which might make it an interesting punt should it ever take off significantly.
- Classic Web: A bluesky account sharing screenshots of THE OLD WEB, mainly the 00s and 2010s – you get not only the screenshots but also Wayback Machine links so that you can go spelunking around in the past like a good web archaeologist. This is partly a huge hit of nostalgia for anyone who’s been doing this (by ‘this’ I mean ‘wasting time on the web’) for a while, but also a strangely-poignant reminder of how much more varied and interesting the web was before we were all taught to create the same tightly-curated and similarly-framed digital presence via the medium of socials. MAKE YOUR OWN HOMES ON THE WEB EVERYONE, LET A MILLION DIGITAL FLOWERS BLOOM, ETC ETC ETC!
- Exit Strategies: Ok, this is in German but thanks to the MAGIC of Google even people like me who don’t have the common decency to speak a work of Teuton can appreciate it. Click the link, right-click the page and hit ‘translate to English’ and enjoy this rather wonderfully-presented thesis which displays as a series of windows…look, this is VERY theoretical and a bit wnky, let’s be honest, but I found it both textually-interesting and also pleasing from the point of view of interaction design; here’s the blurb, see what you think: “Leaving is a departure toward something in the future. The future is vaguely defined, filled with hopes and expectations. That’s precisely why it carries a risk. This text addresses leaving, in the sense of leaving and ceasing to exist, with its risks and consequences. In 37 short chapters, it uses glossary terms to examine the potential, necessities, and entanglements of the act of leaving. Digital spaces and interfaces serve as models. What characteristics define these digital spaces?“
- Random English Places: A project by Alex Torrance which generates made-up English places at random. Why? I DO NOT KNOW WHY ASK ALEX TORRANCE FFS. These are wonderfully-plausible – I am pretty sure Wytheshaw exists somewhere, for example – but even better is the setting you can toggle to get it to generate FILTHY places. I did a proper, childish guffaw just now at ‘Great Twatslsway’, if you want a sense of the sort of material here.
- Freesound: A WONDERFUL free library of soundfiles for you to do what you like with (within boundaries of law and reason). OH MY GOD THIS HAS EXISTED FOR 20 YEARS! Apparently it was started by a team at the University of Barcelona and is now maintained by volunteers and now I love it immoderately (and am annoyed that I have seemingly not managed to notice this at all in all the previous years of Curio-ing). Recent uploads include ‘the sounds of a metal filing cabinet moving’ and some super-atmospheric thunder and a soundfile called ‘dirt drag’ which if I’m honest I’m a little scared to play – I think that you could have a lot of fun trying to make songs from a random selection of clips here, were you of a particularly-creative musical bent.
- A Visual History of the Latin Aphabet: ARE YOU INTERESTED IN THE EVOLUTION OF LETTERING AND TYPOGRAPHY OH GOOD! This is…quite academic, I concede, but I rather like the timeline visualisation and there’s something pleasing about seeing the way in which Latin characters adapted over time.
- 1 Greeting Per Week: A website which, as far as I can tell, each week presents a single scan of a greetings card for you to enjoy. That’s it. Why? DO NOT ASK ME THESE QUESTIONS I DO NOT KNOW THE ANSWERS. I can, though, tell you that the greetings card for this week has pleased me immoderately.
- Ping Pong Map: I learned this week that Schoenberg, the composer, used to constantly carry a violin case around with him – rather than a violin, though, said case was said to contain pingpong bats and balls, in case the famously-obsessed musician happened upon a table and fancied a knock-up. He would, I feel, have approved of this site which seemingly maps ALL OF THE PUBLIC PINGPONG TABLES IN THE WORLD. I have no idea how accurate this is at a global scale (although I have checked a couple of the London tables I know of and they’re marked, which is a good sign), but I like to imagine it’s reasonably up-to-date – if you want a new challenge, why not consider attempting to win a game of pingpong in as many countries as possible? Or, you know, doing something meaningful with your life. Either/or.
- Airline Meals: A website celebrating airline meals – you want to see photographic evidence of what you get in Business Class on Air Eritrea? YOU GOT IT! You want to see what povvo-class meals on Aeroflot entail? IT’S YOUR LUCKY DAY! This is COMPELLING, particularly from the point of view of the high-end offerings (for what it’s worth, the best plane food I have ever eaten was on an Air Ethiopia flight to Rome in the late-80s); some airlines appear to give you ACTUAL CRUET SETS in 2025, which is a degree of oldschool opulence that part of me quite enjoys (also, I like to imagine the health and safety considerations that precede these sorts of decisions – “no, it’s fine, the ex-SAS consultants think it’s vanishingly-unlikely that anyone could overpower a steward with a pepper shaker of those dimensions, even one in actual ceramic”).
- Dancing Dogs: Look, I don’t have a dog and, if I am honest, I don’t particularly like them – SORRY SORRY SORRY I KNOW, but, well, they smell, and they’re…annoying, and they’re needy, and, frankly, they’re far too much like children for me to want any truck with them. Still, I appreciate that many of you might feel differently and so I present to you the latest app by Friend of Curios Damjanksi, who’s made this little iOS toy which lets you upload a photo of your dog and MAKE IT DANCE via the magic of AI. I literally can’t tell whether this is ‘cute’ or ‘slightly-horrifying manipulation of your canine pal’, but, well, YOU DECIDE! Weirdly, the clips seem to indicate that the AI refuses to render canine junk as part of the animation, which is an odd degree of censorship that I hadn’t expected.
By Seemal
THE SECTION WHICH UNDERSTANDS THAT DOING CANNES AND THEN GLASTONBURY IS A PUNISHING BACK TO BACK BUT WHICH WOULD LIKE TO POSIT THAT DOING ALL THREE PARTY CONFERENCES IS ACTUALLY A MORE SIGNIFICANT TEST OF ONE’S STAMINA, PT.2:
- Weird Spotify Playlists: Whilst obviously I don’t fcuk with Spotify per the brief rant above, I appreciate it’s the world’s premiere streaming platform and that lots of other people do – as such, it is a GREAT place to enjoy The Oddity of Man, and this subReddit collecting people’s odd playlists is a nice example of the strange. Playlists composed exclusively of ‘songs about being stoned in supermarkets’; playlists featuring nothing but ‘Chinese artists singing about land formations’ (this is, seemingly, A Thing), a playlist called, for reasons known only to the person who compiled it, ‘Your Dog Is An Albanian Spy’…ALL OF HUMAN (MUSICAL) (WEIRD) LIFE IS HERE!
- You’re Never Lonely On Wikipedia: Ooh, I like this – a small webproject that exists to remind you that however alone you may feel there are others who are JUST as alone as you are! Er, that’s what this is saying, right? You’re Never Lonely On Wikipedia is a Chrome extension which does a single, simple thing – install it, navigate to any Wikipedia page you like and it will tell you how many other people have visited the same page – today, yesterday and since 2015. Will this make you feel like you’re part of something bigger than yourself, or will it simply make you feel small and futile and like you’re indistinguishable from all the other lonely, anonymous websurfers seeking meaning and connection and some sort of answer to the WHY DEAR GOD WHY of all of this? I have no fcuking clue, why not click and install and find out for yourself?
- The Vera C Rubin Observatory: The Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile, named after a pioneering US astronomer, apparently, houses a MASSIVE telescope which this week released its first images of the galaxy – you can look at them via this site and JESUS GOD THAT IS A LOT OF STARS I FEEL SO INCREDIBLY SMALL AND INSIGNIFICANT (plus ca change, innit). I highly recommend you taking the 10 minute ‘tour’ of the image as it will help explain what the fcuk you are looking at among all the spangly cosmic dust – per the blurb, “The Virgo Cluster is the nearest large collection of galaxies to our own Milky Way — about 55 million light-years away from Earth. Home to over a thousand galaxies, including a mix of spirals, ellipticals, and faint dwarf galaxies, it’s like a cosmic dance floor. The Virgo Cluster offers a vivid, nearby example of what galaxy clusters look like and how they evolve.” Honestly, this is DIZZYING and incredible and will, unless you really are dead inside, fill you with awe and wonder. BONUS AWE AND WONDER! You can see more of the telescopes shot on this page, should you want to feel even smaller and more insignificant.
- FcukLAPD: I have to say that I am very much enjoying the use of various public records and open source tech solutions to create pushback against the current US administrations increasingly-fascistic approach to immigration policy; this latest creation allows you to upload a photo and cross-reference it with the database of current LA police officers so you can, should you have cause, report their conduct and hold them to account. What I found interesting when playing with this was a) how many LA police officers look a bit like me, which, honestly, given my general shape (skeletal) and muscletone (nonexistent) struck me as…surprising, and b) how much fcukng MONEY these guys earn; ok, I know that the risk of being shot is significantly greater as a police in the US, but all of these people earn six-figure salaries which feels like…a lot, honestly, and does rather give lie to the whole ‘pay good salaries, get the best people’ argument which, I concede, I’ve often made about public servants. Anyway, I hope none of you ever have cause to use such a website, but, well, just in case.
- Interesting Bars: A website collecting, er, ‘interesting bars’ in cities worldwide. I wouldn’t normally include something like this but, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t *seem* to be AI bullshit – instead it’s drawing it’s recommendations from user submissions and as such it might actually end up being halfway-useful. I checked it on London just to see whether it’s any good and…look, the recommended places are very much Not My Sort Of Thing, but, equally, felt a *bit* less like standard tourist guide stuff than you might normally get, so I would cautiously say that this might be worth a try should you be travelling somewhere unfamiliar and want some non-standard recs for places to get battered on overpriced liquor (you know what my problem with cocktails is? THEY TAKE FCUKING AGES TO MAKE, and as such cocktail bars tend to be approximately 10% actual drinking and 90% waiting for the poor barperson to finish floating a layer of curacao over someone’s horrible concoction. That…that makes me sound like an alcoholic, doesn’t it? I mean, if the cap fits).
- Inglenook: It would be quite hard for this to be any further away from my personal area of interest, but I figure there might be a few of you for whom this is catnip – are YOU into witchery? Are YOU a lover of the occult? Do YOU want to pen your very own grimoire through which to UNCOVER THE SECRETS OF THE GLOAMING? Yeah, alright, fine wevs you weirdo, in which case you might enjoy this, a NEW MAGAZINE about MAJICK (I think, actually, they spell it ‘magic’, in case that makes some sort of category difference for you). “Inglenook Lit is a resource and literary magazine for magic. We review and recommend nonfiction, magical realism, and speculative fiction, publish and promote short stories, and share insights about the occult.” They’re accepting submissions, so should you have some THOUGHTS about, you know, CAULDRONS AND STUFF, get involved.
- Air Delivery: Fast, anonymous, device-to-device filesharing tool. Why might you need such a thing? Why wouldn’t you just want to use WeTransfer? ARE YOU DOING SOMETHING NEFARIOUS? Web Curios obviously accepts not responsibility for any Bad Things done via this link.
- DreamComposer: This is basically just a very simple website for people to post ideas they’ve had, but, honestly, there are a few on here that made me think ‘hang on, there’s something in that if you squint, maybe’ – for some reason I was really taken by the idea of business cards that are also air fresheners, although now I pause to reflect on it properly it’s obviously a fcuking idiotic concept, what were you thinking Matt you MORON, Jesus – and that I think are halfway-stealable (there are also some that are just…dumb, obviously). No idea whether this will continue to be populated or just die slowly, but it might be worth checking back every now and again to see if a bunch of anonymous webmonkeys have posted anything that could catapult you to fame and fortune (or at the very least help you stave off penury, unemployment and starvation for a few months longer). For example, I like this one should anyone fancy making it thanks: “A rotating online gallery, given to a developer, designer, artist every month to do whatever they want with it. After each month the work is gone forever, never to be shared again.”
- The Marine Organism Body Size Database: This is literally a Github repo for MOBS, “a global, open-access database of standardized body size measurements for marine animal species.” Why am I linking to it? Well, in the hope that one of you is inspired to make something totally pointless but brilliant, like, say, a music player which correlates the relative popularity of whatever song you’re playing to the relative size of a sea creature and plays you a video of said sea creature to accompany the song in question! WOULDN’T THAT BE GREAT????? Look, you fcuks, this is a BRILLIANT resource and if you can’t think of something amazing to do with a database telling you how big, exactly, a giant squid can get, and how that compares to, say, a Mahi Mahi, then I don’t really know what the point of you is.
- The Secret Market: I don’t really understand this at all, to be clear – this is a TikTok channel (there’s an Insta feed as well, I think) called The Secret Market, and it shows slideshow videos of…an imaginary market? With imaginary stalls? Selling…fairly-banal things? Look, there’s obviously some LORE going on here and a whole bunch of backstory, and looking at the comments there’s obviously a whole thing about the stallholders and their personalities and stuff, but I think what’s interesting about this is that it’s another example of the general ‘building up a wider narrative world from seeming nonsense’ that you get with the whole Italian Brainrot thing. Honestly, though, if someone could maybe explain to me what the fcuk this is about I would be really grateful thanks.
- Beli: I have seen various people referencing this this week, and so I must reluctantly conclude that it is HOT and VIBEY and therefore I need to include it like the pathetic, zeitgeist-chasing pr1ck I at heart obviously am; Beli is basically ‘letterboxd but for restaurants’ – you tag the places you’ve been, you write your little reviews and give your little star ratings and then share said reviews and star ratings on your little app to your little followers like your an INFLUENCER and your opinion MATTERS, because that is the most important feeling in the world in 2025. This feels almost entirely like a clout-seeking mechanic – what a great way to easily signal that I go out to eat at fancy places really really often! – but I can envisage a (miserable) world in which this gets added to the TopJawification of restauranting and everything becomes even more hypechasey than it already is (I swear, seeing TikTok-poisoned tourists queuing on Archer Street for LITERAL BAKED POTATOES a few weeks back was something of a cultural nadir for me, ngl). Anyway, fcuk knows what this looks like when literally everyone is on Wegovy in a year’s time and people are basing their reviews on having drunk a glass of wine and eaten three olives.
- Lux Weather: Would YOU like a very retro-looking, in-browser weather forecasting service? What’s that? You have literally hundreds of the fcuking things at your disposal already and don’t see why anyone would feel the need to make another? Oh. Amusingly the person who made this is offering a ‘premium’ option for £4 a month that lets you, er, choose different styles of retro telly to display the weather forecast on, which is a degree of blind optimism that, honestly, I am here for.
- Zang Tuum Tumb And All That: This is a fan site dedicated to the record label Zang Tuum Tumb, which, per Wikipedia, was “a British record label founded in 1983 by the record producer Trevor Horn, the businesswoman Jill Sinclair and the NME journalist Paul Morley. They released music by acts including Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Grace Jones, the Art of Noise and Seal.” You want essays? You want criticism and theory and NOSTALGIA FOR THE 80s? This is all well before my time, if I’m honest, but I do very much like the design and general aesthetic that the label seemed to embody, and for historians of the era, or those of you old enough to actually remember the label and the acts, this might be of interest.
- Swimmable Cities: I was in Copenhagen a couple of years ago for Naive Yearly and, on my way to the conference, walked through the city along the river and was amazed at the numbers of people SWIMMING TO WORK like it was the most normal and natural thing in the world; work clothes in a little waterproof bag that floated laongside them as they swam, often in commuter groups, having a nice chat and some early exercise before starting the day, and, as far as I could tell, NOT getting sick because of the unpleasant quantities of fecal matter contained within said waterway – obviously this is hard to imagine for anyone in the UK, but swimmable cities are very much a thing, turns out. Anyway, this website is part of an initiative launched a year ago around the Paris Olympics: “the Swimmable Cities alliance is supporting the growth of a global, grassroots movement for transforming urban waterways. With 125 diverse signatories from 72 cities and towns, and 27 countries; our Charter champions the right to swim, celebrates urban swimming culture, and honours the sacredness of water. Let’s make waves of positive change together!” I have no idea if this is still a going concern (there was a apparently a conference about this that just took place in Rotterdam), but I very much approve of the idea.
- Timdle: Arrange the events, eight each day, chronologically on a timeline and win POINTS! And what do points mean? In this case, actually, they mean the square root of fcuk-all other than, presumably, a vague sense of personal satisfaction, but if you want to test your knowledge of history in a DAILY GAME then this will scratch that particular itch for you rather neatly.
- Chainmania: Ok, this REALLY doesn’t work with my brain – I find it almost impossible to play – but I think this is a ‘me’ issue rather than an ‘it’ issue and so I will happily link to this game in the hope that one of you is less stupid than me and can bend Chainmania to your will. From the description: “In Chainmania you make, break and score chains of tiles – the bigger the better! Place coloured tiles onto the board, connect up the coloured edges, and rack up points. Bigger chains nets you more progress to the next board – where bigger challenges await. How many boards can you clear? How many chains can you make? How many locks can you break? Get chainin’!” I apologise for ‘get chainin!’, by the way.
- Lazy Tetris: Do you like Tetris but feel like it’s possibly a bit too stressful and high-octane for you? On the one hand, lol, you are pathetic what is wrong with you; on the other, have Lazy Tetris, the game of Tetris with all the challenge and jeopardy removed! Rather than the blocks falling automatically from the top of the screen with increasing cadence and velocity, they instead just…hover there, waiting for you to call them down – the blocks only move when you tell them to, meaning that there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to play this literally forever should you have given up entirely on life (and, honestly, I wouldn’t wholly blame you).
- Is Or Was?: Dave ‘Bagpuss’ Forsey (no, I don’t know, and I have a feeling I wouldn’t want to ask, so I shan’t) returns with another fun webgame – is a particular famous DEAD or NOT DEAD? Play this quiz and test your knowledge of celebrity passing – you get three lives, and your challenge is to rack up the highest score possible based on your ability to determine whether, say, Chubby Checker is currently on or off this mortal coil (I, it turns out, was not). This is surprisingly hard (or at least it was for me; your internal database of dead famouses may be more rigorously maintained than my own).
- Dino-Sort: Move the dinosaurs to the right places on the map, based on what each species likes and dislikes – so for example carnivores will need to be near prey, while herbivores will prefer being adjacent to flora so as to be able to nibble…trust me, this will all make sense within a level or two, and there’s something rather neat about the increasingly complexity of the puzzles and the layouts. This is a pleasing 15 minutes of gentle brainwork which I commend to you entirely.
- DOS Zone: OLD PC GAMES! IN YOUR BROWSER! Ok, so they are SLOW AS FCUK, or at least they are when being emulated by my clunky machine, but they do all seemingly work, which isn’t always the case with these sites, and this has the distinction of containing some genuinely weird titles such as (and I promise I am not making this up) a selection of, erm, ‘erotic’ games starring glamour models from my half-remembered childhood – there’s one here called ‘Jo Guest’s Milk Round’ in which, as far as I can tell, you have to, er, pretend to be Jo Guest, delivering milk to households in an attempt to, I presume, unlock some slightly-tawdry topless pics of the then-Page 3 model. I didn’t play this through to ‘completion’ (I lasted approximately 30 seconds – it is not ‘fun’ in any appreciable way) and so can’t confirm whether you will be rewarded with borderline-bongo at any point, but I am sort-of charmed by the fact that these, er, cultural artefacts have been preserved in some way here. For the rest of you who aren’t weird old perverts, though, there is a bunch of actual classic titles on here, including The Incredible Machine which is still a fcuking GREAT game all these years later, promise.
- Scrandle: Another daily game! This time the gimmick is simple – you’re presented with a selection of pairs of photos of food purchased at football grounds and tasked with selecting which of the two the general public thought was most appealing. My main takeaways from this are a) that I don’t care how bouji food has gotten at some grounds, there is a LOT of horror; and b) how the fcuk is it possible that cold chips with pre-grated cheddar cheese is considered a meal in this godforsaken country what the fcuk is wrong with you do you not have functional tastebuds?
- Outlier: Final game of the week! Outlier asks you to select the odd one out from a selection of things across 9 rounds, against the clock. Satisfying and occasionally-infuriating, I have enjoyed this quite a lot this week and you might too I think.
By Chivas Clem
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Low Background Steel: This feels…interesting and important and a concept that you will be hearing a lot more of over the coming years – because it seems increasingly clear that the advent of generative AI will mark a watershed in the verifiability of material online. “Sources of data that haven’t been contaminated by AI-created content. Low-background Steel (and lead) is a type of metal uncontaminated by radioactive isotopes from nuclear testing. That steel and lead is usually recovered from ships that sunk before the Trinity Test in 1945. This blog is about uncontaminated content that I’m terming “Low-background Steel”. The idea is to point to sources of text, images and video that were created prior to the explosion of AI-generated content that occurred in 2022.” This is a new project and as such is just starting to collate sources, but if you can think of something to point them at that fits the bill – untainted data is going to become more important, I think, than we can currently imagine.
- Garflations: I don’t really understand what’s happening here, but it’s Garfield and it’s *slightly* terrifying, so it makes the cut based on those two qualities. Apparently this ‘translates and voices’ a Garfield strip every two hours – I am confused by the ‘translates’ thing (from what?), but the resulting strips and audio files are nonsensical and, for reasons I can’t wholly explain, are really quite unsettling.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Tiny Wasteland: ‘Photographs of tiny figures acting out small diorama scenes in amongst the vastness of real life’ are not a new thing online, but Tiny Wastelands, by a Hungarian artist called Peter Csakvari, are a nice example of the genre and feature a pleasing amount of odd.
- Alex DiPaola: DiPaola makes ‘pixel and subpixel’ art – I really, really like their style, both the pixel work and the more traditional illustration which peppers the feed.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- How AI Might Impact UK Voting: This is a super-interesting piece of analysis by James Kanagasooriam which looks at data from the International Labour Organisation and the Department for Education about the likely impact of AI on specific areas of employment and cross-references that data with recent electoral data to look at how ‘your job is in danger of being fcuked by The Machine’ tracks to voting patterns across the country, and how, over time, this might impact said voting patterns in the future. It’s a bit wonkish at the beginning -it needs to be to explain the methodology used – but the analysis it delivers of the groups likely to be at risk, and how that might affect how said groups are likely to maybe shift their votes in future years as the economic impacts of The Machine start to bite. Honestly, this really is worth reading as it’s one of the few pieces of writing I have read to be clear-headed about What Might Happen and What That Might Mean: ““Executive Britain” though looks like it is in for an incredibly tough decade. Based on the modelling outlined above the top 5 constituencies for job exposure to AI are Richmond Park, Highgate & Hampstead, Cities of London and Westminster, Battersea and Wimbledon. Britain’s leafy, Remain heavy, high income London boroughs might face more trouble than they realise.“Management consultants and business analysts” are listed as the job occupation most vulnerable to automation, and “chartered and certified accountants” the third highest – perhaps suggesting the government’s 2023 analysis of exposure by job type was directionally correct. The white-collar promise of stability and higher incomes may be imploding completely. The graduate earnings premium has eroded in Britain…Automation is likely to take the close but loosening relationship between income and education levels and shatter it completely.”
- Young, Successful and Far Right: More excellent journalism in The Londoner – Harry Shukman goes undercover with a group who call themselves The Basketweavers and who, beneath the vaguely-bucolic-sounding name, peddle a tediously-familiar hodgepodge of racism and white paranoia around the now-classic shibboleths of ‘great replacement theory’ and other such claptrap, and who draw in members feeling the general sense of dissatisfaction with How Their Life Is Going and How The World Is Treating Them and The Fact That They Now No Longer Win Life By Default Like It Used To Be In The Good Old Days – this is, mainly, incredibly-sad, in terms of the direction of travel it indicates, the genuine loneliness underpinning these racist fcuk’s lives, and the fact that so many of the names involved in this piece are the same ones that have been cropping up in discussion of the UK far right since I was a kid – Mark Collett, for example, was the subject of a notorious BBC documentary in the 1990s when he was a young, up-and-coming fash in thrall to Nick Griffin and the like, and it’s miserable to note that he’s still peddling this crap to an eager audience of knuckle-dragging morons. I have to be honest, I’ve had a couple of conversations with young people over the past week or so which left me…somewhat concerned as to what is considered Acceptable Discourse in 2025, and this didn’t make me feel loads better about it.
- A Chat With Peter Thiel: I know, I know, I can almost hear you shouting at me to STOP BORING ON ABOUT PETER FCUKING THIEL, and, honest, I will do one day – as soon as he stops attempting to bend the will of the world in the direction he likes best. This is a chat between him and Ross Douhat of the NYT and…look, if you ever want a proofpoint to demonstrate the fact that there is no close correlation between plutocratic wealth and intellectual rigour then please do read this. It’s a genuinely jawdropping conversation between a pair of men who think themselves to be geniuses but who, quite clearly, are very much not, and contains a selection of truly batsh1t elements – the Thielian admission that AI is literally the only thing that anyone in tech is focused on and that, basically, without that we have NOTHING is…slightly-terrifying from the point of view of the next decade or so (what’s that? We’re putting ALL our eggs into the basked marked ‘completely undermine the entire basis on which significant swathes of the world subsist’? GREAT!), but the part that really made me stop, scroll back and reread (not once but twice because, seriously, it’s MAD) was when he equates Greta Thunburg to the ACTUAL ANTICHRIST FROM THE BIBLE (Thiel, you will recall, is one of those weird self-hating Catholic gay guys (see also Milo ‘One Day The World Will Know The True Story’ Yiannopoulos)) and then doubles and triples down on the assertion as the interview progresses. Honestly, read this and then sit with the fact that this man is without a doubt one of the most influential ‘thinkers’ (in terms of his practical ability to direct the actions of the very rich) that has ever existed and oh god we are so so so fcuked, so fcuked.
- The New Vertigo Years: Anton Cebalo writes about the parallels to be found between the now and the period between 1900-1914, called ‘The Vertigo Years’ because of the sense of PACE and MOVEMENT and INCESSANT CHANGE that they seemed to embody (sound familiar?). This is really interesting, although I am not *entirely* convinced that the parallel holds entirely – still, the central thesis is not-uncompelling: “The vertigo years feel so familiar because accelerating change provokes a strong emotional response. Today, we are also wrestling with a form of cruel optimism: too much emotional affect, but the speed of social change makes it difficult to make sense of it. That which we desire, like autonomy or community or security, are made impossible by the very technological systems we use everyday. By lacking the language to understand that which we experience, we feel a sense of vertigo. What’s left is a collective, unsettled feeling that lashes out as a false means of understanding. Technology may be improving, but it is “cruel” in the sense that it prevents understanding, until emotionality forces a response by chipping away at us until we finally break down.”
- Playability: Not long, this, but a smart perspective from Jay Springett, who writes “One of things happening in culture that I think we can all feel intuitively, is that increasingly, media mediums are playable. I don’t mean ‘gamification’, and I don’t simply mean ‘engagement’ (but metrics inside of systems are certainly part of it). But the sense that people – Gen Z and Gen A, are literate in exploring systems. They poke at the rules, bend them, maybe even break them and see how the system responds far more than millennials did. We played the game, but didn’t fully appreciate that culture is an emergent property of a system’s design.” Basically if you buy the Charlie Brooker line from a decade or so ago about Twitter being the best videogame ever invented then you will get the central thesis here – I think this is smart, and an interesting way of conceiving of things, and the sort of thing that the few of you still managing to hang on to your ‘strategist’ jobs (GOOD LUCK OUT THERE!!!) might be able to turn into some WEIGHTY SLIDEWARE.
- Encounters With Reality: Regina Munch on the extent to which ‘experience’ has replaced actual experience in modern life – the idea being that the performance or record of the ‘experience’ is itself the goal rather than the prima facie unmediated in-the-moment experience. Does that distinction make sense? I promise it will when you read the piece – it’s a ‘Plato’s cave’-type argument at heart, but there’s something interesting here about the mediation of reality, and the communication of it, via technology, and the idea of the ‘screen’ not just as a physical object but a conceptual layer. I enjoyed this a lot, not least for the degree to which it engages with the philosophy behind the idea of ‘experience’ itself – here, try this, see how you get on: “Another reason to remain in reality is that the experience machine reduces who we are as humans to what happens to us rather than what we pursue. Aristotle was right to say that being a person well is an activity, that good habits create a life lived well. A good person is someone who reliably does good things, not necessarily one to whom good things happen. This is what Rosen is getting at when she says that entering a simulation curtails one’s freedom—“freedom” here meaning our ability to do the good things that are a necessary part of being a human. Passively accepting a seamless reality leaves no room for you to act and thus no room for you to act well. It forces you to act according to other people’s fabrications—in some cases, to literally buy into them—and accept lies about who is helped or hurt by such seamlessness.”
- How AI Is Killing Jobs In Tech: Part of a new series in which Brian Merchant is set to investigate the impact of The Machine on various employment sectors – lest you think yours is safe, lol! – this first part looks at the tech industry and features interviews with 15 subjects who’ve all seen their work materially affected to some extent or another by AI and its insidious introduction into the workplace. Look, I know that you probably don’t want to hear more about this, that it’s scary and miserable and depressing – but, equally, I think it’s important to be honest about What Is Happening Right Now, and not to ignore the fact that this is very much ALREADY A THING, and that it’s probably quite important to be aware of the direction of travel before you get swept away by the tide.
- Some Actual AI Art: Should you still be in the (wrong, stupid) ‘you can’t make art with AI and even the merest hint of The Machine’s involvement in a work automatically makes it sh1t’ camp, read this and admit that you’re a moron. This is a profile of artist Almagul Menlibayeva and her work which combines video installation work with AI-generated material to reflect on media and censorship and storytelling – while the work itself isn’t personally my cup of tea (I simply don’t care about video installation work as a rule, sorry), I thought the high concept stuff here was super-interesting, and a near-perfect example of how you can integrate The Machine into artist practice perfectly well thankyouverymuchindeed.
- Robodebt: Following last week’s piece about AI and the welfare system in Amsterdam we have another cautionary tale about ‘what can go wrong when you try and introduce The Machine into the machinery of Government, specifically those bits of it that materially affect people’s level of support from the state’. This is a story from Australia about using automation to identify welfare fraud or overpayments using algorithmic technology – as you might expect, it didn’t go *quite* according to plan: “The goal was to save $4.77 billion through debt recovery and reduced public service costs. However, the algorithm and policies at the heart of Robodebt caused wildly inaccurate assessments, and administrative burdens that disproportionately impacted those with the least resources. After a federal court ruled the policy unlawful, the government was forced to terminate Robodebt and agree to a $1.8 billion settlement.” Worth reading if only as it offers you a good primer on all the reasons why this stuff is A LOT MORE COMPLICATED than just ‘point the software at some spreadsheets’, which is, I am VERY sure, how it is currently being sold to Government by a lot of very interested parties.
- AI Is Homogenising Our Thoughts: A somewhat–hyperbolic headline, fine (after all, it’s not happening YET), but the general principle behind this – that outsourcing lots of thinking to a Big Averaging Machine – is going to lead to a significant degree of consolidation of thinking and output, which, should you wish to extrapolate further, could have some…interesting implications for business and market competition, etc, a little way down the line. “Max Kreminski, who helped carry out the analysis and now works with the generative-A.I. startup Midjourney, told me that when people use A.I. in the creative process they tend to gradually cede their original thinking. At first, users tend to present their own wide range of ideas, Kreminski explained, but as ChatGPT continues to instantly spit out high volumes of acceptable-looking text users tend to go into a “curationist mode.” The influence is unidirectional, and not in the direction you’d hope: “Human ideas don’t tend to influence what the machine is generating all that strongly,” Kreminski said; ChatGPT pulls the user “toward the center of mass for all of the different users that it’s interacted with in the past.” As a conversation with an A.I. tool goes on, the machine fills up its “context window,” the technical term for its working memory. When the context window reaches capacity, the A.I. seems to be more likely to repeat or rehash material it has already produced, becoming less original still.” BONUS AI HOMOGENEITY THINKING!: this piece, on how it’s impacting word usage in real life, is another interesting example of the magnetic effect The Machine exerts on us, drawing us inexorably towards the middle of the fcuking bellcurve.
- Exploiting The Superfans: An interesting piece in The Quietus looking at the music industry’s increasing exploitation of fandoms through merchandising and huge volumes of MONETISABLE CONTENT, and the extent to which this is sustainable – the piece argues it’s not, and perhaps the swathes of empty seats at the recent Beyonce gigs suggest that being a superStan is simply not possible *in this economy* – but, equally, I wonder whether for the biggest stars there’s a certain hardcore of supporters for whom their fandom is entirely price-inelastic and who will continue to bankroll their faves like the whales in the casual gaming industry.
- Some Thoughts On Substack: I thought this piece on the economics of the Substack business model, and how it might not be that sustainable, was fascinating, and offered both a perspective I hadn’t heard before on the numbers underpinning the newsletter giant and an explanation for its increasingly-desperate-seeming drive to add MORE FEATURES and keep people within its walled garden. The basic premise here, per Ana Marie Cox’s analysis, is that the numbers don’t add up, that for Substack to actually deliver on the valuation that its current funding round is predicated on requires it to be a software business rather than a media business, and that on that basis the website is going to become a bloated mess that barely works in pursuit of becoming yet another social network that noone wants in 2025. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO USE SUBSTACK OTHER NEWSLETTER OPTIONS ARE AVAILABLE (you could, for example, use the lovely service that me and Rob at B3ta use, should you desire).
- Let’s Make A Website: In the general spirit of ‘I think everyone should have a personal website that isn’t on a fcuking social platform or substack or reliant on a large company for its existence’, this is a really useful and detailed guide to building a site – from design to hosting and everything inbetween. I appreciate that it’s currently gloriously sunny and you probably have no fcuking desire at all to spend your Summer coding a webpage, but why not bookmark this for later in the year when you haven’t seen the sun for six weeks and everything smells of rot and despair? It might cheer you up. BONUS WEBSITE MAKING THINGY! Kiki is a tiny homepage constructor which might be of interest to some of you.
- In Defence of Playlists: On why playlists are great, and have been devalued in recent years thanks to FCUKING SPOTIFY and the way in which they’re now synonymous with background music and algo-selected filler designed to MATCH YOUR MOOD – basically I think this is a branding problem and we need to reclaim the concept of the mixtape, and, ideally, create a system where we can curate a selection of tracks and have them PHYSICALLY EMBODIED on a small device to give to someone as a real-world gift, and, seriously, if anyone wants to talk to me about this then please drop me a line because I have IDEAS (that I will never do anything with but which I would quite like to palm off on someone more dynamic and proactive than me because, honestly, I could use the brainspace).
- My Couples Retreat With 3 AI Chatbots: This has been EVERYWHERE since its publication yesterday, which was predictable given both the subject matter (people who are in ‘relationships’ with AI companions go on a ‘couples weekend’ with a journalist who interviews them (including the AIs) about said ‘relationships’) and the subhead (“I found people in serious relationships with AI partners and planned a weekend getaway for them at a remote Airbnb. We barely survived.”) which is hyperbolic in the extreme and oversells the jeopardy experienced by the participants here by a factor of about 10,000,000. Still, it’s entertaining enough in the general genre of ‘oh wow, look at the weirdos!’ – although, again with this stuff, I don’t think anywhere near enough attention gets paid to the underlying reasons as to why exactly these people are choosing to establish what they perceive to be ‘intimate’ dynamics with AI chatbots.
- Bang! I Was Out: A profile of a Safe Drug Consumption Centre in Glasgow, and of the people who work there and the addicts who make use of it – established earlier this year, the Centre offers addicts a secure space in which to inject drugs with clean works and medical staff on hand, with the idea being that, through this engagement with local medical workers, drug users might eventually see their way to pathways which will lessen and, ideally, eventually eliminate their drug use altogether. As you can imagine, the Centre’s existence hasn’t proved uncontroversial, and in the face of significant local objections faces an uncertain future – this is a fascinating piece in the LRB on a very complex topic which I’m personally conflicted about; it’s hard to argue that offering people a safe space to do something that they would definitely be doing less-safely elsewhere is anything other than A Good Thing, but equally it’s also not hard to argue that the significant expense of maintaining institutions such as these oughtn’t be in place of initiatives to reduce the instances of addiction that it’s working to serve, and that prevention rather than mitigation ought to be the long-term goal of drug policy.
- Rich, Old Americans and How The Fcuk: Oh, ok, fine, that’s not *technically* the title – still, this piece by Sex & The City writer Candance Bushnell is a slightly-horrifying look at the dating (read: fcuking) lives of the rich East Coasters in the Hamptons, horrifying not because of the details (well done, septuagenarians! Go for it! Bone away!) but because of the miserable picture it paints of horny, viagra-juiced men with leathery epidermises and glow-in-the dark teeth pursuing women in their 20s who, I presume, just sort of smile and think of the benefits, while women of similar vintage navigate the remaining suitors, erectile dysfunction and all, and try and remember what they thought they needed men for in the first place. It does rather feel that what might end us as a species is women collectively deciding ‘you know what? Fcuk these guys (figuratively rather than literally)’ and simply noping out of heterosexuality altogether, and, frankly, I don’t think I would blame them one iota.
- Luke Littler: The New York Times profiles Luke Littler and the sport of darts in 2025 – Bobby George, I don’t think, never got this sort of treatment, more’s the pity. This is a really nicely-done piece, not least because the interviewer obviously gets the square root of fcuk-all from Littler in terms of quality material and so is forced to just style out the rest of the piece on DARTING VIBES, and, frankly, it’s a better article for it. “There’s something about top athletic performance that resists articulation. What made Michael Jordan such a great basketball player or Roger Federer such a great tennis player? Beyond the obvious answers — speed, power, dedication to the craft and so on — it’s easy to drift into hand-waving. People talk about “feel” and “elegance,” “intuition” and “clutch-factor,” about being “born with a ball in your hands.” But these descriptions tell you more about what it’s like to watch someone perform than what it’s like to actually perform, which, in the end, is what we really want to know. And those who know best, the people who are able to do what so fascinates us, are stuck trying to communicate their distinct subjective experiences to others who haven’t experienced anything like it. Asking Littler to describe his darts playing is a bit like asking Mark Rothko to describe how he sees red. He just does.”
- McDoone: Dan Hofstadter writes in Granta – a short story about an old…friend, their brilliance and their madness, and the indistinguishable nature of the two in his memory of them. This is beautifully-written, and will resonate closely with anyone who’s spent any time with people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
- Hanging at the OCD Conference: Finally this week, a superb essay by Andrew Kay in Harper’s – Kay visits the 28th Annual OCD Conference in the US, and…oh, look, just read this, it is genuinely wonderful and funny and interesting and curious and sympathetic and incredulous, and it belongs amongst other top-drawer ‘fish out of water reportage’ pieces and the best of the ‘weird cruise/conference/concert’ genre of reporting. Honestly, this is so, so good and worth every moment of your time.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:
