WHAT a week for fans of the general sense that everything really is going to tits at a rate of knots! Were I a different sort of writer – someone to who you turn for pithy cultural criticism and a neat skewering of the BIG ISSUES OF THE DAY – then I would probably have spent hours agonising this week as to what to turn my WITHERINGLY SATIRICAL eye on first, whether it be the groupchat hilarity, the Spring Statement and disability-fcuking lols, or the the uwufication of racially motivated deportations policy (it would have been the last of the three, I think, because it’s just so ASTONISHINGLY cnuty) (in the bad way).
I am not that sort of writer, though, so I have spent literally NO time this week thinking about that. Instead I have largely been feeling slightly sorry for myself, for reasons that do not concern you but which, let me assure you, are ENTIRELY JUSTIFIED. As a result of this, I am going clubbing this weekend and intend to do some moderate damage to my serotonin levels, meaning I can almost certainly look forward to spending a significant proportion of Tuesday and Wednesday in tears on the floor of my kitchen. I should probably apologise in advance for whatever the fcuk next week’s horrible burnt offering of a newsletter will look like.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND.
By Matteo Ribet
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO SUGGEST THAT IF YOU’RE AT A LOOSE END ON 14 MAY THAT YOU NAB ONE OF THE REMAINING TICKETS TO INTERESTING IN LONDON BECAUSE IT REALLY IS, WELL, INTERESTING, AND I THINK IF YOU LIKE CURIOS (LOL NOONE LIKES CURIOS) THEN YOU WILL LIKE THAT TOO, PT.1:
- Say One More Thing: I have spent not insignificant parts of this week thinking about this website/project/thing and all the different ways in which you could take the central conceit and apply it elsewhere, because you could have a LOT of fun / ruin a LOT of lives with it (exactly the sort of high jeopardy 50/50 I live for!). Say One More Thing is by New York-based code artist Tina Tarighian, and it’s a really simple premise – give it your email address, the email address of someone you would like to…*maybe* pour your heart out to and a message, and it *might* send it to them – there’s basically a lottery element to the site, which means there is a 1 in 1,000,000 chance that your email ever gets sent to its intended recipient, making it the perfect place for you to, I don’t know, confess to that murder that’s been making you feel guilty all these years but for which you *probably* don’t want to do three decades of time, or THE FEELINGS that you have been harbouring for the person in accounts, or the many calcified decades of resentment you feel to the people who forced you into this corporeal hell without even having the common decency to ask first…Honestly, I adore this and, hopefully, you agree and are also now thinking of all the other circumstances in which you might deploy a similar mechanic – maybe some sort of potential discount offered to customers who to are willing to risk having something DEEPLY COMPROMISING sent to their entire addressbook, say, or maybe some sort of internal thing where staff are invited to apply for a BIG CASH BONUS, but by so doing also have to write some ROBUST FEEDBACK to the CEO and know that one of said emails will get to its intended recipient with the author’s name attached…SO many fun ways you can tempt people into potentially doing something really, really silly and potentially-ruinous! Also, potentially cathartic free therapy! This works on SO many levels (two. It works on two levels).
- Deepfake Finder: File this one under ‘depressingly-necessary sign of the times’ – the link here takes you to a platform called Loti which has actually been around for a while but was previously targeted solely at the celeb/influencer market; now, though, presumably as a result of (justified) increased concern around the prevalence of deepfake tech and ungated AI models that can and will spin up an image of anyone given a source photo, they’ve opened up the offering to us normies too. Loti basically offers you a service which trawls the web looking for content – video and images – that use your likeness, and purports to be able to catch stuff that’s been created with AI to look like you – so, in theory, this would catch people using or manipulating your profile picture on scam or dating sites, all the way up to nefarious bongo clips featuring your face, with Loti apparently also working to get the images removed on your behalf. There’s a base-level free tier which allows for upto five ‘takedowns’ a month – it’s slightly miserable that my immediate thought was ‘Christ, that probably wouldn’t be enough if your face breaks confinement – and there are various tiers depending on how much protection you want, along with bespoke packages for the actually famous. There is, obviously, no world in which the existence of this service feels like A Good Thing, but I suppose it’s broadly positive that there are limited degrees of protection springing up for people who, understandably, don’t want their face being used to peddle crypto or knock-off Cialis (let alone the really grubby stuff) – although, obviously, there are questions about how comprehensive the detection software is and how toothy the takedown requests actually are, and whether or not it’s possible beyond a certain point to do anything other than play whack-a-mole with this stuff. Anyway, welcome to the future, in which you have to basically take out insurance on your own likeness in the hope that it won’t be used to defraud a grandmother in Preston in six months’ time!
- Alt News India: I occasionally feel slightly guilty about how little I know about the practical realities of life in one of the world’s most populous nations, particularly in an era in which the realities of digital media and smartphone adoption and social media and AI and misinformation collide hard with a massive rural population and patchy media literacy. Which is why I found this site, which exists to basically fact-check news and viral content across India, so fascinating – it gives you a sense of just how much MAD stuff floats around the digital media ecosystem, how aggressively…elastic with the truth so much of political campaigning is, and how impossible it is to get any sort of handle on deliberate media manipulation when there is just SO MUCH STUFF and it’s so easy to clip and edit and share to the millions of whatsapp groups through which this stuff proliferates. Also, fcuk me are there some awesome fake science stories doing the rounds over there – the stuff about ‘walking ladders’ in particular pleased me no end.
- URL List: This is a project by Curios reader Itay Dreyfus from Tel Aviv – HELLO ITAY! – and it’s potentially really useful; it’s a simple website which lets anyone make lists (and who doesn’t love lists? NO FCUKER, etc!) of urls, which can then be shared. There’s a helpful explainer video on the homepage which sets out how it works and what you can do with it, but, basically, you can create Topics, and then lists of urls within each topic which can encompass outlinks, video embeds and whatever else you need – so, for example, useful for research on a specific subject, or to coordinate resources for a project across different areas, or (and when I realised this I felt a small sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach) basically a really lightweight version of Curios with just the links and a short description/note and none of the awful prose that, look, I know just gets in the way and makes the whole experience slightly worse. Effectively this is a hugely-effective tool for lightweight curation and sharing and I think lots of you might find it really useful – but, also, know that if you use it to create a better, smaller, more readable and less needy version of Web Curios I will find you and make you pay.
- Telephone: Are YOU an artist (you may think that we are ALL artists, of course, but you are wrong)? Would YOU like to participate in a game of what is effectively multidisciplinary artistic exquisite corpse? OH GOOD! Telephone is a short-term project, run twice before in 2015 and 2021, which lets anyone who wants (but which is aimed squarely at people who Make Work of some sort) participate in a collaborate, interlinked art game – per the blurb, “Playing TELEPHONE is simple. We will review your application and, if accepted, you will receive a confirmation email. Then, we ask that you keep your eyes peeled for an assignment. Depending on how our game unfolds, this assignment may come quickly or may take time. In this email, you will be assigned an anonymous work of art from somewhere else on earth and it will be your job to translate this artwork into your own medium. This work of art may not immediately speak to you or reveal its meaning, but trust that it contains a message. Once you’ve completed your translation, you will return your work to us, and it will be passed to another artist somewhere on our big, beautiful globe to translate in turn.” I *really* like this idea, and have absolutely no clue whatsoever what the resulting works will look like – I obviously have no artistic skill whatsoever (unless you count ‘producing more words than anyone really ought to’, which I very much don’t) but will keep an eye out for any resulting writeups – should any of you decide to participate, do let me know how you get on.
- Severance Data Analysis: There are, seemingly, only two TV shows that exist at the moment – the one that’s about how terrifying being a kid is in 2025, and the one about how fundamentally terrifying our relationship with work is in 2025 (obviously I am guessing slightly here, what with obviously having seen neither) – this website is about the work show. Via Giuseppe, this site by Lucy McGowan is SO nicely done and such a smart showcase for some really good dataviz work which, from what I can tell, is also going to be quite fun for those of you who are REALLY into the TV show (you can make your own Lumon Industries badge, should you be so minded). The whole thing’s presented as a sort of low-res rolodex (I presume that this is some sort of callback to an element of the show – fcuk, writing this stuff is really HARD when you have literally no clue what the fcuk it’s actually referring back to, please don’t tell me that I am going to have to start watching fcuking telly too, I cannot), with analysis of all sorts of (to my mind incredibly obscure) datapoints like, er, the ‘dings’ of the lift in the show, or ‘stuff in Mark’s locker’ (WHO IS MARK AND WHY IS HIS LOCKER IMPORTANT? NB this is a rhetorical question please do not feel the need to tell me), or language analysis of the innies and outies to determine who is happier with their lot (dear God)…this is really, really well-made and well-presented and will I am sure be a treat for those of you for whom the preceding 200-odd words made any sort of sense.
- An Amazing Auction of Horror and SciFi Props: This runs until 3 April, so you have a few days to decide exactly which of the 62 lots you’re going to get yourself into serious debt to acquire. The BIG TICKET item here is a model of ET which was actually used in the film and which is listed with a starting price of half-a-million dollars which, look, I am sure ET means a lot to a lot of people but that is a LOT of money to pay for a foam and latex model of a creature that looks very much like a well-varnished, friendly turd. Should your budget be slightly more modest you might find such items as concept art for Total Recall and the original Dune movie which at the time of writing are only a few hundred quid. Personally though my eye’s on the animatronic baby dinosaur which is estimated to fetch about $7k and which I would personally consider to be pretty much the perfect remuneration for spending all these years toiling away for you here in the link mines hint hint hint.
- ASCIIdelic: PSYCHEDLIC VISUALS! Swirling shapes and colours, a bit like lava lamps but significantly-lower-res! There are five or six different animation styles you can cycle through here, and there’s something oddly pleasing about how the coolours and shapes and fluid dynamics work when rendered in the defiantly-lofi ASCII aesthetic; PUT THIS ON THE BIG SCREENS AT THE OUTERNET YOU COWARDS.
- Rotating Parts: I do love a site that exists in obvious homage to another, and this is very much the spiritual cousin to Lauren’s magnum opus (and Tiny Award 2023 winner) Rotating Sandwiches – except instead of sandwiches spinning in place, this site showcases, er, various electrical parts and components. SCART connectors! Oddly-shaped bits of plastic! THINGS WITH PINS! I obviously have no idea what ANY of these things are, but I do like the way that they are presented without context so you see them as AESTHETIC OBJECTS first rather than things with specific utility – also, you can click each one and it takes you through to a link to buy, which makes me wonder whether this is a slightly-oblique and ruinously ineffective storefront. In fact, come to think of it, I now strongly believe that every single website that sells stuff should have the option of viewing its entire inventory as spinning, 3d gifs, because we DO deserve nice things sometimes. Anyway, if you have ever wanted to watch, say, an Omron Electronics Inc-EMC Div SS-10GL2T spinning in place, rendered in glorious colour, then this is very much your lucky day.
- Microscopy UK: Melissa Harrison writes! “I found this today while researching male pussy willows (don’t ask, and don’t google either) and had to send it to you because there surely can’t be many genuine and still operational websites left like this. My favourite pages are ‘projects’ (terrifying) and ‘play games’ (somewhat underserved, given recent advances in gaming technology) but the whole thing is with exploring. And It’s still being updated – most recent post March 13th 2025.” I cannot argue with Melissa here – the ‘Projects’ page really IS terrifying, to the point that I just clicked the link again and physically recoiled slightly at what I saw (it’s not horrible, just…weird and unsettling), and the web design and general layout is oddly anxiety-inducing in the way that only specific types of oldschool webwork can be, and the whole project has that wonderful clenched-teeth air of someone being VERY ENTHUSIASTIC in a way that is perhaps a…touch unsettling. Still, if you want to know about microscopes – specifically, if you want to know a LOT about microscopes – then this may prove useful. Do check out the ‘museum’ section – there are some *lovely* pictures of water fleas.
- BNDCMPR: Another week, another nice little tool built on top of Bandcamp – this lets you make playlists from tracks on the platform which you can then share with other people, useful if you don’t fcuk with Spotify and don’t want to use YouTube (on which, if you will allow me to be a hectoring bore – LOL! – for a second, Bandcamp is a fcuking ace website that more people should use, if only because it lets you both pay artists directly for their work AND it lets you actually own the digital copy of their music, meaning you’re not at the whim of a streaming platform’s catalogue, There, that’s my OLD MAN SHOUTS AT CLOUDS bit for the week done, back to the links).
- SteamPeek: Ooh, this is a GREAT idea – SteamPeek is basically an ‘if you liked this you might like that’ service for games on Steam. Per the homepage, “SteamPeek uses complex, unique, indie friendly recommendation algorithm to find the most relevant similar PC games. The mission is helping gamers find indie gems easily, and support talented, passionate indie developers, who don’t have the budget for fancy marketing. With the normalized tag based approach the results for all kind of categories are not only similar, it also allows everyone to discover hidden or trending PC games, new releases and even coming soon titles – while keeping the results easy to overview and allow all kinds of sorting and filtering.” Given the insane volume of games released on the platform each week, this is potentially a really useful way of digging out new stuff from outside of the norm, smaller titles and undiscovered gems – if you game on PC this is very much worth checking out I think.
- LiveBoxes: OH GOD THESE ARE AMAZING. Do you like stuff in miniature? Do you find tiny dioramas fascinating and soothing in equal measure? OH GOOD YOU WILL LIKE THESE THEN. LiveBoxes are the work of a German guy called Oliver Kring, who somehow discovered (seriously, how do you discover this? I occasionally worry that I have spent my whole life missing out on some deep passion that I have simply never discovered thanks to my total inability to self-reflect) that his personal passion is, er, the creation of small plexiglass boxes inside which he creates beautiful little scenes which move and pulse with life – these are WONDERFUL. There’s a funfair! A garden party! A waterfall! An urban landscape! All tiny, and captured inside these clear boxes! These aren’t for sale of anything – turns out Oliver just REALLY likes making them and putting photos of them on the internet, which I can totally respect from the point of view of someone who basically stops enjoying stuff as soon as ‘being paid’ becomes part of the equation. I find these almost impossibly-soothing and, weirdly, a bit poignant, suggesting I have very much hit that point in the Friday morning Curios-spaffing cycle where I realise I should probably have had more than five hours’ sleep.
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO SUGGEST THAT IF YOU’RE AT A LOOSE END ON 14 MAY THAT YOU NAB ONE OF THE REMAINING TICKETS TO INTERESTING IN LONDON BECAUSE IT REALLY IS, WELL, INTERESTING, AND I THINK IF YOU LIKE CURIOS (LOL NOONE LIKES CURIOS) THEN YOU WILL LIKE THAT TOO, PT.2:
- Lectio: I tend to feature quite a bit of stuff in here relating to design in various forms, despite personally having no facility whatsoever for anything of that ilk, but I don’t tend to do the whole ‘God’ thing so often what with being soulless and hellbound and all that. Hence I wasn’t aware that the field of, er, Bible design (IT IS A THING!) has over the past few years apparently been REVOLUTIONISED by Mark Bertrand (Mark is not shy of putting testimonials on his site, and, you know what, more power to him – in fact, should any of you read this and fancy penning your own endorsement of Curios then I would very much enjoy that, thanks), a man who is VERY invested in making sure the word of God is nicely-kerned at all times. This is, obviously, QUITE SPECIALIST, but I think there’s something broadly interesting here even if you’re not so hot on the whole ‘Christian’ thing – the Bible is VERY dense and how exactly to present the text in a way in which is readable but also which respects its sacred nature is a genuinely fascinating design question, to my mind, and if you do any work around designing for readability then this might actually contain quite a lot of useful thinking/principles.
- The DIY Synths Database: It’s the end of March, the clocks go forward this weekend, the evenings are getting longer, I am just about remembering what it feels like not to be cold – so this is obviously the PERFECT time of year to embark upon a long, complicated making project which will see you have to spend significant time indoors, hunched over a soldering bench and/or keyboard terminal! The DIY Synths Database is your one-stop-shop for instructions on how to build your own synth, from a range of different designs and blueprints – all the projects here come with full schematics and instructions, links to relevant github repos, instructional videos…basically all you need to get building (well, except for a base level of engineering skill, without which this will make absolutely no fcuking sense to you, which is obviously very much the position I am in). There are 70 different synths of various flavours listed here to make, and I personally REALLY want to know what “cross-modulating ultra-chaos generator device which combines Rob Hordijk’s Benjolin and Ian Fritz’s Hypster circuits” sounds like should one of you fancy making one for me (is this manifesting? Am I doing it right?).
- Macintosh Repository: As I think I say with tedious regularity (on which, look, I know that there are certain tedious and well-worn linguistic/stylistic tics that have basically become calcified into the Curios style at this point for which I am genuinely sorry but, well, you try doing this weekly for over a decade; per the FAQs, the prose is the price I am afraid you have to pay for the links), I have no idea who the fcuk the vast majority of you are or what you are into or why the fcuk you are reading this in the first place (or whether in fact any of you are! So much uncertainty!) – that said, I have CERTAIN SUSPICIONS, one of which is that a large proportion of you are the sorts of people for whom Apple is and has for decades been some sort of weird, twisted, fetishistic religion and so for whom a digital repository of Old Apple-Related Software will be an enticing click. SEE HOW GOOD I AM TO YOU? This is basically a fan-maintained community site which collects old programs for old macs – from games to design software to old versions of the MacOS, you can find everything available to download, so should you decide that you want to follow up Project “Ruin Spring By Spending It Indoors Building A Synth” with Project “Ruin The Summer By Reconstructing an AppleII Machine From The 80s” then you will probably want to bookmark this forthwith.
- Chemical Reaction Gifs: This is an EXCELLENT subReddit which will be incredibly pleasing to any of you who only really perked up in science when someone set fire to something, or when Simon Lee decided to see whether or not concentrated sulphuric acid really *could* eat through flesh (‘partially’, it turns out). To be honest part of me is slightly sceptical that these are manipulated in post because if not WHY DID NOONE EVER SHOW US THIS STUFF IN SCHOOL?!?! Seriously, so many of these experiments are jaw-dropping from an aesthetic point of view – the COLOURS! The CRYSTALLISATION! – and I don’t know about you but I can’t watch these without a very small, very strupid part of me wanting to DRINK THE FORBIDDEN POTIONS. Also as a bonus, each of the posts has a dedicated community of scientists below it all explaining to the moron laypeople (ie me) what the chemicals are, what is going on, why the reaction looks like that, etc, which means that you can persuade yourself that it’s not JUST looking at the pretty swirly colours, it’s also LEARNING. BONUS SWIRLY CHEMICALS! If you liked the images in the Sub, you will probably also enjoy the video art of Roman De Giuli, who makes videos that are basically live action demonstrations of fluid dynamics using paint and which are very pretty in a sort of abstract kind of way.
- Justin The Trees: Justin Davies is a man who likes trees, and wood, and enjoys making things out of trees and wood, and then making videos documenting the process of making things out of trees and wood – specifically he seems to like making icecream flavoured with different woods and then eating said icecream from a bowl that he’s carved from the source material (he also has non-icecream-related wood content, should the icecream be offputting for some reason). Which, you know, why not! Anyway, this came to me via Tom Scott and so many of you might have seen it – but, if not, this is honestly REALLY soothing and surprisingly interesting, and made me really wish that I had an ice-cream maker because I find the concept of birch-flavoured icecream oddly appealing.
- Odysseus: Oh this is SO interesting. I have never been personally interested in the idea of doing a LARP, mainly because, well, I am not that sort of person and never have been and, honestly, it’s only in the past few years that the concept lost its absolute aura of ‘social death for anyone who plays’ (that may be unfair but, well, also true), but I have always found the concept behind them fascinating – not the war reenactment or LIVE ACTION WOW-type stuff, to be clear, but the wider idea of large-scale fictive ‘play’ with a shared goal, and the way that at the very top end of the concept it can basically become a sort of large-scale, mass-participatory game/theatre…Anyway, Odysseus is/was pretty much the ultimate evolution of the LARPing concept – the website explains that “Odysseus was a Finnish style larp for 104 players set in a world inspired by Battlestar Galactica. Odysseus is a story about a band of survivors battling against an overwhelming enemy in the aftermath of a devastating attack on a human colony in a distant star system. It is a journey towards the unknown. It is a story about faith, hope and sacrifice. It is a story about survival.” – but to understand more about it I recommend reading Adrian Hon’s fascinating interview with its lead producer and narrative designer Laura Kröger which explains a bit more about how it works/ed and the insane complexity of creating an experience which allows over 100 people to suspend disbelief and have an experience that is at once freeform and necessarily organic whilst at the same time having narrative propulsion and a clear beginning, middle and end. It’s worth checking out some of the videos on the website homepage to get a feel for how insanely polished this is in terms of sets, bespoke software, props and uniforms and just EVERYTHING, really – while I know that in actuality I simply don’t quite have the ‘playful’ qualities required to do this sort of thing (or, if I am honest with myself, the, er, ‘collaborative nature’) I can’t pretend that I don’t find the whole concept utterly captivating.
- Aspect: Is…is it weird not to have any photos of your life? Asking for, well, me actually – I have realised this year that I really don’t possess ANY photographic record of my time on this planet, which isn’t something which particularly concerns me but which equally I am increasingly getting the impression marks me down as something of an oddity (WHY DO I NEED PICTURES WHEN I HAVE THE WORST BITS PLAYING ON A CAROUSEL BEHIND MY EYES EVERY WAKING HOUR OF MY LIFE LOL!). Anyway, I use that completely uninteresting and unnecessary authorial digression to explain that I have absolutely no need for an appwebsitething like like Aspect, but equally that I understand others of you might be the sorts of people for whom photography is an Important Part Of Who You Are and might feel differently. Anyway, Aspect lets you basically organise and tag and sort all your images, coordinate them across devices and all sorts of other gubbins, which, I don’t know, is that useful? Fcuked if I know.
- The Digital Thriving Playbook: I am sure that Adolescence is an astonishing piece of television, but I currently slightly resent it for making the kids/phones debate tediously omnipresent once again and for bringing ‘BAN PHONES FOR KIDS’ back as an argument (fwiw no phones in schools obviously makes sense, attempting to stop kids between 12-16 having them at all doesn’t and won’t work). I’ve seen multiple people this week suggest – quite rightly, I think – that one thing that isn’t being discussed is how and where to go about building better online spaces; the idea that you can just KEEP KIDS AWAY FROM THE CYBER is fcuking ridiculous, obvs, so isn’t it therefore more of a sensible move to pay more attention to the way in which digital spaces are constructed and managed so as to deliver better and more positive outcomes? Orthogonally-related, “The Digital Thriving Playbook is a partnership between the Thriving in Games Group (TIGG) (previously the Fair Play Alliance) and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, supported by the Riot Games Social Impact Fund. The site is owned and managed by TIGG. Our mission is to empower game developers worldwide with accessible tools and resources to cultivate thriving player communities. Drawing from a global network of hundreds of companies, we leverage deep industry knowledge and academic research to provide tailored best practices and development support for game studios of all sizes.” I think this probably contains a whole host of stuff that will be interesting for anyone thinking about how to design communities in such a way that fosters positive communication (which, it feels, ought to be something more of us spend time thinking about than is currently the case).
- The Lullaby Machine: Via Kris comes this lovely project, which self-describes as follows: “Lullaby Machine is a digital rest-stop dedicated to sharing lullabies in a world where it can be hard to fall asleep. Growing from the idea of lullabies as portals into dream and potential tools for collective care, the site hosts a library of .mp3 lullabies submitted by established musicians and non-self-proclaimed artists alike. It is also home to a quarterly e-magazine featuring writing and art on the threads connecting lullaby, rest, dreams, grief, capitalism, ecology, and the internet.” I just paused writing to listen to this one, and it is BEAUTIFUL and now I want to get into bed and put these on a loop and go to sleep (SO TIRED) which, well, isn’t hugely helpful to getting this finished and so I am going to have to reluctantly move on but I strongly recommend you spend some time with this, there is some lovely music and really interesting work on here.
- ASCII Facemaker: You know when you load up a new videogame for the first time in 2025 and one of the first things that you do is spend an hour making a character because the various character customisation options are so insane these days that you can basically make a photorealistic version of pretty much anyone you like with enough effort and squinting? Well this is that, but the EXTREMELY LO-RES VERSION – create your own UNIQUE faces using ASCII characters, selecting each individual element from eyes to chin and everything inbetween from a frankly-dizzying selection of options; there is a LOT of customisation you can do here, and a better mathematician than me would probably be able to tell you how many possible combinations there are (I am going to say ‘tens of millions’ with a degree of unwarranted confidence and the hope that none of you correct me). You can waste a good 20 minutes making all of your colleagues, friends, family or polycule on this, which feels like a pretty good use of your afternoon tbh.
- TypingGame: My second ever real job involved working for a man so insanely controlling and obsessional that he insisted everyone label their stationery in the office because he believed that lost pens, etc, were an UNNECESSARY COST to be eliminated (love you Hector) – he also forced everyone in the company to learn to touch type on pain of sacking if you couldn’t hit a reliable 45-60 (oh man, FUN TIMES!!), which obviously is…slightly-insane, but something for which I am now very grateful (the lesson here is PAIN IS WORTHWHILE, probably) – anyway, this is a little browsergame that lets you race against others in FUN TYPING CONTESTS. You can either play on your own against bots, or create your own contests by sharing a link with friends and colleagues, so what better way to decide WHO IS THE BEST amongst a group of you than by challenging everyone to a type-off, with some sort of appallingly biological forfeit for whoever comes last? LIVE A LITTLE FFS.
- Decodex: Áron Csatlós (hello Áron!) writes: “I saw that WordLink was featured in the previous issue, and I want to show you another wordgame I created. It’s a nice cryptogram with daily quotes.” He’s right, it IS a nice cryptogram with daily quotes! Each day you’re tasked with decoding the quote of the day; your job is to crack the code in as few moves as possible – and, look, I am SO laughably bad at this that it’s making me slightly annoyed thinking about it, but if you’re a different (better) sort of brain than I am you might find this a perfect new game for the roster.
- InCARCeration: I don’t want to spoil this for you, so will keep the explanation minimal – imagine WarioWare (for the uninitiated, a collection of very short, very small, wildly-inventive minigames) but really low-res, REALLY silly and really funny, centred around being stuck in a car because REASONS. This is quite shonky but its commitment to its bit is laudable and it will make you laugh, which are two EXCELLENT reasons to click.
- Prince of Prussia: The final game this week is this EXCELLENT minimalist remake/reimagining of Prince of Persia, built in Pico8. Solve puzzles! Jump! Climb! KILL NAZIS! All of human life (well, certain bits of it) is here, and this is FAR more fun than it ought to be – seriously, I was really impressed with how strong the design and gameplay is despite the whole thing being VERY SMALL and VERY minimal. Also, the way in which the Nazis die when you stab them is beautifully, satisfyingly arterial, despite being rendered in approximately 6 pixels which, honestly, is genuinely impressive.
By Henni Alftan
OUR FINAL MIX THIS EVENING IS THIS RELAXINGLY-HOUSEY SELECTION MIXED BY FRANGI!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Rock and Roll Tedium: This sadly hasn’t been updated in a decade, which, let me say, is a HUGE shame as ‘mundane spots of famous people’ is one of my favourite genres of thing. This Tumblr collected anecdotal sightings of musicians that are in no way interesting or noteworthy – it contains stuff like this, which, honestly, I sort of adore: “I was enjoying some quality time with my son at a soft play area, scampering round the obstacles and slides like a good ‘un. Climbing through a tunnel became a portal into a surreal experience, as I exited to meet Bez, Freaky Dancer Extraordinaire, from the Happy Mondays, who was enjoying a similar experience with his young son. Running round in your socks is a great leveller, and I had a thoroughly nice chat with Bez”
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Rim Atelier: Rim designs posters, I think mainly for things (media) that don’t exist, or which are designed to communicate a mood or vibe, or purely as an exploration of poster design – anyway, whyever (yes, ‘whyever’, it made sense in my head as I was typing just then and I think I am going to appropriate it) they make these they are gorgeous and were I less criminally underemployed right now I would be tempted to commission them to make something bespoke for me.
- Dude on GPT: I found this via the ever-excellent 404 Media, consistently some of the best tech reporting in the world when it comes to the fcuking odd – this is part of the latest vanguard of what they’re terming ‘brainrot AI’, or ‘AI generated content that mines some pretty weird and fcuked-up seams to get people’s attention and thus get money from the Creator Fund’, and this particular channel is currently making a LOT of videos (using…Kling, I want to say, but it’s hard to tell right now tbh) featuring some VERY questionable usage of NBA players’ image rights. Want to see a video that heavily implies that Steph Curry is getting sexually assaulted in prison by Lebron James? No, I can’t imagine you do, and yet that is exactly what Dude on GPT wants to show you! Andrew Tate holding signs saying ‘will suck for bucks’ and then being kept in indentured servitude by, er, Michael Jordan? STOP RESISTING THIS IS THE FUTURE OF CONTENT NOW. Oh, and if you’re in the market for more weird AI horror (you’re not, but I’m fcuked if I am seeing this stuff and then not sharing it with you, why must I suffer alone?) then the work of Bennett Weisbran is probably the most viscerally-unpleasant stuff I’ve yet seen (outside of the, er, VERY NICHE AI experimentation communities that I am loathe to link to here because, well, there are limits, turns out).
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Regime Change In The West: A typically-superb piece in the LRB to kick off with this week, looking back at the post-war Western political landscape, and how it has evolved over the past 85 years. The ‘regime change’ referenced in the title is not the common usage of modernity (‘the current euphemism for overthrowing foreign governments’) but instead a reference to the shift towards widespread acceptance of the neoliberal paradigm from about the 70s. Effectively then this is a potted history of neoliberalism’s dominance as politicoeconomic doctrine, its impacts and the extent to which it can and should still be considered fit for purpose in 2025 and with a world order that looks once again to be…somewhat parlous? The conclusion, perhaps unsurprisingly, is broadly ‘who knows, but you’re not getting rid of it anytime soon’, but the piece really is fascinating and educative (or at least it was to me) and smart and very much worth reading: “An international regime being lowered into the ground, or rising anew like Lazarus? The stand-off in such expert verdicts has its correlate in the political landscape, where the conflict between neoliberalism and populism, the adversaries that have confronted each other across the West since the turn of the century, has become steadily more explosive, as events of the past weeks show – even if, for all its apparent compromises or setbacks, neoliberalism retains the upper hand. The first has survived only by continuing to reproduce what threatens to bring it down, while the second has grown in magnitude without advancing in meaningful strategy. The political deadlock between the two is not over: how long it will last is anyone’s guess.” BONUS BIG THINKY PIECE! The other topic that has generated a lot of discourse around policy and economics this week has been the Ezra Klein/Derek Thompson manifesto ‘Abundance’ (basically ‘hey, let’s build more things to make stuff better’) – it’s worth reading the main link and then reading this critique of the central Abundance premise, because the former neatly sets up the latter’s ‘yes, fine, but can we maybe think about new paradigms that don’t rest squarely on market-based capitalism?’ point (also, the other issue I have with the whole Abundance thing is that it seems to be imagining that we live in a post-scarcity society, or one that is significantly closer to post-scarcity than we in fact are, which, well, no).
- The Underlying Problem: Or, ‘why perhaps it’s time for us to decide as a species that there are certain levels of wealth that it should not be possible for a single human being to attain’. I know that this is very ‘post-Luigi’-type discourse but, honestly, I can’t stress how strongly I feel this or how much I agree. Read this (you can replace the name of That Fcuking Man with whichever local variant of plute most boils your p1ss) and try not to nod: “The underlying cause of our situation is inequality. We have allowed too few people to accumulate too much wealth. The imbalance has grown so severe that a tiny number of individuals with twelve-figure net worths have the means to purchase so much political power that they can effectively make the federal government’s decisions. The significant thing about the way that Elon Musk is presently dismantling our government is not the existence of his own political delusions, or his own self-interested quest to privatize public functions, or his own misreading of economics; it is the fact that he is able to do it. And he is able to do it because he has several hundred billion dollars. If he did not have several hundred billion dollars he would just be another idiot with bad opinions. Because he has several hundred billion dollars his bad opinions are now our collective lived experience.“ Also, to be clear, if you think that exactly the same thing doesn’t happen in every single country around the world every day of the week then I have a bridge to sell you.
- FADFO: I rather enjoyed this framing ‘FADFO’ stands for ‘Fcuk Around, Don’t Find Out’ and is being used in this piece to talk about a particular strain of political thought and action that’s taken hold over the past few years whereby for a significant class of people it is possible to take a punt on some DISRUPTIVE political idea (Brexit, Trump, etc) because, basically, you’re hedged from the potential consequences. The question, of course, is whether this era is now over and we’re all going to start finding out quite quickly from hereon in – and whether that will change some of the ways in which we choose to try and point society as a result. (as my friend Alex said yesterday, “in 2025 Titanic we ALL go down with the ship!”).
- AI As Tech Bribery: I enjoyed this piece, which is basically a long guide to why ‘yes, but what about the amazing medical advances and The Machine being able to identify cancers and stuff?’ isn’t actually a good or strong or meaningful counterargument to ‘I hate the fact that we are being forcefed AI like geese being readied for a very unpleasant end’ – basically, the piece posits, the whole ‘AI WILL SCAN ALL YOUR MOLES AND TELL YOU IF YOU ARE GOING TO DIE’-type promises of utopian tech benefits to healthcare and the like are effectively being used to trojan horse you into accepting the hollowing out of entire industries and the dismantling of the general idea of ‘truth’ and collective reality, and, well, you don’t actually HAVE to have the latter to achieve the former, turns out. Put simply, “when you are confronted with such retorts it is important to see such arguments for what they are: defensive attempts to invalidate critiques of present (and future) harms by desperately gesturing towards promises of future benefits. When someone asks you “what about AI for [this good thing],” the important thing is not to tell them that you don’t buy what they’re saying. But for you to tell them that you are not willing to be bought off by what they are offering.”
- The AI Bubble Is Looking…Taut: A collection of reasonably-strong signals over the past few weeks (MS rolling back datacentre spend, US market reactions to CoreWeave over the past 24-48h, etc) suggest that there might be a BIG CORRECTION coming which will rather fcuk some people in some uncomfortable ways – this piece examines how likely some sort of AI crash seems to be, and comes to the broad conclusion of ‘very’. Should you be interested in my take (you’re not, but I am going to give it to you anyway because Curios is nothing if not FULL OF ADDED VALUE), I think both that there is a LOT of silly money in AI which has been invested by idiots who haven’t understood the whole ‘no moat’ thing which has been entirely apparent for ~2y, and a lot of people are going to lose a lot of cash, and the markets are going to have a VERY bumpy time…but, equally, that that STILL doesn’t mean that the tech is a bust, or doesn’t have all sorts of actual utility right now, and much as you want it to mean that your job is safe and the future is all going to be fine, well, it doesn’t mean that at all.
- Is Buying Things Bad: I realised the other day when sorting through the laughable collection of rags that is ‘my wardrobe’ that I probably have something of a problem when it comes to buying things – specifically, I *really* don’t like doing it. To be clear, I’m not some sort of weird, horrible skinflint (I buy rounds! I buy dinners! I am nice, honest!) so much as I just really don’t like, or want, ‘stuff’. Books I can manage; artworks I can deal with, but otherwise…no, actually, sorry, I do not need or want to own physical things at all, turns out (which in turn becomes problematic when you realise that your aforementioned wardrobe is that aforementioned ‘collection of rags’). Anyway, this piece on slightly-enervating fashion zeitgeist chroniclers BlackBird Spyplane interrogates the question of whether it is in fact bad to buy stuff – the answer, obviously, is ‘no, in general, but maybe a bit if it’s sh1t, or plastic, of sweatshopped, or sh1t plastic from a sweatshop’. This feels like an interesting companion to the ‘make heavy things’ piece from last week in terms of the importance of quality and heft in the face of so much ephemerality and transience.
- Video Games and Young Men: Keith Stuart writes for the Guardian about the role that videogames, and the associated culture and communities around them, play in the problematic radicalisation of young men – Keith’s a brilliant journalist and this is typically measured and sensible and non-hysterical, while at the same time making the accurate point that Gamergate (still fcuking the culture 11 years on, still making claims to be one of the most culturally significant inflexion points of the past 25 years which, honestly, is fcuking INSANE) continues to mean that the wider culture around games is still often dominated by some genuinely awful people and views. I made this point earlier in the newsletter, but Keith articulates it perfectly I think: “The worry, in the current maelstrom, is that the nuance of the problem will be lost. Even while condemning gaming communities that worship influencers such as Andrew Tate and Sneako, that belittle women and share “incel” and red pill philosophies, it is important to recognise the hugely positive roles that online communities can play in the lives of teenagers. As the father of an autistic teen, I have seen my son flourishing through contact with other players in games such as Minecraft and Warframe. The last thing we need from politicians and attention-seeking lifestyle gurus is a blanket philosophy that boys need to stop playing games or that all games are unhealthy – this isn’t about screen time, it’s not about getting boys to touch grass once in a while. We have to understand that our children are digital natives, as at home online as they are in any physical space – for many, there is no clear delineation. And honestly, if you’re shaking your head at how sad that is while spending hours a day perusing Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, then I don’t know what to say to you.”
- Far Right Feminism: I appreciate that the likelihood of this being the case is somewhere near 0, but should there be anyone reading this who is incredibly senior in TV production and wants a HOT TIP then I would like to pitch you ‘right wing propaganda aimed at women is going to become an issue over the next couple of years and we are going to see the effects of the past decade or so of this stuff being dripfed to girls via socials and lifestyle content’ as a useful avenue to explore considering you’re on a 4 year development cycle. Regular consumers of these longreads will be aware that this is something I’ve been talking about for a few years now, and which has become more obvious as a thing with the strange and awkward way in which certain members of the ‘gender critical’ movement have found themselves sharing ideological beds with the MAGA right, but this far broader. The piece specifically looks at France and is an interview with writer and academic Charlène Calderaro who neatly encapsulates the whole thing early on: “Instead of outright rejecting feminism, as has traditionally been the case at the far-right, these activists selectively adopt feminist themes–particularly those related to gender-based violence and women’s safety–while reshaping them to fit an exclusionary, far-right agendas. I analyse this process as an appropriation of feminism, which involves a selective adoption of feminist fights and ideas, and their subsequent transformation to align with far-right agendas. The broader aim is to relocate feminism at the far-right.” So, so interesting and, I think, something that you are going to hear lots more about.
- Evie Magazine: Consider this a companion to the last piece, or a practical manifestation of it – this is a profile of Gabriel Hugoboom and his wife Britney, founders and owners of right-wing women’s lifestyle website Evie which has made a name for itself promoting a Christian Right-coded, family values-friendly version of femininity that values being really really hot, pleasing your husband, cooking, and DEFINITELY NOT PRACTISING BIRTH CONTROL. Is that…is that Peter Thiel you hear in the distance there? IT IS! HELLO PETER THIEL!!!
- The Rise of the Digital Dupe: This is super-interesting, and something that seems inevitable now that I think of it but which, prior to reading this piece, hadn’t occurred to me at all – there are entire cottage industries that have sprung up creating duplicates or fakes of digital goods, unofficial replicas of the sort of branded content that sees kids pay cashmoney for GTA Online skins or a pair of Actual Nike kicks for their Roblox avatar, particularly of brands that haven’t yet leaned into the Digital Goods Thing – depending on the sort of sector you work in this could perhaps trigger an idea or two.
- I Hate ‘Creatives’: Look, there’s every likelihood that if you work in an agency that everyone you know was sharing this EVERYWHERE when it dropped on Wednesday, but in case not…Deez Links has brought back its ‘Hate Read’ series of anonymous pieces in which people get to slag off something they can’t stand, and this time someone’s chosen to take aim at nonspecific ‘Creatives’ – look, the writing here isn’t necessarily to my taste and I don’t personally hugely recognise the archetype described here, but, well, I appreciate some of you might find it speaks quite deeply to your soul, so.
- The Rise of #HotBoyBadArt: Being a) straight and b) not on Insta I was not aware that there was a growing trend for BEAUTIFUL BOYS posting about themselves being BEAUTIFUL (nearly-naked) BOYS while showing off their ‘artistic practice’ – this is a funny, slightly-tongue-in-cheek bit of writing about both the phenomenon and its position in the history of ‘the gay male come-on’ in art over the centuries, which features lots of links to various instagram accounts of said beautiful boys and their (honestly, fcuking TERRIBLE) art.
- Drinking Was The Job: I am a real sucker for ‘tales of hardbitten restaurant life’, and while I have less of an appetite for ‘tales of workplace abuse’ this account of working for famously-handsy New York chef Mario Batali by Laurie Woolever (extracted from her memoir) delivers in spades – horrible splendour: “I was wrecked with fatigue, my throat and head pounding, my nasal passages now a fountain of thin yellow mucous. I chugged two quick glasses of Champagne and took a sip of water before the waiters began delivering the food: glistening, translucent spring-onion cakes, followed by scallops with lily buds and a whole roast sucking pig the size of a well-fed toddler, the meat tender, the skin like crunchy taffy. There was Murray cod fried in a rice-flour batter and garnished with soy sauce, scallions, and cilantro, then thin slices of abalone that had been cooked for 13 hours at low temperature, served with dainty baby bok choy. When the waiters retreated, Sandra told us that abalone retailed for $450 per kilo. Mario and Mark, seated across the table from me, both seemed somehow completely fucking functional, even chipper, whereas I was a mute shadow of a ghoul.” If this is your bag, by the way, I can highly recommend the novel SweetBitter from a few years back.
- Confessions of a Once-Bearded Lady: I absolutely adored this piece, by Elisa Albert, about growing up in the 90s as someone who grew facial hair, and how she reacted, and how her memories of that reaction and the need for it have made her think about and question her own notion of gender and her own identity and what she may or may not ‘be’. This is honest and funny and interesting and uncertain, and I love it for all of these things: “I’ve had a postcard portrait of one such person taped up over my desk for years: Jennifer Miller does Marilyn, by Zoe Leonard. A reminder of who (or what) I might have been. Who or what I “really” am. Who or what I sold out. Jennifer Miller, mon ami. Seventeen years my senior, hiding in plain sight at the Coney Island freak show around the time I was still finishing up laser treatments and dutifully swallowing hormone blockers. In photos from the time, she wears a full, natural beard and sequined ball gown. Her gaze is calm and confrontational and deep and unafraid and gorgeous and wonderful. Her smile, pure heaven. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I wanted to be her and I was madly in love with her. Did I want to study her or kiss her!? Confusing. Revelatory. She dared exist! Whereas I … did not, exactly.”
- The Thief Who Became A Celebrity: A superb story in China Books Review (written by Emily Feng) about a peculiarly Chinese story of modern fame in the digital age, within the Party panopticon. This feels like it could be near-future fiction, which is probably the highest compliment I can pay it.
- Your AI Lover Will Change You: I know, I know, ‘people trying out AI companion chatbots’ is OLD NEWS and you come to Curios for the NEW HOTNESS – trust me, though, this is excellent. Jaron Lanier – reliably one of the most interesting and sensible voices talking about technology – writes about what it might *do* to us when we are all talking to The Machine as much, if not more, than we are talking to each other. This is smart, interesting, speculative and imaginative, and I want to share a long-ish extract so you can get a feel for the sorts of practical questions it asks: “On the more moderate end of the spectrum, A.I.-love advocates do not see A.I.s replacing people but training them. For instance, the Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman makes the argument that people are not instinctively good at relationships, in the way that we are good at walking or even talking. The current ideal of a healthy, comfortable coupling has not been essential to the survival of the species. Traditional societies structured courtship and pairing firmly, but in modernity many of us enjoy freedom and self-invention. Secular institutions have found it necessary to train students and employees in consent procedures. Why not learn the rudiments with an A.I. when you are a teen-ager, thus sparing other humans your failings? Eagleman suggests that we should not make A.I. lovers for teens easygoing; instead, we ought to make them into obstacle courses for training. Still, the obvious question is whether humans who learn relationship skills with an A.I. will choose to graduate to the more challenging experience of a human partner. The next step in Eagleman’s argument is that there are too many channels in a human-to-human relationship for an A.I., or eventually a robot, to emulate—such as smell, touch, social interactions with friends and family—and that these aspects are hardwired into our natures. Thus we will continue to want to form relationships with one another. In some far future, Eagleman predicts that robots could “pass” in all these ways, but “far” in this case means very far. I am not so sure that human desire will remain the same. People are changed by technology. Maybe all those things tech can’t do will become less important to people who grow up in love with tech. Eagleman is a friend, and when I complain to him that A.I. lovers could be tarnished by business models and incentives, as social media was, he concedes the point, but he asserts that we just need to find the right way to do it.”
- 250 Things an Architect Should Know: Finally this week, I am obviously not an architect – are YOU? – but I absolutely loved this. 250 things – principals, maxims, ideas, ideals – selected by Michael Sorkin which, apparently, architects should know. Except these are perfect for anyone, I think, and the whole thing is weirdly lyrical and beautiful and reads like a poem, in the very best way, and I think this is rather unexpectedly magnificent and I hope you do too.
By Emma Hartvig
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