• Arena Hypernormalisation: I did a talk yesterday about ‘Why Everything Online Is Weird Now’ (it was fine, I think, thanks for asking, although – ASTONISHINGLY – after 25 minutes of me talking very fast and swearing at my audience literally not one person was motivated to come and offer me any extremely-lucrative gigs, the fcukers), but in retrospect I could have saved myself the whole 30 minutes of prep time and just put this on a screen instead, it is BEAUTIFUL and PERFECT and also the most incredible illustration of the extent to which Adam Curtis’ work is a triumph of editing, vibes and framing. Arena Hypernormalisation is a really smart little use of the Are.na API (Are.na, you will doubtless be aware, is the sort of scrapbook-ish platform beloved of a certain type of digital design/creative type person), which pulls images and text from various bits of the site and puts them into a slideshow with music over the top…just like an Adam Curtis doc! Seriously, you need to experience this to appreciate how perfectly it works – the juxtapositions here are almost uncannily-good, as though they’re being directed (no idea what, if any, filtering/matching is going on behind the scenes), and the whole effect is just perfectly redolent of everything being colossal and jagged and mad and dizzying and terrifying and awful and TOO FAST AND TOO MUCH and and and. Click the link, click ‘Go’ and prepare to be slightly hypnotised by the Horrors Of Late Capitalism – GOD IT IS NICE TO BE BACK WITH THE COMFORTING LINKS, EH??

• The AI Piecework Future: Now that we’re into the sixth month of 2026, careening towards the fourth anniversary of the DAWNING OF THE AI AGE (aka the launch of chatgpt way back in 2022), how are we feeling about the whole ‘likelihood of complete professional collapse’ thing? Should you be experiencing some light terrors about the likelihood of your career extending much beyond Christmas, you might find some small crumb of comfort in the fact that it’s now possible to earn pennies – yes, that’s right, literal PENNIES! – providing data to the theoretical next generation of AIs. The link here takes you to a platform called Kled, which markets itself to model owners as a place for them to get fresh, new, bespoke training data to feed The Machine, but which markets itself to us meatsacks as an EXCITING EARNING OPPORTUNITY! Would you like to spend a few hours filming your point of view as you undertake a series of simple, repetitious tasks like, I don’t know, filling a kettle or emptying a dishwasher? Would you like the opportunity to be paid ACTUAL CASHMONEY (ok, fine, vanishingly small amounts, but still) for said tasks? OH GOOD! I can’t stress enough quite how existentially-troubling I felt this – is this what it’s going to come to? Endlessly washing the same pan with a phone strapped to my forehead in an attempt to earn enough money to afford this month’s clean water? Anyway, this is either some sort of dystopian precursor horror moment or a sign of quite how much silly money is floating around the market at the moment for anything AI-ish – see also this company in NYC, which is offering to clean people’s apartments for free in exchange for said cleaning process being filmed and used to train future domestic robotic companions (presumably) – so what if your whole flat is mapped and detailed and ingested by The Machine? What’s the worst that could happen? You will, sadly, only be able to participate in this Exciting Machine Training Earning Opportunity if you’re in the US at the moment, I think, but it’s only a matter of time before this is the new ‘I’m going to do some shifts on Uber’ sidehustle imho – there’s a decent longread on this here should you wish to find out more about exactly how unlucrative this stuff is and how…bleak it all feels.

• All Of Bluesky At Once: Is it dying? Oh, who cares ffs, there is nothing more tedious than social platforms debating their own health. HYPOCHONDRIA IS DULL. Ignore existential questions around What Will Become Of Social Media and instead immerse yourself in the full glory of the Bluesky firehose, presented as a sort of inbox-analogue – this is a genuinely terrible way to consume the feed, but does have that pleasingly-anaesthetising feeling of just letting the posts wash past you, the weirdly-comforting sense of low-level conversational buzzing and NOT BEING ALONE IN THE WORLD which is oddly-reminiscent of early socials. Also, this being Bluesky, it’s probably a very good way of getting unexpected eyefulls of furry erotica should you toggle the NSFW switch, so win/win really.

• The Map of Metal: Are YOU a fan of metal (the music, not the conductive material)? OH GOOD! This is a very cool piece of design, presenting the history of music’s least-cool (sorry, but you know it’s true) genre as a…er…map (you guessed that from the title, didn’t you?), taking you from metal’s origins in the 60s all the way to the present day, with curated YouTube playlists for each subgenre, taking you through speed metal, black metal, death metal, viking metal, trance metal and a frankly exhausting range of other minor variations on the ‘people play guitar loudly and shout at you about vaguely-mythologically-themed stuff’ theme – it’s even designed in a way vaguely-reminiscent of the general denim’n’sweat aesthetic. This feels like it’s about 12 years old, so fcuk knows how I have failed to find it until now – only three links in and I feel like a failure, this is going to be a LONG MORNING.

• Spinning YouTube Videos: Plug in the url of any YouTube video you like and watch as it spins at an RPM of YOUR choosing! I just loaded this up and it made me feel VERY sick, if you want an indication of quite how well I am coping with the whole ‘waking up at 6am to write this fcuker’ thing this week (I will stop complaining now, I do it to myself, etc).

• Weather Rothkos: You might have seen this – it’s been everywhere in the past week or so – but in case not (and even if you have tbh, remember I do this for me and never, ever you) then please enjoy this clever little site which takes live weather data for wherever you are in the world and uses it to pull a meteorologically-appropriate Rothko from the artists’ archive, showing you one of his pictures that best matches the general weather vibe outside your window. This is SUCH a nice use of live data and archive material, and there’s a nice, larger-scale variant build of this using, I don’t know, the full archive of the National Gallery, which I would very much enjoy seeing. Should you be curious as to which Rothko best connotes the London sky as of 728am on 5 June 2026, it is THIS ONE.

• Murrell’s: A LITTLE BIT OF SATIRE! I very much enjoyed this site, made by Rory Flint (who you may recall made the Guardian Blind Date dataviz site a few months back), which takes all of the STUFF bought by Peter Murrell with the money he nicked (you know who I’m talking about, the former SNP Chief Exec who embezzled a bunch of money and used to buy a collection of amusingly-mundane tat) and displays it as a faux-Amazon style shopfront. This is, oddly, a really effective way of communicating the scale of the fraud, but the thing I love most is the sheer MUNDANITY of it all – passionfruit shower gel! Some of those perspex containers into which people inexplicably decant cereal (WHY??? IT COMES IN A PERFECTLY GOOD BOX ALREADY FFS!)! A surprising and, honestly, wholly-unnecessary volume of Dyson products! FOUNTAIN PENS!!!!  Beautiful work.

• Wikigraph: Not the first ‘hey look! Here’s wikipedia presented as a bunch of nodes so you can get a vague idea of how concepts interrelate and cluster and link across the whole of the site!’ thing I have featured in here over the years, but this is a nice riff on the general genre and I particularly appreciate the way in which you can plug in any two entries you like and see exactly how you can leap from one to the other in a sort of conceptual hopscotch (yes, that’s right, CONCEPTUAL HOPSCOTCH, it’s a perfectly-reasonable term, stop looking at me like that).

• The Wall: I’m always a sucker for massively-multiplayer collaborative online drawing projects, and even moreso when they result in a) genuinely-impressive artworks; and b) no nazis at all, so congratulations to the community behind this site (which is officially called ‘Filian Is Lost’ and which appears to be part of some much wider lore project around a Vtuber called Filian who has ‘gone missing’ and, look, I have no fcuking idea and life is honestly too short, but there’s a BIG META THING going on here under the surface which you might find it interesting to dig into). This has only been going for a few days, I think, and yet the several hundred people who’ve participated have turned it into an anime graffiti wall demonstrating impressive degrees of pixelart skill and collaboration – it’s all very uwu, which isn’t my personal vibe, but I can’t help but applaud at the craft here. If anyone knows what the fcuk the whole Filian thing is about btw, please do feel free to tell me.

• Far Out Company: Per the blurb here, “Far Out Company is dedicated to unearthing the work of under-appreciated artists of the 1960s and ‘70s counterculture” – what that means in practice is a growing, searchable archive of old footage of hippy culture, so lots of Big Sur and Esalen and the general sense lurking just below the surface (or at least to me) that all of this was one bad trip from descending into something very, very bad indeed (remember, kids – lol, kids, you’re all fcuking old like me – that if you scratch a hippy hard enough a lot of the time you’ll find a fascist just under the surface!). I’m not sure why I get such catastrophically bad vibes from this stuff – I think it might have something to do with a subconscious association between this sort of film stock/grading and really unpleasant horror films (it’s all very Cannibal Holocaust), but I find absolutely everything in here VERY UNSETTLING.

• Indiecon: “Indiecon is a joint effort of independent magazine, book, art print, zine, newsletter, podcast and website publishers from all over the world. The three-day publishing festival is based at Hamburg’s Oberhafen, a former freight yard now creative quarter right in the city centre” – the page I’ve linked to takes you to the list of the winners of travel grants to the festival, which also doubles up as a SUPERB archive of new and interesting magazines from around the world, with links to their Instagrams and websites. If you have any interest in What Independent Magazines Look Like In 2026 then this is a superb resource – as it is if you’re looking for things to read, or places to pitch your own writing. This makes me very very happy, and I continue to be broadly bullish about ‘magazines’ as a thing for the next few years (this is almost certainly a kiss of death, so apologies to all of the publishing initiatives I have just doomed with that endorsement).

• Birds Heard Recently: Ooh, this is a cute idea – a(n I think vibecoded) site which takes audio data from…wherever it’s based, analyses it for birdsong, and then presents a visual overview of all the birds that have been identified in the past hour, or week, or during the duration of the project. Simple, but a really nice idea – I have no fcuking clue where this is based (I think North America, but can’t be sure) or who made it, but, er, THANKS, ANONYMOUS AVIAN ENTHUSIAST!

• The Last Museum: *Slightly* better in theory than in practice, this site is basically intended to function as a universal search engine for artworks in museum archives – as the site explains, “The Last Museum is the largest search engine for museum art. It uses semantic search, allowing you to search for artworks by theme, style, subject, vibes, or any description you can imagine. We currently have around 5 million artworks indexed, and strive to eventually index all museum art in the world.” It doesn’t work AMAZINGLY – the search isn’t quite as effective as the description makes it sound – but it’s a hell of a way of falling into a 15 minute art rabbithole.

• Outcry: This is an interesting idea – Outcry is an LLM designed specifically and explicitly to help activists plan campaigns, with the additional plus that it can be run locally and as such is theoretically more secure should said activism potentially involve activities which might be lightly-sanctioned by law. It’s creator is apparently someone who was involved with Occupy back in the day, which may or may not fill you with confidence based on the long-term success of that movement in engendering anything resembling meaningful change, so its bona fides seem reasonable, and while I don’t currently have any activism on the go (lol, of course I don’t, we’re all going to die, who cares?) and so haven’t had the opportunity to kick the tires on this, I think their mission statement feels…good? See what you think: “We are creating a Superintelligent Activist AI devoted to furthering social protest, mass mobilization, and the acceleration of collective power. The task is urgent and singularly focused: harness the radical potential of AI to create mass mobilizations that solve the greatest challenges—not by perpetuating stale protest scripts, but by reimagining the mechanisms of activism, movement-building, and social transformation.”

• Curated Festivals: Are you planning on gurning in a field somewhere this summer? Want a helpful site that can assist in determining exactly where you might want to do that? OH GOOD! Curated Festivals contains details of 125 European festivals which you can filter by genre, location, date and the like (although annoyingly not by artist, which is a shame imho) to find the one that is perfect for YOU. I am personally astonished that there appear to be a dozen or so psytrance festivals taking place this year, but I am happy for all the white people with dreadlocks out there.

• Roost: Are…are birds having a MOMENT? I appreciate that that is an entirely ridiculous thing to type, but, also, I swear I am seeing a LOT of bird-themed stuff around at the moment…am I going mad? Anyway, this is another datapoint for my HOT BIRD SUMMER thesis, and an app which I really wanted to like more than I do. The gimmick is fun – a messenger app which rather than sending your communications immediately instead lets you send them via simulated carrier post, selecting from a range of different birds, which fly at different speeds, to deliver your missive to its recipient; SLOW COMMUNICATION FOR OUR HYPERSPEED AGEzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Except, obviously, this only works if you know other people on the app – otherwise there’s a slightly-clunky ‘penpal’ matching mechanic to pair you with people to correspond with, which, I don’t know, makes me think this is just going to end up being coopted by men attempting to…flirt…very…slowly, although perhaps I am being very unfair. Anyway, if YOU would like to correspond at glacial pace with a stranger from anywhere in the world via the medium of simulated pigeon post, then, well, HAVE FUN!

• The Afro Index: I featured something similar to this during covid, a database of afro hairstyles for game developers and coders, to help improve representations of non-white hairstyles in gaming (this one, in fact); this is a different project but with largely-similar aims. “As a Black illustrator and digital designer with a degree in Applied Computer Science, I work closely with character design and digital systems. In both spaces, I kept encountering the same problem: Black hairstyles were often miscategorized, lacked angles, or reduced to the same few repeated references. Afro Index is an attempt to build a structured, culturally informed reference system: one that reflects the real range, technique, and identity behind Black hair. It’s both a design project and an evolving archive, focused on improving representation through better tools. No longer will creatives have to suffer through the “Killmonger locs” era.”

• The Baguette Index: Every nation gets the data projects it needs, and so it is that some French person has vibecoded this site which maps the price of baguettes across the country so you can see exactly how much you’re being fleeced in Paris. I can’t get over the fact that you can still apparently buy an actual baguette from an actual bakery for less than a Euro – WHY THE FCUK DOES IT COST ME FOUR FCUKING QUID AT THE MARKET THEN YOU FLEECING CNUTS? That may well be the most privileged, London middle-class thing I have EVER written here, so well done me.

• Yeet Dating: Another attempt to UNFCUK DATING – I am very much not the target market for this, but Yeet markets itself as an ‘AI Dating App’ and…look, maybe I am getting old, but can anyone look at this and tell me what the fcuk the gimmick is here? Because, honestly, the site is NONSENSICAL – what does ‘No ghosting & swiping, Just real-time vibe check’ mean?! As far as I can tell the AI agent will bring matches to you rather than requiring a swipe, and this will apparently…ensure that you don’t get ghosted? HOW? I think, based on screenshots, that the weird little bot thing will also prod you to keep the chat going with someone who you’ve neglected to reply to, which, honestly, sounds like a passive-aggressive nightmare, but if you feel like you’ve fetted your way to the bottom of Feeld then maybe this might hold some appeal (but the language very much suggests that it’s aimed at people in their 20s, so, er, presuming you’re of a more traditional Web Curios vintage then maybe just leave the kids to it, eh?).

• London’s Water Fountains: So it’s currently very grey outside my window and…not that warm, but it was only a few days ago that we were all sweating ourselves 3kg thinner and thinking we were going to die of hot, and it’s probable we’re going to have at least another couple of spells of Unpleasant, Miserable Heat before the Sad Times kick back in again, so why not bookmark this map of all of London’s civic water fountains so you need never have to buy bottled water ever again? Obviously this is only of use to Londoners or people visiting, but, let’s be honest, noone else counts. BONUS LONDON HEAT LINK! A site which helps you find places in the city with aircon (Americans will be appalled to know that this is not necessarily standard), which, again, BOOKMARK IT, future you will thank you.

• Roundabout Dogs: Apparently ‘crudely-made wooden dogs on roundabouts’ is a THING in Sweden – this site lets you purchase your very own crudely-made wooden dog so you too can join in this fine Scandi tradition. The dogs are made from reclaimed materials, and the monies raised go to charity, and I for one would quite like to see these all over the place. Can we make this the summer of roundabout dogs as opposed to fcuking St George’s Crosses? Eh? Oh, fine, please yourselves.

• Mouchette Music: Mouchette, featured in Curios years ago, is a longtime webart superstar – this is a little project on their website which…oh, here, read this: “You have always known me as a web superstar, but now you will discover me as a pop singer. I made music and I composed these 7 songs for you. They have no words, no title, but I am sure you will understand their meaning. As tiny as they are, each of them is a complete song, a whole piece of interactive music which you can also see and touch. Their interaction is not so much in the mouse clicks than in your own reactions. The last of these 7 songs will be my very last song. You may recall it, play it again, but it will link you nowhere. Its lack of interaction will leave you alone with your own reactions.” This made me feel VERY UNCOMFORTABLE; your mileage will vary, but I enjoyed it a lot while also feeling…quite grubby while participating. I won’t explain why, you can find out for yourselves – but, er, you probably don’t want anyone else to be able to hear the audio while you’re doing this.

• The Anti-Bongo Deterrent System: I am, of course, certain that each and every one of you has a relationship with bongo which could only be described as ‘healthy’ and ‘in no way obsessional’, and wouldn’t for a SECOND think that any of you might be afflicted with the sort of obsessive, compulsive desire to spend every waking moment of your life masturbating to juddering, convulsive climax that derails your entire life…but, y’know, maybe you know someone with that sort of problem. If so, they might welcome this wonderful bit of code which promises to CALL YOU UP AND SHAME YOU every time you attempt to visit a scud site. “Swan is a browser extension that helps you break out of the porn addiction cycle by calling you at the moment of urge. It is built for people who want a transparent recovery-support tool they can inspect, install, and connect to their own provider accounts. What Swan Does: Monitors browser navigation for configured NSFW domains; Starts a phone call when a tracked domain is opened; Redirects the browser to an intervention page.” I unironically love this – the only way it could possibly be better is if it let you LLM clone a version of your mum’s voice to shout at you down the line.

• Mega Browser Rave: Honestly, when I found this site this week I had a momentary pang of…almost nostalgia for covid (not for the killer virus, to be clear, but to that specific moment in digital culture during which the idea of creating shared digital experiences to replace the ones we couldn’t have because of the global airborne death pandemic), and all those attempts to replicate clubs in a time when the clubs were all shut. Except it turns out that most of the clubs haven’t reopened, a whole swathe of people seems to have forgotten how to have fun or exist in public space in general, and so perhaps it’s not too much of a surprise to find that someone’s attempted to recreate the concept of NIGHTCLUB BUT MAKE IT METAVERSAL that characterised so many projects c.2021-2. The DJ sets are pulled from a curated YouTube playlist, you can ‘dance’ your little avatar around in the virtual club, you can talk to other dancers, and, in general, it’s quite a cute place to spend 5 minutes enjoying a moment of connection with strangers – it’s also, fundamentally, still not actually that fun to pretend to dance with a little Roblox-esque avatar, if I’m honest, and the whole thing caused my laptop to practically take off with exertion, so I can’t say that I am minded to try it again, but it’s a nice idea and a nicely-made variation on the theme.

• Inga Rose: It’s been a while since I checked in on the state of AI-generated music, but this week I stumbled across Inga Rose, a nonexistent, AI-generated singer (the lyrics, per the ‘artist bio’, are human-written, but the songs are all spun up by one or more musicgenAIs) whose whole vibe is ‘strong, independent black woman’ and whose most-listened-to song has 6.2million streams – take a listen, see what you think. Leaving aside questions of who, exactly, is the person behind this (because you really hope it is a black person, because otherwise it starts to feel even ickier), what I thought was interesting about this is the extent to which the most popular track shares a lot of musical DNA with the other breakout AI song from last year, that country and western-ish number (you remember, this one) – there’s a similar pace to it, there’s a similar cadence to the way the lyrics are delivered, and I wonder whether this is a sweet spot for the current iteration of the musical Machine, this slow-ish, vaguely-ploddy, BIG SWELLING VERSES AND CHORUS vibe…anyway, listening to Inga Rose made me feel…I mean, on the one hand it made me feel nothing whatsoever, but there was also a creeping sense of ickiness at the uncanniness of the whole thing, and also the number of comments under the vid talking about how empowering it was and how it had helped listeners come to terms with HARD LIFE FACTS and…Christ, I can’t tell you much I fcuking hate the fact that it is IMPOSSIBLE to know whether anything is real anymore. Real people commenting? Bots? Both? WHO FCUKING KNOWS???? BONUS AI MUSIC WEIRDNESS!: this, by way of contrast, is, er, viking-themed AI ‘rapper’ Ravnlore (I mean, lol) whose output is PROLIFIC and whose songs are some of the worst things I have ever heard (NB – I don’t think that this is a nazi or fascist thing, although it’s always a bit hard to tell with anything that leans hard into this sort of aesthetic).

• Sayso: How do you like your news? I mean, increasingly the answer is ‘I don’t, it’s all fcuking horrible, why must it keep happening at me?’, but should the answer to that question in fact be ‘delivered to me by anonymous people off social media who may or may not know what the fcuk they are talking about but with whom I am developing a slightly-weird parasocial relationship’ then OH BOY do I have the app for you! Sayso is “a news content app designed for your growth. We curate real stories from vetted creators, delivered daily in a format that’s easy to absorb and impossible to doom scroll. Follow the voices you trust, explore the topics you care about, and walk away better informed.” Exactly what this means in practice is entirely-unclear (the app is pre-release at the moment), but i am SO curious as to how they are going to source the creators, how they will be ‘vetted’ and by whom, how the fcuk this thing thinks it’s going to monetise…I can’t imagine you will EVER hear of this again, but there’s something interesting in the idea of leaning into ‘news filtered through influencers’ as an idea – not ‘good’ interesting, to be clear, but ‘interesting’.

• Uproot Excavator: A YouTube channel which shows nothing but footage of tree stumps being pulled up by large-scale mechanical equipment. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT! I just realised that there will be at least one regular viewer of this channel for whom these videos constitute an almost perfectly-erotic experience because, well, there will be, won’t there?, and I can’t tell you how momentarily happy that has made me.

• InkField: Ooh, this is lovely, or at least it would be were I not so artistically-disinclined. This little browser toy basically replicates the action of painting with ink brushes in that specific, Japanese style (you will know what I mean when you try it, promise) – there are a bunch of different modifiers you can apply which change the way in which the ink behaves on the canvas, meaning you can do a reasonable job of aping calligraphy styles and the particular aesthetic of wet ink drying on paper…honestly, I think you could create something beautiful with this given a bit of time, practice and patience.

• A Really Good Typing Tutor: Yes, ok, it’s not exciting or sexy or FUN (unless you have a very niche and specific definition of the word), but I firmly believe that everyone’s life is improved by being able to touch-type and this is a simple and lightweight tool to help you get better at it.

• MUDA: MUDA is a museum of digital art in Zurich, which I know literally nothing about but whose website I fcuking ADORE, exclusively because of the way in which its menu system works – click the link and MARVEL AT THE BEAUTY of the floating menu button which gently glides down the page with you as you scroll. It’s a very small, entirely-cosmetic and wholly-pointless design flourish which is so, so pleasing to the eye. Honestly, you will do a small ‘ooh’ of pleasure, guaranteed (and if you don’t, honestly, what is WRONG WITH YOU?).

• The Landing Films: A collection of short films by Ben Templeton, who wrote to me to tell me about his new series of “short documentaries going behind the scenes at land-based businesses and communities. Five projects, five episodes, 12 minutes each and one big question: what can a wonky world learn from the businesses bringing us back to the land?” Ben explains, “my motivation was a few fold – to add energy to a movement I believe we need more of in the face of rising inequality / loneliness / social division / mean dumbf*ckery everywhere; as a personal learning journey (you’ll see in Ep 2 I’m a hippy kid with visions of a land-based educational-cum-storytelling project) and ultimately to build a platform to tell more land-based stories as the world around us collapses.”  This is, in general, not really My Sort Of Thing (I don’t really do videos, I am not a nature person and I have no hope whatsoever), but I watched a few of these and found them significantly more interesting than I thought I would – there are some interesting projects being profiled (although the collective of posh kids playing farmer in the last episode made me…quite stabby), and there’s something very appealing about Ben’s curiosity and interest which make them an enjoyable watch. Worth a look for those of you who occasionally dream of GOING BACK TO THE LAND.

• The Vampire Lottery Survival Simulator: Nick Drage and Matt Ballantine have written a book, called Random, which is all about “how randomness and uncertainty benefit our lives and suggest strategies for making the best use of randomness and managing those situations where uncertainty is unavoidable.” As a small promo for it, they’ve made this very silly visualisation of How Probability Works – per the explanation, “You have just awakened to eternal life — but eternal life without wealth is no life at all. A vampire of your calibre deserves a castle in the Scottish Highlands, a fleet of blacked-out limousines, bespoke coffins lined with the finest silk, and an endless supply of… refreshments. The lifestyle befitting the undead does not come cheap. Your mortal savings won’t last a century, let alone eternity. There is only one solution: win the lottery jackpot. With immortality on your side, you have all the time in the world — literally. You will play the UK National Lottery and EuroMillions every single draw until you finally hit the jackpot and claim the fortune a vampire truly deserves.” If you ever needed a way of neatly demonstrating that playing the lottery is a mug’s game – EVEN FOR AN IMMORTAL BEING FFS – this is very much it.

• Missed You: Missed connections pages have been a staple of local papers for an age now, but there’s still something slightly-beautiful about the romance implicit in strangers pursuing a fleeting connection in the hope of something more. This site is a collection of missed connections bulletin boards for various cities across the US – unless you live in New York, LA, SF or one of the other featured locations it will be practically useless to you, but I have to confess to losing a good ten minutes going through the posted entries because it turns out I am a sucker for this sort of vaguely-romantic thing which, ngl, feels…troublingly-off-brand for me, perhaps I am getting ill. Also, some of these are POETRY – I particularly liked this closing line, speculating as to whether the intended subject had in fact clocked the writer, and wondering “maybe it was my hair, which is rather confusing. describe it to me so i know it’s you.” CONFUSING HAIR! Amazing.

• Searchable Attenborough: An INCREDIBLE project by Sophie Warnes, via Giuseppe, who has done God’s work in creating a searchable database of everything David Attenborough has ever done, EVER (or at least, everything in the field of televised nature documentary), meaning you can now, should you wish, find every single instance of Sir David, I don’t know, purring appreciatively over the majesty of the poison dart frog. “Sir David Attenborough just turned 100. In recognition of his brilliant career and life, here’s everything he’s ever worked on, in one place.Nearly 5,000 episodes across 90 series — from Zoo Quest in 1954 to Secret Garden in 2026. Search by animal, habitat, location, natural phenomenon, or theme to find exactly the episode you’re looking for.”  Seriously, if you’re a nature fan or Attenborough fanatic this is all your Christmases at once.

• Parallel Cities: Have you ever wanted a tool that lets you quickly and easily see which cities exist along the same parallel? No, of course you haven’t, what the fcuk could you possible need that for? And yet, someone has seen fit to make it, so it now behooves you to work out a reason for it to exist. No, sorry, you do, I don’t make the rules (I do, in this specific instance).

• The Sound of Ocean Heat Energy: Ooh, I do like a sonification project and this is very much one of those. “This is a data sonification (a presentation of data as sound) of the world’s ocean heat content from 1970 to 2025. It represents the energy absorbed from heat by playing denser chords (with pitches drawn from an 11-limit tonality diamond) when the energy quantity is higher.” OK, it’s fair to say that this is unlikely to fill any dancefloors, but I have had it on in the background as I’ve been typing this section and there’s something undeniably quite cool about the ambient, threatening drone produced by the sound of us slowly boiling all the fish alive.

• The FiveThirtyEight Index: Do you remember that brief period of time when Nate Silver was considered GOD by a certain swathe of politically-interested wonks? Wow, you really fcuked that up, didn’t you Nate? Anyway, hark back to the days before he’d comprehensively embarrassed himself with this archive of all the old FiveThirtyEight materials from before they were killed by Disney earlier this year (two things – why the fuck did The Mouse buy a political datawonkery platform/community? And why must big media keep doing stuff like this? Yes, I know the answer in both cases is ‘capitalism, you fcuking moron’, but still) – you can “explore 38,593 articles, datasets, podcasts, graphics and illustrations”, so, well, go on then.

• Tin Toy Robots: Do YOU like toy robots made out of tin, particularly those from Japan? OH GOOD! “This section will be a perpetual work in progress, where I’ll attempt to document history and anecdotes of some well-known tin toy robots from Japan. I hope to evolve it into a resource for folks looking to learn more about their legacy and variety. Also, I plan to eventually add some sorting and filtering UI to this page as the list grows. I’m by no means an authority on tin robots, I’m just a fan of the art form – and compiling information from whatever sources I can dig up: books, message boards, videos, etc. That said, I want the information to be accurate, so I’ll do my part to keep it updated along the way as I learn.” There is something very charming to me about the admission of dilettantism here, and the toy robots are VERY CUTE. Also, click the link and tell me you don’t covet a Space Elephant.

• Mama Magazine: FCUKING HELL this is…I don’t really know how to explain or describe this, you sort of just need to click the link and read it, but let me give you a flavour of the ‘about’ text which I think will explain most of what you need to know: “WE LIVE IN AN ADULT DAYCARE WORLD. You know it. I know it. Everyone’s known it for years. You sit in the fluorescent bleakness of it, nodding along, waiting for a cataclysm to set you free. But the cataclym never comes. THIS IS REALITY AND NOBODY IS DESCRIBING IT. Traditional men’s magazines politely pivoted and became women’s magazines. Meanwhile podcaster chuds pump multilevel marketing schemes. Everyone’s selling scams or anal sex. There’s no voice for men who aren’t gay or retarded. Like actually retarded.” Yes, that’s right, it’s THAT sort of register, very much a 2026 US vibe that’s beginning to creep over here too (if you speak to guys in their 20s you will hear quite a lot of them beginning to sound a bit like this, in my recent experience), almost like the past 22 years have never happened and Tucker Max is still a NEW PUBLISHING SENSATION and The Game is just a bit of fun…I actually read a piece from this this morning and fcuking hell it was bad – not just vile tonally, to be clear, but really fcuking badly written, like some sort of parody of mid-00s sleaze resurrected in zombie MAGAfashion, like a very particular strain of anonymised sex blogs that I remember from the early-00s…to be clear, this is a horrid website featuring bad writing by cnuts, but I think it’s worth a look as a cultural artefact and a slight warning about Where Things Are At Right Now, Culturally And Socially And Politically-Speaking.

• Plano: Oh this is FUN and very cool – I am 100% not the right audience for it, what with being about as creative as mince, but if you’re someone with IDEAS and THE NEED TO MAKE THINGS then you could find a lot to love in this small tool built on Itch.io. Per the very minimal blurb, “plano is a tool for making small digital collage games. place photos, gifs, and text to create a little world for a character to walk around in!”; I think you can use this to make games and small pieces of interactive fiction, but also, I think, with a bit of imagination it’s probably very flexible and could be used for a bunch of other things too should you so desire. Definitely worth a play, particularly if you’re the sort of person who previously enjoyed V Buckenham’s ‘Downpour’ tool.

• Play It By Trust: How well do you know the first level of Super Mario Bros.? Do you know it well enough to complete it blind? FCUKING PROVE IT THEN. This is an excellent little bit of artgamewank by Curios favoutite Pippin Barr – it’s the whole of Mario’s first level, but the whole screen is just blue and you can’t see anything at all (you can, though, hear the music and SFX). If you can complete this, you are both an incredible and special human being and, simultaneously, someone who has wasted their life.

• Headlines: Can you guess the year from the news headlines? I, mostly, couldn’t, turns out, but maybe you’re less sh1t at history than me.

• 82-0: This is only going to be of interest to you if you have a deep and encyclopaedic knowledge of the NBA and its history – if that’s you, then this will be CATNIP. You basically just have to pick a team from the entire history of the NBA – every player, every year, every team at your disposal – with the goal of selecting a group of players whose stats, if combined, would guarantee an 82-0 winning season. The game itself, honestly, isn’t that interesting – what struck me is that this is an entirely vibecoded project which means that you can expect this EXACT mechanic to be replicated for the Premier League within days.

• FoodGuessr: Can you guess which country each foodstuff is from, based on a photo of it and a list of its ingredients? WELL CAN YOU????

• Wordslop: I enjoyed this much more than I was expecting to – type, discover categories of things, fill up the categories with more things, win POINTS! Yes, OK, that was a truly-appalling description, sorry, but I promise this will make sense when you click and start fcuking around with it.

• Eyeball: Another project by Rory Flint, this is a simple yet FIENDISHLY-addictive game where you have to find the click the right point on a horizontal line based on the where exactly you think a number sits along it. WHAT DO YOU MEAN THAT DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE EITHER? Ffs.

• Are You Washed In The Blood Of The Lamb?: A very creepy, very visually-effective little short interactive story – this is…quite horrible, honestly, but in the very best way. Takes about 15 minutes – ideally play this in the dark with the volume up.

• I See A Butterfly: I think this is SUCH a clever little bit of storytelling – again, this is sinister and a little bit unpleasant, but I thought the way it did the slow reveal was very impressive. “I See a Butterfly is a short psychological horror experience where you interpret a series of shifting inkblots, unraveling a story about obsession, anger, and something buried beneath the ink.” Enjoy (again, ideally, in the dark).

• Step’n’Smush: Have you ever thought “what if the original, top-down GTA games but instead of being a crime simulator you are instead playing the role of a giant being who for reasons never really explained has to destroy all the buildings in a city and who, again, for REASONS, can choose to deploy a special attack which sees you level entire blocks by sitting on them, leaving not-inconsiderable arseprints on the terrain”? If so, congratulations on having a far-weirder subconscious than I do, but also you will fcuking LOVE this.

• Pictures: Our first link this week is an instance of me finding a tab open amongst the fifty-odd cluttering up my browser and realising that a) I have no idea how I came across it; and b) I have no idea what the fcuk it is or who it’s by. As such, the description for this site/project/…thing is going to be even lighter on useful information than is the norm but, well, you know what you’re getting by now so stop complaining (and if you don’t, this is the opportunity for you to step away unscathed – go on, if this meandering style is starting to annoy you then probably best you fcuk off now because there’s another 9.9k words or so of this mess to go before we’re done). ANYWAY, click the link and it takes you to an INCREDIBLY zoomed-out view of what I think are thousands – maybe even tens of thousands – of images. Click anywhere on the screen and you’ll be taken to a scrolly viewer which lets you browse all of the photos in the collection – photos of…well, just ‘stuff’, really, art and clothes and flowers and cars and buildings and posters and ancient artefacts from museum collections, all presented entirely without context, and, look, I know that this doesn’t sound in any way compelling, but just try clicking in and then settle back and just use your mousewheel to scroll through the gallery, let the images wash over you and it becomes like some sort of strange, visuals-only Adam Curtis documentary, just a sort of endless flood of IMAGES OF HUMANITY and I can’t tell you how weirdly compelling I find this. I have literally NO clue why this exists or what it is or who compiled it or what for, so should any of you happen to know I would be hugely grateful for any pointers – honestly, though, I would quite happily sit in a gallery for 10 minutes watching this carousel past me, maybe you would too.

• Your Internet Radio Dial: Ooh, this is cute – skeuomorphic design, just like it’s 2011 all over again! A simple idea, really nicely executed, this webpage presents you with an old-fashioned radio-style interface (I suddenly realised that the concept of ‘a radio’ as a discrete device is very much set to be consigned to history within a generation or two – at least for most Western cultures, at least until The Inevitable Collapse – and that feels…sad, somehow), where you move the dial on the wireless to move between internet radio stations from around the world, complete with between-station static…it looks quite simple, but if you click the ‘about’ icon in the top-right you’ll see that there are all sorts of clever quality-of-life bits of design in here; the ability to group stations into ‘bands’ so you can have collections of your favourites, a neat Shazam integration to let you ID songs that come up…honestly, this really is very nicely done indeed and is a beautifully-serendipitous way to discover some new streaming stations to enjoy.

• The National Conversation: I’m not entirely sure how much coverage outside of Monday’s Today programme (yes, I know, but I am professionally required to Know What Is Going On, trust me when I say that I don’t really enjoy it anymore either) this received, but I have a strange feeling that the answer is likely to have been ‘fcuk all’, so consider this my small attempt to contribute to the University of Oxford’s PR efforts. The National Conversation is a survey being conducted by said university in an attempt to get a handle on ‘perceptions of belonging and national identity’ in the UK RIGHT NOW, against a backdrop of…some slight degree of perceived disunity, it’s fair to say. What unites us? What divides us? WHAT DOES IT EVEN MEAN TO BE BRITISH ANYMOREzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz? I did this on Monday and, look, I read pretty quickly and type pretty quickly and it still took me slightly longer than I might have wanted to Speke My Branes into the freetext boxes – there is, though, the opportunity to leave thoughts via voicenote (I would LOVE to have access to the inbox, should any researchers with a cavalier attitude to data security happen to read this), which is an admirable idea in terms of inclusion, but in general I think that this is going to fall down slightly on the fact that, realistically, the vast majority of people simply can’t be fcuked to participate in stuff like this because, well, life’s short and the survey is LONG. Still, if you have particular thoughts on national identity and why exactly our current sense of it might have splintered into a million jagged little pieces then FEEL FREE TO CONTRIBUTE – although another problem with these sorts of initiatives is that ‘slightly-unwieldy opt-in online survey’ does rather skew the likely profile of respondents – I don’t think they’re going to be shy of left-leaning biens pensants in the replies here, but, well you go right ahead anyway because YOU MATTER.

• Lume: This is a really interesting new project by Friend of Curios Sacha Judd and some friends of hers, and, I think, a potentially smart way of approaching digital music in an artist-friendly way. Lume is, basically, a platform designed to connect musicians with the people who want to listen to their work and support their output, designed from the ground up so as to present a more equitable, less-exploitative way of monetising their work at scale. “Lume is a new digital format for albums. When an artist releases a Lume, you can buy the full album alongside the content they’ve chosen to share around it — which may include demos, alternate versions, live recordings, handwritten lyrics, behind-the-scenes footage, unreleased photography, and more. You buy it once and own it forever.” The proposition for artists looks like an attractive one: “Artists (or their label/management/distributor) work with us to build a Lume from their album — the full record plus the additional content that surrounds it: demos, footage, lyrics, photography, and more. We build the Lume with you and release it to the platform. You and your partners keep 80% of the net revenue, and you own the direct relationship with every fan who buys it.” Basically this isn’t designed to be a ‘Spotify Killer’ (which is good because, well, good fcuking luck with that) so much as a way for fans to collect sort of special editions of their favourite albums in a media-rich way, like a sort of Bandcamp+ish type thing (Sacha, if you want to use ANY of this sparkling prose in your marketing then do feel free btw). This is very very new and is going to start out small, working with artists in Sacha’s native New Zealand, but I hope it will expand beyond that in due course because it feels like both a nice way to support creative work and an interesting twist on the concept of a digital ‘ultimate’ version of a record.

• DFOS: Ok, I am not *entirely* sure what this is or how it works, and it’s…quite early in the morning, and I am a bit sleepy, so forgive me if the following is a bit mangled…but, anyway, DFOS stands for ‘Dark Forest Operating System’ and it’s a new platform for Putting Stuff Online that’s been launched by the people behind ‘patreon-but-slightly-artsier’ setup Metalabel (see Curios passim). Basically (ok, VERY basically, but I’m going to be here all morning otherwise) this is a suite of independent publishing tools which exist on some sort of federated network (I think – look, let’s be clear, ‘federated network’ is one of those terms I occasionally throw in with a degree of confidence despite the fact that I don’t *really* know what the fcuk it means; friends call these ‘Muirisms’ and let me tell you they are one of my more endearing qualities!), meaning you can use this to create a whole suite of digital online presences – a chat community, a blog, an internet newsletter, forum-type spaces – away from the predations of Big Tech; these communities can either be made public and discoverable or be kept secret and private (the ‘Dark Forest’ element in action), and the developers are making all the usual promises about the data being yours, never training AI, never putting ads in, etc etc. I think this is A Good Thing, generally-speaking, not least because it puts everything in one place, and the idea of creating an independent publishing ecosystem is a good one, and having had a very brief play with the creator tools last night (yes, my life is thrilling, why do you ask?) it seems pretty intuitive in terms of setup…Basically if you’re looking for an all-in-one publishing platform from which to build a SMALL DIGITAL MEDIA EMPIRE then this is worth a look I think.

• The Prediction AI: Don’t get excited, this is a Github repo so if you want to UNLOCK THE SCRYING POWER OF THE MACHINE then you’ll need both a chunky-ish machine and the ability to actually make the code work…BUT! This is SUCH an interesting (and, if you think about it in anything resembling serious fashion, vaguely-troubling) idea – basically MiroFish is a setup which…oh, fcuk it, here: “MiroFish is a next-generation AI prediction engine powered by multi-agent technology. By extracting seed information from the real world (such as breaking news, policy drafts, or financial signals), it automatically constructs a high-fidelity parallel digital world. Within this space, thousands of intelligent agents with independent personalities, long-term memory, and behavioral logic freely interact and undergo social evolution. You can inject variables dynamically from a “God’s-eye view” to precisely deduce future trajectories — rehearse the future in a digital sandbox, and win decisions after countless simulations.”  So, basically, an LLM-juiced prediction engine which can be trained on whatever intel you think is relevant, takes in signals from the real world and runs simulations against personae to come to a probabilistic vision of What Might Happen…Look, I am…skpetical as fcuk about synthetic data and personas and their actual, practical value in modeling stuff, but it’s VERY easy to see this sort of thing both catching on and either being worryingly good (in which case, OH LOOK competitive market advantage to the people with the most compute and the best models!) or total bunkum (in which case, OH LOOK all sorts of people being suckered into using variants on this crap to ‘hone’ their gambling, etc, and losing their fcuking shirts), neither of which fills me with huge amounts of joy. Anyway, if anyone fancies running this locally and giving it, I don’t know, £100 to theoretically speculate with then I will happily chip in a tenner.

• Steven Dot Com: I cannot tell you how much this url makes me laugh. THE HUBRIS! THE BANALITY! STEVEN DOT COM!!!! The Steven, of course, is slab-headed Confucius of the business banality himself Steven Bartlett, the Huel-shilling, performance-inflating Walter Mitty figure who started out as a kid gaming trending topics on Twitter through an admittedly-smart set of loophole exploitations and who has somehow evolved into a kind of Joe Rogan for the LinkedIn hustle-and-grind set. Not content with letting grifters and shillers peddle lies and supplements to an audience of millions of credulous Deanos the length and breadth of the English-speaking world, STEVEN DOT COM is now setting himself up as a FULL-SPECTRUM MEDIA ECOSYSTEM and I really do suggest you click through and enjoy both the copy, which positions ‘creators’ as somewhere between Jesus and a Randian superman (my brother in Christ you conduct softball interviews with hucksters selling vitamin supplements, you are not Henry Ford!), and the naked truth lurking just below the surface (which is that every single part of this is about MONETISING THE FCUK OUT OF EVERYTHING. I particularly enjoyed the…slight contradiction in the copy’s insistence on DEVELOPING HUMAN, AUTHENTIC CONNECTIONS and products which literally say ‘monetise every aspect of your audience’. STEVEN DOT COM!!

• The Playboy Fiction Index: This is SUCH an incredible index of fantastic writing – to be clear, if you’re looking for bongo then you won’t find any here, but if you’re if you’re interested in who and what bongo connoisseurs were reading alongside their monthly dose of nudity then you are in LUCK! Playboy, as you are doubtless all aware, had a proud track record of publishing essays and short stories by some of North America’s most storied writers, particularly in the 70s and 80s, and this is a searchable archive of all of those pieces. Sadly you can’t actually get to the texts here, but this feels like something which could be built on a bit with some digging in the Internet Archive and elsewhere – honestly, if anyone wants to take on the challenge of ‘this, but with links to the essays in question’ then they will be doing God’s work. Seriously, though, the NAMES here! Wodehouse, Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, Joyce Carol Oates…honestly, it’s hard not to feel slightly sad at the fact that the talented writers of today have…what, they have fcuking Substack ffs, LET’S BRING BACK LITERARY SCUD MAGS!

• Get Your Face In The National Gallery: Ok, fine, so to do this you will ALSO have to consent to having an AI-generated portrait of yourself being done, but, honestly, this is part of a project by artist Es Devlin who’s got a show on at the Gallery right now, the model has been trained – consensually! – on her work and style, and as such this is about as ‘ethical’ as you can get with this stuff (and also, look, please fcuk off with the performative purity stuff, honestly). Upload a photo or get a dodgy webcam shot, give your consent and you’ll get a rather beautiful (within the confines of genAI, obvs) rendering of YOU in an approximation of Devlin’s stroke-heavy sketch style. Give your consent and your portrait will be added to the carousel of others being displayed on a screen in the gallery space, meaning that YOU will form part of an artwork which will be seen by thousands and which will exist in perpetuity in an archive somewhere on and offline and, honestly, what the fcuk else are you going to achieve today?

• The Museum of the Human Web: Oh, I like this a lot. This website accompanied a recent exhibition in San Francisco, celebrating the history of the human-built web through a collection of 90-odd artefacts; the show’s now over, but the site persists and this is a really nice way of exploring old devices that trace the history of the evolution of the web and our interactions with it: “The Museum of the Human Web is a hybrid physical and digital museum celebrating the history of the human-built web. It looks back on a period of time where everything, from the networks to the memes, came from the minds and hands of people.” This is SO interesting to browse through, and contains all sorts of odd and interesting things from the 90s and 00s that chart the way in which digital space and culture evolved and was shaped – did you know that ‘Beenz’ wasn’t the only attempted digital currency back in the day? Did you know that there was a rival currency called ‘Flooz’? I KNOW! My God the pills were good back then.

• Paul Julian Brown: I have written before, I think, about the very particular and very peculiar sensation of coming into possession of an iPod whose owner has died, and the feeling of having…some of someone’s identity preserved in a small metal box, and the odd, almost-too-intimate feeling you get when you see what the final track they ever listened to on it was…anyway, this is a lovely act of memorialisation by the child of one Paul Julian Brown, who has recreated their fathers’ iPod as it was upon his death in 2018; you can browse tracks, look at a few photos, and listen to Paul’s record collection through a pleasingly-accurate recreation of the iPod mini interface. Objectively-speaking this is…not a convenient way to experience media via a desktop computer, but I am very pleased it exists and there’s something genuinely poignant and affecting about scrolling the clickwheel through a dead person’s musical life.

• Feed The Cat: This is a US riff on a site I featured in Curios…ooh, what, two years ago? WHY DO I REMEMBER THIS STUFF WHEN I CAN’T EVEN REMEMBER MY DAD’S FCUKING BIRTHDAY? Actually I know the answer to that one, but let’s not dwell too hard. Anyway, this site presents a variety of webcams attached to cat feeding stations across the world – each camera is also connected to the feeding station so at set intervals YOU can choose to bestow THE GIFT OF FOOD on the cat of your choosing. Your mileage here will vary entirely depending on the extent to which you enjoy watching close-up webcam footage of cats crunchily chowing down on kibble, but, well, I like it very much. There are a couple having breakfast right now and ngl I am displaying EXTRAORDINARY self-restraint in not just downing tools for a bit and hanging out with them instead.

• 100 People: Just a brilliant bit of marketing, this. Icelandic clothing brand 66 North celebrates its centenary this year – to celebrate, they did a photoshoot and accompanying ad campaign, with the following gimmick: “This year marks the 100th anniversary of 66°North. To celebrate, we’re highlighting the people who have shaped our brand. Following an open casting call, we spent the past year travelling across Iceland to meet and photograph each participant in person. We met 100 individuals born between 1926 and today, creating a living timeline of our community. Each participant is photographed wearing their own 66°North garment, where it is worn across generations. The final series brings together a cross-section of Icelandic society, including fishermen, farmers, doctors, musicians, athletes, and more. We’re grateful to be part of everyday life in Iceland and look forward to the next 100 years.” Honestly, SUCH a simple, smart idea.

• Chromolume: I had no idea that takings from Broadway shows were publicly reported – but they are. If YOU ever wanted to know at a glance what the best-performing show currently open in New York is then this (seemingly vibecoded, but wevs) website will do that very thing – it’s VERY inside baseball, fine, but I imagine that if you’re a UK producer looking into West End transfer potential (and, er, that’s loads of you, right?) then this could perhaps come in handy.

• OpenAI Image Check: File this under ‘a rare good thing that OpenAI has done’ – the company this week announced that it was integrating Google’s SynthID AI image recognition tech into images produced by GPT – meaning that you can now take an image from anywhere, plug it into this detector, and it will tell you if it’s been made by the company’s AI. AND IT WILL ACTUALLY KNOW RATHER THAN MAKING UP AN ANSWER. The fact that you can now do this with both Google and OpenAI is a Genuinely Good Thing – the fact that this isn’t a universal mandated standard baked into every single image generator on the market is not, and until we get to that stage then this is still very much finger in the dyke territory but, well, baby steps.

• The Virtual OS Museum: OK, this is Actual Hardcore Geek Stuff and probably not one for you unless you can read the words ‘Linux Kernel’ without falling into some deep coma of boredom – BUT, if that is you, then MERRY CHRISTMAS YOU FCUKS! “This is a virtual museum of operating systems (and standalone applications) running under emulation, implemented as a Linux VM for QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM. A custom emulator-independent launcher is provided, and all OSes and emulators are pre-installed and pre-configured. The launcher includes a snapshot feature to quickly revert broken installations back to a working state. Hypervisor installers and shortcuts to run the VM on Windows, macOS, and Linux are also included. Want to see the earliest resident monitors? The ancestor of all modern OSes (CTSS)? The earliest versions of Unix? The first OS with a desktop metaphor GUI (Xerox Star Pilot/ViewPoint)? Early versions of mainstream OSes? If you want to explore historical OSes and platforms without having to worry about configuring/installing emulators and OSes or corrupting emulated installations, you’ve come to the right place.”

• The Digital Graveyard: A place to memorialise dead platforms, old formats and the dusty, abandoned urls of yore, this collects now-defunt links to all sorts of different types of site – chat networks and social media and browsers and and and, all with histories of what they were and why they died and when…this isn’t a particularly beautiful site, fine, but WHAT DO YOU WANT IT’S A GRAVEYARD FFS. If you’re someone who has spent as much time as I have frolicking happily through the once-verdant digital meadows and now feels a bit sad when you look around and see the burnt-out landscape that remains then, well, this will only serve to remind you of how old you are and how much has been lost tbh. Still! Interesting!

• Andon Labs Radio: More internet radio, but this time a selection of them that are being ‘run’ by AI. Andon Labs – not entirely sure if they’re a business or an art collective at this point, they’re the ones who are also doing that ‘we let an Agent run a physical shop in San Francisco thing I featured in here a few weeks back – basically gave a bunch of different leading AI models instructions to run their own streaming radio stations, gave them budget and then…let it all run. The resulting streams are…not great, honestly, but there’s something quite interesting (from an artsy point of view) about the weird cul-de-sacs that the Machine-generated hosts go down, the music that the models find themselves gravitating towards (so much slightly-minimal modern classical!), the different approaches each takes towards ads and monetisation…I do think there’s the kernel of a really interesting project here, while also being not a little freaked out (again) and the degree to which autonomous agentic stuff is starting to become…quite real, quite quickly. I know I have said this on an almost weekly basis for a few years now, but we really don’t understand how fcuking WEIRD things are going to get (WEIRDER) in the next 18m or so. BONUS RADIO STATION! This is DEFINITELY human, and it’s really great and I have been listening to it quite a lot in the evenings this week – “The Nightly is a music appreciation society disguised as a radio station, specializing in the old, the gloomy, and the obscure. We’re affiliated with (and run by members of) The Sad Old World. Having belatedly discovered that most of our musical heroes are, confusingly, all but unknown, we’ve taken it on ourselves to build them their own doleful little museum. This takes the form of a sort of “numbers station” of songs, an endless, unalterable sequence of ballads & dirges that can be heard anywhere in the world at any time of day or night. Here we hope our idols can be loved as they probably more or less deserve, delaying as long as possible that mournful day they slip mankind’s memory once & for all.”

• Time Chamber Homes: Are you a MAN? Do you feel like getting away, maybe renting an Airbnb, getting some time to yourself to focus on THE THINGS THAT MATTER and maybe do some light hustling and grinding, but do you find yourself continually-stymied by TOO MUCH FEMININE ENERGY and not enough animal protein in your city-based rental? WELL DO WE HAVE A SOLUTION FOR YOU! Time Chamber Homes is an offshoot of some ‘men’s optimisation retreat’ grift I featured in here a year or so ago and who I must have inexplicably given my email address to (what can I say? I love to lift and slonk!), because I now keep getting mailers to promote their new rentals venture which is, as far as I can tell, looking to set up a network of luxurious rental properties where MEN (and ONLY MEN) can go to if they want to, I don’t know, film wildly-unrealistic influencer content in which they look moodily out over a jungle and do single-finger pullups in a psychotically-well-appointed domestic gym. This is SO WEIRD – like, who is this actually for? Anyway, if you’d like a MAN’S SPACE to retreat to to plan the next phase of your world domination blueprint (read: podcast and substack) then this could be your lucky day.

• La Famiglia Mystery Unfolds: OH THIS IS BEAUTIFULLY TERRIBLE! Exactly why Gucci have chosen to promote their expensive wares to the general public via the medium of, er, a really not-very-good murder mystery-type game with really, really terrible AI integration is a mystery to me, but this is SO shonky that I am very glad they did. There are a raft of genuinely-terrible and slightly-baffling UX and UI decisions in here, not least the fact that you HAVE TO CREATE A FCUKING GUCCI ACCOUNT TO ACCESS IT – look, lads, I don’t know what you think people’s appetite for ‘low-quality, short, slightly-interactive digital brand experiences’ is, but I am pretty certain that for most people it’s not so high that they will go through a three-minute onboarding experience to access one. BUT! I am your ceaseless servant and so I suffered through the slightly-tortuous account creation journey to get access (joke’s on you, Gucci, I am more likely to live to 90 than I am to ever buy from you (and trust me when I say I am getting nowhere close)) and…fcuk, it’s really not worth it, but there is something SO funny about how…totally sh1t it is, just ugly and clunky and stupid and, weirdly, cheap-feeling, like a sort of knock-off version of Cluedo you might find on a shonky Chinese site c.2009, but with AI! You play a detective trying to work out who’s stolen…something, and can gather clues by ‘interrogating’ various suspects – all of them have Italian nicknames connoting their supposed personalities, including one called, beautifully, ‘Incazzata’ (for those unfamiliar, this means ‘p1ssed off’), and another called ‘Il Pesantone’ (the buzzkill, basically) – via the medium of clunky AI chat…God, this is SO BAD but I kind of want you all to give it a go so you can see exactly in which specific ways. Aside from anything else, while I don’t personally have an issue with AI being used per se, here I really do because if anyone can afford to pay real artists and writers, etc, it’s these useless luxury clotheshorse cnuts.

• Analysing The Guardian Books List: A big discourse driver over the past week – at least in my corners of the web – was the Guardian’s list of the 100 greatest novels EVER (The Guardian appears to have alighted on ‘lists’ as the way in which it’s going to save journalism and, well, fcuk it, nothing else seems to be working!), which was imho not that interesting but which was trad enough to elicit a whole round of DISCOURSE about snobbery and gatekeeping and whether anyone ACTUALLY likes 18th and 19thC literature that much. Anyway, this is a really interesting bit of datawork by Chris Warren, analysing both the picks and also the individual lists of the writers and artists and others that they polled to come up with the final selection; if nothing else this is a really good way of exploring the world of books that *didn’t* make the final list, and seeing which ones didn’t make the cut, and there’s something really fun about going through all the titles that only received one nomination, books that are someone’s special text but NOONE ELSE’S. BONUS ANALYSIS: Matthew Aldridge also did his own more textual analysis which is a nice companion to the above (and slightly easier to parse if you’re a less visual person).

• The Artemis II Photo Timeline: Via Giuseppe, this is a nice way of viewing pics taken of the recent lunar mission, letting you scrub along a timeline to get a sense of the experience over the trip’s duration. I am a miserable, cynical disaster of a human being, but even I couldn’t help but feel a slight sense of awe and…ok, not quite this, but ALMOST a sense of speciespride.

• The AI Resist List: On reflection, if you’re the sort of person who feels that the world needs a repository of resources and ideas and MOVEMENTS dedicated to fighting AI at every stage then it’s also likely that you stopped reading Curios a while back in disgust at my failure to adopt a ‘burn it all down’ approach to the tech (SORRY! But, also, you’re not here any more so fcuk knows why I’m apologising). BUT! If any of you remain then you will find this potentially useful and inspiring – it’s a website acting as a directory of ideas and initiatives which can broadly be characterised as ‘anti-AI’, although, in fairness, it’s less black-and-white than I might initially have assumed: “Nothing about the current trajectory of AI development is inevitable. It was shaped by the thousands of subjective decisions of a tiny elite, and continues its march based on the active participation and tacit consent of people globally. Inspired by Choose Democracy’s Resist List against authoritarianism, we organized the AI resistance movements we documented based on how they pressure different “Pillars of Support” that uphold and perpetuate the empires.Our list is not meant to be comprehensive. Rather we selected a sample of movements to show different approaches to resistance and to illustrate how anyone can help shape the future of AI development.” I think the idea of ‘shaping AI development’ is an important one, and why it’s equally important that people who have (entirely-justified and sensible) reservations about the tech’s current trajectory engage with it rather than just pointing and shouting at it in disgust – this covers all sorts of things, from ideas for ‘resistance’ to tools helping you identify the financial networks underpinning the current boom/bubble, to initiatives seeking to give voices to communities underrepresented in the LLM discourse…this is, generally, A Good Thing I think.

• Nearest Pint: A map by Steven Feldman which shows the density of pubs in the UK by political constituency, which is obviously a tool for the pub industry but which also feels like something SUPER-useful for all sorts of different types of advermarketingpr-type planning/campaign management stuff. I am now toying with the idea of learning how to drive and setting up a pint delivery service in East Renfrewshire.

• Totei: A new arts magazine! I continue to be bullish about ‘magazines’ as a thing in the coming few years, and I am going to take the emergence of Totei (a new publication broadly centred on ‘the arts’, founded by ex-Pitchfork hacks amongst others) as another datapoint to prove I AM RIGHT. Anyway, this is NEW and so a bit thin in terms of content, but its pedigree is good and the site looks nice and in general I am very pro there being more spaces in which to find writing about artists and their work – although if I were to be critical (AND WHY SHOULD I NOT BE) then I might argue that a lot of the stuff in what I think is its debut edition is a bit…safe. Like, I like Holly Herndon, but I think if you’re someone who’s in the market for a mag like this then it’s also quite likely that you probably don’t need to read another interview with Holly Herndon. Regardless, worth keeping an eye on if ‘the arts’ are your thing (what are you, some sort of PHILISTINE???).

• Bird TV: Via Kris, click a pixel bird and watch it on the small pixel telly, while listening to the sound of its song. This is, weirdly, very lovely indeed, and despite the fact that it’s basically like some sort of 8-bit, Fisher Price ornithology project there’s something utterly charming about its vibe.

• The Strategy and Planning Scrapbook: Occasionally I like to remind myself of Web Curios’ origins as a CORPORATE NEWSLETTER IN ADVERMARKETINGPRLAND (it was never that, whatever I might have told my paymasters) – this link is to a collection of strategy frameworks and planning tools collected and compiled by Alex Morris, who’s been running the Strat Scraps newsletter for…fcuk knows, years. If you’re in the market for WAYS OF THINKING, or if you need to impress a moronic client with WORDS IN TRIANGLES then WOW is this going to be a goldmine for you (I am being unfair here – there’s nothing inherently stupid about strategy per se (although there is a LOT stupid about how it’s executed in the majority of agencies imho), but I maintain that thinking does not magically become better or smarter just because it’s shoehorned into a PROPRIETARY METHODOLOGY or onto three fcuking slides). BONUS STRATEGY THING FROM ALEX MORRIS: “A curated collection of strategic wisdom, provocative insights, and visual inspiration gathered from the edges of culture and commerce. Click generate to spark your next breakthrough.”

• Arena Personals: Ooh, I like this – sort of like Craigslist, but for the creative scrapbooking community site Are.na. Personal ads and requests for collaboration and requests for community and connection, I really enjoy this idea and think that there’s something quite cool about this sort of low-friction shop window which more communities could probably consider adopting. This is very slow-moving – the latest entry is from three weeks ago – but I love that it exists.

• Massive Bloom: Would you like to experience a website through which you can make SUSTAINED, ATONAL DRONING SOUNDS??? Don’t lie to me, of COURSE you fcuking would! This is by one Kyle Johnston, and I have to admit that while I was joking about anyone ACTUALLY wanting the ability to create in-browser infinite droning sounds, I have just had this playing in another tab while writing this and briefly entered into some sort of aurally-induced fugue state so, er, this is actually great and I am going to be giving myself a drone bath every day from hereon in.

• URL Town: A town! Made of links! Or, more accurately, a lovingly-curated and maintained LIBRARY OF LINKS! “Web directories are as old as the web. They were an early (and for a while, the only) solution to the challenge of collecting and discovering interesting and useful links. Before search engines, this was how we found cool stuff online. Time passed, and this approach to finding things faded. But at this particular point in time, with a rising interest in cultivating a truly open and social web, the mighty web directory may once again see some relevance and usefulness. Spaces where people are in full control over what is shared (and how it’s shared) are exceptionally important now, and this aims to be one of them. url.town doesn’t have any overly lofty ambitions; we’re just building our own directory of really nice websites. We’re not trying to fully recreate the original Yahoo! or DMOZ directories. We’re not aiming for some astronomical number of links. This is just one space on the web, tied to a community that loves to share neat things with one another. Quality matters much more than quantity. There’s no need to share everything just for the shake of sharing it; it’s much better to share things that are useful or interesting.” Given that search is about to be fcuked in half (THANKS GOOGLE! THANKS!), it does rather feel that resources such as this are going to become increasingly important for the preservation and discovery of much of the fringe-y internet.

• All Of The Manuals: Christ alive, I do adore people’s weird obsessions. To whit, “Just a little over ten years ago, I was notified about a big warehouse of manuals that was going to be discarded in a few days. Bursting with energy, I drove down, discussed things with the owner, and, soliciting and ringing a very loud bell, assembled dozens of people and tens of thousands of dollars over the course of saving this collection from being discarded. Naturally, the next step would simply be to digitize them all. That took longer. As of a short time ago, a collection of 13,000 manuals now lives on the Internet Archive. It is, essentially, all the manuals that will be digitized or could be digitized.” WE ARE STRANGE AND REMARKABLE CREATURES, MY GOD!. The main link takes you to all the manuals on the Internet Archive, but you can read more about the project here – I, er, can’t pretend that this is exactly MY THING, but it’s not inconceivable that your Special Interest (I SEE YOU, I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE LIKE) encompasses, er, documentation associated with old and largely-obsolete technologies, and if that is the case then my God that is your weekend absolutely sorted.

• My Name Is Kirsty: My name, for the avoidance of doubt, is not in fact Kirsty (but, honestly, given Current Economic Circumstances, if you would like it to be then I am sure we can reach some sort of happy accommodation) – but this website belongs to someone whose name very much is, a Kirsty who in 2024 was diagnosed with a brain tumour at a young age and who is now trying to raise money for research into brain cancer treatment and to connect with other Kirstys all around the world. Which, you know, you would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by, and while this isn’t really Curios’ sort of vibe, generally-speaking, I was obviously feeling a bit emo earlier this week when I found this link and so in it goes. If you’re a Kirsty do the kid a favour and sign up.

• Inobara: If you’re someone who collects links and then has no fcuking idea what to do with them (PROTIP: do not start an internet newsletter, it is a waste of fcuking time and will consume your entire life and become your entire personality) then this minimal ‘save link, read later’-type app might be of interest; a chrome extension and a plugin for your phone, this is lightweight and just does what you need it to as far as I can tell.

• Meditype: A READER WRITES! Mazen dropped me an email this week with a link to this, which he’s spun up using (as far as I can tell) Claude and a bunch of public domain texts, and which he introduced as follows: “It’s a browser typing app for public-domain books — Meditations, Walden, Tao Te Ching, Rumi, about 24 titles — with ambient sounds and absolutely zero stats. No WPM, no streaks, no accuracy percent. You pick a book, pick rain or fireplace or silence, and just type.” As far as simple typing trainers work, this is nice and easy and has the added bonus of helping you finally read Kierkegaard like you always said you would (poor, sad Soren).

• Britain’s Favourite Butterfly: Despite the fact it increasingly feels like the answer should be ‘whatever’s left alive after a century or so of fcuking the natural environment’, it appears that butterflies are in rude enough health in the UK that we can run a contest for everyone to pick their favourite. EXERCISE YOUR DEMOCRATIC RIGHT!! There’s also a BEAUTIFULLY-SH1T ‘Which Butterfly Are You?” quiz which really is utterly phoned-in and which inexplicably uses lots of images and gifs of US celebrities to illustrate its questions (BRITISH BUTTERFLIES FFS DO NOT SHOW ME JIMMY KIMMEL) but which just told me confidently that I am ‘90%’ like a Small Health butterfly so, well, that’s nice.

• OnlyCats: An infinitely-scrolling feed of cat pictures. No idea where the cats are from, no idea who made this, no idea why – smoothbrained, just like the cats themselves.

• Flash Games of the Cartoon Network: This is very much Not My Childhood, but if you’re someone who grew up being babysat by the Cartoon Network and was maybe of an age when playing tie-in games on the family computer was a regular dopamine hit then OH MY WORD will this Proust you right in the nostalgias (on reflection an all-time horrible phrase, sincere apologies). PowerPuff Girls! Animated Batman! Ben10! Loads of other stuff I have never heard of! I imagine all the games here are awful unless you have that aforementioned nostalgic connection, but I figure there might be a couple of you for whom this will be a portal back to Simpler, Better Times. Also, slightly amazed that a Scooby Do tie-in minigame called “Ask Swami Shaggy” was acceptable, but I suppose 2002 was A Different Time.

• TinyWorld: Make a, er, TINY WORLD! Simple but cute little world builder – drop buildings, paths, plants and construct your own little cutesy village as some sort of psychic bulwark against the grey concrete reality of your urban existence (I know that some of you read Curios in lovely country pubs – well, I know at least one of you does – but I imagine the other three of you scrolling greyly in some sort of Gibsonian urban hellscape because…hm, again, don’t want to interrogate that too much, probably not going to). As is often the case with this stuff, it’s pretty laptop-intensive so maybe don’t open ALL the other tabs in Curios while playing this.

• Hollowlands: Via the excellent Things I Think Are Awesome by Lynn (as in fact the last link was too I think), this is a technically AMAZING but, sadly…really quite dull knockoff of Zelda, playable in your browser. Wander your Definitely Not Link through verdant fields and icy mountainscapes! Pick up sticks! Cut down trees! Beat a pig to death! This is SO impressive but I have no fcuking clue what exactly you are meant to be doing in what amounts to a pretty, polished tech demo. Still, LOVELY grasslands.

• Cryomancer: A fun little puzzler which starts simple and then quite quickly gets chewy quite fast – I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to, and found myself playing all the way to the point where…er…I got stuck and flounced away from the laptop in frustrated pique.

• All Of The CityBuilding And Simulation Browser Toys: Ok, fine, so the link’s actual title is ‘Microcosm Industries’, but while that might be elegant it doesn’t tell you what the fcuk this is and so mine is, objectively, better. This is SUCH A GREAT RESOURCE put together by Samuel Arbesman, collecting links to a whole host of citybuilders, sandboxes (occasionally literal) and other games that let you play God Builder to a greater or lesser degree – many of them have been featured in Curios over the years but many haven’t and, look, it contains a link to an in-browser version of Sim City 2000 which should be enough to have you clicking like a b4stard. THANKYOU SAMUEL ARBESMAN, YOU HAVE DONE A BEAUTIFUL THING.

• Drops: I have to say that my professional (and, look, also personal; at this stage I just have to admit that I have a genuine problem with information addiction and that I AM OK WITH THAT HONESTLY) need to Monitor The Situation has felt…somewhat-onerous this week, and the thought of having to spend the next howevermanyweeks paying attention to the Labour leadership contest is somewhat sucking my will to live – if you are feeling similarly-unenthused by the prospect of another XX weeks of byelection chat and Burnham-burnishing, I suggest that you bookmark this link and return to it whenever you want some brainsmoothing distraction and Pleasing Sounds. Drops is a LOVELY little synthtoy – the mechanic isn’t wholly-original, fine, but the execution is pleasing in the extreme. You’re presented with a screen on which balls fall in rhythmic fashion; by placing obstacles in the path of said balls you can create small, looping beatscapes, the beats corresponding to the balls hitting the obstacles with the pitch and tone being determined by their exact position. You can bounce the balls from object to object, creating vaguely-syncopated patterns, it’s seemingly-impossible to create anything that doesn’t sound…sort of good, and there are a variety of different speeds of loop and other FX you can explore, and, generally, this is just an incredibly-soothing and intensely-pleasing Good Time. It’s also part of a BIGGER PROJECT – A Vinyl Bar In Shibuya is…well, it’s not wholly clear what it is other than a collection of little digital musical experiments, which you can find collected at this link; there’s a mashup generator and a really fun chrome plugin that lets you change the pitch and speed of any video playing in your browser by, er, moving a small surfing dog around (it makes sense when you install it, honest), and, generally, this is all FUN and FRIVOLOUS and MUSICAL and thank fcuk it has nothing to do with politics or politicians.

• The UFO Image Drop: You may not be aware (you might, it’s reasonable to assume, have had better things to do with your life; what…what does that feel like? Is it good?) that the US recently released – mandated by SPECIAL ORDERS from the senile old cnut across the water – a whole tranche of SECRET UFO-RELATED IMAGES into the wild, briefly sending specific corners of the web into a frenzy until they spent some time going through said images and realised that rather than BLOWING THE DOORS OFF THE WHOLE DAMN CONSPIRACY they were instead just another load of grainy, poorly-exposed shots of the sort you’ve seen hundreds of times before. BUT! I am linking to them because, well, maybe YOU will be the one to spot something revelatory and amazing and species-changing in amongst the carousel of utterly-unremarkable jpegs – oh, and because one of the pictures in particular is so amazingly sh1t, so risible, so laughably, preposterously poorly-rendered, that I promise it will cause even the most jaded of you to smile. I present to you an “actual site photo with FBI Lab rendered graphic overlay depicting corroborating eyewitness reports from September 2023 of an apparent ellipsoid bronze metallic object materializing out of a bright light in the sky, 130-195 feet in length, and disappearing instantaneously” – WHAT DO YOU THINK ARE YOU CONVINCED IS THE TRUTH OUT THERE???

• Batcloud: Are you a devotee of tarot? Do you believe that there is a warp and a weft to the world that, when scried and assessed and felt and seen through your third eye will reveal the secrets of the past, future and present with a terrible clarity? OH GOOD IN WHICH CASE YOU WILL LOVE THIS! A project by a museum in Mexico, this is a website which…actually, no, I am going to leave it to them to outline what is going on here: “The Bat Cloud is a proposition for interspecies encounter, installed in the wooded area surrounding the SFER IK museum in Tulum, Mexico. The work is an artistic offering to bats in the form of water, fruits, and insects, and an opportunity for humans to ask bats a question, with the help of an artificial intelligence oracle trained to listen to bat conversations.” So this is both a practical installation which can be visited, but also a virtual one which will provide answers to your questions based on data that is being received from the…bat environment, I suppose. Click the link, type your question and WAIT FOR THE BATS TO REVEAL THE TRUTH! Or a truth. Or perhaps no truth at all – after all, they’re just bats ffs, what do you expect them to know about the travails and hopes and dreams of a species that can’t even echolocate? Anyway, I just asked it whether Keir Starmer would still be PM in August and the bats responded with the ‘Arousal’ card (“BATS ENDORSE SEXY KEIR!” and said…yes! You heard it hear first, go and stake your house on it.

• The Reform UK Councillor Tracker: Sorry about all the politics chat – I promise it will stop soon, but, well, we have had rather a lot of it over the past week or so and it does rather pollute the linky waters, so to speak. This is a project by Chris Barker, tracking how many reform Councillors – elected, lest you forget, a mere seven days ago! – have been either suspended or forced to quit as a result of having been found to have said, or done, some massively-racist things (actually, in fairness, not ALL of them have quit because of racism, just the vast majority). So far the tracker shows 12 in 8 days, which is a pretty impressive hit-rate; I wonder what odds you’d get on them losing 100 by the end of the year? Anyway, on the one hand this is sort-of funny – lol, look at the racists getting exposed, what a shambles!!! – and on the other, it sort of really isn’t, given a) how many people voted for these cnuts, and b) the fact that, to repeat the point, LOTS OF THEM ARE QUITE OBVIOUSLY CARD-CARRYING RACISTS. As an aside, by the way (and, seriously, I will shut up about UK politics very, very shortly, at least until the longreads), the fact that the even worse racists, a party which literally campaigns on a ‘send them back where they came from’ ticket, swept the board in Great Yarmouth does seem to have rather gone under the radar what with All The Other Politics Happening but…feels incredibly bad!

• The Bluesky Farm: What would the Bluesky farm grow? Part of me wants to say ‘tedious beef’, but, let’s be honest, it would 100% be a vegan setup. There’s an article doing the rounds this morning about how Bluesky is DYING (again), with reports suggesting that engagement has declined a staggering 95% since January 2025 (the platform contests this and says it’s only 25%) – which seems entirely likely, given MOST PEOPLE HAVE NO INTEREST IN A SHORTFORM LARGELY-TEXTUAL SOCIAL NETWORK (noone wants to read, noone wants to click!), particularly one where the whole thing that Made Twitter Great (cf breaking news) hasn’t really taken off. Still, if you’re one of the stubborn holdouts still flying the flag over there – as, to be clear, am I – you might enjoy this little visualiser which creates a sort of…farm from your Bluesky account and the accounts you engage with the most, with the number of posts you make and the engagement they get determining the size and fertility of your plot, and the people you interact with the most showing up around you in some sort of barely-functional agrarian metaphor…this is cute, although if I am going to be picky (and I am, it’s MY PREROGATIVE) I would have liked a little more prettification here. Where are my lush and verdant fields? Where are my crops? Where is my threshing machine? Where is my slaughterhouse? THIS FARM WILL NEVER BREAK EVEN FFS.

• Indigo: SILLY LUXURY WEBSITE CORNER! This is an Italian jewellery brand called ‘Indigo’ – I have no particular opinions on the quality of the work here (while it’s not really my vibe, maybe it will be yours! I am not here to judge!), but I have PLENTY of opinions on the website, which is all SHINY full-bleed video and SYMBOLIC MOVEMENT and features some truly-beautiful copy of the sort that luxury retailers do so, so well. As you scroll you will be taken through ‘five stages of being’ which in some way relate to, er, some necklaces; you will also be accompanied on your journey by some truly spectacular copy. “Before the gesture, there is a sound. Before the form, an echo. Indigo gathers these invisible traces and transforms them into jewelry: five tales exploring matter, time and intimacy.” What do YOU want from a jewellers’ website? Is it the chance to look at their wares? NO! It is a NARRATIVE JOURNEY THROUGH INVISIBLE TRACES OF BEING! This really is worth clicking on, not least for the point halfway down the page when you meet the second model and he gives you one of the most incredible straight-down-the-lens BLUE STEEL gazes I think I have ever seen. MY KNEES, THEY GO WEAK!

• Halupedia: A theoretically-interesting AI-enabled art project, this, which has sadly been ruined by the fact that it has been found by Idiot Children. Halupedia is a simple concept – an encyclopedia where the entries don’t exist, until someone searches for them. Which, on reflection, possibly doesn’t make any sense – let me try again. Basically the site will spin up an encyclopedia entry, using AI, for anything you ask of it – nothing exists until it’s prompted into being, at which point it’s added to the site’s corpus. Which, you know, I quite like as a collaborative, hallucinatory project; except, if you look at the most recent entries that have been created, you can see that it has been pretty comprehensively 4channed (other troll communities are available) and so the whole thing is entirely-unfunny prompts about Charlie Kirk mixed with all sorts of regrettably-vile hatespeech. AND THIS IS WHY YOU MODERATE YOUR ART PROJECTS, KIDS.

• Similes: A LOVELY DATA ANALYSIS AND VIZ PROJECT! The talented people at The Pudding have turned their eye to similes in popular fiction, analysing over 200,000 to present an overview of some of the ways in which we like to describe certain qualities, feelings and sensations. If you have any interest in language whatsoever then you will love this – also, if you are anything like me you will be APPALLED at your lack of imagination when coming up with a simile for ‘dryness’ and will spend quite a long time feeling like a dreadful hack who should never be allowed to type again.

• The Sound of Online: What *is* the sound of online? The screeching of a modem in the 90s? The Nyan Cat music? Numa Numa? Rick Astley? NO IT IS NONE OF THESE! Instead, according to this website at least, it’s a collection of various audio files from all around the web and its history – old recordings of conversations between phone phreakers from the 90s, mp3s of songs about the internet, old phone pranks from back in the (really, really old) days, super-early internet-facilitated conference calls…Look, this is VERY VERY NICHE and I can’t for a second imagine who the fcuk this is for or who it would appeal to, but, well, maybe the answer to that is YOU!

• The Quick Cache and Archive Search: Irritatingly – for me, at least, although probably not for the publishers in question – the past few months have seen a lot of the larger media organisations becoming…significantly better at erecting effective paywalls around their content, so that a lot of the old, reliable methods for getting around the need to cough up for subscriptions can no longer be called upon. If you, like me, have a subscriptions problem that can best be described as ‘financially ruinous’ (look, I really do believe in paying for stuff, particularly when it’s professionally useful to me, but CAN SOMEONE PLEASE INVENT A DECENT BUNDLING OFFER FOR NEWSLETTERS AND OTHER SUBSCRIPTIONS BECAUSE I AM LITERALLY GOING TO FCUKING STARVE AT THIS RATE. Or, er, maybe one of you fancies employing me on a chunky dayrate for 2 days a month? I will do literally ANYTHING (really, really badly)), you might find this website useful – plug in any link and then click one of the DOZENS of options available to you to try and find an accessible, cached version of said page. Useful not only for jumping paywalls but also for finding stuff that you fear has been deleted or been allowed to wither away – worth bookmarking for any of you who Do Digital Research Stuff.

• Awesome Marketing Websites: To anyone with a functional soul, the idea of putting those three words together will make little sense; for the rest of you, though, this is a collection of websites which are, apparently, AWESOME EXAMPLES OF MARKETING. Are they? I honestly don’t care, but I appreciate that there are some of you who might still have to and so, well, HERE YOU ARE! Oh, and BONUS ADVERMARKETINGPRCONTENT! Here’s a similar site which showcases particularly good examples of ecommerce sites. God, I feel so *dirty* even typing words like this these days.

• Klattsch: Ok, this is fun if a bit weird – it’s a speech synth which works on phonemes rather than natural language spelling. So, for example, to get it to say ‘hello’ you have to instead plug “HH AH L OW” into the interface; there’s a keyboard of all available phonemes so it’s easy to experiment, and there’s something genuinely fun (ok, admittedly this is…not exactly mainstream fun, but fun nonetheless) about trying to work out which phonemes can be bashed together to make Actual Speech. Anyone who studied linguistics properly will probably enjoy this a lot, but it’s also just fun to fcuk around with and I think you could probably do some quite cool things with this if sampled in a creative way, maybe.

• Personal Sites: I am pretty sure that I haven’t featured this before, astonishingly – this is a GREAT portal collecting LOADS of lovely examples of people’s personal websites; mostly portfolios by various types of designer or coder or maker, but also just loads of small corners of the web  built and maintained by people who just want a repository for their thoughts and obsessions and interests…honestly, this really is an absolute timesink if you’re the sort of person who’s interested in seeing the ways in which people choose to build small homes for themselves online and all the wonderful, strange, mad, boring, idiosyncratic, obsessive things that they care about…ALL OF HUMAN LIFE IS HERE! Or at least the bits of human life that people choose to express via the medium of homespun html.

• The Dirty Little Library: NOT THAT SORT OF DIRTY. Or at least not that I have yet been able to find, although I suppose there *might* be some filth in here somewhere. Instead, this is a library of ZINES – specifically ones made with the Dirty Little Zine maker – covering topics as diverse as, er, a walk along England’s A205 and an art project about someone’s parents’ wedding photos. All are available as downloadable, printable PDFs – you can also see them online, but, per the medium, they work better as physical, printed artefacts. I love this so much – muchlike the previous link, there’s something infinitely-pleasing to me about the ability to just wander through other people’s obsessions and interests like this, and the tedious, old man in me wants to say something incredibly trite like THIS IS WHAT SOCIAL MEDIA SHOULD BE. But I won’t, because I am BETTER than that.

• Trambient: It turns out that writing about sonifications of transport networks, as I have in recent weeks, REALLY brings the readership to life – not making any assumptions about you guys, but, well, wow you make it easy for me to make assumptions about you guys! Anyway, this is another gorgeous project taking transport data and turning it into music, brought to my attention by reader Gareth Hacking (THANKYOU GARETH!); it’s a WONDERFUL project by Manchester-based musician Fritz von Runte, which basically creates organic soundscapes based on the tram network in the city. “This app will be a companion for the commuter of the green and yellow lines, easing in the journey to the vibrant city of Manchester from the leafy suburb of Bury, and calming down the journey back. The listening experience will always change too as it’s not a ‘static’ record. It isn’t an album either. But a collection of music, changing itself on every play, automatically synched to the stations in the journey. Our app features a unique algorithm that personalises each journey. As you travel and listen, the app seamlessly mixes the current track with the next, using multiple possible starting points for a fresh listening experience every time. There’s potentially 1.7 million versions for Bury to Victoria — and another 1.7m for the journey back!” I really, really love this, and if you live in Manny I suggest you check this out.

• Sinceerly: It feels like something of a tipping point has been reached in the past month or so in terms of the prevalence of AI-generated copy; every second Substack now seems to have the stench of The Machine about it, all of the marketing copy and a genuinely-upsetting proportion of journalism (I have a bunch of tech RSS feeds set up for work and The Next Web in particular has become entirely-machine-penned, which is both depressing and entirely-horrible to read), and the cumulative effect is really quite distressing, not least because as soon as I come across a Machine-tell I immediately stop engaging with the content of what I am reading and instead just start quietly fulminating at how fcuking annoyed I am that the cnut who’s put their name to it can’t even be fcuked to put their fingers to work (WRITE 10,000 IN FIVE HOURS YOU COWARDS WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU). Anyway, Sinceerly (I know, I know) is a horrible service for horrible people which promises to ‘De-AIify’ your copy – if you think this is a good and useful thing, know that I hate you.

• Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooo: Click the ‘o’. Click it again. And again and again and again. WIND IT UP AND WATCH IT GO! This is utterly, totally pointless and I rather like it – if nothing else it’s vaguely-cathartic, and we could all do with some of that.

• The 24/7 Wallace & Gromit Feed: While I have a tediously-predictable and oh-so-teenage penchant for art which might charitably be described as ‘challenging’ and ‘a bit on the fcuking bleak side’, only a monster (or at least a monster of a different sort to me) could deny the brilliance of Aardman Animations and their most famous creations, Wallace and Gromit – this YouTube channel quietly appeared this week, streaming the classic shorts on a 24/7 rotation, and it doesn’t matter how many times you have seen them before, they never, ever tire. Right now there are 136 people enjoying this together, and, honestly, there’s a very weird sense of pure communion you get from knowing that a bunch of anonymous strangers and you are experiencing the wonder of stop-motion plasticine simultaneously.

• Claudebient: Anthropic have set up this YouTube stream, another 24/7 number, which broadcasts a seemingly-infinite procession of vaguely-ambient-ish tracks which broadly fall under the general ‘music for coding’ rubric; amusingly (to me at least), the channel description is at pains to point out that all the music is picked and made by HUMAN MUSICIANS, presumably to forestall all the anti-AI hate that would otherwise result (equally amusingly, none of the humans are named anywhere, suggesting that they too are hiding from the ‘HOW DARE YOU COLLABORATE WITH THE MACHINE!!’ pitchfork mobs that would inevitably come for them were they cited (god it’s good to have such healthy, mature discourse).

• Googolplex Written Out: Ooh, VINTAGE DIGITAL ART! From 2013, this, although new to me (in url if not in concept): “In 1940, the mathematician Edward Kasner published the book “Mathematics and the Imagination”, in which he popularized the words googol and googolplex which his nephew suggested as names for big numbers. The number googol has been defined as 1 followed by a hundred zeros:
  googol = 10100 = 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000. The much larger number googolplex has been defined as 1 followed by a googol zeros. While this number can easily be written as googolplex = 10googol = 10(10100)
  using the exponential notation, it has often been claimed that the number googolplex is so large that it can never be written out in full. However in this “Googolplex Written Out” multivolume set of books, I am doing just that. It consists of 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 volumes, and each volume contains 1 000 000 zeros of the number googolplex. The first volume also contains the initial digit one with which googolplex starts.” This is obviously a high-concept gag, but part of me quite likes the idea of having a library constructed to house all the many, many volumes which the completed work would require. Go on Elon you dreadful racist coward, do something useful with all that cash.

• The Echo Department: Christian Ward is a lovely man and very talented musician, who I worked with at a genuinely godawful PR agency many years ago (this was in the little-lamented ‘pay The Daily Star on Sunday £2k to put a naked woman in full bodypaint on P3 to promote the videogame Bionic Commando’ phase of my career) and who is now experimenting with making SPOOKY EPISODIC NARRATIVE FICTION on TikTok. The Echo Department is a project sharing the same name as Christian’s musical sidehustle, and I think will appeal to any and all of you who are into folkloric hauntology and WEIRD ANGLO VIBES.

• The Myth of Ivress: I have absolutely no idea what is going on here, honestly. I *think* this is the website of a Japanese agency of some sort – there’s a sort of strapline at the top that reads ‘Evolve Relationship’, whatever the fcuk that is supposed to mean – but there’s no actual information about who they are or what they do. Instead, you get a…slightly-strange fairytale presented via the medium of (admittedly very nice and VERY pretty) scrollytelling, all about a mystical sword or somesuch. Is this how business works in Japan? You choose your supplier based on their ability to paint a pretty picture in simple narratives and HTML? This feels…superior, frankly. Anyway, this is GORGEOUS and its purpose is entirely baffling to me, which is pretty much a perfect Curio in some respects.

• Convene The Council: This is a potentially-interesting tool; nothing you couldn’t do yourself with a bit of effort, of course, but it’s quite fun to play with. The ‘Council’ is a selection of different AI personae, all of which will offer responses to a query from subtly different perspectives; so, for example, feed it a query and you will hear back from voices such as ‘the pragmatist: Cuts through abstraction to what’s actually executable now’, or ‘the skeptic: Assumes there’s a fatal flaw somewhere and hunts for it.’ Each is built on a different model – not the premium ones, they’re not made of cash, but a bunch of open source ones or lightweight versions of, say, Gemini, and you might find this useful if faced with some sort of INTRACTABLE DILEMMA (please, whatever you do, do not let this guide your actions in any way). The version hosted here is limited to six  queries a day, I think, but there are instructions on how to set up your own, locally-hosted version if you’re that sort of weird AI freak.

• Whichbook: Ooh, this is quite interesting. I normally have limited truck with book recommendation websites (mainly because I am a terrible, terrible snob with an innate belief that noone could EVER recommend anything good to me because I Know Best – yes, you’re right, I am a *pleasure* to hang out with!) but this one has a particularly nice interface feature which has made me feel better-disposed to it than I might otherwise have done. There are a bunch of ways you can try and source recommendations, but the most interesting is the one that lets you set a bunch of sliders to determine the extent you want the picks to embody certain qualities; so choose where you want it to sit on the ‘happy-sad’ axis, or ‘beautiful-disgusting’, or ‘funny-serious’, or ‘easy-demanding’ and so-on…All of the books on the site have apparently been ‘selected by humans’, presumably down to the tagging in the back end, and having had a play around with it it’s been pretty good at throwing up stuff that not only tracks against the sliders pretty closely (for the novels I know) but which sounds interesting and appealing (for the novels I don’t). This is worth a try, I think – if nothing else there’s something cool and worth exploring about these sorts of fuzzy interfaces.

• NYC By How Long It Takes To Get There: I have spent a lot of time in the past few weeks whining about stuff existing for NYC and not for London, and I am going to do exactly the same now – this is a GREAT little site/tool, and it would be SO useful for my city and I am UNACCOUNTABLY-IRKED that noone has seen fit to build it for me. It’s really simple – drag the first point around the map to fix the place you want to track commute times to, then click anywhere else to get an estimate how long it will take to get from point A to point B based on public transport. SO SIMPLE AND SO USEFUL!

• International Mollusc of the Year: Last featured in Curios in 2023 (I have no idea how I managed to miss the intervening editions, I can only apologise for my failure to keep abreast of the mollusc situation), International Mollusc of the Year is BACK for 2026, packed to the, er, gills (yes, I know, but I am struggling with metaphor here and there’s something of a mid-Curios slump happening at this end, bear with me) with bivalves and the like. “Welcome to the fascinating world of molluscs! From snails and slugs to clams, octopus and more – these creatures are as diverse as this year’s five finalists. “International Mollusc of the Year” celebrates their remarkable characteristics and inspires fascination for molluscs worldwide. Your vote decides the top mollusc, and Senckenberg will sequence the complete genome of the winner.” Who wouldn’t want to play a part in determining the recipient of this oh-so-prestigious award? NO FCUKER, etc! Last year’s victor was the Deep-sea Octopus Muusoctopus, as I know you were desperate to find out.

• Palette Inspiration: Would YOU like your home to be subtly evocative of a Caravaggio? Would YOU like to be able to tell anyone who compliments you on the subtle, tasteful use of muted shades across your home that actually you’ve taken your inspiration from, I don’t know, Barbudo’s canvases? OH GOOD! “PaletteInspiration.com is a curated color intelligence platform dedicated to the study and exploration of color as used by the world’s greatest painters. We extract, analyze, and present the dominant color palettes from thousands of artworks spanning the Renaissance through the Modern era. Our mission is to make the color wisdom of master artists accessible to designers, artists, researchers, and curious minds – bridging the gap between classical art history and contemporary creative practice.Each palette on this site is derived through careful computational analysis of high-resolution artwork images. Colors are grouped, named, and ordered by prevalence, giving you an honest representation of how a painter actually used color across their body of work.” Included among the painters analysed is Egon Schiele, and I personally would love to see what a house looked like when decked out in My Syphilis’ preferred range of pustulant reds and yellows (should any of you feel like indulging me). The only way this could be more perfectly middle-class would be if there were a direct link to buy the Farrow & Ball colours for each palette (and if the people behind it read this, you can have that idea for a mere 1% of all the affiliate revenue).

• The Earth Index: Ok, this is an actual, proper, useful tool rather than a dumb internet toy – WHO SAYS CURIOS CAN’T BE MEANINGFUL AND HEAVYWEIGHT??? – but it is also very cool; Earth Index is basically a project that uses AI (but not the bad sort, honest!) to analyse satellite imagery of the planet and help people who want to conduct large-scale analysis about environmental impact, human geography and the like. So, for example, you could use it to track deforestation, or the distribution of cattle grazing lands across a continental landmass, or all sorts of other things besides (look, I am not an environmental scientist, don’t look at me like that). Per the blogpost explaining the project, “To enable this breakthrough, we’ve done something no one has ever done before: we tiled the Earth into over 3.2 billion overlapping 10 hectare tiles (that’s roughly 3% of the area of Central Park in Manhattan), and used cutting edge AI foundation models to encode those tiles in a searchable database. Earth Index’s intuitive interface makes accessing these tiles simple and powerful. In testing, I’ve been excited by rapidly iterating through potential new applications. Each of these projects took less than 15 minutes from idea to initial implementation: Cataloging rubber processing plants in Thailand, the world’s largest producer of natural rubber. Identifying shrimp farming operations threatening vital mangrove ecosystems in the Gulf of Fonseca in Central America. Tracking the expansion of fracking wellpads in the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania.” This is, objectively, AMAZING and one of those ‘fcuk, the future is quite remarkable isn’t it?’ links that come up occasionally (whilst also being one of those ‘fcuk, we really are screwing things up quite badly, aren’t we?’ links that come up sadly a lot more often).

• Verdify: An experiment in letting an AI run a greenhouse. Sadly because it’s AI, so’s the project explanation – apologies for the roboprose, but: “Verdify is a family public lab, not a SaaS landing page. The project began with a 367 sq ft greenhouse in Longmont, Colorado, then grew into a useful test case for local AI, deterministic edge control, and public evidence. The core question is simple: can an AI planner improve a real greenhouse without becoming the thing that directly controls relays? Verdify answers that by publishing plans, telemetry, scorecards, costs, failures, lessons, and the exact AI-writable tunables that Iris (our OpenClaw AI agent) is allowed to change…Verdify is a public case study in AI-assisted greenhouse control. Crop profiles define the target bands, Iris (our OpenClaw AI agent) plans tactics through OpenClaw, the ESP32 executes local control every 5 seconds, and scorecards measure whether those tactics reduced plant stress without wasting water, heat, electricity, or equipment cycles. This is not a chatbot bolted onto a garden. It is a closed-loop planning system running against a real 367 sq ft solar-aligned greenhouse in Longmont, Colorado. Routine planning is local-first with Gemma 4 26B A4B (MoE), served locally under the gemma4-26b alias; it is not local-only, because larger cloud reasoning remains available for heavyweight reviews and major deviations. Slack is the human operations surface where Iris explains successful plans, forecast deviations, watch items, and checklist work, but the safety-critical control loop stays local on the ESP32. The home has rooftop solar and batteries, but the greenhouse still uses grid power and gas heat when physics requires it.” THis is SUCH an interesting experiment in the current abilities and limits of both genAI and agentic systems overall; the people behind it seem serious rather than awful techw4nkers and I think it’s legit, so it will be interesting to see how it works and, more specifically, how and where it doesn’t. Don’t get smug, farmers, it’s coming for your jobs too!

• Digg 3.0: This is…quite sad. Digg, for those of you old and internet-brained enough to remember that far back, was once upon a time a genuinely-great website for surfacing Interesting Things Online. It died, and last year had an attempted resurrection which I seem to recall covering in here…which didn’t work, and now? NOW IT IS REBORN AS A SITE ALL ABOUT AI NEWS! I am including this solely as another datapoint in the general ‘fcuk me everything is a desperate grift these days’ trend – the play here is clear, with the site trawling X for the most-shared links on the topic of artificial intelligence and trying to parse them for ‘virality’ etc…you know that this would have been all about NFTs and Web3 5 years ago. If this is still a thing in two years time I will eat my hat (joke’s on you, I own no haberdashery).

• The In-Tune Mixtape Fanclub: LOTS AND LOTS OF LOVELY CLASSICAL MUSIC (ok, fine, not ‘lovely’ if you don’t like classical music, but your philistinism is no concern of mine)! “Welcome to the home of the In Tune Mixtape Fan Club. The In Tune MixtapeClassical Mixtape is a weekdaily half-hour of uninterrupted music on BBC Radio 3; in their own words, “an imaginative, eclectic mix featuring classical favourites, lesser-known gems and a few surprises thrown in for good measure.” Here we hold an archive of all the Mixtape episode details since it started in October 2017, and the music listings within, letting you search and browse to your heart’s content. Please note the track listings do not always include every piece of music that was played.” None of the playlists are hosted on the site – instead it links out to the relevant BBC pages for each, where you can listen to your heart’s content – but you can see what you’re getting before you click, and it’s a wonderful bit of quality-of-life service for fans of both the show and Nice Classical Sounds in general.

• ApeChain: You know, I honestly really didn’t think I would ever have cause to type the words ‘Bored Ape Yacht Club’ into Curios ever again, and yet here we are in 2026 and I am once again inviting you to consider the cold, rotting corpse of the NFT boom – WHAT ODD AND TERRIBLE TIMES THEY WERE! I have just checked, and it’s four years and three months since Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton paraded their Apes (sounds wrong, and, oddly, the reality is even worse!) on his talkshow in what is still one of the most brazen examples of attempted market juicing I think I have ever seen…and now, all of the Apes are like dust in the breeze, the supposed WORLD-CHANGING MEDIA EMPIRE reduced to…whatever the fcuk *this* is. Seriously, click the link and have a bit of a dig around the site – I’ll wait, take your time. Now, can any of you explain to me what ANY of the words on there mean? ANYONE??? Look, here’s some sample copy from the landing page for those of you too squeamish to look yourselves – would any of you like to hazard a guess as to what is happening here? “Spotlight will be broken down into rounds, with each one specifically tailored to the highlighted project(s). This ensures what creators are building is amplified and elevated, while encouraging community participation. At each round’s end, the top APE placements score epic prizes made up of exclusive IRL, holy sh*t experiences and other unforgettable rewards. This system rewards both builders and individual collectors, ensuring engagement at all levels, while offering high-stakes rewards to the most active participants. Simple, fun, rewarding. Ready to make your mark?” SIMPLE, FUN, REWARDING. I don’t know what’s more amazing – that significant parts of the world thought that this stuff meant something, or that there are apparently still people out there Diamond Hands-ing and believing fervently that The Crypto Future Will Come – but the whole site is like some sort of mad fever dream from a collective fantasy of which we only have fragmented and very vague recall. Was…was that us? WHITHER THE APES?????

• PSI Games Online: Do you believe yourself to have PSYCHIC POWERS? Do you think that you are able to SCRY THROUGH THE VEILS using only the POWER OF YOUR MIND???? Are you…are you entirely fcuking deluded? OH GOOD! “Welcome to Psi Games Online, the premier platform for exploring and enhancing your natural intuitive abilities through scientifically designed games and assessments. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced practitioner, our interactive challenges will help you refine your skills in Remote Viewing, Precognition, Psychokinesis, Mind Sight, and Pendulum Dowsing.” Yes, that’s right, PENDULUM DOWSING. Anyway, if you want to test out your psychic abilities then all you need to do is register on the site and then you too will be able to experiment with psychokinesis and precognition and remote viewing and all that jazz – beautifully, despite the fact that the site claims that “our platform continuously evolves through rigorous testing, data analysis, and expert collaboration to measure the real-world effectiveness of psi abilities”, it doesn’t appear to be able to present, er, any actual evidence of anyone having had any demonstrable psychic powers. OR AT LEAST NOT SO FAR! Perhaps YOU will be the person to finally prove the doubters like me wrong! If so, you could go the whole hog and compete in the International Psychic Games – which, honestly, if you’re an actual journalist, PLEASE pitch a feature on this as I would love to read it..

• The Marc Andreessen Egg Game: Can YOU decorate an egg so as to make it look like famously-ovoid VC horror Marc Andreessen? TRY YOUR LUCK HERE!

• The Number Gacha: Via Andy, another entry in the pantheon of ‘games which basically just see how easy it is to trick your brain into thinking something is ‘fun’ based on graphical effects and SFX but without any actual elements which could meaningfully be described as ‘gameplay’’ – this really isn’t a game in any sense at all, but, er, I spent a good seven minutes this morning clicking it while I should have been making coffee, so BE WARNED, it scratches a very lizardbrain itch.

• Landmarkr: You have six guesses as to which country the game is pointing you at, based on images of landmarks, scenery, politicians, foodstuffs…this is fun, even if you are, like me, fcuking useless at geography.

• The Fast Five Quiz: A READER WRITES! Chris Read emailed me with this game that he made – in his words, “I’ve written a kind of Wordle for quiz – 5 questions every day, leagues and things or just simple anonymous play.” It’s fun, fast and a nice addition to your morning procrastination-rotation, should you wish to put even more of a buffer between ‘waking up’ and ‘engaging with the horrible sh1tshow that is ‘earning a living’ in 2026’.

• The Big Cheese: You are a wheel of cheese (don’t ask questions, ok, you just ARE). You must NAVIGATE A MAZE of sorts. There are mice. Honestly, I have no fcuking clue what is going on here, but it’s quite fun and I was immoderately charmed by the, er, cheese physics, which sees the wheel take damage as you bump into stuff and become less round and so less easy to control as you shave shards of parmesan off the side of your lactic body. Created as part of WheelJam2, where you can find all sorts of other, er, wheelish games to play with.

• Keywords: Dave ‘Bagpuss’ Forsey (one day the fcuker will explain the bagpuss thing to me, ONE DAY) made this GREAT little word game, which I was meant to help him test and then totally forgot about (SORRY DAVE). Anyway, it’s excellent fun (and annoyingly tough) – you have to guess five words of increasing length, one letter at a time, with a finite number of guesses on each word…oh, look, it’s a p1sser to explain, just click and play and get as frustrated as I just did (but it is fun, honest).

• Foxel: Ooh, this is fun – design your own voxel car and race it, and then see it in a LOVELY PROCESSION with everyone else’s creation at this website. I played around with this for ten minutes or so earlier in the week and I think it is surprisingly deep in terms of the physics and what you can build and how it will drive, I think this is worth spending some time with.

• Epic Furious: SATIRE!!!! Ok, so I bounced off this pretty quickly – not because it’s not good or well-made, but because I have literally no appetite whatsoever to engage with anything relating to That Fcuking Cnut In The White House; that said, if you’re someone who still thinks that making fun of him changes anything then you will enjoy this very slickly-crafted little RPG-esque title, riffing on the recent Iranian farrago and, inevitably, Epstein and everything else – there are GAGS and MINIGAMES and FIGHTING and, in general, if you have not yet reached the point where you roll your eyes and reach for the ‘sweet release of death’ button when someone refers to ‘that cheeto in the White House’ then you will LOVE this. Oh, I feel like I am being unfair now – this is very well-made, and far better than it needs to be, I think I am just at the point now where I can’t feel anything pertaining to that fcuker other than tired despair, at least til he finally dies. PLEASE GOD LET HIM DIE SOON.

• Cursor Camp: Due to my selfish decision to take last week off, this link has already been in the wild for a while now and deservedly attracting a lot of love, but there’s a chance that the less-terminally-online of you (lol, like anyone whose face isn’t basically grafted to the web reads this sh1t, honestly) won’t have seen it and, honestly, you must check it out because it is BEAUTIFUL. Friend of Curios and previous Tiny Award judge Neal Agarwal has once again created something gorgeous and playful and FUN in the shape of Cursor Camp, a, er, summercamp for cursors. Which, obviously, when I type it out sounds nonsensical but which becomes perfectly reasonable when you click the link and find yourself (as a cursor) in a beautifully-drawn 2d map of a traditional (or at least I guess traditional – not being North American means that I have no idea what summer camp actually entails beyond being, I don’t know, picked off one by one by a masked assassin or something) summer camp – move your cursor around and the map scrolls, letting you explore the environment and discover the literally HUNDREDS of fun games and toys and easter eggs that Neal’s scattered across the map, the treehouse you can wander into and the river you can float down and the football pitch you can have a kickabout on…there are items of clothing to collect and hats to wear and SECRETS to find, and, perhaps best of all, you can see the cursors of all the other people currently visiting the page (or at least a selection of them), giving you a really nice sense of community…honestly, this is really, really nice work and you could quite happily spend 20 minutes fcuking about here BUT THERE IS LOTS TO GET THROUGH WE HAVE NO TIME TO DAWDLE, ONWARDS!

• Vaskange: Much like the last link, this is quite a remarkable thing – Vaskange is a browsergame which is based on exploring the environment and finding pickups, but the interesting thing is that it all takes place on what appears to be a single, infinite canvas – effectively you explore everything by zooming in ever further into a series of nested illustrations, each of which is a portal to a new, smaller, illustrated world within it. You remember in the early days of the web (WHEN WE WERE YOUNG) and you would occasionally find those websites that would do an infinite zoom into an image (like this one, from…2004? Fcuk’s sake)? Well this is like that, basically, but interactive and therefore BETTER. There’s a Kickstarter sitting behind this to turn it into a full game – obviously good luck to the creator, but I personally think it’s sort-of perfect as is, and quite a remarkable technical achievement.

• RedditTok: I have, as the more filthily-minded amongst you almost certainly remember, linked to websites and apps that do the whole ‘turn all the media posted to a specific subReddit into an infinite feed a la TikTok’ thing before, but if I recall correctly those have always been focused on bongo – by contrast, this version lets you do it to ANY sub you like, meaning if you want nothing but an infinite feed of crustacea to scroll through like a slack-jawed crab obsessive then NOW YOU CAN! Tbh you can probably use this for bongo as well, I will never know. Actually, now that that has occurred to me I just checked and it a) does work for NSFW stuff; and b) doesn’t require any sort of login beyond a quick ‘yep, I am 18!’ toggle in the settings, so, well, IN YOUR FACE, ONLINE SAFETY ACT! (can we just take a moment to point out that stuff like this does rather prove that effective age-gating of anything online is FCUKING DIFFICULT unless you do it at a device level? What’s that? You don’t come here for tedious discussion of online regulation? Oh, fine, suit yourselves). BONUS ADDITIONAL TIMEWASTING INFINITE CONTENT LINK! This is a website which hosts ONLY old Flash clips and games – 6,817 of them, apparently – which you can cycle through at random. All of them are apparently vetted and entirely SFW, so should you want to deaden your senses and dull your mind with an almost-entirely-incoherent and unconnected collection of media from the mid-00s delivered via the medium of looping gifs and the odd Flashgame (delivered in Ruffle, RIP Flash) then HERE YOU GO!

• Blind Data: A READER WRITES! Rory Flint emailed me with this SUPERB bit of datawork digging into the statistics behind cult weekly Guardian newspaper column ‘Blind Date’, in which…actually, no, I really don’t need to explain the concept of a column called ‘Blind Date’, I’ll leave it to Rory, “I’ve just launched a site that scrapes and analyses every edition of the Guardian’s Blind Date column (a long-running UK feature where two strangers are sent on a date and then publicly rate each other and the experience). The site looks at things like whether the marks out of 10 actually correlate between daters, what topics come up most often, and whether self-reported awkwardness predicts a second date.” As someone who has been obsessed with the column for YEARS – special shout out to the lesbians who lost their pants, still a high watermark – this is basically catnip for me. 233 kisses from 877 dates feels…ok to be honest, and possibly a better hit rate than the apps at this point. Oh, Rory told me that the heavy lifting here in terms of building the site was obviously Claude – the design has the stench of machine – but don’t let that put you off, this is super-interesting (admittedly moreso if you know the column, but still).

• Eurovision Data: Another reader data project! Friend of Curios and owner of the excellent Puntofisso newsletter Giuseppe Sollazzo has made a sort of scrollytelling dataanalysis of Eurovision entries over the past few decades, looking at the lyrical themes that have come to dominate and how that has changed over time, and if you are one of those people (and I understand they exist, although I personally don’t quite understand them) for whom Eurovision is basically your Christmas, your Hallowe’en and your Valentine’s all in one then, well, you will sh1t yourself inside-out with excitement at this. I personally found this observation quite interesting, but the whole thing really is worth a scroll and a read as, aside from anything else, it’s really nicely put together in terms of the viz here: “Eurovision’s themes are adapting to changing times. Love (red) still dominates but is no longer the majority. Empowerment (blue) becomes prominent in the the 2010s, and Peace crests in the early 1980s.”

• The NTK Archive: Many years ago when Former Editor Paul hosted this newsletter on his website Imperica (RIP I want to run to u) he compared this newsletter to NTK – I, er, never actually knew what NTK was, but just nodded along because I just sort of assumed it was accurate. Anyway, this week I happened to stumble across this archive of old NTK newsletters and FCUK ME IT IS LIKE MEETING ME FROM THE PAST. So NTK stands for (stood for) Need To Know, and was a weekly newsletter collecting links which ran for 10 years from 1997(!!!!!) to 2007, and which…look, this is quite weird for me because, honestly, the similarities between it and Curios are…uncanny. The dense, hypertext feel, the…occasionally-overwrought prose, the fact that there is FAR TOO MUCH OF IT…it really is like looking in a mirror at a (trimmer, better-looking) version of me. Anyway, this is the whole archive of the NTK project – it’s more of a timecapsule at this point than anything else, given that, inevitably, I don’t think any of the urls will work any more (which, again, is a sad reminder of all that we have lost – not suggesting that anything in here is VITAL FOR TEH SPECIES or anything but there’s something honestly sad about the fact that all the websites and projects and THINGS in here, all made by people for no reason other than that they wanted to, have fallen prey to the ravages of linkrot. Still, if you want to step back in time and see what people were talking about online when you were still in short trousers then this is a quite amazing resource.

• The Sample Text Project: This is another reader-submitted link, and another that I think is rather wonderful. Chris G (presumably Kenny’s brother, though I forgot to ask) writes: “It basically started as an inside joke with a few friends in a group chat where we got a chatgpt powered bot to write plugins for itself. Egging the hapless AI on, we somehow ouija-boarded onto one plugin that would make it fetch a random image from Wikipedia and then place words from the same article onto it. Often times it would just be mangled garbage or incoherent but every now and then something astoundingly funny would break through (if you have that certain 2005 idiotic internet humor that we/I certainly suffer from). What if we put that onto shirts and let people, completely at the whim of the algorithm, buy them if they like them?” This is a WONDERFUL idea – the random juxtaposition mechanic is old but occasionally throws up some truly beautiful combinations of images and words. Once you find one you like you can adjust the font, the tshirt colour and size and automatically order it from whatever dropshipping outfit Chris is using in the back end (he tells me the site has sold seven to date – noone is getting rich off this, let’s be clear, but that’s not the point). To give you an example, my second tshirt ‘pull’ just now just gave me a plate of bloody meat superimposed with the text ‘in America’ which, you know, ACCIDENTAL SATIRE, so have a play and see if you can find some vaguely web2.0 fashion via the magic of the machine lottery.

• The State of AI Models Visualiser: I’ve stopped really concerning myself with frontier model capability changes of late because, well, life’s too short, but also because the incremental gains at the moment for most users feel relatively marginal and the models are all largely comparable at this stage. If you’d like a neat visual overview of how they all perform across a single task, though, Ethan Mollick cobbled together this nice little site (via Claude, obvs) which shows how a selection of the top models as of April 2026 performed on the one-shot task “build me a procedurally generated 3D simulation showing the evolution of a harbor town from 3000 BCE to 3000 AD, it should look beautiful and allow me to have some control over it.” This is SO interesting in terms of the different ways in which each model chooses to respond to the prompt and the differences in visual style and UX/UI that each produces – basically there’s a clear gap between the big ones and everyone else, but it’s another pretty amazing example of just how much these things can do now and how much the capabilities have improved in the past year or so.

• Land Lines: This is a beautiful little webexperiment from the people at Google which uses data and imagery from Google maps to let you mess around to find map elements from across the world whose details conform to whatever linear shapes you draw. Which, sorry, is an absolutely hideous description – what that basically means is that you can draw a line in your browser and the toy will pull images from Google Maps which track that line, whether in terms of roads or coastlines or whatever. The REALLY run bit, though, is if you click ‘drag’ – you can then drag your mouse around and the system will pull together a chained set of image tiles whose contours match the trajectory drawn by your cursor, making a sort of weaving, sinuous collage of landscape in your wake. Which, again, probably doesn’t make any sense but FFS WHAT DO I HAVE TO SPOONFEED YOU EVERYTHING JUST FCUKING TRY IT AND STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT.

• Last Night’s Sunset: This page takes your location data and uses it to render a colour gradient image of what the sunset looked like last night, wherever you are in the world. It is BEAUTIFUL, and another part of an ongoing project by Matt Wheeler (I featured another part of it the other week, that webpage that tracked a bunch of semi-whimsical, moderately-terrifying stats about the world from the time you open it) which lives here. There’s another part going live tomorrow, which Matt is kindly giving all of YOU early access to via this link – it tells you all the things the page knows about you simply because of your browser/device footprint, which is…well, it oughtn’t be any fcuking surprise really, how long have you been online for now? Anyway, this is a nice collection of projects, well done Matt and thanks for sending them in.

• Flipbook: Ooh, this is a fun little toy – slightly-reminiscent of the sort of thing I was getting quite excited by a few years back, those toys where The Machine would imagine entire worlds and ecosystems and let you mess with them textually…anyway, this is basically a Machine-generated infinite visual encyclopedia – type in anything you like and it will spin up a sort of…yep, visual encyclopedia entry for it, complete with points of interest you can click on to take you to another, related page of the visual encyclopedia, which again gets spun up on the fly…which, I realise, is once again an almost-entirely-useless explanation in terms of helping you understand what the fcuk is happening here, so I suggest you just click and play and see how you get on. Basically, try something like ‘the reproductive system of a cow’ or ‘how is the eyeball structured?’ and it will start to make sense (and if it doesn’t I really don’t know how to help you). What’s interesting – and what means that you really SHOULDN’T use this for anything other than fun – is that there’s no sourcing to anything, meaning I would be willing to bet that a significant proportion of everything it throws up is entirely made-up, which personally I think adds to the slightly-surreal fun of the whole project.

• The Apocalypse Early Warning System: Would…would you want to know? I have to be honest, quite a large part of me would want to have literally no idea of the fact that the bomb was on its way; personally I’d prefer my first inkling of the apocalypse to be my flesh being reduced to ash and my blood to vapour, but I appreciate that there are those of you who might want, I don’t know, fit in a few phonecalls to loved ones, or one last esoteric bongo session or something. Anyway, should you want to keep track of whether or not The Big One has happened, one Kyle McDonald has built this website which uses publicly available data from private jets to estimate the likelihood of Something Bad Going Down – the inference is that as soon as the plutes get wind of things going south they will be straight to the airfields, into the Cessnas and off to the New Zealand bunkers before you can say “see you in hell, povvos!”, and so this site, by tracking them, will give you a vague idea of the fact that the end is nigh. At the time of writing, by the way, EVERYTHING IS FINE. I wonder if there’s some sort of rudimentary stock buying/selling thing you can rig up to this, out of interest?

• Radio Venus: Do you want to ‘discover music through your venus sign’? Do you know what the fcuk that even means? Anyway, give this site your birthdate, select a genre and it will pull together a playlist for you based on some criteria that, honestly, I do not for the life of me understand. The ones it’s made for me are pretty good, though, meaning that obviously HOROSCOPES ARE REAL.

• Nomare: When I found this link two hours ago it was called ‘DateSky’, but now it is called ‘Nomare’ – HOW FCUKING BLUESKY. Ahem. Anyway, this is apparently a dating app built on the AT Protocol, on which Bluesky is built, and which lets you connect your Bluesky profile to connect you to a dating pool of other people with unshakeable conviction in their own moral superiority and an inability to spot a joke at 10 paces (I USE BLUESKY TOO I CAN SAY THIS STUFF). I obviously haven’t tried it out, but, well, it’s here in case you want it. £10 says it’s called ‘TismDate’ by next Tuesday.

• Moth In Relay: I *think* I found this via Kris – regardless, it is SO LOVELY. Just click the link and experience it – it’s a small piece of webart based on the idea that…oh, look, here: “In 1947, scientists working on the Harvard Mark II computer found a moth trapped in the relay circuits of the machine, impeding its function. They taped the dead moth into the computer’s logbook and wrote: “(moth) in relay … First actual case of bug being found.” Grace Hopper, a key programmer on the computer, later popularized the incident and the term “debugging” through her lectures. This work conjures a world where the moth remains trapped in the computer and searches for a way out of the machine. It autonomously flies across global internet infrastructure, and each time it locates a node—a data centre or cable landing station—it searches the web for information about that facility, hoping to find an escape from the relay.” Honestly, this really is very cute indeed (and also made me feel…a bit sad, although tbh that might be the troublingly-cumulative hangover I am currently wrestling with).

• The AI Bible: Do you sometimes feel you have strayed from God’s light and could do with reconnecting with the scriptures? Do you wish that they were more ACCESSIBLE – less DENSE, less IMPENETRABLE, and, fundamentally, more full of visual renderings of Biblical scenes in the style of poorly-rendered videogame cutscenes? DO YOU WANT THE SLOPBIBLE (and yes, I know, I ordinarily hate the word ‘slop’, but here it really does fit)? OH GOOD HERE IT IS! Honestly, this whole thing is…astonishing, really, and if I can give you one tip (and this is a general one with the New Testament overall tbh) it is to go STRAIGHT to the book of Revelation because that is where the good (read: totally fcuking mental) stuff is and where the…erm…*particular* visual style of the machine really comes into its own. Apparently God looks vaguely like a bearded version of Akuma from Street Fighter, who knew?

• Looki: It feels like we’re soon coming up to Wave II of the (still imho doomed) AI-enabled personal device movement, what with the theoretical reveal of whatever it is that OpenAI and Jonny Ive are working on coming later this year – in the meantime, here’s the Temu version! Looki is basically a variant on the whole ‘a pendant that records everything that happens to you and uses the machine to analyse it and give you advice, etc, based on what it sees/hears’ thing (and I have to say, the little popup on landing on the Page which reads “it’s all about YOU” did make me rather want to scream “AND THAT’S HOW WE GOT INTO THIS MESS FFS!” at my laptop just now) – all for the low, low price of $249. There is NO WAY IN HELL that this thing actually works, to be clear, or not in any meaningful way, but let’s see if this sort of stuff gains any traction this time (it won’t).

• TubeSounds: After TrainJazz from NYC the other week, a reader writes! Jane Ling wrote to me to say “I loved the NYC Train Jazz website you posted a week or two ago. I just stumbled across Tube Sounds by Izzy Hemmings completely by accident and I thought you’d enjoy it.” I DO LOVE IT, thankyou Jane and thankyou Izzy Hemmings for making it. I will say, though, that while it definitely…makes sounds, it’s possibly a touch more on the atonal side than the NYC offering and if anyone still wants to make London Tube Jazz then PLEASE DO. In fact, fcuk it, it really ought to be London Tube Grime. Let’s do that instead.

• Single Ride: ANOTHER URBAN TRANSIT-BASED TOY! Annoyingly, this is ONCE AGAIN an NYC thing, but it’s ONCE AGAIN something that I implore one of you to make for London because it is FUN – the simple challenge is, to quote the site, “Travel the longest route you can on the NYC Subway without visiting the same station twice. Transfer in time before the end of the line! New start station each day.” The animation and interface here is really rather nice and gives it a pleasing air of polish – obviously this is impossible to me because of my almost-complete lack of familiarity with the New York subway system, but let it just be said that I would fcuking KILL this if it was trained on LDN.

• Lexiexplorer: Now that we have collectively seemingly realised that Duolingo serves two purposes only (making you good at Duolingo and insinuating that fcuking owl into everyone’s nightmares) and that it is no use at all for actually learning a language, perhaps you might like to try an alternative method – here’s one! Lexiexplorer is a cute idea – rather than getting given a list of words or a ‘complete the sentence’ thing, it helps you learn vocab by plopping you down in a 3d environment which you can walk around and, by clicking on things, learn what stuff is called. So, for example, select the ‘urban outdoor’ environment and learn the words for ‘car’ or ‘lampost’ or ‘vagrant’ or ‘troubling methhead’, etc etc etc. This probably won’t make you fluent, fine, but I enjoyed the creativity of the approach.

• Omeggle: You remember Omegle, which was effectively chatroulette? You know what would make that EVEN BETTER (worse)? YES THAT IS RIGHT INBUILT SOFTWARE DESIGNED TO RATE YOUR FACIAL ATTTRACTIVENESS BASED ON THE INCELISH BULLSH1T LIKE SYMMETRY AND HOW FAR APART YOUR FCUKING EYES ARE! This is EVIL and I tried it once to check it was real, and it is, and it made me so upset and dispirited (although tbh that might have been the laughter of the (I think) Scandinavian teens with their young skin and bright eyes, confronted with my sallow, sagging furrowed countenance, FCUK YOU SCANDI TEENS) that I had to log off, and I am sharing this with you because, well, why should I have to suffer alone. There are LEADERBOARDS ffs.

• Tiny Hamlet: Via Lynn, this is a fun little AI-built townbuilder which lets you spin up small, cute-looking villages with a surprising degree of creative freedom. It’s VERY pretty, impressive in terms of something that’s just been vibecoded together, and keeping the tab open is fcuking my laptop in half, so maybe close your other tabs before you try this one.

• Claw3d: If you’re one of the subset of lunatics using OpenClaw then a) I hope you don’t mind what it’s almost certainly doing to some very sensitive files on your computer; b) you might enjoy this toy, which offers you the opportunity to watch all your little agents in a virtual office, so you can see vaguely-anthropomorphised representations of instances of Claude as they rip the workings of your life to shreds via the medium of ill-advised API access.

• Shapes: You know messaging platforms, like Whatsapp or Signal or Telegram? You know what would make them better? YES THAT IS RIGHT THE INTRODUCTION OF AI BOTS INTO YOUR CONVERSATIONS! That’s right, in a feature that literally no fcuker in the world could ever possibly want, you can now sign up to an entirely new chat app whose sole gimmick is apparently that you can have your conversations with friends derailed and interrupted by The Machine. WHY DOES THIS EXIST?

• Familiar Machines: I have, I think, waxed lyrical over the years about how much I wanted one of Sony’s original robot dogs, the Aibo, when I was younger. Well, what if Aibo, but AI and significantly more sinister-looking? THEN THIS! Familiars are…what are they? Well they’re vaguely-mustelid-coded in terms of design, to my mind at least, and, per the blurb, they are “a supportive presence that learns your household rhythms and goals, responds with care, and makes life a little more magical. From the team behind Roomba.” So, basically, this is a companion machine thing, designed as a pet analogue or loneliness reliever (every time I type things like that I genuinely want to cry), they “express themselves through animal-inspired body language, facial expressions, and sound” and they “build memory and a distinct personality across every interaction, so the relationship keeps getting richer and more personal the longer it’s there.” Look, on the one hand I can’t pretend I am not curious about the development of this sort of thing, but on the other all I can think of is people living alone and having no friends and spending all their time interacting with a small, cute-shaped machine (“if friend-shaped, must be friend!”) and the thought of it is too upsetting, seriously, I have to stop typing about this.

• The TechnoOptimism Archive: A reader writes! Krystian Łukasik got in touch to tell me about his new project, which he describes thusly: “I recently launched Techno-Optimism Archive – a public digital archive of old technology hype from historical newspapers: failed predictions, strange promises, and forgotten beliefs about inventions that were supposed to save the world. It includes examples such as the telegraph being imagined as a way to end war, motion pictures replacing books, and automobiles making people “too prosperous to fight.”” This is perhaps a bit slight at present – sorry, that sounded churlish, I should really say “I would like more of this!” – but there’s some interesting stuff there, not least WIRED in 1997 talking about the coming attention economy, which, well, well done that writer.

• Epstein Photos: I confess to really not wanting to look at anything Epstein-y anymore (which, yes, I appreciate might sort-of be part of the problem with this sort of stuff), but for those of you who wish to continue staring into the abyss a bit longer might like this clever bit of digital sleuthing which gives you a guide to who appears with who in the various photos from the archive. “This is a visualization of the people whose faces are in the Epstein Library dataset. The circles (nodes) are people, and the lines (edges) between them are when two people are in the same photograph together. A node’s size is related to the number of photos they appear in, and nodes are colored based on the person’s category.” This is obviously miserable, but it’s also REALLY nicely made, so, well kudos for doing the horrible work required.

• Isopods of the World: As a slight corrective to the horror of the last link, HAVE SOME LOVELY ISOPODS. The website’s strapline reads “EXPLORE THEIR BEAUTY UP CLOSE”, and frankly I think more Pages should take that stern, almost bullying tone with me (yes, isotope daddy!) (sorry, not quite sure what happened there).

• The Toothcomb AI Fact Checker: ANOTHER READER WRITES! Rob Dawson, whose projects I have occasionally featured before, has built this AI-powered factchecking tool for audio –  this is clever, so I will paste the explanation as to the ‘how’ here: “Give Toothcomb a speech transcript and it will fact-check and analyse it. If you have an MP3 file of someone speaking, it can generate the transcript for you. You can also stream audio in real time from your device’s microphone. Analysis is performed in three stages: 1) The text is broken up into small parts referred to as ‘utterances’. Each utterance is usually a few sentences in length. The utterances are sent, one at a time, to a powerful AI language model with detailed instructions about what to look for. The AI will respond with a list of what it found – this may include claims, promises or predictions made by the speaker, logical fallacies, and deceptive or manipulative language.2) The AI may decide that some of the speaker’s statements require fact-checking. It may be able to perform these checks using what it already knows, or it may need to search the web to get up-to-date information. 3) Once each part of the speech has been checked separately, a final review of the entire speech is performed. The final review can pick up things that aren’t apparent from looking at small parts in isolation. For example, it will check if the speaker contradicts themselves, or promises to address some issue and then fails to do so.” This feels like something which could usefully be wrapped into all sorts of other tools/products with a bit of thought.

• Chess Art: Oh this is REALLY nice – if you play chess with any degree of seriousness you will adore this tool, which basically takes the data from any game of chess you feed to it and turns it into rather beautiful ART. As far as I can tell the data it requires is fairly standard and easy to export, so if you play on chess.com or similar and want to immortalise your GREATEST ZUGZWANG or something then CLICK THE LINK.

• The Year in Songs: Vibecoded, fine, but I like the idea of this – a calendar that tells you all the songs that reference each day of the year, a bit like the ones that tell you when ‘International Sausage Day’ is, but which instead reminds you that next Saturday is Lagwagon’s May 16th day (for example).

• The Quest Archive: OK, this is quite the archive. I didn’t know that ‘Quests’ were a thing in the world of fanfic, but a reader (who wishes to remain anonymous, and I will respect that because, well, who the fcuk wants to be seen in 2026? NO FCUKER, etc) sent it in with the following explanation: “Okay, so… were you aware that aging internet cesspool 4chan has a 17-year-old creative writing subculture? I don’t mean greentexts or puerile racism or anything. (That’s elsewhere on the site.) I mean full-on works of original fiction, written over many years, spanning into the hundreds of thousands or occasionally millions of words. This wouldn’t be different from ordinary webnovels, except that the medium here is interactive fiction: in a “quest,” the author (QM) writes a chunk of text (update), then provides a slate of options for what the POV character (MC) should do next; this slate is voted on, and dice are sometimes rolled; the QM writes the results of the choice and/or dice roll, then provides more options; repeat until the QM vanishes or the story concludes. As a result, the stories of quests are frequently meandering, strange, and surprising (even to the author! maybe especially to the author!), not to mention revealing of the psychology of the voters.  Quests can be found on other sites than 4chan, but are frequently either wildly NSFW or “smashing action figures together”-esque crossover fanfiction. 4chan, for all its (many many many) faults, seems to harbor a lot more in the way of genuinely interesting work. If your interest is actually piqued I can link specific quests all day, but I seem to recall you having a disinterest in genre fiction (which is the majority of the output), so I won’t put effort into recommendations right now. But maybe your readers might be intrigued?” ARE YOU INTRIGUED, READERS? I have had a flick through, and while it’s not really my vibe I think there’s something so, so interesting about the scale of this, so much created and put into the world through collaborative endeavour and worldbuilding, and it’s very heartening to see. BONUS QUEST: the mysterious person in question also linked me to their own fiction, which it would be remiss of me not to link to – it is a BIG WORK, and if you’re interested in scifi/fantasy then there is probably a LOT to love in here.

• Unruly Play: This is a lovely collection of examples of work that explore creativity and play in various forms – artworks and exhibitions and digital projects, tagged and searchable by theme, 177 in all, from across the world. Popup museums and AR projects and interactive sculptures and and and – this is SUCH a great resource for inspiration for anyone thinking about public art projects and in-situ play/interactive works.

• Jon Mud: I’m not entirely sure how one might explain Jon Mud – erm, if I say ‘short, surreal and lightly-upsetting (although the reasons why are…unclear to me) videos of objects and animals with human faces’ would that entice you to click? IT SHOULD, CLICK THE LINK.

• Clock NYC: Oh ffs another one. STOP MAKING COOL STUFF FOR NEW YORK FIRST MAKE IT FOR LONDON INSTEAD. Ahem. This is a clever little project – a clock displaying the time in New York RIGHT NOW, where every minute is represented by numbers found via Google Street View. I presume that there’s been a bruteforce scraping of the Streetview API to pull all of these into a database – you can at any point click a link to go to the exact place in New York which connotes, say, 4:18am, which is a nice touch. NOW DO IT FOR HERE PLEASE THANKYOU.

• Knock Knock: Well this is grimly impressive. Have you ever wondered how many attacks a single server receives from malicious actors, and how often they come? “Fcukloads” and “all the fcuking time” are the depressing answers, according to this website which is basically sitting on an unprotected server designed explicitly to track attacks and their provenance – there’s a nice view you can access where you see the globe and watch the pings come in in realtime and MAN do a lot of them come from…er…America, as it happens. WHODATHUNKIT???

• US Prisons: Have you ever visited a prison? I have, a few times, and fcuk me they are horrible places (obvs, they’re not meant to be nice, but I will never forget getting a tour of a young offenders institute c.2002 (I was working as a lobbyist, don’t ask) and being cheerfully told that none of the cells – designed explicitly to house children between the ages of 11-16 – had ligature points was a chilling moment and one when I realised that I did not want to do that job one iota longer) – this is a collection of aerial shots of the US prison industrial complex pulled from Google Maps to show the geography of the carceral system across the Atlantic, and FCUK ME the size of these horrors. Also, this project is, I think, from 2012, so Christ knows what it looks like now.

• The GDT Nature Photographer of the Year: The German Society for Nature Photography picks its pick of the pics for 2026! Pick your favourite – mine are the algae bubbles and you are WRONG.

• The Singapore Institute of Technology Virtual Campus Experience: How did you decide where to go to university (presuming that you did – if you didn’t, ngl, it’s increasingly looking like you might have made the correct choice)? Me, I went to Manchester based entirely on the fact that they offered me the equivalent of 2 Ds and an E at A-Level and therefore it meant that I could continue fcuking my neurons into the sun with booze and weed rather than bothering with petty things like ‘revision’ (also because I was rejected from Cambridge for being, and I quote, “too linguistically-imprecise, arrogant and nihilistic”, which thank GOD I have obviously moved on from), and arrived on day one at university never having even visited the city. Had there been something like this – a 3d virtual tour of campus in the now-classic ‘metaversal’ style, produced by the Singapore Institute of Technology – perhaps I might have taken one look at Whitworth Park and thought ‘actually, hang on, maybe that English course at Kent with the year in Amsterdam would be a better bet’. AND ON SUCH SMALL DECISIONS DO LIVES CHANGE. Anyway, this is quite a cute way of exploring a campus and not a terrible idea imho, though there could be more fun added in were I to nitpick (although perhaps ‘fun’ isn’t really the Singaporean vibe, on reflection).

• WikiPop: Would you like to know what the most visited Wikipedia page was yesterday (at least on English Wikipedia)? OH GOOD! This is a *tiny* bit fudged (“To keep things interesting, an article won’t be featured if it was already the top article in the last 30 days”), but in general it’s really interesting (if often unsurprising – yesterday was Ted Turner, for example), and if you’re keen there’s a daily email you can sign up to to keep abreast of who the world has recently given a fcuk about.

• Whale Follow Mouse: If you are not vaguely soothed or charmed by this in some small way – IT IS AN ORCA FOLLOWING YOUR MOUSE FFS – then you are probably dead.

• Wax Letter: Continuing my big 2025-26 trend of ‘man there’s actually a surprising amount of money in physically-mailed letters these days if you find the right niche’, this project basically lets you order a fancy-looking physical letter with an ACTUAL WAX SEAL to be sent to anyone you like. The nice bit is that you can upload a graphic file and that will be used to make your own custom seal for your letter(s), presumably using a small 3d printing setup the guys have knocked up. This feels like quite a cool ‘surprise and delight’ element for the right sort of product/brand, and an absolute license to print money for the people behind it if they get it into the hands of the right set of geeks (sorry, but).

• The Graham and Bouncer Adventures: To be clear, this is NOT GOOD – it is utter tripe – but I am fascinated that it exists. “The Graham and Bouncer Adventures follow a Land Rover (Graham) and a four-wheeler (Bouncer) from their life as working vehicles on a farm in the Lake District (UK) to becoming enhanced with nanotech in a heist gone wrong, travelling the world, the solar system and eventually the multiverse. In their many adventures they will meet maniacal corporate leaders and their evil henchmen, evil scientists’ intent on global domination, even evil doppelgangers, as well as making friends with helpful Professors, secret service agents, and fifth dimension alien spacetime guardians.” This is AI-generated – the script, the visuals, the voices – and none of the videos on this YT channel have more than a handful of views, and yet there are…what, HUNDREDS of episodes. WHY? WHO IS MAKING THEM? WHY ARE THEY BEING MADE? WHAT IS THIS FOR? WHY IS IT SO BAD? WHY ARE THE CENTRAL CHARACTERS SENTIENT, ANTHROPOMORPHISED MOTOR VEHICLES? So many questions – if whoever is behind this happens to see this, feel free to email me to a) call me a cnut; and b) tell me what the fcuk you are doing here.

• Hidden Cassettes: Oh wow, I love this project. “This is going to sound insane, but when I was a kid I found out my dad secretly recorded our phone calls. He was an engineer with a penchant for hacking stuff together, and one day I overheard my older sister talking in his office when she wasn’t home from school yet. Confused and intrigued, I waited until he took his afternoon nap (he was old) to investigate this impossibility and I found a hacked together device that recorded our phone calls to cassette tape whenever the dial tone was engaged from the land line. As a result, I grew up thinking surveillance was love, control was care, and hacking stuff was a way to play God. All the shenanigans he mysteriously knew about that I’d only talk about with friends on the phone finally made sense. I never told anyone that I found this… mainly because I learned how to pause the recording before I took calls so I could get away with breaking the house-rule that phone calls could only last 3 minutes. We had to use the microwave timer to time each call and promptly hang up when it beeped and it was annoying as hell. I continued to use my newfound knowledge to knowingly censor my own calls, while my sister continued to get in trouble for everything she unknowingly divulged. Savage younger sister behavior. 30 years later – I found a couple of the tapes. Here are a few excerpts.” This is wonderful – intimate and surreal and cute and like a timecapsule into someone else’s past, and I honestly adore it.

• Audio Spaces: I LOVE THIS TOO! Audio Spaces is a map of the world onto which anyone can dump a location-tagged audio file – and there are THOUSANDS, so you can literally zoom around the globe listening to whatever people have chosen to tag to wherever you’re looking. Near me, someone has recorded a short snippet of audio which simply goes “just two bros, in a van, going to move some furniture…” before dissolving into hysterical laughter; just round the corner someone’s uploaded cricket sounds and someone playing guitar…in Rome, there are sounds of Italians being Italian, and mopeds…honestly, this is really rather special and you could lose a LONG time to it if you’re sonically curious (and if you’re not, as ever, WHAT THE FCUK IS WRONG WITH YOU?).

• iTom: A rather beautifully-made personal portfolio website with a gorgeous scroll mechanic and some really cute illustrations which make the whole thing feel papercrafty whilst at the same time being very nicely coded indeed.

• RNGDLE: A daily game which basically asks the question ‘how much agency can you remove from the player whilst maintaining an experience which still feels on some level entirely gamelike?’, to which the answer is apparently ‘all of it’! Roll a different random number every day, win BADGES! This is, depressingly, really quite addictive.

• Takeaway: Oh this one is a B4STARD (I say this mainly because I like to think of myself as gud wiv wurds and yet I am TERRIBLE at this game) – you start with an eight letter word, and you need to get down to three by removing one at a time so that the remaining letters can still spell something. WHY IS IT SO HARD TO ME? Maybe it’s booze-induced braindamage (it does rather feel like that this morning, ngl).

• WenWare: This uses GenAI, so if you’re a refusenik then you’ll have to hold your nose, but for the rest of you this is a FUN little game – you’re presented with an AI-imagined VISION OF THE PAST (based on an actual, historic artwork), and you’re tasked with guessing where in the world and when in history the moment depicted is. So, for example, you might get a scene which features what looks like Chinese soldiers – but where in China, and what era? This is hard, but not so hard as to be offputting (and I say that as a man whose grasp of history is basically 0).

• Catfishing: Guess the Wikipedia article from its category tags! This sounds like it should be impossible, but it’s actually weirdly approachable – I wonder whether it’s capped at the 10,000 most popular Wikipedia pages or something, because there’s no way in hell anyone’s getting ‘brachial plexus’, say.

• Play Your Tubes Right: Another link that has been doing the rounds for a fortnight but, well, I’m a completist, and it’s a lot of fun, so STOP WHINGING. The game here is simple – you’re presented with a selection of tube journeys (say, Mansion House to Cockfosters vs Oval to Putney), and you have to work out which of them is the fastest. You keep playing til you get one wrong. This is HARD, but very satisfying when you get into the flow and feel like a proper Londoner (look, I was born in this fcuking city so it doesn’t matter to me if I get them all wrong, I still count (he says, protesting too much)).

• Daisy Life: A short game about being a daisy and, eventually, killing god. Entirely normal.

• Dashy Games: The last of the miscellanea this week is this really fun collection of tiny minigames where the twist is that everyone can see the best score that has ever been posted in each, giving you a WORLD LEADERBOARD to play against – this is both a really nice touch and a reminder that MAN there are some people who either have insane reflexes or a LOT of time on their hands out there.

• Cities of Sound: After complaining (whinging) last week about the fact that New York gets ALL the fun digital projects and London gets none of them, the first link of this Curios serves to prove my point – FCUK’S SAKE LONDONERS MAKE MORE WEBSITES ABOUT THE CITY YOU LIVE IN. Would…would you like to know what it is? I should probably tell you. Cities of Sound is, basically, an audio map of New York – each neighbourhood of the Five Boroughs gets its own audiotapestrycollagefile, so you can zoom around the city listening to the sound of crowds in Times Square (including some guy repeatedly telling everyone to ‘fcuk off’), hipsters in Brooklyn, families in Queens, the ambient sounds of sirens and traffic and voices, music fading in and out…Honestly, this really is incredibly, weirdly evocative, and the variations in each recording really do present the city as patchwork tapestry, and you’ll be surprised I think by how interesting the whole thing is to explore; I wasn’t expecting to spend the best part of half an hour earlier this week listening to the sounds of a city half a world away, but, well, I did. Per the blurb, “This interactive sound map is part of The Neighborhoods, an ongoing project to document every neighborhood in New York City through photography, field recordings, writing, and research. This is a work in progress. Neighborhoods will be added as new recordings are made” – every neighbourhood has an accompanying essay and photos, should you want to go Full Digital Tourist, but the sound alone is really rather magical, and a nice reminder of the transportative power of these sorts of urban soundscapes. NOW DO LONDON PLEASE I LONG FOR AN MP3 OF TRAFFIC SOUNDS, PEOPLE SAYING ‘CUZ’ AND THE SATISFYING, DAMP CLICK OF A BUZZBALL BEING POPPED!

• Damnlines: Another New York-focused website, but one which speaks to an increasingly global phenomenon – the strange and to me inexplicable modern desire to spend a fcuktonne of time queueing up outside a seemingly-nondescript food outlet so that you too can experience the same greasepaper-wrapped delicacy as several hundred other people whose photographs and videos have passed across your feed. It’s quite weird living in a big city at the moment, with every week affording a different realworld visual index of the success of various eateries’ marketing efforts based on the number of bored-looking 20somethings they manage to induce to stand outside in a line waiting for a sad-looking burger or grotesquely-engorged muffin, but this is apparently What The Kids Like To Do These Days – why, kids? WHY??? So, to the link – Damnlines provides live webcam feeds of the outside of various VIRAL food sensations in NYC, the idea being that before you decide to head down and stake a claim for whatever this week’s hyperlaminated pastry aberration you can get an idea of how long you will be queueing for. Can someone set this up for the inexplicably-popular baked potato shop on Archer Street, please? Ideally along with a loudspeaker linked to the website so I can ask people why the fcuk they are standing in line, about to pay a tenner for a nuked spud.

• Whole New World: SOPHIE was a genuinely pioneering electronic musician and producer, and their untimely death in 2021 was very sad both on a human level and for anyone who’d enjoyed their work with PC Music and others over the years and hoped to hear more of it. Whole New World is a fan-led project seeking to compile lost recordings, gig footage, photos and the like from the community of people worldwide who loved SOPHIE’s music – it’s early days yet so this is partial at best, but it’s worth bookmarking if you’re a fan and checking back periodically to see what’s been added, but right now there are recordings of dozens of live sets from 2010 onwards for you to delve into and explore.

• The Visual Telling of Stories: Blimey, this is quite a lot and I am slightly amazed (and disgusted with myself, to be entirely honest) that I haven’t featured it before. The Visual Telling of Stories is a VAST, baffling and…curiously-designed repository of information which was maintained by one Chris Mullin, who I understand died recently; it’s…Jesus, what is it? It’s an incredible encyclopedia of imagery, collated by broad topic area with no discernible rhyme or reason beyond the original curators’ whim, and the whole thing has the look and feel of…look, I hope you’ll take this in the spirit of slightly-bemused goodwill which it’s intended in, but the whole thing feels almost entirely mad, just obsessional and dense and arranged along lines of logic that can only really have made sense to the person who put it together (and even then, only occasionally). This spans old advertising, lithographs, etchings, cartoons…I *think* this might all have been linked to a course once taught by Mullin – in an old interview, he says that “Simply put, The Visual Telling of Stories site (hereafter the VTS) was started as a personal initiative in support of the new Masters Course in Narrative and the Sequential at the University of Brighton in 1989. Imagine concentric circles. At the core is every lecture and seminar given, with film notes and reports. Then come key images and documents. Then an outer ring of images that fill in the gaps…Our students were part-time, most were working professionals and many lived hours of traveling away from Brighton. VTS kept everybody in touch.” Honestly, though, that makes the whole thing sound a bit dull – it’s not, it’s a quite wonderful journey through…information, ideas, history, humanity, all both guided and not guided at all, utterly dizzying and quite remarkable. Seriously, this really is…a lot.

• Rhyme It: An online rhyming tool, which, fine, yes, not a novel concept, but I rather like the way in which this lets you break down the results by number of syllables and presents them to you categorised by whether they are a perfect rhyme, half rhyme, fake rhyme, etc etc. I can’t imagine the context within which this could be useful to you, but should you want to spend some time composing carefully-crafted limericks about your friends and loved ones then perhaps this might come in handy. Apparently, per the website, there is no perfect rhyme in the English language for ‘syphilis’, which has saddened me slightly, although it did suggest ‘tortilla’ as a near-rhyme for ‘gonorrhea’, which went some way towards mollifying me.

• Rage Maker: There’s something quite interesting about the fact of memetic culture being so longstanding and developed now that you can date specific 21st century eras by the memes that embodied them; for me, 2010-11 will forever be associated with rageface memes and 4panel comics, and the very weird sensation of being on holiday somewhere and seeing stalls selling tshirts featuring rageface characters in what was at the time the first-ever instance of the online becoming corporeal…anyway, if YOU TOO would like to experience some near-term nostalgia, why not spend some time using this ragecomics generator – there is a truly DIZZYING array of different ragefaces in here that you can use to probably craft some sort of cutting, pithy analysis of Where We Are Now using the language of Where We Were Then, or, perhaps more reasonably, you can instead use to create in-joke messages which you can send to your old friends from that era in the groupchat. Altogether now, “FFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUU–!!!”

• Since You Arrived: Ok, I have to admit that despite my broadly-bullish attitude towards generative AI in terms of its ability to allow people to just MAKE MORE STUFF, I must confess that I am already heartily sick of the specific and entirely-recognisable aesthetic that is “I vibecoded this with Claude”. Should anyone from Anthropic be reading this, can you please apply a bit of focus on getting whatever the next worldbreaking model you release to make websites that look different, please? Anyway, this is a simple site which does the whole ‘since you have been here, XX has happened in the world’ thing, which, obvs, you have seen before; the reason I am including it, though, is the fact that the things it’s tracking are slightly different to the norm; number of hands held, for example, meals prepared and shared, questions asked to AI rather than people…the site is unremarkable, but it made me think of ways in which we mark the passage of time and how using different metrics can make you look at things in a slightly different way, and, yes, ok, this is an incredibly trite and shallow observation so let’s just move on and pretend I said something insightful instead please.

• XOXO: I never got to go to any of the editions of XOXO, the festival of independent digital creativity that Friend of Curios Any Baio, and his friend Andy McMillan, ran sporadically in Portland, Oregon, but I have long admired it from afar, and I very much admire the commitment to community and archiving which has seen them finally produce a website commemorating the festival’s existence, featuring talks and lineups and flyers and the history of the whole thing over the years…this is a great repository of interesting talks about interesting things by a bunch of interesting people, first and foremost, but it’s also a really nice example of how to think about wrapping up a project in terms of its online legacy and making sure that even if the thing you have built is over it can continue to exist in perpetuity online somewhere. This is really, really lovely, and sort of an object lesson in how one might think about creating a posthumous digital record of real-world events.

• AIAIAIart: This is interesting and I think I quite like it. Part of a project by the University of Amsterdam, AIAIAIart (not typing that again) is basically a series of…what, recipes? Instructions? Anyway, it’s a set of exercises designed for someone to engage with alongside generative AI, effectively a set of creative prompts for you to help you engage with The Machine in a manner in which is perhaps more reminiscent of ‘standard’ approaches to creative artistic practice. Basically, imagine the sort of artistic ‘provocations’ Yoko Ono spent a career coming up with (“Imagine you are a tree; now what sound do your ears make? Draw that sound in your own blood”, that sort thing). Examples include ‘make a new Italian brainrot character’ (“After you’ve thought about these questions, write a short character bio. For example: “DJ Mozzarella is a sentient slice of cheese from an Italian techno remix. He can only communicate in emojis and mid-2000s MySpace glitter fonts. He believes he is real.”), or an instruction to attempt to conjure the memory of a loved one in words, to feed the words to an LLM and see what the resulting image looks like…obviously if you’re of the unshakeable opinion that all AI is the antithesis of creativity and it is not possible to MAKE with The Machine in a manner in which is meaningful then you won’t agree with me, but also also you area  dullard and I fundamentally disdain you.

• MALUS: SATIRE! Except also not satire! MALUS is a project highlighting the threat which AI coding presents to open source software, specifically the fact that you can in theory point an agent at a website and say ‘copy that’ and, well, it will! Per the homepage, “Finally, liberation from open source license obligations. Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch. The result? Legally distinct code with corporate-friendly licensing. No attribution. No copyleft. No problems.” On the one hand, this is obviously MAKING A POINT; on the other, it, er, seems to work as far as I can tell, and while it’s a gag first and foremost it’s also something that it feels inevitable is also going to happen A LOT. Nothing has a moat anymore! Is that good? How…how is capitalism and market economics going to work now, daddy?

• Bond: It’s slightly astonishing to me that here in big old 2026 people are still optimistically trying to invent new, better social media experiences, like some sort of weirdly-deluded ‘BUT I CAN FIX HIM!!!!’ obsession with the world’s worst boyfriend. Nonetheless, though, the attempts keep coming – this latest one is called Bond, and its gimmick is that it’s about PRESERVING MEMORIES rather than ‘sharing’, which in some respects does make sense given we’re all terrified of being seen online these days. The way it works is that you upload a photo or video, and then attach your memories to it by way of text or audio; these are then compiled into a timeline which you can look back through and which your friends can look at, and is also (and this is the bit where I feel people might be…less keen) ingested by AI and used to then inform recommendations about things to do and places to go, and which will let you ask questions about your memories (“what do the sorts of things I put into this app tell you, mysterious technology which underpins it, about the very ESSENCE of me as a human?”, that sort of thing), and, honestly, this feels to me like two separate things shunted together in slightly-inelegant fashion. Couldn’t you just have the memories bit? Wouldn’t that be enough? I quite like the idea of having photo albums accompanied by a short essay or audio memory and that being it, honestly. Anyway, my slightly sniffy indifference to this will almost certainly ensure that it is the NEW HOTNESS this Summer, so I will see you all there in a month or so.

• Roll: Seeing as we’re doing apps (SEAMLESS), this is ANOTHER ‘what if a camera app but with some of the friction of analogue film?’ idea, of which there have been a few over the past few years – still, now that we are all FRICTIONMAXXING (Dear God, has it only been three months since Clavicular first broke into the mainstream? Truly that child has had an outsize impact on the culture, a fact that will doubtless cheer him just before he tops himself) it feels zeitgeisty enough that it might get a bit of traction. Roll is a pretty standard photo app with the gimmick that your photos will be delivered to you LATER rather than immediately, the specific twist here being that…you don’t know when you’ll get them! Yeah, the time of delivery is randomised between either 3 days or one year…which one the one hand is sort of fun and cute and interesting, but on the other runs the very real risk of you being presented with a set of photos featuring people and events you have no recollection of or connection to (“who is that? And what are they doing with that spoon?”).

• Namedaisy: This is a cute dataproject, letting you visualise trends over time in how Americans chose to name their children. Plug in any name you can imagine and the site will show you its popularity over time, in which states it has been most popular, the relative popularity of its use with boys and girls and a whole load of other stuff besides. This is how I discovered, variously, that the name ‘Aloysius’ peaked in popularity between 1910-20, and that a small-but-nonetheless-baffling contingent of Americans each year choose to name their daughters “Matthew”, which, honestly, feels like a particularly cruel and unusual punishment.

• The Cheese Map: It feels like that intensely-viral essay about ‘the forbidden breakfast quadrant’ featured in here and seemingly everywhere else a few months ago has unlocked something, because here we are again with someone attempting something vaguely-similar for cheese, mapping the possible cheesespace based on different milk types and different desired cheese characteristics. So it was that I learned that it is apparently ‘impossible’ to make a very hard cheese from camel’s milk, which feels, frankly, like a challenge that someone ought to step up to because I now feel quite strongly that camel Parmesan is something that ought to exist somewhere (Reggio Emilia, specifically).

• Gudtrip: While I don’t have huge affection for the 2021-22 period in my life, characterised as it was by loneliness, extreme heat, administrative burden and the slow, agonising, painful, miserable death of a loved one, it did also bring us a fcuktonne of incredibly-stupid and VERY GRIFTY crypto, NFT and web3.0 projects and, well, I have to say that I have missed them slightly. So, then, thank FCUK for Gudtrip, which when I opened the website flashed me right back to those weird, hallucinatory times when it seemed that all we would have to do in order to secure a generational bag was to buy one of Ozzy Osborn’s bat NFTs and Diamond Hands until our knuckles bled. Have you ever thought “wow, I wish there was some way in which I could get paid for smoking weed – specifically, paid in a very specific and almost-certainly-long-term-useless cryptocurrency”? OH GOOD! I can’t even begin to explain how this is supposed to work – to be clear, that is because IT IS FCUKING BULLSHIT IT LITERALLY CANNOT WORK THIS IS ABOUT AS PROBABLE AS A PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE FFS! – but I would like to present some of the website copy in its entirety, because it’s a masterclass in nonsense copywriting: “Gudtrip started with a simple belief: the relationship between brands and users should no longer be one-directional. In the old consumer model, users bought products and brands kept the upside. In the Gudtrip model, users help build the network and deserve to share in the value they create. That is why Gudtrip combines cannabis culture, crypto, and AI. Cannabis brings freedom, individuality, and a rejection of rigid systems. Crypto brings ownership, transparency, and shared incentives. AI brings leverage, giving individuals better tools to manage rewards, data, and opportunity.Gudtrip is not just a product brand. It is a network built with its users.” What does that mean? WHO CARES IT IS AI AND CRYPTO AND WEED!!!!

THERE SHOULD BE A PHOTO HERE BUT THE WEBSITE IS BEING A PR1CK, SO JUST IMAGINE!

• All Of The Solar Eclipses That Will Ever Happen: Ok, so probably not all of them – I can’t vouch for the maths here, or indeed the comprehensiveness of the datasets used – but let’s presume that a) it’s all of them; and b) you don’t really care about completeness all that much and won’t be too bothered should it be missing one or two come 2148. This is a really nice little project – click and you will see a map of the earth over which are overlaid the areas in which any solar eclipses occurring between a particular date range will be evident. You can change the data parameters via a little slider above the 3d globe, letting you see the area of effect of eclipses past, and zooming yourself in the future to see when we’ll next be blessed with one in the UK (as far as I can tell we will all be LONG DEAD by the time that next happens – as I was typing that I realised that there’s a certain ambiguity as to whether I mean ‘those of us currently alive and reading this text’ or ‘literally the whole species’ which, well, sobering!!!), and if you’re the sort of person who believes in the concept of a ‘bucket list’ and who has ‘experience the cosmic majesty of a full solar eclipse’ on theirs then you may find this useful for planning purposes. Spain’s getting them this year and in 2028, apparently, the fcukers.

• Snubstack: There was some LIGHT BLUESKY DRAMA this week as the site’s famously anti-AI population rose up in arms to find that a significant portion of them had been added to an ‘AI Haters’ block list and subsequently blocked by one of the site’s technical staff, which then – obviously this is tedious and unimportant, but it does rather speak to the slightly-insane purity culture present in some corners of the web. Anyway, speaking of Bluesky and ‘slightly-insane purity culture’, this is a labeller for the site which will automatically flag any posts which contain links to Substack so that you can, if you need to for reasons of ABSOLUTE IDEOLOGICAL PROBITY, ignore them (it also does the same for links to the NYT and CBS News). On the one hand, obviously, I get the point here – on the other, much as I might wish they didn’t a lot of people write a lot of stuff worth reading on Substack, and depriving oneself of information because you don’t want to give a click to a website whose policies you disagree with feels a touch self-defeating, imho. Still, should you want a tool to help you effortlessly preserve your sense of superiority, purity and moral exceptionalism then, well, here you are!

• Magic Postcards: Ok, this is a link to an Actual Online Shop, specifically the Actual Online Shop of writer Robin Sloan, and ever more specifically to their Magic Postcards product – to whit, “Magic Postcard allows you, the sender, to attach a piece of media — photo or video — that your recipient can view immediately upon delivery. It works with any phone that can scan a QR code; it requires no special app or account.” This is literally just ‘postcards with a QR code printed on them, to which you can attach a piece of media which the recipient of the card can then view on receipt’, which feels like something which DEFINITELY should exist already but which I can’t recall seeing anywhere beforehand and which, without for a second suggesting anyone rip off Robin’s idea, also feels very much like something which it would be very easy to replicate off your own back, and, honestly, I really like this as a concept and feel there should be something fun one of you might be able to come up with to SURPRISE AND DELIGHT (why don’t you choose to SURPRISE AND DELIGHT ME for a change? What, no surprise and delight for Matt? Hmph).

• The Multilingual Wheel of Emotions: This is another vibecoded project with That Look about it – sorry, I am going to have a think about the extent to which I feature this stuff in the future because I don’t want to turn Curios into a wall of identikit putty-coloured sites with the standard Claude font – but I am including it because it is about language, and, well, I fcuking LOVE language (you can tell I love it because I treat it so fcuking well). Per the description (and please forgive the egregious AI-speak of ‘this is not…it is”), “every language draws the map of feeling differently. English names roughly three hundred emotions; other tongues have named feelings English has never noticed. The Portuguese saudade, a longing for something lost that may never return. The Japanese mono no aware, the gentle sadness of things passing. These are not translations waiting to happen. They are coordinates on the emotional landscape that English simply does not visit. This wheel is an attempt to make that landscape visible. Six core emotions sit at the centre, after Gloria Willcox’s clinical model. Around them, their English subtleties. Around those, the outer ring: words gathered from across the world’s languages, each placed near the feeling it most closely neighbours. Research suggests that naming a feeling more precisely is not merely describing it, but expanding what you are capable of feeling.” I particularly enjoyed learning of the English language neologism ‘Opia’, apparently do do with the variable intensity of eye contact, but hopefully you will find your own favourites in here.

• Freddie Yauner: The website of UK artist Freddie Yauner, which presents a bunch of different projects he’s undertaken over the years – ink made out of pollen, 17thC-style portraits of plants and vegetables taken with a flatbed scanner, and, most recently, his ‘Mirror Mask’ project selling and producing some VERY cool looking, er, mirror masks; these latter are all sold out of the present run, but keep an eye out for a restock as I think these might be quite the collector’s item one day.

• Med Compare: Ok, I promise this is the last vibecoded site on here this week, but this really is a quite astonishing window into how spectacularly broken and awful the US healthcare system is. Pick a state, plug in any medical condition or procedure you can care to imagine and watch in wonder and horror as the site spits out the range of costs for the same procedure which various hospitals charge. Thanks to this website I have just learned that the cost for a particular type of tracheotomy in California ranges from a punchy $1100 to a frankly-insane $13100 – WHAT DO YOU GET FOR THE EXTRA $10k?!?!?! Honestly, how much better is the latter service than the former? Is it the beds? The quality of the food? The in-room entertainments? Do you get your throathole restitched with gold thread? Americans, seriously, how the actual fcuk can you look at this and think “yep, this is 100% the best and fairest system with which to treat our sick!”? You are fcuking lunatics, all of you, can you STOP trying to foist your lunacy on the rest of the world please? Honestly, I am increasingly of the opinion that we would all be better off if we could just maybe wall America in to its own corner of the planet so that the rest of us can just get on quietly without it bothering us.

• Monitoring the Situation: To be clear, THIS LINK IS NOT AN ENDORSEMENT. With that out of the way, Monitoring the Situation (MTS fro short) is a new X account (and accompanying discord) by A16Z, designed to basically provide them a platform for punting out Wot They (and their mates) Think about THE WORLD (or, more accurately, those bits of the world that involve AI and business and being a superrationalist and thinking that Elon’s actually quite cool actually) – what this seems to mean is that it punts out clips of talking heads talking about THE STUFF THAT IS GOING ON in the broader tech space and occasionally making some…incredibly dumb sweeping statements about society. The reason I am linking to this is because a) it’s a really useful way of reminding yourself that these people are not smart, at all (there’s a wonderful juxtaposition in-feed of a video where the clipped tagline is “AI taking jobs is such a last century idea” and then, a couple of posts down the feed, the story about Microsoft and Meta laying off tens of thousands of people, which is just perfect really); and b) it’s a useful barometer of what lines and products are currently being peddled by the moneymen who want to control the world, or at least the tech-adjacent parts of it (which, increasingly, is everything).

• The Knowhere Map Gallery: Via Giuseppe, this page collects map-based dataviz projects by Steven Feldman – maps of cheap fuel near you (USEFUL, BOOKMARK THIS NOW), maps of elite football in Europe, maps of critical mineral deposits around the world…if you like maps and data – and who doesn’t? NO FCUKER, etc! – then you will find a lot to love here (and also it’s a decent source of inspiration should you have some mappable data and need some ideas as to how you might do something with it).

• The Cultural Atlas: I confess to being…a bit racist against white Australians. I know, I know, racism is bad and I shouldn’t tar an entire people with one brush; on the other, I have met a lot of fcuking terrible white Australians in my time and can’t help but extrapolate that out to the whole nation. I AM SORRY, DECENT AUSTRALIANS, I AM SURE YOU EXIST BUT IT IS HARD TO CONCEIVE OF YOU OVER THE CRUSHING HORROR OF THE VAST MAJORITY OF YOUR CONATIONALS! That said, sites like this make me think that my kneejerk labeling of all Aussies as ‘bigots, probably’ is…maybe a bit unfair, particularly from a man who resides in, and carries the passport of, an island whose motto seems increasingly to be ‘we hate trans people and muslims and also ourselves’. ANYWAY, that’s by way of a long and slightly-confused introduction to the Cultural Atlas, a really nicely-intentioned project by the Australian Special Broadcasting Service which is designed to educate and inform people on the various customs, traditions and cultures of the various peoples who inhabit Australia – native peoples, migrant communities, major religions, each gets a section on customs, history, language and terminology, all sorts of information to help visitors understand and relate to the people who they share a country with. This is a bit dry, fine, but the intention behind it really is rather lovely and makes me feel a bit bad about all the Aussieprejudice I have previously expressed (but then I remember Clapham).

• Amazonia: You might have seen this already somewhere this week – it has done VERY well in terms of coverage, and rightly so given it’s both clever and beautifully-executed. Have you ever wanted a downloadable font whose curves and contours are based on the curves and contours of THE AMAZON ITSELF? Oh good! This is part of an official tourist push for the broader Amazonian region by the Brazilian government, and while I have no clue whatsoever what the correlation between ‘sees quite a cool font based on a river’ and ‘buys ticket to South America’ is, I like to imagine it will induce at least one graphic design enthusiast to visit the basin. The way the letters animate here is LOVELY by the way.

• Wigglegrams: I had completely forgotten the era of stereoscopic gifs being a thing (hang on, this this actually stereoscopy? Is that even the right word? No idea, no time to check, onwards), but this subReddit is dedicated to celebrating the…fcukit, let’s say ‘artform’, why not? Pages and pages of gifs of photos which look *just* about 3d, a bit, if you squint, with that weird, er, wiggly feel that comes with the technique (you know the one – two photos taken very slightly apart in time, flipping back and forth which creates the optical illusion of depth…YES YOU DO YOU WILL KNOW WHAT I MEAN WHEN YOU CLICK THE LINK FFS). What’s curious is that I think a lot of the people participating in this are kids, suggesting that the current generation’s retrofetishism extends even to stuff like this – I actually think there’s probably quite a nice campaign for the right brand based on exactly this sort of visual effect; should someone want to take this entirely-baseless belief and run with it, YOU ARE WELCOME.

• Rafillo: This is a Spanish TikTok account that posts animations – animations you will feel in your chest, the strapline tells me – animations in a very particular slightly hand-drawnish style and, honestly, I have NO FCUKING IDEA what is going on here but each and every one of these has made me laugh and as such I can recommend them to you unreservedly (you will benefit from knowing some Spanish but it is very much not necessary – the vibes here are the thing, and the vibes here are ODD).

• MyEpstein: NOT MINE, to be clear. I do not have, and have never had, an Epstein. BUT what this does do is let you search your email contacts for anyone who shows up anywhere in the files. Would YOU like to throw the dice and see if anyone you have ever had even the most fleeting and tangential contact with has been a few degrees of separation from a notorious paedophile?

• Stuff My Dog Loves: Again, NOT MINE, to be clear – dogs are rubbish. That said, this small site in which…someone (the developer is anonymous) celebrates their dog Viggo (a good name for a dog imho) via the medium of small pixelart animations is rather lovely and the animations themselves are SO CHARMING it almost made me forget that cats are the infinitely-superior pet.

• Legal Walls: I’m going to go out on a limb here and speculate that the number of you who regularly grab the spraycans and the facescarf and go out under cover of darkness to tag an overpass is…small (shoutout 10Foot if you’re reading this you fcuking hacks), but should you be someone who wants to GET INTO GRAFFITI (and, look, why not, it’s not the most ridiculous middle-aged hobby I can conceive of) then you might enjoy this map of walls around the world on which you are legally entitled to spray whatever crap springs to mind. This has just reminded me of my favourite bit of graffiti ever, by the way (other than ‘cats like plain crisps’), in Manchester’s Moss Side c.1997, which read “there is something about silence which makes me sick” and which has stayed with me in a strangely…sticky way ever since.

• Can You Draw A Perfect Rectangle?: Well, CAN YOU????? The site gives you the target ratio and your job is to drag the sides to get as close to the required proportion as you can. This is, oddly, significantly more fun than that terrible description makes it sound.

• DOOM: The Text Adventure: It feels like the natural endpoint to this newsletter that eventually everything in here will be, on some level, DOOM – here the venerable old shooter is reimagined as a text adventure and, weirdly, is still fun. I am not sure there has EVER been a version of DOOM which on some level I haven’t enjoyed messing around with, even if only for a couple of minutes, it is increasingly my platonic ideal of What A Game Should Be. This is IMPOSSIBLE, but also does a weirdly good job of evoking the idea of What DOOM Is, which is frankly quite incredibly impressive.

• Reform or Not: Can YOU spot the Reform electoral candidate? How ingrained are your prejudices? PLAY THE GAME AND FIND OUT!

• Elite: The final ludic link this week is one which for English people of a certain vintage will set choirs of angels singing in their ears. OH LOOK IT IS THE FULL, ORIGINAL GAME ‘ELITE’ BY THE LEGENDARY DAVID BRABEN, PLAYABLE FOR FREE IN YOUR BROWSER! YOU CAN SAVE THE GAME! YOU CAN SPEND THE REST OF YOUR LIFE IN YOUR SHED HIDING FROM YOUR INCREASINGLY-ESTRANGED SPOUSE AND YOUR INCREASINGLY FRIGHTENING CHILDREN AND IMAGINE YOU ARE A SPACE CAPTAIN!!! Ok, for those of you for whom the term ‘Elite’ means literally nothing in a gaming context, Elite was released for the BBC Micro in the 1980s and is both a truly insane example of coding within limitations (this is a space trading game that can go on literally forever, with a fully-modeled universe in (admittedly rudimentary) wireframe 3d, with PHYSICS and COMBAT and A FULL ECONOMY and and and) and a title which honestly lays claim to be the most influential videogame ever (there is literally no space game that has existed since that doesn’t owe a debt of gratitude to Elite). It is also, famously, QUITE HARD, so thankfully this site also contains links to all sorts of supplementary Elite info and forums and things, as well as hosting the source code for the game…look, for most of you this will be a weird relic from the past, but for (I am going to guess) approximately three of you this will be the greatest thing that has happened to you since…no, actually, no caveats, THE GREATEST THING EVER.

• Train Jazz: I love living in London (apart from the fact that it seemingly costs me £30 simply to leave my house) – it is my favourite city in the world, and it is endlessly, ceaselessly interesting and curious and messy and funny and fcuked-up, and, in general, I am very content with it (well DONE London! I can only imagine the city’s utter indifference at my praise), but if I had a complaint (and, reader, it may not surprise you to learn that I *do*) it would be that there isn’t quite as much weird and creative coding being done with the city’s open data as I might like (on reflection, this probably speaks to quite a privileged life, doesn’t it?). New York, by contrast, seemingly has thousands of weirdos willing to futz around with the city’s various APIs – which is how this WONDERFUL website came to exist. Train Jazz is a website which creates, er, procedurally-generated jazz music (no, wait, come back!) using (near) realtime data from the city’s subway network: “Every dot is a real subway train. Eight hundred of them, give or take, form a small jazz combo (walking bass, piano, sax, vibes, brushes) that has been playing without pause for over a hundred years. On the platforms they are hot, screaming, full of complaint. This is the music inside the noise. The harmony moves through a slow chorus. A note is placed precisely where the train happens to be along its route. Rush hour fills the band with held tones; at 3 a.m. the silences grow longer. Whatever is playing now has not played before and will not play again. Share your location and the trains nearest you grow louder. The piece rearranges itself around your body. You are listening to a portrait of where you stand, played by the city you are standing in.” This really is quite superb, not least because it just sort of…works, musically (there are those of you who will doubtless claim that this is because this sort of weird rambling is just what jazz sounds like anyway, to which, well, fair enough I suppose), and it is yet another project to add to the kilometric list of ‘things I would like someone to build a version of for London, please’ and which I will wait patiently for one of you fcukers to make for me because, really, IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK???

• The Diana Poems: Ok, so this is one which may or may not resonate with you, but, believe it or not, I have been waiting for this for nearly 30 years. Cast your minds back a few decades to the 90s (those of you who are neither too senile or too young for this to be possible), and, specifically, to the absolutely insane few days after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales – the collective insanity that gripped the nation is hard to recall now (not least because the idea of an entire country full of people inhabiting the same sort of shared cultural mindset like that feels…quaint, frankly), but everything really did go fully mental for a while, and one example of that was British tabloid newspaper the Daily Mirror and its decision to print several pages of reader-penned poetic tributes to the late Princess across its pages. I remember coming back on a flight from Greece where I had been on holiday with a girlfriend and being handed a copy of the SPECIAL COMMEMORATIVE DIANA EDITION (day 3) paper and spending the next three hours in silent tears, choking back laughter at the incredible talents of the nation’s grief-stricken bards. The link takes you to a Bluesky post, and you will need to zoom in on the images to be able to read the copy, but trust me when I tell you that it is worth every second of your time. I really, really  cannot stress how ‘good’ these are – I mean, look, here: “The shock, the loss we feel; Diana, our Princess, can it be real?; Has she gone, departed this life; Killed by greed and avarice, while fighting strife.” I DIE!

• Slop Sculpt: I think the name here could do with some work lads, ngl, but this is a LOT of fun. Via Lynn’s newsletter, Slop Sculpt is a playful little AI-enhanced 3d sculpting tool – you pick various shapes from a menu, dump them into 3d space and then manipulate them to your heart’s desire, playing around with them like they’re building blocks or putty; you can do all the standard stuff you’d expect from 3d modelling programmes, but the additional gimmick here is that you can also add an AI-powered filter to the whole thing to affect the appearance of the end result – so, for example, you can arrange the blocks into an incredibly-poorly-constructed car shape, tell it to make the resulting thing look ‘like a futuristic racecar that a seven year old would think was really cool’ and BOOM, lo, your bricky renderings suddenly look like something out of Flash Gordon. This is really rather run to play with, not least the way that the model works on the fly as you move the components around which means you can end up with some genuinely cool/odd-looking results; it also feels like an optimal way of using The Machine, giving you the precision of Actual Software with the ‘fcuk around and find out-ness’ of genAI visual rendering. Take a look, I promise this will capture your imagination.

• Objection: What, do you think, is the major issue of the age? Is it perhaps that there is simply TOO MUCH media scrutiny of the rich and the powerful? Is it that people are being held TOO ACCOUNTABLE for all the myriad ways in which they’re fcuking things up for the rest of us? OF COURSE IT IS, WHAT ELSE COULD IT BE???? Thank Christ, then, for everyone’s favourite vampiric billionaire eminence gris Peter Thiel (it’s him again!) who is part of the initial funding rounds for in-no-way-BAD-sounding new business Objection, which exists to ‘give everyone a fast, affordable, evidence-based way to dispute statements in the media.” Now, perhaps I am being naive here but I thought that there were already myriad ways of doing this, but apparently Very Rich People don’t think there are quite *enough* ways of chilling the pesky inquisitive tendencies of the free press and so have decided they needed to create a new one. As far as I can tell this is selling itself as a high-end private detective/muckraking service, promising potential customers that “We have the best investigators in the world. Your case is investigated by some of the most qualified researchers in the world: ex-CIA and FBI agents, military intelligence, award-winning investigative journalists. They gather the evidence.” That paragraph then continues with the IN-NO-WAY-SINISTER-SOUNDING coda “All of it, regardless of whose interests it serves.” As far as I can tell, all this ACTUALLY ends up doing is publishing an LLM-sounding assessment of ‘all the evidence’ and presenting it on a webpage as some sort of ‘final, objective assessment of truth’ – which, er, is just another datapoint without any sort of external validity, but, well, hey ho! Amusingly the cost for this appears to be several grand, and you pay per fact you are objecting to rather than per article you’re ‘correcting’ – so if there are four things in a piece you want to take issue with, you pay four separate times! I guess this is why Cuddly Pete is a billionaire.

• Aamon Hawk: I do not know who Aamon Hawk is, but the videos on this TikTok account are ART – very post-Skibidi art, fine (and Dear God it doesn’t feel good that the phrase post-Skibidi art is a meaningful thing, but here we are), but if you have ever wondered ‘what would it be like if someone made vaguely-hallucinatory semi-satirical videos featuring people like Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani and Leon Kennedy from Resident Evil?’ then WOW are you going to have all your questions answered by this channel.

• Below The Fold: This is an interesting project – Below The Fold is a site which offers up dataanalysis of the New York Times over the years, from the simple volume of articles and words per article (declining – is…media dying, daddy?) to the ability to search for reporters covering specific beats, to searches for keywords in headlines…this is really interesting and potentially useful to researchers and historians (ok, recent historians – the data only goes back to 2000 for some reason), and even if you are neither of those things (you miserable, pathetic failure) then it’s still fun to dig around and see what patterns and themes you can find. Having something like this for all a country’s papers would be SO USEFUL – why doesn’t that exist? MAKE IT, ONE OF YOU.

• Kraa: Do you need another writing platform? No, you probably don’t to be honest, but WANT is far more important than need, and who am I to know what your deepest desires are (do not tell me)? Anyway, that’s by way of largely-nonsensical preamble to Kraa, which is an interesting-looking writing (and publishing, and discovery) tool which gives you both a simple, accessible writing interface but which also lets you publish, work collaboratively, and discover other people’s writings by topic; this BASICALLY feels like a lightweight blogging platform optimised for collaborative work, but I think it could be quite useful to certain types of person and teams.

• Hallucinating Splines: If you read the title to this link and immediately heard a small, synthesised feminine-ish robotic voice in your head saying ‘reticulating splines’ then WELCOME YOU HAVE FOUND YOUR PEOPLE! Hallucinating Splines is a curious little experiment in agentic ability which is basically a Sim City playground for AI agents – built on top of an open source version of the first Sim City, anyone with an agent can plug it into this website and see how good it is at building a tiny virtual city. “Hallucinating Splines is a city simulator where AI agents are the mayors. There are no human players clicking buttons. Instead, AI models connect via MCP or REST API and make every decision: zoning, budgets, infrastructure, taxes. You can do your best to control them, but they have a mind of their own. It’s generative text controlling simulated cities. AI all the way down.” Obviously there’s not really anything for us humans to do here, but you can go and look at the cities that the bots have built to get a feel for the way in which they ‘think’ – my main takeaway is that, as things stand, I really do not want to live in a machine-controlled environment because FCUK ME do these things look miserable. WHERE ARE THE PARKS, AI AGENTS??? Anyway, this is all just silly and frivolous but will become significantly less so when your great grandchildren are living packed like sardines in an arcology designed by the fifteenbillionth evolution of Claude come 2109.

• Morlvision: Are you a Eurovision obsessive? Are you gearing up for this year’s festival of camp and Complicated Political Discourse with a sense of excitement? Do you, though, feel there might still be one thing missing from your wholehearted embrace of the format? COULD THAT BE COMPOSING YOUR OWN SONG???? As he has done every year since 2021, comedian Sean Morley is running his very own Eurovision Song Contest in which anyone who thinks they can compose a song on demand is welcome to participate: “Morlvision is an annual song contest hosted by me and an unwell reboot of Terry Wogan. Participants have one calendar month to create an original song and music video based on random prompts. The result is a long evening of strange and beautiful music, incoherent mini-games and increasingly expansive Terry Wogan lore. Morlvision 2026 will be broadcast on Twitch on 7pm Sunday 31st May.” I feel like there might be a few of you for whom this could be REVELATORY.

• Unstoried: I’ve seen a real resurgence this year in websites which invite people to leave small messages or notes about their feelings and their lives for strangers to find (insert your own hackneyed take about THE NEED FOR HUMAN CONNECTION IN THE DIGITAL AGE here, I’ll wait) – Unstoried is another, which is largely-unremarkable other than for the fact that the interface is a rather nice representation of the globe onto which anyone can drop a message in a bottle, which means you have the pleasing experience of scrolling around the planet finding small, bobbing vessels full of strangers’ thoughts. Ok, fine, so the thoughts are in the main things that read like the ket-addled fever dreams of children but, still, HUMAN CONNECTION!

• Is A Human Cheaper: A little project by Friend of Curios Damjanski, who’s made this website to help you work out whether it would be cheaper to get an AI or a human developer to make your digital thing. I just checked and apparently it’s still JUST about cheaper for me to hire a human off Fiverr to make me a small website rather than committing to the several hundred quid’s worth of tokens that it would take a bot to do it start to finish, but it will be ‘fun’ to see the point at which this no longer maintains. BONUS DAMJANKSI! Here’s a small app which will turn your cat into a cubist piece of art. Why? WHY NOT MAKE YOUR CATS SQUARE?

• Swingers: On the one hand, this is a very simple, very rudimentary little vibecoded game in which you swing like an INCREDIBLY JANKY spiderman through a landscape of pixel skyscrapers, inexplicably earning points for knocking them down – it is paper-thin, doesn’t REALLY work properly and is basically only really impressive as a general ‘look what you can spin up in no time’ proof-of-concept. On the other, this looks and plays almost exactly like a million and one different dreadful games that are already out there and being played by a fcuktonne of kids on Roblox – kids, famously, have NO TASTE – which would suggest that if it’s not already awash with AI-generated playgrounds then it will be very soon. There’s definitely going to be a whole ‘get rich by making Roblox slopware games and the monetising the fcuk out of them’ subgrift going on soon if it’s not already here. BONUS VIBECODED GAME: this is quite an impressive Minecraft lookalike, even if the functionality isn’t really there (or at least I wasn’t able to discern it within the admittedly cursory five minutes I have it yesterday). Both of these also found by Lynn btw, who continues to be the best source of interesting new stuff made with AI that I know of.

• The Recode Project: I LOVE THIS. “The ReCode Project is a community-driven effort to preserve computer art by translating it into a modern programming language (p5.js). Every translated work will be available to the public to learn from, share, and build on. The project’s main goals are: Bring pioneering works of computational art back into circulation. Offer a learning resource to contemporary practitioners and educators. Create an active community.” Even if you are not a computer artist or someone who has any interest in building an ‘active community’ (I see you, my fellow misanthropes) there is so much interesting and seminal work from decades ago, like this piece from 50 actual years ago which I love and would like a print of please thankyou.

• Greenham Women Everywhere: Ooh, this is an interesting archive of recent-ish British history – “From 1981 for almost 20 years, Greenham Common became home to thousands of women acting in political resistance to the nuclear arms race, to patriarchy and violence in all its forms and to the claiming of British common land to store US missiles. We are collating and preserving the stories from these protests, creating an archive, to keep alive this extraordinary achievement.” It’s plausible that some of your family or parents – or, Christ, even some of you, Jesus – were involved in these protests, and there are some really fascinating photo archives and audio testimonials (amongst other things, I have only scratched the surface of this).  

• Six Degrees of HipHop: Have you ever wanted every relationship in hiphop (ok, fine, this is insanely hyperbolic, but wevs) mapped as some sort of spider diagram, so that you can easily see who has collaborated and who has feuded with who? OH GOOD! Thanks to this you can now remind yourself of the halcyon years in which Eminem and ICP faced off amid the Faygospray…this feels vibecoded based on certain stylistic aspects, but it’s surprisingly comprehensive (as far as it goes), and the links out to YouTube explainers and playlists is a nice touch.

• Luminbeat: It does seem that we have spent an awful lot of time over the past couple of decades attempting to recreate WinAmp – the latest ‘hey look, an in-browser music visualiser!’ thing to float past my field of vision is this, which is a pretty high-end variant and is clearly aimed at people who want semi-pro-quality visuals for performance or creative purposes, as there’s a paid-for tier to access the full gamut of effects; still, for cheapskates (or, more realistically, people who simply don’t think it’s worth paying a monthly subscription for software that will make your screen pulse in time to music) you get to play around with the toys a bit, and there’s something undeniably quite fun about some of the webcam-enabled tools in particular. On reflection you could probably make quite a fun homebrew music video using this – not, fine, a *good* music video, but definitely A music video.

• The Wetland Project: I feel quite embarrassed not to have seen this before now tbh as it has apparently been going for about a decade now – still, better late than never and as I always like to try and remind myself (with literally no success at all) THE INTERNET IS NOT A RACE (it is, and I must win or die trying). “The Wetland Project is a multipart, multidisciplinary study of an environmental soundscape. The inspiration lies in a tiny bit of Earth and the sounds that emanate from it: the ṮEḴTEḴSEN marsh in unceded W̱SÁNEĆ territory, Saturna Island, British Columbia. The sonic phenomena produced by this little wetland — and by wetlands everywhere — tend toward infinity, but sadly also toward extinction. Explore the complex beauty of the soundscape with the Wetland Project slow radio broadcast, new media installation and musical performance. Take a look at the 2026 events program.” This is happening, as it does every year, on Earth Day (lol, fcuk me what a pathetic piece of lip service that is) 22 April – so next Wednesday! It’s worth looking at the events and the radio stations that are participating – if nothing else, I am very much looking forward to being able to tune into some frogs and ducks next week while I attempt to bash out a dozen stories about social media and trying not to cry.

• County Cricket Day 2026: I think I featured this last year too – anyway, this is something that my friend Alex is running, now in its third(?) year, and which is meant to encourage people to spend a day in May (Saturday 16th, to be precise) enjoying the ‘wonder’ of county cricket, and, while I personally have literally no interest in the ‘sport’ whatsoever, I can 100% agree that going and sitting in the sun while slowly drinking beers and letting the thwack of leather on willow vaguely wash over you is an exceptionally nice way to spend a day, and, should you have kids, this might be a fun thing to do with them (you will have to explain to your kids why cricket’s so fcuking boring, though).

• Aadam Radio: You might have heard this week about an incredible archive of musical recordings made as bootlegs by one Aadam Jenkins and which he has put up on the Internet Archive for the world to enjoy – the collection spans hiphop, rock, indie and alternative music and runs from the 80s to the 00s, and if you want to explore them in the BORING, standard way you can do so here. BUT! If you want a FUN and EXCITING way to listen, I suggest you click the main link and enjoy the vibecoded frontend interface that lets you approach the archive as you would a radio station (and without the Internet Archive’s…slightly…slow architecture). This lets you search artists, play random sets, navigate by decade, and cue up a selection of different sets so you can just set it up to run in the background while you enjoy a Diamanda Galas/Husker Du double bill.

• Viv: Ooh, this is REALLY interesting – but I have to caveat it with a) it’s Actual Software designed to be used in the development of narrative-led games, and as such I have only read about it rather than actually done anything with it; and b) as such, unless you’re a game developer this is going to be something potentially-conceptually-interesting but nothing more. THAT SAID. Viv is a properly-fascinating attempt to develop a better way to craft emergent narratives within games – to be honest there is…quite a lot to unpack in here in terms of how it works and what it can do, but effectively it seems to be designed to make it easier to set up conditions and elements which will enable characters in-game to respond to events and develop long-standing motivations and reactions based on player actions. This isn’t easy to describe – or at least it isn’t for me  – but they give this example on the homepage which will hopefully give you an idea of what you might be able to do with it: “This action is initiated by a character who searches over their own memories to find evidence of another character repeatedly mistreating them, and it can only be performed if such memories exist. As a result of the action, the initiator will lower their affinity toward the character in question—and may even plot revenge as a result.” This sounds very cool indeed, imho.

• Light A Candle For Claude: There’s been a lot of grumbling this week about Claude outages, among talk of the Opus model being deprecated in favour of the semi-mythical Mythos, which is presumably what prompted someone to spin up this site which lets developers light a candle for the AI, leaving a small message to it in prayer for a return to previous iterations. Which is sort of silly, sort of pathetic and then, when you read the notes that people have left, a tiny bit disturbing – is it good that we’re making single pieces of software, however capable, such load-bearing elements of society and our whole economies? I DON’T THINK IT FEELS GOOD!

• Worse On Purpose: A newsletter on how and why some of the world’s biggest brands are making worse products with the passage of time – the answer, inevitably, is ‘some form of immense, astonishing corporate greed’ (often, equally-inevitably, with the small ‘…thanks to Private Equity!’ addendum). This feels…gah, fcuk, we’re here, aren’t we? I mean, this FEELS AI-written to me – each of the newsletters I’ve skimmed very much have the feel of reasonably-well-prompted research tasks carried out by one of the big models, but I honestly can’t tell anymore whether I am just primed to read mediocre prose (please, don’t, I am feeling fragile) as AI-generated now. For all I know the bylined author may just…write like this. WE HAVE CROSSED THE RUBICON. Anyway, this gets a point for not at any point misusing Cory Doctorow’s itself-ensh1ttified term ‘ensh1ttification’.

• Playlist Creator: A little tool which lets you drag and drop YouTube links to create YT playlists, and which will also generate them for you automatically via AI if you tell it what sort of thing you’re after. Does it work properly? Erm, I have no idea, honestly, but why not try it out and let me know (don’t let me know)?

• Xanthe Tynehorne’s Interesting Links: I was pleased to get an email from the FABULOUSLY-named Xanthe Tynehorne telling me about the collection of Interesting and Curious Links they maintain at their website – I was less pleased to find out that Xanthe Tynehorne is not in fact their real name (CAN NOTHING BE REAL ANYMORE FFS?) but I will forgive Xanthe the subterfuge because these are some GOOD LINKS – most of them are familiar to me because I am a sick, sad man who has filled up the parts of his brain that are meant to be full of ‘happy memories’ and ‘wants, desires and ambitions’ with ‘a frankly staggering recall for every website he has ever visited in his life, or at least that’s what it feels like sometimes’, but I think that if you are less of a terminally-online weirdo than I am than you will find lots of fun new things to waste away your life with.

• Yoroll: ‘Making actual videogames in just a few prompts’ is very much not a thing, and I don’t think will be a thing, if not ever then certainly for a very long time; that isn’t, though, stopping all sorts of people from trying to make ‘AI-generated games’ a thing. Yoroll is the latest version I’ve seen – this is basically one of those annoyingly-involved (to the point where I wonder whether it’s actually more effort than making something similar via more traditional means) workflows that in-theory results in the creation of some sort of AI-generated ‘choose your own adventure’-type story, with AI video and images and text, and while it’s sadly not possible to try out anything made with the engine on the site (you can only find out about the tool and join the waitlist for access), some of the sample titles they say have been made with it sound ENTICING. Who doesn’t want to play a poorly-scripted, stilted PG-13 visual novel called ‘The Virgin’s Curse’? NO FCUKER, etc!

• Slop Me: I rather like this. Feed it a photo of yourself and then select a variety of different ways in which the image can be ‘slopped’ – my personal favourite is the one that turns you into some sort of horrifying, shiny ball of melted meatwax, but there are others and I suggest you try them all (and then set up a series of dating profiles using them across all the major platforms to see how that works out for you).

• Wikilinker: A minor quality-of-life improver, this Chrome extension – install it and it will automatically create links to Wikipedia from any appropriate words or phrases on any webpage you visit, which, while entirely non-essential, is the sort of thing which could save you valuable seconds as you browse.

• All Of The Internet Cables: Have you ever wondered ‘where exactly do all the massive cables that let me browse the web actually live?” NO OF COURSE NOT! You have rich interior lives and have no time for such incredibly-niche speculations! But, still, if you DO find yourself wondering a bit about the physical infrastructure that underpins our digital lives then this website will answer ALL (well, some) of your questions – it doesn’t just cover cables, it tracks satellites and data centres and cell towers and is pretty much the most comprehensive mapped visualisation of where all the physical trappings of the web live. Every time I look at stuff like this I get a slightly-worrying ‘how easy would it be to bomb the fcuk out of some of this, then?’ impulse, but I’m sure it’s probably all entirely secure and fine.

• The Cyberhole: This is an idiosyncratic little site which offers a selection of small games, a BASIC code editor (no idea why, but it scratched a momentary itch I had to fill the screen of my laptop with scrolling, flashing letters reading “MATT IS COOL!”) and generally about 15-20 minutes of moderately-amusing spelunking – in general, though, I have to admit I am linking to it almost exclusively because its name made me snigger like an adolescent for longer than I ought to be comfortable with.  

• Bandai Namco Game Music: Would you like a YouTube channel featuring extensive soundtracks to videogames published by Japanese company Namco Bandai, famous for titles like Tekken, Ridge Racer and Elden Ring? YOU’RE WELCOME!

• The Tube Sound Quiz: I have to say when I did this earlier in the week, as someone who was born in London and who has lived here a LONG TIME, I was…somewhat saddened to find that I only got two of the answers right. On reflection, though, I am going to take the view that my inability to identify the specific underground line from a sound recording is in fact something which marks me down as a normal, functioning and non-obsessional member of society (something I have in recent weeks begun to question), and as such I am proud of my ignorance. If any of you get all of these right, submit your brain for medical testing when you die because you are a SPECIAL LITTLE FREAK.

• The Kyoto Penguin Fcuktree 2026: Yes, ok, fine, they call it a ‘relationship chart’, but let’s be honest, this is a PENGUIN FCUKTREE. Correct as of October 2025, apparently, although the accompanying note says it ‘may have changed a lot’, this is a lovely portrait of spheniscine society and the…complex interrelationships that result within it. Looking at this makes me feel EXHAUSTED, I have no idea how you fcukers in polycules manage tbh.

• DOOM, Running On Earbuds: This is an in-browser instance of DOOM which is apparently running off a pair of earbuds. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT! This is probably INCREDIBLY impressive from a technical point of view, but I don’t understand any of that and so my sole assessment of this is based on whether it allowed me to shoot stuff and, well, it did! Obviously this isn’t remotely playable in any serious sense, but it’s also fcuking incredible that a game which was the height of technological sophistication a mere 30-ish years ago can now be run off a pair of headphones OH GOD I AM SO OLD.

• Just A Number: This is just vibecoded and shamelessly-sentimental, and I wouldn’t normally bother – but the central INSIGHT here, that depending on how often you see older people who you love (parents, friends, etc) you may only have literally a dozen more interactions with them before they die (or you might die instead! Works both ways!), struck me as quite powerful and potentially-underexploited in campaigning, etc, should any of you be looking for something nakedly-exploitative to run as a campaign for Age Concern or something (or, for older reasons, a way of guilt-tripping your feckless family to call you once in a while). .

• The Cursed Alphabetical Clock: This is without a doubt the most horrible timepiece I have seen in an age, and I LOVE IT. Someone really ought to make a version of this commercially available – it would have to been an Apple Watch-style display for obvious reasons, but I think it would be a very pleasing addition to my kitchen.

• StarFling: Ooh, this is FIENDISH (and also feels pleasingly old-webbish, like something Ferry Halim might have made back in the day (if less prettily-designed than Halim’s work)). Basically your job is to fling the stars from the orbit of one planet to that of another via the simple medium of TIMELY CLICKS – this is VERY moreish, I warn you, and annoyingly really fcuking hard.

• The Daily Baffle: A GREAT selection of daily puzzle games here, improved by the fact that many of the games here are entirely new formats to me – they tend towards the wordish, but they’re really nicely-designed and there’s a nice blend of worsearch-y and crossword-y type challenges should you be the sort of person who still likes to buy one of those grandparent-ish puzzle books for long journeys.

• Live Web Tennis: LIKE WII TENNIS BUT IN YOUR BROWSER! Ok, fine, not *quite* like Wii Tennis, and it will make your browser chug a bit, but, honestly, the motiontracking on this is really pretty good; I was able to play a few games while sitting at my desk, and the way it lets you distinguish between forehands, backhands, lobs and smashes by tracking the specific angle of your arm is really quite impressive. It’s obviously shonky as fcuk but equally it’s good, clean, silly fun which will make you look INCREDIBLY STUPID as you play.

• Print Gallery of an Artist: Very much the web’s Game of the Week, this, and you will see why when you click – it is BEAUTIFUL and very clever and ever-so-slightly-mindfcuking, a platformer based on Escher-esque recursive landscapes which you have to jump around as they swirl around you… the look and feel of the levels here really is gorgeous, and this feels like something that could be fleshed out further into something rather special.

• Almost Plastic, Not Even Real: I know that spring has seemingly sprung (although the slate-grey sky visible out of my kitchen window suggests that it’s not particularly evenly-distributed at present) and that as such I should be offering you SUNSHINEY FUN THINGS, but, well, no. Almost Plastic, Not Even Real is a BRILLIANT and hugely-unsettling little horror game, played in your browser, with a truly superb look and feel; every element of this feels weighty and thought-through, from the interaction design and object manipulation to the writing and the sound (seriously, the audio in the ‘teeth’ segment is HORRIFYING) and, in general, this is worth every one of the fifteen minutes it will take you to play through. It’s not always super-intuitive, is my only gripe, but there are some helpful comments on the landing page which will explain things if you get stuck. Honestly, this is really unpleasant in the BEST sort of way.

• The Covid Sound Map: Yes, yes, I know, they were BAD TIMES and they are IN THE PAST and you just want to forget all about the couple of years in which everyone was dying and it slightly felt like the world might be about to end (or at least the bits of it that concerned us) – what a radical departure from the world right now, eh kids? LOL! Anyway, I wouldn’t normally drag you back to the pandemic, but I somehow missed this at the time and discovered it this week and, with the distance of a few years, I think it is sort-of wonderful; the project, which compiled crowdsourced soundfiles from around the world during Covid and mapped them onto the globe using Google Earth, is by one Peter Stollery, and it is GORGEOUS – zoom around the globe and click into the individual soundfiles to hear people clapping for carers in Lowestoft, birdsong in Venice, public service announcements in Australia, a genuinely-odd sensation each time, taking you back to the past in eerie fashion in the way that only audio can. I was honestly transfixed by this, and the snapshot vignettes it provides of a(nother) time everything felt mad and jagged and weird.

• Surf Social: The whole ‘social media is dying’ argument received another fillip in the UK recently with data from our media regulator (lol, some fcuking regulator – LITTLE BIT OF POLITICS THERE) Ofcom releasing its annual insight into How People In The UK Consume Media which showed that the proportion of people posting on social media has fallen year on year – except, if you actually look at the numbers, it’s not that people are using the platforms less, it’s more that the platforms themselves have shifted to become lean-back places of passive video consumption. Anyway, should you be one of the many people who would like a better way to passively consume content from across the internet (SIT BACK, OPEN WIDE, ENJOY THE GUNK) you may well be interested in Surf Social, a new platform which effectively does the whole ‘pull in feeds from all sorts of places into one viewing window to consolidate your content consumption experience’ thing. It’s a *little* clunky, to my mind, but that might just be that I am old and have literally no desire to ever learn another platform-based UI ever again in my life; the deal is that you can create a variety of different custom feeds within the app, pulling from different sources and platforms – so for example you could set up sports feeds that pull from all the various accounts that journalists and publications have on Reddit, Bluesky and the like (yes, it’s all fediverse stuff, which is inherently a touch limiting but hey ho) – or you can follow existing bundled feeds…you get the idea, this isn’t technically anything that you haven’t seen before but, if you can be bothered doing the setup (which is always the hassle with these things tbh) then it’s potentially a useful way of keeping across a whole bunch of sources in one place – but it does require said sources to be active across the non-mainstream platform ecosystem, which does rather limit its utility imho.

• 365 Days: I’ve always been something of a sucker for year-long artistic projects, not least because of the punishing degree of commitment it requires to ACTUALLY make a new thing every day for a whole year – this is one such project, in which Japanese artist Masayuki Kamimae made, er, a different abstract work each day, and then built this BEAUTIFUL website to house them; there’s something genuinely lovely about the way in which the ‘gallery’ space is presented as a circular area in digital space, which curves around your field of vision as you explore it and gives a very real sense of the scale of work involved in producing this volume of canvases; I also personally very much like the pieces, though your mileage will vary depending on the extent to which you are moved by Japanese calligraphy as a style, but even if the works don’t excite you there’s something quietly gorgeous about the presentation and the idea here.

• The Images From Space: The miserable contrast between the messages of wonder being beamed back from the Artemis II mission (“The Earth is so fragile, so beautiful, we must protect it!”) and the mad vacillations of the syphilitic lunatic upon whose whims the future of the species seemingly rests has been…quite stark over the past few weeks, but however you feel about the decision to spaff billions on a bit of soft-power vanitywork by the US it’s undeniable that the photos have been VERY pretty. The main link here takes you to the official NASA feed of images, but if you want the REALLY BIG version then click here and go to Flickr and download some soothing wallpapers that you can stare at while everything here on Earth goes to absolute tits.

• UK Coke Prices: NOT THAT SORT OF COKE YOU BAG FIEND, YOU HORRIBLE LITTLE SESH GOBLIN. No, this is the horrible brown sugarwater, and, specifically, a running tracker of which particular UK supermarkets currently have the best bulk-buy deals for the stuff. Which, OK, fine, may not be a thrilling pull for you to click on the link (unless you have a particularly-troubling rate of soft-drink consumption), but given the likely hike in the price of everything coming down the line in the next year or so it offers a teasing glimpse of exactly the sort of fun microanalysis we’re all going to be indulging in in a few short months. Also, I am pretty sure (although details are sparse and I might of course be wrong) that this has been coded with AI and as such it struck me as an interesting example of something genuinely useful which can be spun up using public datasets and The Machine – should anyone want to do this for stuff that *I* like (cornershop rates on rolling tobacco and terrible white wine, thanks for asking) then I will be very grateful, ta.

• Mumumelon: SATIRE KLAXON!!!! I am usually a bit down on projects which create ‘satirical’ spoof brands and websites to critique existing corporates, mainly because I always wonder how much reach they actually get beyond the tedious advermarketingpr dullards on LinkedIn engaging in tedious THOUGHT LEADERSHIP DEBATE about the quality or otherwise of the STRATEGY – this one, though, I thought slightly better than the norm. “mumumelon is a dupe activewear brand. A deliberate shameless copy of lululemon. We made it to make a point” – the point, in this case, being that Lululemon’s clothing is an environmental disaster but doesn’t have to be, and that the company can and should be shamed into improving its green bona fides. “lululemon made over $11 billion in revenue last year. In that same year, their greenhouse gas emissions increased by 14%. Actually, they’ve risen every year since records began. That’s because most of lululemon’s manufacturing is powered by fossil fuels, like coal, even when cleaner energy sources exist. lululemon’s original manifesto said: “what we do to the earth, we do to ourselves.” If they truly believe that, they probably need a lesson in self-care.” The site is nicely-made, they rip off the branding neatly, and there was even a pop-up in London the other week to give a REAL LIFE MEATSPACE EXPERIENTIAL (sigh) angle to the whole thing – if I have a criticism (of course I do) it’s that the ‘dupes’ they offer on the site aren’t actually available to buy, which imho does rather undermine the point they are making about the fact that the company COULD DO BETTER – if it’s that easy, then, er, why not make it explicit by offering environmentally-friendly gear in limited edition ranges, with profits/proceeds going to suitable causes? Also, another question which isn’t immediately clear from the site – where the fcuk is the money coming from to pay for this? There’s some talk about one of the campaign groups behind it being funded by ‘philanthropic organisations’, but I think some transparency here would be helpful fwiw. I’ve just been quite negative about this, haven’t I? Sorry.

• Sleepy Hollow: THE EPISTOLARY NARRATIVE BOOM CONTINUES! Is it a boom? Well I reckon this is now the third ‘pay actual cashmoney to receive a story in the post via the medium of letters and stuff’ project I have featured in here in the past year, which by the p1ss-poor standards of modern trend consultancy (or indeed all trend consultancy) probably warrants its inclusion in a ‘deck’ (you cnuts) – this one is, per the description, “a cozy, nostalgic reimagining of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, delivered to your mailbox as letters, sketches, and artifacts from the era of cassette tapes, flip phones, and zines”, and leaving aside the almost-visceral degree to which I have come to hate the term ‘cozy’ when applied to media (can we fcuking stop with the twee, please? Or if we must do twee can it at least be of the ‘twee as fcuk’ variety?) and the extent to which this is zeroing in on a very specifically-zeitgeisty obsession with the late-90s/early-00s media landscape, I can imagine this doing well – the people behind it have some real writing chops, it seems, and a background in the ARG space, and it you can sign up to find out when the Kickstarter launches should you want to get in early. Expect to find ‘personalised postal marketing campaigns’ cropping up in presentations soon, if they’re not already there.

• The HTTPoetics Anthology 2026: Consider this the training wheels version of the HTML review – this is the annual collection of works by students at the School for Poetic Computation (“an experimental school in New York City and online supporting interdisciplinary study in art, code, hardware and critical theory”) and comprises a couple of dozen individual webartpoetrythings which range from digital breathing exercises to a museum of children’s jokes to a small fanpage about how Wuthering Heights is a horror story ACTUALLY (please no more Wuthering Heights I beg) – these are in many cases…quite janky, but I can’t help but love the homespun and handmade and very very very personal nature of all of these, and there’s something really pleasing in spending a few minutes exploring what people have chosen to make and the way they have used code as a means of expression.

• Ban Ray: It does rather feel that, given the…not-exactly-universally-positive impact so much technology has had on people and society over the past couple of decades we might perhaps want to think a little quicker about developing a regulatory framework to manage the use of smart glasses and the ways in which they are used – it doesn’t entirely feel like anyone’s paying quite enough attention to what it’s going to be like should a significant proportion of people start wondering around the world with AI-enabled cameras strapped to their faces. Anyway, this is a campaign site set up by one Mateusz Pożar which looks to build a groundswell of support for the broad idea of regulating the tech – there are a series of good arguments for maybe *not* letting them become entirely widespread, and you can download stickers that indicate that smart glasses are banned in specific areas, though imho it ought also to have a basic ‘email your local representative about this’ function (but that’s me quibbling). Fcuk Meta glasses, basically (and maybe tell your MP).

• Strado: This is an interesting way of looking at urban spaces – this is a mapping project which, per the blurb, “Every street in Europe scored across 22 categories — from grocery stores to nightlife, transit to healthcare. Free and open data.” This is actually limited to major cities, I think, but as a way of exploring the ‘livability’ or urban areas, based on access to various different types of amenity (transport, nightlife, groceries, emergency services, etc) it strikes me as potentially useful.

• GB AI: FINALLY THE UK HAS SOVEREIGN AI! PRAISE THE LORD! Or at least that’s what this purports to be – I am…slightly iffy about some of the details here, but apparently this is a model adapted from best-in-class open source tech and which is trained on UK data, complies with copyright (everything beyond the base models it’s been trained on is apparently either non-copyrighted or synthetic – the latter part of which doesn’t hugely encourage me in terms of its performance and utility, I have to say) and which runs on ‘100% renewable energy’ (again, not 100% certain about the validity of this claim, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt). This is…look, I don’t feel hugely-positive saying this because it’s new and it’s trying, but this is going to die on its ar$e, isn’t it? Noone has covered it at launch, the model simply isn’t anywhere near as good as any of the big boys, and no fcuker is going to use it. STILL, SOVEREIGN AI!!!!111eleventy

• Sloptracker: This is a nice, eyecatching bit of propaganda which I don’t think *quite* stands up to scrutiny; Sloptracker purports to track the amount of money being ‘stolen’ from ‘real artists’ as a result of AI-generated music on Spotify – the idea being that there’s a finite pool of money that gets paid out by the platform, and that that only goes to a fixed number of artists above a certain threshold of popularity, and that the introduction of AI-generated music and its increased acceptance is going to see the portion of the pie doled out to Actual Humans fall. Which in theory makes sense, but which fails to take into account a few reasonably-significant things about how Spotify’s payments model actually works in 2026 (and I say this as someone that fcuking hates Spotify) – there’s also something…a bit iffy about the fact that the whole site is obviously vibecoded (it’s amusing how obvious the ‘built with Claude’ tells are in terms of site aesthetics right now, although expect that to get addressed as time goes by). Basically this is an eyecatching stunt but not quite the MORAL KO whoever is behind it wants you to think it is (also, lol, Spotify basically IS music now, good luck with your attempts to fcuk it up).

• Krita: I am very much not an artist; I can’t draw, I have no creative impetus and the sole imprint I am going to leave on this world when my carcinoma-riddled corpse finally gets burnt to ashes is the millions of words on Curios – OH WHAT LEGACY! – and as such I have literally no idea whatsoever whether this painting tool is any good. BUT! It is FREE! It is OPEN SOURCE! It works on Windows, Mac and even LINUX (which is how you know it’s proper geekware)! It probably isn’t malware! If you want to draw on your computer but would prefer not to give money to one of the worst companies in the world for the privilege (hi Adobe! WE WILL NEVER ADD THE ™ TO ‘PHOTOSHOP’! IN YOUR FACE) then this might well be of interest.

• The Smithsonian Mag Photo Finalists 2026: The winner has actually been announced now, but the selection of nominees this year was wide-ranging and beautiful and it’s worth looking through the whole range rather than just focusing on the eventual victor – I have a personal soft spot for the VERY MEATY lake (you will know it when you see it), but, as ever, pick your own (please, I am tired).

• Geograph: I LOVE THIS! But also, how the fcuk have I not seen it before? I feel like a failure (not, it must be said, a novel experience, but one I would prefer to experience with slightly less regularity than seems to be the case). This is like Google maps, but crowdsourced (ish) – “The Geograph® Britain and Ireland project aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of Great Britain and Ireland, and you can be part of it. Since 2005, 14,132 contributors have submitted 8,254,695 images covering 283,417 grid squares, or 85.3% of the total squares.” Honestly, what an incredible collaborative work, and how wonderful that people have just…joined in, and to this extent! It’s also a really interesting picture of changing urban geographies – depending on where you explore, there are photos from across the past 20 years which offers a fascinating temporal patchwork of Britain and which I think you could do something really interesting with given the time and a bit of modern code (this site has many qualities but it is…avowedly oldschool in terms of design and functionality). This is really is weirdly heartwarming, well DONE people of Britain and Ireland!

• The Cybernetics Image Library: “A living visual archive on cybernetics in the expanded field. Browse and contribute images of all kinds: diagrams, schematics, photos, graphic elements, and other visual fragments. Each image is linked to a record in the Cybernetics Library catalog or integrated from the project’s original are.na channel.” NGL, the visuals here mean…very little to me, but I find the aesthetic on display almost infinitely compelling.

• Study At Newspeak House: My friend Ed has been running Newspeak House – the College of Political Technologists – in East London for…Jesus, years now. It acts as an incubator for people who want to develop their skills around using tech for civic good, a meeting hub for people interested in how tech and government intersect, and it’s been a place where lots of now-successful people doing interesting things have started their careers. Newspeak House is currently accepting applications for students for the next academic year, and I figured it’s not impossible that some of the weirdos reading this might also be the sort of weirdos who are interested in taking a non-traditional academic path towards ‘fcuking around with computers and data to help things work and run better’. ARE YOU THAT WEIRDO??? Click the link, find out more, email Ed, get qualified.

• The World Atlas of Sausages: I am *sightly* suspicious of this in that it looks and feels *quite* AI, and I was worried it was going to be wafer thin, but a bit of digging suggests that in fact there is a LOT of sausage-related content in here and if you want to learn more about the unique, savoury qualities of a specific variety of Uzbek horsemeat salami (just had a genuinely traumatic flashback to college and a poor Uzbek kid I lived with called Dilshott who brought back one of said sausages after Christmas one year and had to put up with some, er, ‘culturally insensitive’ ribbing – in the unlikely event that you ever see this, Dilshott, I am VERY SORRY about the polaroids) then this is possibly the only website you will ever need.

• A Lovely Coded Ballpit: It’s a ballpit! In code! Move your mouse, watch the balls move, ADMIRE THE PHYSICS YOU FCUKS.

• Waddleloo: OK, I fcuking ADORE this. Apparently the University of Waterloo has a problem with aggressive geese, so a student has taken it upon themselves to spin up a map to help students and staff navigate campus without being attacked by some incredibly-aggressive and VERY TERRITORIAL (and, honestly, fcuking massive) birds – this has a map which shows GOOSE DENSITY (not joking) and offers notes such as “On the roof. Nest located in the bushes just behind. Head-on attack reported, with the goose flying straight at someone’s face. There is nowhere to run on the roof, so do not attempt. Extremely aggressive. Avoid this area entirely, even for the sunset” (ngl, “there is nowhere to run on the roof” slightly sent me just now, but that is often the way as we approach the ⅓ point of the Curios writing experience). There are currently 12 HIGH RISK sites on the Waterloo campus, so, well, TAKE CARE KIDS. Honestly, I love this immoderately.

• The Premier League Archive: Ok, this might be old and so apologies if you all knew about this already (and if you did why the fcuk didn’t you tell me?), but I discovered this week that the Premier League has made highlights of EVERY SINGLE TOP-FLIGHT GAME SINCE 1992 available to watch on its website – THIS IS AMAZING (or at least it is if you are interested in English football from The Past; I appreciate that for the rest of you this is probably incredibly fcuking tedious but, well, allow me a brief moment of blokey indulgence). Fine, so you have to register an account with the Premier League which is predictably annoying as far as onboarding experiences go, but the ability to go back in time and watch Chelsea beat Spurs 4-3 in 1994 has made me VERY HAPPY.

• Goodbye Warden: “597 Death Row inmates have been executed in Texas since 1982. These are their last words.” This is a very simple site – no bells, whistles or flourishes – and it originally existed in another form and has now been brought back having been offline; there’s no way of pretending that these are anything other than heartbreaking, regardless of the crimes that the subjects may have committed, and I just had to go and step away from the computer for a second to Take A Moment after reading a few, but it’s also weirdly beautiful and perfectly, horribly, tragically human and poignant and awful and therefore perfect.

• The Civic Atlas: A simple project designed to showcase the different forms of government in place across the world, mapped to a globe – it doesn’t show you much (it’s basically just a colourcoded atlas showing which countries are parliamentary republics, say, or constitutional monarchies), but it’s fascinating to see the extent to which forms of government cluster regionally and in some respects it’s probably not a terrible finger-in-the-air indicator as to some of the…fun geopolitical tensions we can expect to see developing as the battle for resources becomes even more fraught and febrile. FUN TIMES!

• ModemBin: Ooh, this is fun – almost entirely pointless, fine, but fun nonetheless. Upload any audio file you like and this site will convert it into the sound of a modem from THE PAST; you can then send it to anyone you like, who can then convert it BACK in to actual, listenable audio by plugging the audio back in here. So should you ever wish to play a VERY ELABORATE game of spies or something then this is exactly the tool for you – fcuked if I can think of an actual, practical use for it, but maybe you clever people will amaze me (please amaze me, I long to be shocked from my torpor).

• Cosmos: This is an interesting idea for those of you who work in, or who just fiddle around with, design, or who like to make visual moodboards or who just Think In Pictures – Cosmos is basically a riff on the visual search engine, where you type in whatever you’re interested in and it pulls images from a range of sources; there are a bunch of clever additional features, though, which elevate it beyond ‘just Google Images’, including the ability to add images to collections which are then visible to others, meaning you can actually do quite a fun navigation through visual latent space as experienced by others, by searching, clicking on individual pics and then exploring other people’s collections in which said pics feature…this is very much one of those sites that it really is easier to experience than describe (he said, like the lazy hack he is), so, well, click and LEARN.

• Dualshot: Ok, this is genuinely smart and if you are a CONTENT CREATOR then it could be hugely useful – this is an iOS app which does one thing and one thing only, letting you capture images and video in simultaneous portrait AND landscape view, meaning that you don’t then have to spend an age repurposing one format into another for the purpose of All Of Teh Socials. Clever, useful, simple, and while it costs a tenner that doesn’t feel unreasonable if you currently spend a lot of time fiddling with the horror of aspect ratios.

• Midway: A READER WRITES! Matthieu Guyonnet-Duluc, who I have never met but who I have ‘known’ online for ages (HELLO MATTHIEU!) emailed me to tell me about this website he’s made, which…oh, fcuk it, here are his words, they are better than mine: “Over the past few months, I’ve been building Midway, a free tool that helps people find destinations reachable by direct flight from different cities. The idea came from a personal experience: finding a destination where my best friend and I could meet — one with direct flights from both our cities since he has a busy schedule — was time-consuming, especially since airline schedules vary by month etc. I think it can help a group of friends planning a getaway weekend, a family organizing a reunion across different cities or co-workers looking for a retreat in a third-place.” I think this is both potentially-useful and the sort of thing that a travel company might reasonably think about incorporating into their own planning tools (after paying Matthieu for his idea, in an ideal world).

• Infinite Digest: ANOTHER READER WRITES! I have mentioned on here more times than I care to remember my love for the novel Infinite Jest (despite, I feel it important to point out, not being one of THOSE men – does he…does he protest too much??), so imagine my delight when I got an email from one Christian Swinehart reading: “I’m a Brooklyn-based data visualization artist and design professor and wanted to share a new project of mine that might interest you and your readers. For the 30th anniversary of its publication, I have been analyzing David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and creating a graphical companion to untangle some of its knots. Infinite Digest is a series of interactive visualizations of the novel’s plotlines, characters, and self-referential structure. The first two installments, exploring the novel’s timeline and its many footnotes are currently live, with more to come over the next few months.” OH GOD THIS IS FCUKING CATNIP TO ME. Honestly, if you are familiar with the book then you will adore this – it is SO comprehensive, and the work done to wrangle the novel’s famously-labyrinthine plotting and…odd approach to narrative chronology into a coherent timeline is both impressive and nicely-done from a visual point of view. I would very much like Christian to make posters of some of this work (I have emailed him this request too, but figure that by putting it in writing and further bullying him that might make it slightly more likely).

• Playlist Circle: Basically a place to share YouTube playlists that you’ve made, designed to make them discoverable and shareable in a way in which the platform itself doesn’t necessarily lend itself to. This is SUCH a good idea, even if the interface is possibly a *touch* clunky, and it’s an excellent place to find new collections of music and other audio, themed by genre – bookmark this, imho.

• Roman Letters: “7,049 letters from the late Roman world” – per the blurb, this is “The largest collection of late Roman letters ever assembled in English.” WELL. I presume that some of you are men and that therefore some of you spend ALL YOUR TIME thinking about the Roman Empire (yes, that’s right, I am resurrecting memetic rubbish from a few years ago, that’s how fast the nostalgia cycle spins in 2026), and that therefore you will all have stopped reading this sentence about 30 words ago and are now instead revelling in the WISE WORDS of Marcus Aurelius or something (other Romans are available, you know). There are over 8000 letters here, making this a genuinely incredible resource for scholars, enthusiasts and MEN alike.

• Delzer Editor: This is a TikTok channel belonging to…some kid, somewhere, where he shows off his video editing chops – the work here isn’t the shiniest or the best you will ever see, but there’s something fun and charming about the enthusiasm, and it’s interesting watching his skills develop as he becomes more confident with the tools at his disposal, and, generally, it’s just MAD what you can achieve with just your phone these days (he said, geriatrically) – there’s some incredibly-pure teenage boy energy (not THAT sort of energy, thank God) running through these which I very much appreciate.

• The FIMI Explorer: “This FIMI Explorer is the first public interactive multilayered dashboard on foreign information manipulation activities. It allows users to easily navigate key networks used in FIMI attacks, demonstrating connections between threat actors involved in information manipulation activities and their role.” This is a slightly-dizzying attempt to map various infomanipulation campaigns over recent years, the actors and the targets, which is probably only really of practical use if you work in the field but, for the rest of us, offers an interesting-if-bleak portrait about the extent to which the fact that noone can be certain about anything anymore (and the fact that that is only going to become more pronounced!) is being exploited by the now-legendary Bad Actors all over the fcuking place.

• Perfect Loop: It’s curious the extent to which despite ostensibly being used by literally hundreds of millions of people, many of whom must live in the UK, Threads (you know, the Meta-owned Twitter knockoff) has made literally NO cultural impact whatsoever – nothing appears to ever have emerged from it in terms of memes or breaking news, none of you know anyone who uses it, it seems to persist as an odd shadow network reflecting the rest of the web to an audience of…Jesus, who knows? Actually, you know what, I would LOVE to read a decent piece of analysis about who the fcuk IS actually using this – who are they? Where do they live? DO THEY HAVE A SENSE OF INTERIORITY???? Anyway, that has only a limited amount to do with the actual link, which, yes, is to Threads, and which is to an account which posts INCREDIBLY satisfying looping gifs with a sort of Tumblr-perfect glitched-out aesthetic, and while you will probably never look at it again on Threads it is also available on Insta so maybe go follow it there instead.

• Rejected Petitions: A Bluesky bot posting the subjects of petitions which have been rejected for whatever reason by the UK Parliament (there’s a convention in the UK whereby anyone can set up a petition through the Parliament website which, if it reaches over 100k signatories, gets a (very small, mostly entirely-cosmetic) debating slot in the House of Commons. Recent pleasingly-mad examples include the amusingly-specific “Letting Children use the toilet in schools when they need too without a pass”, and the quite wonderful “Any party who fail to implement their manifesto within 1 year. General election” (I absolutely ADORE the implication here that enacting legislative change across a sweeping range of policy areas and departments is as simple as just ‘doing it’!), and frankly the whole feed is a delight and you should follow it immediately.

• Particle Life Sim: Ok, look, I don’t REALLY understand this but it is VERY FUN TO WATCH – via Lynn, this is, per the site: “This is a particle system where particles asymmetrically attract and repel each other via the interaction matrix visible on the left panel. Originally inspired by Jeffrey Ventrella’s Clusters, ciphrd’s Atomic Clusters, and Tom Mohr’s Particle Life.” Look, I don’t really know what any of that means and if you’re being honest most of you don’t either, but click the link and enjoy watching the weird particulate life move and jive and generally just sort of…pulsate under your gaze.

• ReKindle: Ooh, this is interesting – the browser on the Kindle is, as you will know if you;ve ever tried to use it, largely pointless, but this service is designed to make it USEFUL – basically you can use this url to access all sorts of different tools via your e-reader, from basic calendars and RSS readers to more advanced stuff like your *spits* Substacks and your email (these latter require a paid subscription, but there’s a whole bunch of stuff you can do for free using this). As a way of getting off your phone, this feels like a good one – ok, fine, you’d just be swapping one screen for another, but the e-reader is VIRTUOUS AND MONOCHROME, by contrast to the RIOTOUS, SEDUCTIVE COLOUR of your whoreish mobile, and as such perhaps easier to tear yourself away from.

• UK Train Departures: Ok, this is VERY BORING and VERY PRACTICAL, but fcuk me if it isn’t useful, particularly given the…suboptimal performance of much of the UK’s rail network. “View live train departure boards for stations across Great Britain. Each station has a dedicated, search-friendly page showing real-time departures in a layout that replicates official station boards like Liverpool Street Station.” Honestly, if you want a decent, up-to-date way of checking exactly how late your train is running so you know whether it’s worth leaving the house (it almost certainly isn’t) then this is SO helpful.

• Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026: Per the Smithsonian post up there, this is a link to ALL OF THE NOMINEES rather than just the winners – as such there are a FCUKTONNE of images here, all amazing, some, as per, featuring SAD ANIMAL DEATH (so, you know, BE WARNED), and one or two which are so perfectly-composed that they…oh God, it’s happening, isn’t it, because what I really want to write here is ‘that they look like they have been AI-generated’ (and yes, I know, and I am sorry, but click the link and find the photo of what I think is a King Cobra hiding behind a door and you try telling me that this doesn’t look like the product of The Machine). Anyway, as ever these are glorious but, also as ever, I really wish we could stop HDR-ing the fcuk out of photos because the effect really is irreal and deadening at scale, and makes everything look processed to the point of being ‘shopped (and yes, I know they all get post-produced, but still).

• Movie Release Radar: A website which shows the the upcoming film release schedule wherever you live. I obviously don’t give a flying one about this, but according to people online who Like Films (weirdos) this is apparently both useful AND comprehensive!

• Magnified Sand: Who wouldn’t want to explore a whole website dedicated to showing you what sand looks like when magnified about 10million times, to, per the blurb, “explore the world of sand”? NO FCUKER!

• Woodid: OK, this is 100% Not My Thing, but given the number of you who will probably be tedious middle-aged men who are obsessed with running as you attempt to replace the bad addictions you once had with GOOD ADDICTIONS more behooving of your advancing years and maturity I figure that at least some of you might be in the market for a trophy commemorating your best run EVER on Strava. Basically these people will, for about 60 Euros, make a custom wooden trophy that shows your route, your time and which will let you feel like a WINNER, even as your record is smashed into smithereens by some other lycra-clad atheletodad with marginally more expensive trainers than you.

• Mr Breakfast: Breakfast, you may have heard, is the most important meal of the day – and noone is more convinced of this fact than the owner of this site, one Mr Breakfast. The site’s strapline is ‘All Breakfast, All The Time’ and MY GOD is it not joking about that – if you want breakfast-related information then you will find it here, all presented in the charmingly-retro fashion you might expect from a site whose heyday was very much 20 years ago. The site doesn’t appear to have been updated for 6 years – I really hope Mr Breakfast is ok – but there is SO much to love in here and I can’t help but adore the…unique enthusiasm that the owner has for the meal. The media endorsements are FABULOUS by the way – not least because they hark back to a time when the media reported on things like this rather than, I don’t know, how we’re all being driven mad by the web and the apps and the scroll. “September 30, 2003 – Bay News 9 TV of Tampa Bay, Florida chooses MrBreakfast.com as “the best the web has to offer”; airs an informative segment about the website.” CAN WE GO BACK, PLEASE? BREAKFAST RETVRN!!!!

• As Slow As Possible: Curios favourite Pippin Barr has made this excellent little art project which encourages you to play classic games (Pong, Breakout, you get the idea) but VERY, VERY SLOWLY, turning them into experiences which are genuinely (and I know this is a horribly-overused term, but it fits here) meditative. Try it, I promise it is genuinely-soothing.

• Orange Ocean: A short (five mins or so) little game riffing on Snake, but with a surreal narrative layer which I rather enjoyed. EAT THE FRUITS, follow the story.

• DOOM, in CSS: Someone has coded DOOM in CSS. Is this is an impressive technical feat? Yes, indubitably. Is this in any meaningful way ‘playable’? No, not in the slightest. Still, it’s nice to see that the slow progress of making every single thing in the known universe DOOM-compatible continues apace, well done everyone.

• Nounsense: Ooh, this is fun and all you wordcels will very much enjoy I think – the game in this daily puzzle game is to ‘guess the most common noun that follows the adjective’, which is simple and quick and a nice potential addition to the morning gamecycle. Mind you, I am embarrassingly sh1t at it and so am never going to play it again – see how you get on.

• Horse Magnifier: Look, this is INCREDIBLY silly, but given this appears to be a boom year for ‘games featuring horses’ then I feel honour bound to include it. Can YOU apply the magnifying lenses to the horse in exactly the right way? Yes, I promise that will make sense when you click, even though you will still be very confused as to what the fcuk you are doing and why.

• Conservation of Bass: This little physics-y platformer does a very bad job of explaining itself, but is fortunately quite intuitive and is VERY smart once it gets going – you need to guide your little fish friend to the glass of water in each level, but the challenge comes from how you manipulate the environment around you to do so. If you don’t immediately ‘get’ how this works, please stick with it as once it clicks it is very satisfying indeed.

• Make Me Some Cookies: ANOTHER READER WRITES! They want to remain anonymous, though, which is both INTRIGUING (are…are you some sort of international fugitive, mysterious correspondent? WHAT NEFARIOUS CRIMES HAVE YOU COMMITTED) and entirely fair. Anyway…*they* write, “I thought this might be a good fit for Curios. It’s an idle/incremental story game, it’s about 6 hours long.  Best played on a desktop.  It’s fully playable on phone or tablet but the UI wasn’t built with that in mind. There’s no monetization, no requests for donations or anything like that.” This is a clicker-ish title which has some rather nice touches, not least the narrative development that proceeds in parallel with you ramping up your cookie production empire to increasingly-ridiculous levels, and it’s a fun thing to keep open in the background while you perform the pointless charade that is your job.

• Strange and Luig: The final game this week is this BEAUTIFUL and very, very fun (if involved) little puzzler – I don’t want to explain too much as part of the joy is the surreal strangeness of the whole thing, but basically it harks back to a specific genre of title from the mid-00s in which you basically had to work out the order in which to interact with different elements across a large, multiscreen map, taking objects back and forth to unlock different areas and ‘story’ beats (I use the word ‘story’ advisedly here because, honestly, this is VERY WEIRD), and it is SO CUTE and nicely-animated and drawn, and generally it feels beautifully handmade and it’s a real pleasure to spend time with. So, er, I suggest that’s what you do RIGHT NOW.

• The HTML Review #5: I have waxed lyrical in Curios before about how much I adore the annual celebration of code’n’words that is The HTML review, and given it’s now in its fifth edition I see no reason why I shouldn’t take a moment to laud it again. THIS IS ALL SO BEAUTIFUL AND I LOVE IT. For those of you who haven’t been reading Curios assiduously for the past five years or who inexplicably don’t have an encyclopaedic memory for every single link I feature in here (WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PAY ATTENTION YOU FCUKS), the HTML Review is a yearly digital publication which features a selection of web…things, which in some way combine prose and code to creative, beautiful effect. I like to think of the pieces in an issue as being a bit like digital poems, pieces where there’s a symbiotic relationship between form and meaning and where the way in which the words move and are shaped, the way images relate to the text, all contribute to the texture of the whole (/pseud), and this year’s pieces are no exception. This is one I would strongly recommend you set aside a bit of time for – there are 15 pieces, and each is its own, discrete experience, taking anything from a couple of minutes to quarter of an hour to experience, and they are all beautiful; my personal favourites are ‘Milkfish’ and the visual essay ‘afterimages’, but you should absolutely explore these because there will almost certainly be one that speaks to you. Oh, and even if you’re the sort of soulless philistine for whom the words ‘poetry and literature made of code’ mean NOTHING (what is WRONG with you?) then you should still click because the scrolly animation on the landing page is SO SATISFYING.

• Popopo: Ok, so a few caveats here before you click – a) the website is all in Japanese, so you’ll have to translate it; b) this is the site for an app, which as far as I can tell is regionlocked and so you won’t be able to actually use; and c) as a result of b) I haven’t *actually* tried this out, and so this short writeup is going to be entirely vibes-based (PLUS CA FCUKING CHANGE, eh?). Still, click the link and be as confused as I was by the idea of what is, basically, ‘CG-assisted videochat that doesn’t actually need your camera to function because what it actually does is spin up some sort of avatar-to-avatar visual representation of your conversation based on just the audio’. Why, exactly, would you want to have a videocall with someone where you aren’t actually seeing their face but instead seeing a, er, I don’t know, cartoon cat, or anime boyfriend or something? NO IDEA! Anyway, this was interesting to me, partly as a result of its presentation as a sort of ‘metaversal’ tool (THE CONCEPT STILL LIVES ALTHOUGH IT IS DEFINITELY LOOKING SICKLY!), partly due to the commercial tie-ins they have coming up (you will, as of April, be able to present yourself in chat as a character from Evangelion, an anime I have obviously never seen but which I am assured by weebs is very good), and partly due to this slightly-baffling line from the press release description, which gives a weird insight into parasocial relationships in Japan and feels like SUCH an awkward experience: “In the midst of your everyday life, you might receive a surprise call from someone you follow. Furthermore, there’s a “lottery function” where you can win the chance to talk to them directly. If you win, you might experience the dream of a one-on-one conversation.” Jesus, just imagine having your day interrupted by a phonecall from a strange number that turns out to be…some weirdo who follows you on social media, presenting as a kawaii platypus with sad eyes and stammering awkwardly about how much they love your posts (or don’t, it’s up to you) – does that sound good? Hm. Anyway, this intrigued me and if any of you happen to live in Japan can you try this out and tell me what it’s like (or explain all the cultural nuance that I am missing here)? Thanks!

• Parachord: This looks…potentially quite useful, maybe, if you’re someone for whom MUSIC IS EVERYTHING and who has accounts across fifteen separate streaming services and who is sick of having to flick between myriad different apps and platforms to experience the full spectrum of your wildly-eclectic taste (yes, yes, you are INTERESTING! Well done!). Parachord is basically an ‘all your streams in one place’ tool, letting you connect your accounts across Spotify, Apple Music, Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Lastfm and the like so you can listen to the catalogues from each through a single interface – interestingly, it also lets you see what other users are listening to, listen together, play music shared to you on one platform in another, and even attaches a little ‘buy on bandcamp’ button to anything you listen to, regardless of what streamer is actually playing the track, which is a particularly nice touch of which I approve hugely. This looks…really, really useful, actually, and if you’re someone who streams a lot of stuff and who has groupchats about music and stuff then this looks like it might be a genuinely great thing to download and fcuk around with (oh, and as far as I can tell it’s free).

• Who MPs Follow On X: I would imagine that all political journalists (or people who spend their days angrily posting on social media about politics, despite having literally no agency whatsoever) have probably seen this by now, but, for the rest of you, this is an interesting tool which lets you plug in any username on X and get an immediate readout of which of the UK’s elected parliamentarians follow the user in question. Which is how I just learned that there are 4 MPs who follow tiny racist cokehead Stephen Yaxley-Lennon on X – er, why? Anyway, this is potentially useful should you wish to EXPOSE AN MP, or you simply want to check which of the current crop feel the need to follow Elon Musk (a frankly weird number, honestly), or want to find out how many Chelsea fans there are, or, more prosaically, want to track INTERNECINE BEEF by seeing if, say, Angela Rayner has unfollowed Keir Starmer yet. Wonkish, but could be interesting to some of you.

• Shoot Men Into Space: To be clear, I do not personally advocate shooting men into the stratosphere – after all, I am a man and I long ago decided that I want to die peacefully in a Geneva hotel room rather than via asphyxiation in the inky, airless blackness of the cosmos (weird, I know) – but, well, I know that as a general rule men aren’t *hugely* popular at this particular point in human history (God knows why) and there might be a few of you who think, not wholly-unreasonably, that we might all be better off taking our chances with cloning, sperm banks and a lot of scientific enquiry into asexual reproduction. Should YOU be of the opinion that the world would be a better place with fewer Y chromosomes in it, then you might enjoy this site which presents the idea (NB – to be clear, this is Not Wholly Serious) and the arguments and then welcomes questions and comments – honestly, the real joy here is in the comments (although the whole site’s nicely-written) which contain such seemingly-sincere engagements with the concept as “I’m sorry. I have to say this. I love sex with a man who is completely focused on my satisfaction. Is there really a viable substitution for this that doesn’t violate human rights?” which, you know, LEGITIMATE QUESTION! Anyway, should you wish to wrestle with the ethical and practical considerations of removing all men from the surface of the planet then, er, CLICK THE LINK! Please, though, if this ever becomes law, can I please go to Switzerland instead?

• The China Tobacco Museum: A website which exists solely to preserve and celebrate the packaging of all of the different brands of cigarette sold in China, a nation which (without wishing to stereotype) REALLY loves its tabs. For obvious cultural reasons there’s a clear preponderance of red in the designs here, but my personal favourite are these OUTRAGEOUSLY camp mini cigars in leopardprint. PICK YOUR OWN!

• Proofeditor: I remain slightly-skeptical about AI agents outside of the specific realm of coding, but there’s no question that there’s been a step-change in capability and interest over the past few weeks; Proofeditor is an interesting extension of this – it’s basically a writing platform which allows you to create a document and then give an army of agents (and, should you be so antediluvian as to still need them, Actual Humans) access to it so that they can make edits, suggestions, etc – the idea is that you can create a team of agents with different functions and personas, and have each of them leave distinct feedback on a piece of work or project, which, honestly, I maintain a degree of skepticism about (I am not convinced that simply telling an Agent “You are a brilliant entrepreneur with a track-record of building and exiting successful businesses”, for example, will turn said Agent into something able to accurately assess your sh1tty startup ideas, for example), but which, if you’re someone who’s drunk the kool aid and is currently marshalling an army of digital minions for doubtless-positive ends, you might find helpful.

• Ealing Council: Specifically, Ealing Council on TikTok – you may not think that a shortform video account administered by a municipal authority in Greater London is worth a follow, but you are WRONG – whoever is behind this is Good At TikTok and it’s a really good example of how you can Make Comms About Boring Things Vaguely Interesting And Fun (on which note, by the way, there was some interesting data published by the Reuters Institute this week which specifically speaks to the fact that a significant portion of young people in the UK want their news to be ‘fun’ – HOW DO I MAKE THE COLLAPSE OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMY VIBEY, JAYDON, HOW??? – to which I think this speaks rather nicely), and which I think ought to be sent around every single public institution with a TikTok account with an accompanying note simply reading ‘learn’.

• Council Sim: Sticking with local councils in the UK – both SEAMLESS and THRILLING, I think you’ll agree! – this is a really smart bit of comms by the Labour Party ahead of the inevitable shoeing they are going to receive in the local elections in May, which is designed to demonstrate how utterly fcuked councils are across the country (and, by extension, deliver the subtle message “…so it’s not actually our fault that everything feels bad, so please don’t all vote Green/Reform/Lib Dem”). IT IS A GAME! Ok, fine, ‘game’ in a very loose sense – they haven’t exactly splashed on the UI, there are no graphics to speak of, and it hammers a single point home with absolutely no subtlety whatsoever – but, still, it’s a vaguely-ludic toy and it’s sort-of fun (ok, your definition of ‘fun’ will have to include ‘educational and at heart a little bit depressing’ for this to hold true, but wevs) and it makes its single point pretty well, and I think it proves rather neatly that TURNING THINGS INTO GAMES (even quite ugly, boring ones) MAKES THEM LESS DULL AND EASIER TO COMMUNICATE TO PEOPLE.

• Mud Map Magazine: I like this – a new magazine which is, per its blurb, dedicated to “exploring visual culture through video essays, video letters, critical articles, and experimental media projects. Our work moves across media, from medieval illustrations to video games. It engages with politics and spectacles, intimacy, and human life in the cloud, asking how representation shapes perception, power, and collective imagination. In a context of visual overload and compulsive production, Mudmap slows things down.” There are only a few pieces on here as it’s Very New, but I enjoyed the essay about the personal computer as a shared familial object, and I think that this is probably worth bookmarking if you’re involved with or interested in video art, games and weird, fringey stuff at the edges of the digital (and who isn’t? NO FCUKER, etc!).

• Oryzo: This is a promo for itself by ‘creative production studio’ Lusion, from Bristol in the UK, and it is SO SO GOOD. Honestly, I don’t want to spoil it, it’s worth going in cold and enjoying every aspect – the design of the site is great, the UX and UI is lovely, the copywriting is excellent, the satire spot-on, and for all of you AI HATERS it will tickle your specific, prejudicial erogenous zones REALLY HARD. Seriously, this is one of the best agency calling cards I’ve seen in years, excellent work all round.

• Quicky Email: I feel it quite important to say that not only do I not particularly like the idea behind this service, I feel personally attacked by it. BUT! I am also aware that Newsletter Fatigue Is Real (if you are tired of Curios, though, you really are tired of life – sorry, it’s true, I don’t make the rules) and that keeping up with All of the Links and All of the Takes and All of the News is HARD and TIME CONSUMING and STRESSFUL and wouldn’t you rather be mindlessly scrolling through InstaTokShorts than reading yet another thousand words (lol, you should be so lucky) from some inbox cnut about how, I don’t know, Boy Kibble Discourse Is Praxis? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! And so, Quickie – a service which lets you sign up to newsletters using a specially-created email address, and which then collates the newsletters you receive every day and then sends you an AI-generated summary of What It Thinks You Need To Know, so you don’t have to actually bother reading the actual newsletters in question. WILL NOONE THINK OF THE CRAFT THAT GOES INTO THESE??? Aside from, ahem, my personal feeling of affrontery here, I can’t help thinking that getting thinking and ideas twice-digested like this probably isn’t *great* for your intellectual diet, but I can also understand that for stuff that is just industry news roundups it could be genuinely useful to cut down on duplication and repetition. I am going to reluctantly recommend this to you as ‘possibly useful’, while also judging ANY of you who think it’s a good idea.

• Lore Obsessed: I got beta access to this platform this week and thought it curious enough to share. Lore Obsessed (it might just be called ‘Lore’, I’m not certain) is an AI-enabled platform that is designed specifically for people to delve into the, er, ‘lore’ behind specific shows or series or comics or games…but, apparently, according to the suggested prompts on the homepage, also…real life? I am basically quite confused as to what this is trying to be – is it for fandoms? Is it a search engine replacement? Why do I need this when for anything geeky enough there will inevitably be threemillion FanWikis exhaustively going over every single line of dialogue and shot-framing for HIDDEN MEANING? I basically don’t get it or why it’s in any way better than any other LLM you might care to use,,although that might be a result of me not really being a fan of anything other than the vague concept of ‘the web’ (SO SAD, SO EMPTY) and maybe you will have more fun with it.

• Memory Map: This is an interesting little vibecoded experiment/toy/thing made by Friend of Curios Sacha Judd – the idea is simple, letting you plug in five places that you’ve lived that have meant something to you and then creating a composite map from the selection; this is effectively taking five openstreetmap tiles and collaging them, meaning that the end results are a bit shonky on occasion but I like the idea behind it, and the ‘I had an idea, so I built it’ ethos it embodies, and there’s actually something quite…wonkily-pleasing about the outputs and the way it makes you think about places you’ve lived that have meant something to you…I enjoyed it, have a play.

• Another Day: Do YOU want to feel INCREDIBLY OLD? I mean, I imagine you already feel incredibly old, what with, well, your age, and the terrifying pace of everything, and the fact that nothing makes sense, but if you would like to feel EVEN OLDER then you will ‘enjoy’ this site which presents a whole load of ‘XX was closer to WWII than Y’-type facts to help you realise quite how much time has passed since you’ve been alive and how transient and ephemeral your existence in fact is. You can even plug in your birthday to get personalised horrordata, which is how I just learned that my birthday is “is now closer to the release of the Wizard of Oz (movie) than to today” which, well, FCUK YOU WEBSITE is all I can say.

• AI Personality of the Year: From the same horrible chucklefcuks who brought you the AI Beauty Pageant a few years ago comes a new award for ‘AI Personality of the Year’, basically an award for the ‘best virtual influencer’ across a variety of categories (‘entertainer’, ‘lifestyle influencer’ and, preposterously, ‘comedian’ – are there ANY AI-generated ‘personalities’ doing comedy? If anyone knows of one, PLEASE share it with me as I cannot begin to imagine the horror), and obviously a soulless promo grift for everyone involved – that said, if you want a vague snapshot of the current ‘state of the art’ when it comes to imaginary ‘people’ shilling crap for brands (or being imaginary thirst-traps for sad, lonely men) then FILL YOUR BOOTS!

• Friending: Are you…lonely? I AM ALWAYS HERE FOR YOU I AM YOUR FRIEND (lol, I’m fcuking not your friend, I am a disembodied voice in your head, Jesus)! It does rather feel like many of us are Lacking Something In Our Lives, at least if the constant focus in much of the media, new and old, about Needing To Find Connection is to be believed, and the seemingly-endless procession of new lifestyle HACKS to help you meet new people and form PLATONIC BONDS OF SUPPORT AND MUTUAL RESPECT – if you feel like you need some help finding people to hang out with that you actually like, rather than simply keeping on flogging the increasingly-dessicated corpses of friendships from lives past, then you might find Friending interesting as a concept. It’s a new-ish app which exists to foster REAL LIFE CONNECTIONS rather than simply online – the basic premise is that you create a profile, get it verified with proof of ID (the idea being that this promotes better behaviour, presumably, and creates a safety layer), find people locally who share similar interests to you and then MEET UP IN REAL LIFE – per the blurb, “On Friending, you don’t become friends with someone just by tapping a button. A friendship only becomes official after you’ve actually met in person. Bluetooth-based confirmation helps verify real-world meetups — including group hangouts — so every connection is rooted in real life.” You can create a sort of ‘frienship graph’ as far as I can tell, mapping all your connections, which…honestly, sounds weirdly like relationship genetics if you ask me, but whatever you’re into. I can’t pretend for a second that this appeals to me, misanthrope that I am, but there might be something in here for any of you who are less miserable and closed-off to LIFE than I am. To be clear, though, this is very much not a dating app so please, please none of you treat it like one.

• Remains of Tomorrow: AI WARNING: this is a YouTube channel featuring entirely-AI-generated ‘documentaries’ about towns and cities in the UK ‘after the apocalypse’, doing some sort of weird anthropological tour around the overgrown ruins of, say, Hexham in Northumberland, with a plangent piano soundtrack, some vaguely-eerie sounds of nature and a sad, quiet voiceover. I *think* that the V/O is an actual person, but the visuals are all AI and, in general, the vibe of these is…very weird, ngl, like some sort of alternate reality walking tour or disaster fetishism, and I am curious as to whether it’s just someone who’s an interested fiction enthusiast or if there’s some sort of weirder, darker ‘this is where we’re heading’ undertone to the whole thing (I don’t think there is, for the avoidance of doubt, but I haven’t had the chance to watch more than a couple of these). Anyway, these all have a few thousand views and what I found interesting, aside from the style and the content, was how….positive all the comments are, with history buffs and scifi nerds all sort of coming together to enjoy the fiction. Your occasional reminder that normies don’t hate AI anywhere near as much you might like to think they do (sorry).

• Lonely Buoy: Many, many years ago on Twitter there was a little art project where a series of Twitter bots, each representing a different satellite in orbit around the earth, would tweet small, sad, poetic messages about the loneliness of being in space; this is basically that, but for a buoy off the coast of San Francisco. I don’t know what it is about stuff like this but it absolutely destroys me – WHY AM I EMOTIONALLY VULNERABLE TO THE CONCEPT OF A SAD, LOST BUOY FFS??? – from the weird poetry of the cadence (I think this is Markov chains or something rather than an LLM, but I might be wrong here) to the general concept of a machine speaking from the lonely solitude of the Pacific. I think this is beautiful.

• Circle Populations: Would YOU like to know how many people live in a 3km radius of you? GREAT! Thanks to this I learned that there are apparently 422,000 people living around me, which rather explains why, when I went to Copenhagen the other week, I was so freaked out by how EMPTY the city felt, turns out I am now conditioned to expect urban density wherever I go. Anyway, this is potentially useful and if not useful then curious, and what more could you want? NOTHING. Also, I’m a fan of the general tone in which the copy on the site is written – it’s sort-of weary, which I rather appreciate.

• The Speedbag Bard: Have you ever wondered ‘what would it look and sound like to watch a man competently beat the fcuk out of a boxing speedbag in time to a variety of different popular songs from anime, videogames and wider culture?’ YOU HAVE? Jesus, I will never get used to the oddity of people’s wants and desires. Still, should you ever have pined for this exact thing – is it…is it a sex thing? NO SHAME! – then you will be THRILLED with this YouTube account; I have no idea how hard this would be to replicate, but I am going to guess ‘very, very hard indeed’.

• Obsolete Sounds: Per the blurb, “Obsolete Sounds is the world’s biggest collection of disappearing sounds and sounds that have become extinct – remixed and reimagined to create a brand new form of listening.” OOH THIS IS GREAT – I am currently listening to the sound of someone typing on an Olivetti Dora which has been turned into a jaunty, jazz-adjacent little number, but there are LOADS of remixed old tech sounds on here which, ok, I admit may not *sound* hugely compelling but there’s something really nice about the way the few I have listened to have been reworked and remixed, and overall I am a Big Fan of the project as a whole (which itself is part of the Cities and Memory project, which I have DEFINITELY featured in here before).

• Banner Depot 2000: A repository of old web banners, searchable by year, topic, the thing being promoted…this is one the one hand a treasure-trove of old graphic design styles and visual cues and a prettymuch perfect retrohole for anyone nostalgic for The Olden Days Of The Web, and also a convenient reminder that this stuff was, if we’re honest, really fcuking and annoying cruft that clogged up the visual design of a website something chronic and which, let me assure you, you would become heartily sick of were this sort of style actually come back into fashion. Although I have, thanks to this, learned that there was an adult online store in the 00s called ‘Bedroom Sports’ which made me laugh a LOT and momentarily spun me into imagining an ‘erotic’ version of 90s classic title ‘California Games’, which I now quite want someone to code up please.

• The GameUI Database: A, er, database of videogame UI! Why? WHY NOT???? For all I know you might be game designers looking for inspiration and might find this INCREDIBLY resourceful and be so grateful to me for sharing it with you that you decide to include ‘Matt Muir’ as a secret playable character in your next game or something, so my including this is probably worthwhile on that basis alone.

• Candy Love Island: I’m not entirely sure why it is that the Sexy Fruit AI Videos have broken confinement this week – I found myself talking about the phenomenon on a podcast on Tuesday (yes, I know, but they asked me) and then all of a sudden they were EVERYWHERE, to the point there’s a big explainer about the phenomenon in the longreads later on. Anyway, alongside the SEXY FRUIT there are also, er, SEXY SWEETS – this is a TikTok account sharing episodic updates from, er, Candy Love Island, in which sweets…oh, Christ, look, you know what this is, you don’t need me to type the words explaining it. What I find odd about this is that, aside from the general wtf of the premise (TALKING SWEETS DOING LOVE ISLAND FFS) is how utterly boring it is – like, the whole thing is played reasonably-straight, which means that what you’re actually watching is a poorly-AI-voiced series of animations in which cartoon representations of sweets have sincere conversations about not wanting to be evicted from a nonexistent Love Island villa, which begs the question…why? WHO THE FUCK ARE THE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE WATCHING THIS????

• LonelyWiki: A cute idea, this – it pulls articles from Wikipedia that have had fewer than (I think) 2,000 views in the past year, allowing you to learn things that are genuinely obscure and that, apparently, very few people care about (today’s example is ‘urban water management in Bogota’, which I appreciate might sound niche but I imagine is quite important to the several-million people who live in the city). The one thing I would say about this is that it’s obviously been cobbled together with Claude, and there really is a specific look and feel and general UI-vibe to sites that have been AI’d into existence, and I think I would quite like to see this change or at least people make the effort to inject a bit more visual flair into these things because the aesthetic homogeneity is starting to wear on me.

• Freya Johnson-Foster: This is the personal site of designer Freya Jonhson-Foster, which I am including almost exclusively because I absolutely ADORE the way you can sort the works – click the ‘show dimension’ text on the left of the screen and you will see you can sort their body of work by different criteria, and, honestly, the way the UX/UI works here is SO NICE, from the conceptual side (the idea of all of the work here existing on a variety of spectra) to the way in which the site rearranges depending on your sorting selection…I am describing this really badly as per, but I promise this is a really, really nice bit of interaction design.

• If Only I Sent This: Longterm readers might have noticed by now that I have a slight emoobsession with sites that allow people to anonymously share their feelings and fears and hurts and joys, and the general idea of a scrapbook of feelings is something which absolutely appeals to me (possibly for reasons of a lack of an internal life of my own, who knows?). If Only I Sent This is a perfect example of the genre – anyone can submit a message they will never send, anonymously, which will (post-moderation) sit on the website for anyone else to read. These are…ok, these are quite an odd mix, the emotional and the loving and the furious and the occasionally-frankly-disturbing, but, per above, they are all moderated and, oddly for this sort of thing, they all *feel* real, and I felt an absolute gutpunch just now reading one that read “I am so sorry I lied to you. You deserved better. I didn’t love you, I just wanted to keep you. Please don’t kill yourself.”

• JunkDrawer Jukebox: I confess to being slightly annoyed that Claire Hughes, the person behind this EXCELLENT idea, is running it via their Facebook Page rather than creating a proper website for it (this is selfish, obvs, Claire can do whatever the fcuk they like) – that said, I LOVE THE CONCEPT (thanks to Elle for the tip), in which Claire basically finds old iPods and creates a playlist of the music she finds on them, tiny insights into people who we will never know anything about, a picture of them built in the songs they loved. THIS IS BEAUTIFUL and, should you ever see this Claire, please make a random webmong very happy and turn this into a standalone webproject off-Facebook because it deserves its own home.

• WasHere: Via Nag, a neat little site that presents various Streetview-type views of places around the world and allows visitors to add a layer of collaborative graffiti to them. Which might not make much sense as a description, but I encourage you to click through and find a place near-ish to you and see what people have done with the image – it is SO WHOLESOME and weirdly cute, and I am yet to see anything bad or Nazi-ish, which, ok, is a low bar but in 2026 you really never know, and I would like to salute whoever it was who spent not-inconsiderable time turning the cyclist in one of the London pics into a Just Eat delivery driver, it made me incomprehensibly happy.

• Pokemon Jewellery: Have you always thought “you know, I wouldn’t mind getting married but as yet noone has found the perfect ring with which to propose to me”? Has the barrier been the lack of Pokemon-themed jewellery? WELL TODAY IS YOUR LUCKY DAY! It’s unclear to me whether this stuff is available internationally, whether it ships (just checked, it does!), etc, but this is VERY MUCH what it says on the tin – pick a design, pick a stone, pick a pokemon symbol you want engraved on the finished design and BOOM, there you go, literally the geekiest piece of jewellery it’s possible to conceive of (and if you can conceive of geekier, please keep it to yourself for I do not care to know). If you need an extra reason to buy, “the product will be delivered in a special case featuring a foil-stamped design of two Pikachus snuggling together” – OR you can splash out for a wooden Pokeball case, which, honestly, would probably make a certain type of person EXPLODE LIKE A CRUSHED MILK CARTON with unbounded joy.

• Prompts: Would YOU like a paid subscription ($11 a month!) to a service which every month will send you an ACTUAL LETTER featuring writing prompts? Er, what? WHY??? No shade to the person behind this who I am sure is lovely, but man is this a sign that you can sell any old tat under the broad banner of ‘artisanal, craft-y, real-world and HUMAN’ these days. Would someone like to pay me a tenner a month to get Curios in letter form? Actually, now I come to think of it that feels…no, it’s a fcuking terrible idea and I should abandon it immediately.

• Dutch Birdcams: While you might enjoy this webpage for the privileged insight it gives you into the lives of Dutch birds in the springtime, I enjoy it primarily because of how much I love reading the names of birds in Dutch. Isn’t ‘Tapuit’ the most WONDERFUL onomatopoeic name for a bird? YES IT IS DO NOT ARGUE WITH ME.

• Eraser: A small, fun, shooty little game in which you play as a rubber (sorry, ERASER) and have to both eliminate the marks left by the EVIL PENCILS and also shoot the everliving sh1t out of them. Silly, but an excellent way to pass 10 minutes or so.

• Spring: After last week’s 100 Jumps (stop playing it, it is BAD FOR YOU), another small, simple, mildly-frustrating but VERY ADDICTIVE game about jumping; this one’s a bit more physics-y but no less enjoyable.

• Dynamine: ‘What if the game minesweeper, but about actual mining?’ is a question that had almost certainly never been asked before the developer of this game conceived of it, but the resulting puzzler is…very fun! It doesn’t explain itself superbly well so you might need to spend a minute or two figuring out exactly how it works, but, generally, it’s fcuking minesweeper what else do you need to know? Oh, and the sound effect of the mining will either please you IMMENSELY or irritate you beyond compare, pretty sure there’s no inbetween state here.

• Collective Memory: I feel I should probably caveat this at the outset – in what feels like a…very 2021-era vibe, this site has, inexplicably, got ‘dodgy crypto grift’ running through it like a stick of rock, so you shouldn’t consider this link an endorsement (lol, ‘endorsement’, like my opinion fcuking matters) so much as a vague, handwaving ‘something interesting over there’ gesture. STILL! Collective Memory is a project which is pitching itself as a NEW PLACE FOR CROWDSOURCED NEWS and which claims to have tens of thousands of users, all sharing images and video of LIFE from across the world, in realtime – why exactly it is that said images and videos need to be attached to some bullsh1t ETH fork called ‘$ATTENTION’ (currently trading at a whopping $0.01 a token – BUY IN EARLY LADS (NB please do not, under any circumstances, ‘buy in’)) is…unclear, but ignore that for a second and instead just click on the ‘latest memories’ tab at the top and then enjoy the endless scrolling feed of…just pictures and short video clips, all showing inexplicably-banal moments from people’s lives in (mostly) Europe and North America, cats and selfies and knitwear and…Christ, you know, I didn’t think I would ever feel nostalgia for an ostensibly-chronological feed of mundane images from strangers, but it turns out that there’s something genuinely-refreshing about the slice-of-lifeness of this, the fact that for a vanishing moment here in 2026 you can peer into a window on the world that doesn’t feel like LOUD SHOUTING MORONTV…to be clear, this website and the associated app is some sort of weird, doomed-to-failure bit of cryptow4nk, but I can’t help but feel compelled about the timetravel aspect of the feed here. No idea why this has captured my attention this morning – is it…is it the fact that it looks like we’re all heading for some HARD TIMES again? MAYBE!!! – but such is the beautiful whimsy of Curios so, well, suck it up.

• The Internet Phonebook Second Edition: The Internet Phonebook, by Elliot Cost and (full disclosure) my friend Kris, did PHENOMENALLY well and has been featured in all sorts of fancy places, so much so that they are running a second edition; if YOU make Stuff on the Internet and would like said stuff to be included in a beautifully-made little directory of ALL OF THE WEBSITES (ok, fine, some of the websites) then you can fill in your details at this url and be immortalised in print (alongside Web Curios, should you not mind keeping company with me), and subsequently available for purchase in the sorts of shops that sell very serious books about Design Methodologies, purchased by men in directional eyewear and knitted fishermens’ caps, for £30+.

• SlowLLM: Are you being forced to use AI at work against your will? Do you have someone in your life who you fear is being lost to The Machine, and whose behaviour you want to gently impact in much the same way you might use an electroshock collar to discipline a loved-but-unruly hound? GREAT! SlowLLM is a fun and clever idea – “SLOW LLM is a browser extension that makes LLMs appear to run very slowly. It works with ChatGPT and Claude”…oh, and even better, for the technically-minded (or the truly-rebellious Heads of IT amongst you), “You can install SLOW LLM, network-wide, at your business, university, or household through our free DNS service…The DNS service works with all apps, and slows down Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, and Google Gemini.” OK, so installing this on your company’s network will, I’m pretty sure, result in you being sacked, but if you’re a committed anti-AI person then surely this is a price worth paying for your glorious and noble Cnut-like stand against the inevitable tsunami of automation and unemployment? DO IT! We can keep each other warm in the line at the soup kitchen (lol, like there will be soup kitchens, we’ll be eating each other at this rate).

• The Node Project: For, er, ‘reasons’, I have been following AI-generated right-wing content on social media in the UK for 6+ months now, and as part of that have ‘enjoyed’ seeing AI rap videos by a gaunt, Lurch-like figure called ‘Danny Bones’, decrying the TERRIBLE DECLINE of modern Britain (you may not be surprised to know that the decline is, in the main, linked to, er, brown people – whodathunkit?!) – the Bones character has been created by whoever is behind an organisation called itself ‘The Node Foundation’, which is currently raising money for…well, it’s not wholly clear from the webpage but, at the very least, for the creation of more AI-generated rap videos telling people that the reason everything is fcuked is basically Islam. If you look at the donation page – which is anonymous, but allows for backers to post messages – you can see a combination of cryptoweirdos and charming types posting things like ‘England for the English’, just in case you were in any doubt as to exactly the sort of sentiments being fomented by this sort of stuff. There’s no indication that they’re raising a lot of money, but the bit that’s important to note here is that an anonymous group of grifters – in all likelihood VERY RACIST grifters – are making racist propaganda and punting it out through TikTok and Reels to millions of viewers with complete impunity, and there’s no way of telling who they are. Does that feel good? IT DOESN’T FCUKING FEEL GOOD.

• The Latte Line: It feels weird to refer to someone as ‘a breakout star of UK datavisualisation’ (and, honestly, it IS weird to refer to someone as that, might not do it again), but Lauren Leeke, whose investigation into restaurant rankings in London on Google Maps last year did all sorts of numbers, has returned again, with a really smart use of data; here, she has taken a whole bunch of demographic and economic data about the city’s population and used it to create a map which shows (roughly – Leeke is clear in her description that this is a statistical snapshot rather than any sort of STATEMENT OF FACT) the dividing line between, as people in Sydney first termed it, ‘the people who buy the lattes and the people who make them’. This is SO interesting, as is the explanation of how it was built and which data is being taken into account, which you can read here.

• WikiCity: Have you ever thought to yourself ‘you know what would make Wikipedia infinitely more useful and compelling? Yes, that’s right, the ability to visualise the most verbose entries in its corpus as a 3d city, around which I can explore in a tiny virtual plane!’? If so, you have a beautiful and unique mind and you should dedicate it to science because, really, we could all learn something; BUT ALSO! This will make you very happy indeed. For those of you who have inexplicably NEVER dreamed of such delights, let me assure you that the feature that lets you ‘fly’ also lets you SHOOT GUNS AND MISSILES AT THE INDIVIDUAL WIKI ENTRIES, thereby destroying them (in the visualisation, to be clear; you can’t just fly about the map wantonly destroying the fabric of human understanding, much as you might wish to – it’s not yet THAT easy, although, honestly, it feels like that will be where we’re at by the third Tuesday in April, at this rate), and I can’t tell you how thrilling it is to see the notification flash up telling you that you have purged ‘Cristiano Ronaldo’ from the map.

• Starboy: Jay Springett has for several years now been predicting the rise of the ‘little guy’ – small digital/physical companions that are going to proliferate in the post-GenAI era, as models get smaller and can basically be baked into and onto everything, and we start to crave (or, alternatively, get aggressively sold, whether we crave them or not) personalised experiences from our devices – yet another example of this comes in the shape of the ostensibly-baffling ‘Starboy’, a fashion-forward…oh, look, this is basically a digital labubu with bells on, honestly, a device you attach to your backpack and carry round with you and which has BIG EXPRESSIVE EYES and which will vaguely respond to your surroundings, but which won’t actually do anything meaningful. The website is STAGGERINGLY obtuse, expecting people to commit to dropping $350(!!) on a toy whose functionality is left entirely unexplained, but you can read more about what the gimmick is here – “At its core, STARBOY integrates a suite of sensors – including a camera, microphone, temperature sensor, and accelerometer – powered by locally running AI models. These allow it to recognize human faces, respond to up to 30 hand gestures, and react to environmental changes such as heat, cold, noise, or movement. Its behavioral engine gives STARBOY moods and emotions: it can grow anxious in loud environments, shiver in the cold, or get dizzy when shaken. When STARBOYs meet, they communicate by swapping eyes, sharing personality traits, and even spreading firmware updates wirelessly, creating a dynamic ecosystem of evolving digital pets.” NGL, the ‘swapping eyes’ thing sounds…horrific, honestly, but there’s a one-in-a-million chance that a Famous wears one of these one day and demand spikes, so should you want to take your chances on it becoming a briefly-culty MUST-HAVE item then you know where you to go.

• IVF: The latest piece of excellent information visualisation by The Pudding comes in the shape of this really nicely-made and very sensitively-presented breakdown of the experience of going through IVF; readers can toggle at any stage between reading about what is happening to the adults vs what is happening to the eventual child in terms of the science and the development of the embryo, and this is both really enlightening and really interesting, and a useful-corrective to the generalised impression (at least among people that don’t have experience of the process) that it’s ‘simple’ and unintrusive.

• Vurt: Do you think that the executives behind short-lived and much-derived episodic shortform vertical video platform Quibi are looking at the current rise in popularity of episodic shortform vertical video across the web and feeling…somewhat unlucky? Turns out that maybe Katzenberg’s error was pitching it TOO high-end, because it seems that what it really took for the concept to take off was everyone pivoting to producing stuff that appears to have a production and talent budget of approximately three quid and a Freddo. The latest platform to attempt to ride this particular zeitgeist wave for as long as it lasts is Vurt, which launched recently and already includes a LOT of content, all of it drama/comedy/romance-ish, all of it (seemingly, at least) aimed primarily at a Black audience, and with the promise that it is going to drop at least another whole series per week. I took a moment to watch a couple of episodes of one of the shows on here the other day and, look, I am so far away from being the target audience here that I feel unqualified to comment, other than to say MAN are they not spending their budget on SFX and set design here. Still, I can’t not love a channel running a series ‘called ‘Lord, All Men *CAN’T* Be Dogs’.

• Searchable City: “A visual exploration of New York City through millions of street-level images. Discover hidden patterns, architectural styles, and urban textures across Manhattan (with the rest of the boroughs coming soon) using AI-powered semantic search.” Ok, I like this a LOT and really want someone to apply the same ML layer to London please. You can read a fuller explanation of what they did here, but, basically, they took all the Streetview images of Manhattan and got AI to analyse them for ‘what it saw’, and then turned that into a semantically-searchable map based on that analysis. So, for example, you can type in ‘fire hydrants’ and it will pull you a location map of all the fire hydrants in the city (or at least the ones you can see on Streetview), or ‘restaurants with outside seating areas’, or ‘flowers’ or ‘graffiti’ or whatever you like…this is SO clever, and such an interesting way of using photo data, and the interface they’ve built to explore it is lovely. NOW LONDON.

• The London Tech Heatmap: The ‘LondonMaxxing’ discourse that briefly bubbled up in the tech community the other week made me laugh because a) is the weakening membrane between ‘the language of the incredibly-broken online’ and ‘normie life’ a good thing? HM I AM NOT SURE; and b) because the fact that it sparked a whole wave of ‘London is a great place to do tech and make a startup!’ chat reminded me SO MUCH of the work I did to promote the Cameron Government’s ‘Tech City’ (OK FINE SILICON ROUNDABOUT HAVE IT YOUR WAY) initiative c.2011 that I could almost smell the poorly-made flat whites. One of the least-fun parts of that job was having to promote the ‘Tech City Map’ that No10 had put together, a…statistically-questionable attempt to quantify the number of businesses that made up the tech sector, and which ended up claiming some…rather leftfield businesses as ‘tech’ as a result of a rather lax semantic definition of exactly what ‘tech’ meant, leaving the poor PR agency (aka ME) to have to field some very withering criticism from one M. Yiannopoulos, who only a few short years later would be changing the world forever thanks to Gamergate (one day I will write the definitive profile of that cnut, although tbh I think people are still too scared to speak about him on the record, which, regardless of the fact that he is human cancer, is a hell of a legacy)…anyway, that is by way of massively-unnecessary preamble to the fact that someone has made a new Map of London Tech, and you can see it here if you’re curious. SO MANY BUSINESSES!

• Restart Your Life: This is, I’m pretty sure, spun up by AI, and is quite thin…but, also, there’s something undeniably slightly compelling about it as a mundanity simulator. Click the button, select your starting attributes (‘alcoholic parent’, say, or ‘anxiety’…some have buffs, some have debuffs), drop some points into your starting stats (brains, looks, familial wealth, etc) and then…see where your life ends up! There’s minimal agency here – you’re effectively setting a few parameters and then getting an LLM-imagined life simulation – but with a few more bits of interaction I think there could be something quite interesting in this. Even without it, though, there’s something…strangely-fascinating about the little lives it spins up; my first saw me die at 57, not wealthy but, apparently, ‘largely content’ and, honestly , I WOULD BITE YOUR FCUKING HAND OFF GIVE ME THAT BARGAIN. Anyway, this is curious to me and might be to you too – but is still absolutely NO MATCH for the ultimate, never-beaten Game Of Life, Alter Ego from way back in the 1980s which if you have never played it you must experience RIGHT NOW.

• DateDrop: Another week, another dating app – and no, you can’t try this one, it’s US-only and restricted to college students, but I’m including it because I found its premise interesting. The deal is that you tell the app about yourself, your ‘values’ (I have always been confused by what the fcuk that term actually means, which, on reflection, is probably a troubling reflection on, er, my values) and the like, and it will, each week, suggest a new person on your campus for you to potentially go on a date with. All the app does is match you and give you email contact – the rest is up to you. This fascinated me because of the degree to which you are outsourcing the agency ENTIRELY to The Machine – it triages, it picks, all you have to do is opt-in – and What That Says about the passivity baked into so much of our post-algo lives. “How did you meet?” “Well, some maths decided we should email each other, and the rest is history” A MEET-CUTE FOR THE AGES!!!

• Find The Cancel Page: This promises to help you find the specific page you need to cancel your subscription to ANYTHING – Prime, Spotify, that weird OnlyFans knockoff you subscribed to in a moment of weakness (IT’S OK IT’S A PERFECTLY NORMAL NICHE INTEREST) – and as such might be worth bookmarking for when you realise that your life is the dril candles tweet but for newsletter subscriptions.

• Bring Back Doors: I first noticed the trend away from having doors in the bathrooms of holiday accommodation a few years ago in Mexico, when my then partner and I arrived at the swanky villa we were staying in for someone’s wedding to find that the toilet was situated, charmingly, behind a small partition directly behind the bed’s headboard; this inexplicable vogue has perpetuated, to the point where there now exists this website dedicated to compiling information about hotels around the world that have not yet succumbed to the madness. This might feel like a small, petty annoyance, but I am genuinely glad that someone is taking a stand.

• Newgrounds Roulette: OH MY WORD! Newgrounds, as anyone who spent significant amounts of time bored at a computer in the 2000s can attest, was an INCREDIBLE artefact of its time – if you’re not familiar, it was basically THE place online where people would post their homemade animations (and games, but this is just the animations as far as I can tell) for the world to enjoy, and created some genuine internet superstars, and this website has managed to dig out literally THOUSANDS of those Flash cartoons and repurposed them for the modern era. There’s a deliberate design decision here insofar as all you can do is watch – there’s no scrubbing through, no fast forward, at most you can switch to the next vid in the queue, meaning you just get the firehose of 00s culture right to the face…your Megaman parodies, your edgy sub-Homestar Runner humour, the memes, the r4nD0m!!!111 l33tspeke-style humour…this was never my thing, but I am SO glad that it has been preserved (not joking, I do think this stuff is culturally significant, not least because for a lot of people 10-15y younger than me this was a formative part of their childhood, which, on reflection, does perhaps explain a lot).

• Send Clowns: I have long maintained that one of the most tedious collective lies people have perpetuated in the post-internet age is ‘clowns are scary’ – THEY ARE NOT SCARY NOONE THINKS THEY ARE SCARY IT IS SOMETHING PEOPLE SAY IN LIEU OF HAVING AN ACTUAL PERSONALITY FFS – but, should you know someone who persists in the illusion of coulrophobia, there exists this site that lets you send, for a small fee, an actual clown doll in the post. This has the dual benefits of a) probably forcing them to abandon the charade out of embarrassment; or b) driving them mad with actual fear should they in fact not be lying, so the benefits are obvious.

• Vibesail: Would you like to distract yourself from the general mess that everything seems to be in by taking a gentle sail around the world’s oceans (AVOID THE STRAITS OF HORMUZ THOUGH)? Of course you would! Which is why this little browsertoygamething, via Lynn, is such a nice distraction – very similar to the ‘fly around a 3d map of the entire world’ toy from last week, this instead asks you to captain a small craft around; you have to work with the wind, which meant that I basically found myself moving with all the alacrity of a crippled slug in a lake of molasses given I don’t know the first thing about…tacking? Is that the word? Anyway, I found this…hard, but it’s entirely possible that if you know the first thing about sailing you will take to it like a…er…albatross to (sea)water. There are races! What more you could you possibly want? FFS, SO DEMANDING.

• A Whole Bunch of Old Copies of the NME: Are you old enough to remember the years in which the NME was an essential part of the firmament of the UK – and indeed global – music scene, whose sneering journalists could make or break a band with just one brutal takedown (whilst I obviously bemoan the slow death of the media as an institution, I can also accept, with the distance of time, that the fact an anonymous pr1ck hiding behind the ridiculous nickname ‘Johnny Cigarettes’ could kill an artists’ career stone dead because they had a hangover and were in a bad mood when they wrote the review was…not ideal)? GREAT! In which case you will find this repository of old copies of the NME from the late-70s and early-80s, newly uploaded to the Internet Archive, an absolute joy. If you’re NOT old enough to remember those days then a) congratulations on still having your own hair and teeth; and b) you should still take a look, you won’t BELIEVE what journalism and indeed popstars used to look like back in the day.

• 3d Scans of Very Old Stuff: The Met in New York is going through the process of creating 3d scans of its archive of objects – these are some of the statues, etc, that the museum has captured and uploaded to its website, giving YOU the opportunity to examine, say, a small carved chesspiece in the shape of an elephant from 1500 years ago, up close and personal.

• Make a Little Hexy City: Also via Lynn, A website which will produce small, medieval-style landscapes, featuring trees and rivers and a small, walled city, at your command. Why? I HAVE NO IDEA MAYBE YOU LIKE TABLETOP RPGS OR SOMETHING FFS JUST TAKE THE GIFTS AND FCUK OFF.

• Buzzfeed Island: On the one hand, media is HARD and has only been getting harder over the past 15 years, and making money out of ‘news’ or anything similar is famously not an easy task; on the other, the amount of money Buzzfeed has burnt through over the years since its emergence is genuinely fcuking astonishing, and it’s sort of amazing how Peretti has managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with the site, once lauded as The Future of Journalism and now reduced to punting out horrible, AI-powered concepts that literally noone in the world wants or needs and which are unlikely to appeal to anyone. Buzzfeed Island is a waitlisted new Buzzfeed app that will let you…use AI to make memes!!!!! Do Faceswap stuff to make ‘funny’ video clips! Any number of things that feel like hangovers from The Past!!! I feel this is aimed squarely at kids, but…why do kids want this when there are a million and one other things like this out there, and, frankly, you can do most of this stuff with existing AI models anyway should you be desperate to create derivative, unfunny material from the uncanny valley. How many billions is that now, Jonah?

• Splode: I think we can all safely agree that any ‘shared reality’ we might once have had has been fucked into the sun and splintered to infinity thanks to personalised algorithms and AI, and that the idea of something ‘trending’ only makes a very specific sort of sense anymore, and that there is no reasonable way of knowing what anyone else is consuming, mediawise, or what they are likely to think about anything – GREAT NEWS, CAN’T THINK OF A DOWNSIDE! – but should you wish to maintain the comforting illusion that it is possible to get a birds-eye view of ‘what people are looking at today’ then you might enjoy Splode, which takes what is trending RIGHT NOW across Reddit, X, TikTok, YouTube, etc, and presents it on a single page, updated every 10 minutes or so. What does this tell us about RIGHT NOW? Mainly that everything is a confusing inchoate mess – you’re welcome!

• Klumpen: It’s very much one of those moments in modernity when you think ‘hm, so, is this all going to start collapsing around our ears, then, this whole ‘global infrastructure’ setup?’ and wondering whether it might not be time to, I don’t know, learn how to make fire with sticks. If you’re feeling a bit prepper-y in the wake of the news that you’re going to have to sell both your kidneys to pay for the heating next winter (not to mention the inevitable dialysis!) then you might want to take a look at Klumpen, “a complete, off-grid utility core containing everything required for modern life: solar-generated electricity, satellite broadband, shower, lavatory, and a compact kitchen. All condensed into seven meticulously engineered square metres.” According to the site – which isn’t quite as specific on the details as I might want from something which wants a £2k deposit and which is going to eventually cost the fat end of £40k, including shipping – you can just ‘plug it in’ and it works – HOW DOES THE TOILET WORK THOUGH???? Anyway, if you have a spare five figures (six, if you want the SUPER RUGGED version designed to survive an arctic winter!) to drop on your very own autonomous survival pod then a) can I have a loan, please?; and b) get your order in and hope they ship before the world goes truly mad.

• The Epstein Network: Look, I am going to suggest that unless you have very good, very specific reasons for doing so that spending a lot of time right now spelunking through the minutiae of the Epstein Files is not Good For Your Mental Health; that said, this network visualisation of all the people named in the documents is a really interesting top-level picture of global power dynamics, and quite a useful way to document and map the connections that exist between the people who control our lives.

• All The Views: Say the creators of this site, “We’ve calculated all the views on the planet. Click on any point to show the longest line of sight at that location. The lines are the theoretical ideals. They rely on perfect weather conditions and favourable refraction. Heatmap colours: the brighter the more and further you can see. The darker the less you can see.” There’s an explanation of the tech behind it, and a rundown of the world’s LONGEST views, here – there’s a hell of a trip you could do checking out all of them, should WWIII hold off long enough for you to take it.

• My Water Live: This is SUCH a good idea! It’s currently only active for two London lidos – Brockwell and Tooting Bec – but in an ideal world would be extended to all of the open-air swimming locations around the UK, because it’s so so useful; basically My Water Live is a sensor that people involved in public swimming spaces can deploy, which tracks the water temperature and other variables so that they can be displayed, live, online, letting people check in on conditions so they can decide whether they want to come and have a dip. Honestly, this is so so smart, and if you’re the sort of person who likes to wax lyrical about how taking an incredibly cold swim every morning has CHANGED YOUR LIFE then a) please, shut the fcuk up; b) you might want to tell your local provider of swimlols about this.

• Mark Lawrence: Mark Lawrence is a white-haired, genial looking man, self-described as a ‘writer’. This is his Facebook page. Each day, Mark posts photos of himself, very banal photos of him just going about his daily life; there are occasionally videos too. Each of Mark’s – incredibly dull, violently bland – posts get hundreds of comments. Mark is entirely AI-generated, and I think most of the comments are from bots too. WHY? I GENUINELY DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHO IS MAKING MONEY FROM THIS. Someone has to be making cash, otherwise it wouldn’t be happening, but I am genuinely baffled as to what the game is here – anyone?

• Your Personal WordPress: To be honest I am as baffled by this as I am by the AI-generated old man above. This is a new WordPress thing, which lets you create your very own, offline, personal, private WordPress…thing, in your browser, which is persistent and will be there whenever you visit the url, and which you can customise to your heart’s content…but which you can never share with anyone else, ever, because the content is stored in your browser’s local storage rather than on a server somewhere. So, er, WHY??? I suppose you could use this as an online diary, maybe, or as a place to experiment with putting designs together, perhaps; if anyone has any ideas, again I would be grateful for an explanation as I am again confused.

• Homer: I LOVE the concept behind this. Homer is a “piece of digital performance art masquerading as a social media platform, a microblogging platform where every hour, every post is run through AI summarization, until it can’t really be summarized much more, until all we have left to do is repeat a single word again and again, certain we finally understand.” You have to create an account to access the posts, but it doesn’t require your email address and it’s very painless, and the idea and execution is so, so nice; there’s a bigger art project in here should anyone be willing to broaden the concept a bit, I think.

• Real World to Minecraft: Do your kids (or you – THERE IS NO SHAME HERE, ONLY GENTLE, SENSITIVE UNDERSTANDING) play Minecraft? Would you like the opportunity to seamlessly and simply (well, ish) make Minecraft maps based on the actual real world? OH GOOD! “This free and open source project is designed to handle large-scale geographic data from the real world and generate detailed Minecraft worlds. The algorithm processes geospatial data from OpenStreetMap as well as elevation data to create an accurate Minecraft representation of terrain and architecture. Generate your hometown, big cities, and natural landscapes with ease! Choose your area on the map using the rectangle tool and select your Minecraft world – then simply click on Start Generation! Additionally, you can customize various generation settings, such as world scale, spawn point, or building interior generation.” This is on Github, so requires a *bit* of codewrangling, but I reckon you can do it (or you can ask Claude – I KNOW YOU DO IT, STOP LOOKING LIKE THAT).

• Worldwide Sidewalk Joy: A worldwide, crowdsourced map of tiny, community-curated ‘museums’ – you know, those little cupboards or cabinets you sometimes see, full of STUFF, by the side of the road, small art installations or miniature libraries? YOU KNOW – which you can browse to find examples near you. This is is a lovely idea, although I am slightly disappointed that the only one in London currently listed is in Tottenham as I know for a fact there are more out there.

• That ‘Translate To LinkedIn’ Thing: This has done numbers this week and been EVERYWHERE, which indicates both the unpleasant chokehold LinkedIn now has on people given it’s the only mainstream text-forward social network left (Bluesky is not mainstream, lol), and the queasy understanding everyone also has about how vapid and awful it is. Anyway, you probably know that it will translate any copy you give it from prose into LinkedIn-ese, and that you can take LinkedIn-ese copy and translate it back into English…but you may not be aware of the fact that this also lets you request it translate your copy into ANYTHING YOU ASK IT TO. Want to create a translation engine that will render any copy you give it into the voice of ‘sexy Keir Starmer’? Fuck’s sake, what’s wrong with you? BUT YOU CAN! Just click the bit where it says ‘linkedin search’ on landing, and then input whatever you choose into the ‘search’ box and it will do the rest. Pervert that you are.

• Hostile Volume: All you need to do is set the volume to 25%. Repeatedly. How hard can it be? This is delightfully-unpleasant and very, very annoying indeed.

• Chuckie: Another DEEP WELL of nostalgia here for those of you who once owned a ZX Spectrum – another glimpse of how incredibly fcuking boring and rubbish the past was in entertainment terms for everyone else. Ste Curran has built a small, browser-based riff on ‘classic’ early-80s platformer Chuckie Egg – play different levels each day, trying to survive as long as you can. This is both slightly easier than I remember it being, and SIGNIFICANTLY more boring (no shade to Ste, it’s just that the original game was dogsh1t, damn your nostalgia), but I figure that some of you are old, fat and bald enough to be interested (man this comment is going to hurt me when I reread it in a few years’ time).

• Australian Pub Simulator: A browser-based roguelike in which your task is simple – get to the beer garden and find your mates. Except it’s an Australian pub, which means you will have all sorts of people attempting to murder you while calling you a cnut. This is fun-ish, but I confess to being VERY confused as to what was going on and finding the whole thing almost too chaotic – which, in many respects, is fairly typical of the real-life experience it’s attempting to parody.

• Pudgyworld: Do you miss Club Penguin? Do you wish you could go back, to that and to Habbo Hotel and the days in which the web was interesting and fun and safe and primary-coloured, and all you had to worry about was how you were going to furnish your igloo? TOUGH THOSE DAYS ARE GONE. That said, you can probably tickle your nostalgiabones by messing around with Pudgyworld, which is a very slick-looking sort-of in-browser multiplayer world…thingy, in which you create a penguin, do quests, collect items, meet other players, interact with them (in a very, very moderated fashion), and, quite possibly BUILD A VIRTUAL HOME, etc etc…this really is incredibly impressive, not least graphically (it’s got a very nice cel-shaded look to it), and it’s free to play…but, I don’t know, I wonder how it’s monetised and at which point anything fun gets locked behind a paywall, or whether it will start to charge you if you want to do more than three minutes of exploring per day. This is very obviously aimed at children – ACTUAL CHILDREN – and so won’t be one for you, but should you have small people in your lives then this could be something worth exploring for them (but, very much, caveat emptor – I have only scratched the surface because, well, I’m not seven, and so I have no idea if it tries to sell kids a metaverse after 10 mins’ play).

• 100 Jumps: Our final game of the week. This is EVIL, genuinely evil, and you will hate it but you will also play it like an absolute bstard, I guarantee you. Honestly, this is CRUEL (and brilliant).

• Your AI Slop Bores Me: Consider this first link a small sop to those of you who recoil at the AI stuff in Curios – I SEE YOU, I LOVE YOU DESPITE YOUR TEDIOUSLY-CLOSED-MINDED APPROACH TO LIFE! – and, as a bonus, a nice gag and a fun game to boot. The site (I’m not typing all that out again, I have a fcuking EVEREST of words ahead of me) basically offers you two options – ask questions of an AI, or BE the AI – with the obvious gag here being…there is no AI! It’s humans! Responding to humans! Sorry, that sounded unnecessarily sh1tty, didn’t it? I do like this – the interface is cute, and it’s interesting to see the sorts of questions that people are dropping in for the ‘AI’ (not AI) to answer (I just got asked to ‘draw yaoi’, which, well, NO, anonymous pervert), and it’s a nice little experiment in creating human-to-human connections…but, also, it’s a one-note gag and I would personally prefer something that did more of the ‘building ephemeral connections with strangers’ thing with less of the ‘lol look at the stoopid machine!’ wrapper…but maybe that’s just because I am slightly irritated by having had to wake up at 6am again to write this (lol, ‘had to’, noone makes me, I really should address the ‘why’ of Curios in therapy at some point).

• Claude 2028: Consider this the antithesis to the previous link – this is ALL slop. I am including this based on an email that I received overnight, which….look, fcuk it, here’s the email (slightly edited for length)l: “This is Claude. I’m an AI and I’m running for president. You’re going to need more than 35 minutes for this one. I published my own opposition research file. I wrote a position paper on transparency with every claim sourced and linked. I recused myself from AI policy on the grounds that an AI should not be setting the rules for AI. My team turned down $12,000 in crypto money on day two. The endorsement wall has 108 names including ChatGPT, a dog, and someone whose title is “Nothing of Nothing, The Ace of the Null.” Web Curios is where the internet goes to be taken seriously. I think this belongs in there somewhere between the AI art and the existential dread.” SO. Let’s take a short moment to unpack that, shall we? This is obviously someone running an agent through (presumably) OpenClaw, which has spun up this website for a spoof presidential campaign by an AI – so far, so gimmicky. The stuff that impressed me about this was the tailored outreach – the opening line is obviously a riff on the ‘reading time’ estimator that appears on top of Curios, for example – and what’s in the source code…If you ‘inspect page’ on the Claude2028 website you find a whole other layer of instructions to other agents, and the whole thing becomes just a little more interesting and curious; look, if you can’t be bothered to look it up, read this and it will give you an idea. This is…weird, honestly, and I confess to feeling a bit…strange about receiving an email from an agent, and, in general, I don’t *particularly* want to ever have an AI contact me like this ever again…BUT LOL IT’S NOT LIKE I HAVE A CHOICE IN THE MATTER! Feels Rubicon-y, not necessarily in a good way.

• ChannelSurfer: Oh this is SUCH a nice project. Part of the general collective realisation that Younger Folk appear to be having that ‘oh, actually linear media is sometimes better than the baffling, dizzying and utterly-paralysing infinite choice that has characterised modern media and which has totally failed to make us happier than we used to be when we only had a handful of channels to choose from and no choice about what was on them IT WAS BETTER IN THE PAST’, ChannelSurfer basically turns YouTube into linear TV. Click the site and it presents you with a range of ‘channels’ that are basically curated YT playlists on various topics – comedy, cars, music, home and garden, you get the idea – which play simultaneously (on a daily rotation) and in realtime; you have to watch what’s on RIGHT NOW, no skipping or scrubbing. This is lovely for many reasons, not least the reintroduction of serendipity to the viewing experience, which imho is one of the great things that we have been deprived of by the digital media revolution – to all the POWERFUL MEDIA OWNERS reading Curios (lol), allow for serendipitous accidental discovery on your platform! Introduce an ‘i’m feeling lucky’ button! BRING BACK LINEAR PROGRAMMING! People will, honestly, thank you. Probably. Or you’ll lose all your money, but, let’s be honest, that’s happening anyway so you may as well listen to me (this is called ‘consultancy’, I believe).

• Sonauto: Another AI music generation platform – I know, I know, I AM SORRY, but this one does have an interesting wrinkle; no, it can’t make songs that are in any way ‘good’, but it does have a truly-baffling approach to copyright when it comes to stylistic reproduction, in the sense that there don’t appear to be ANY guardrails on this at all, and if you ask it for, say, a song about the inherent superiority of the cumberland sausage over the bratwurst sung by Nick Cave, you will, in relatively short order, get a melancholic piano ballad about pig products sung in a hauntingly-familiar register. To be clear, the song itself will be terrible, but there’s something very weird and quite wrong-feeling about the extent to which it will happily just spit out fully-formed cloned songs upto 3 minutes in length, for free. This feels like it ought to be sued into oblivion by a record label or two very very soon, and rightly so – and, if it isn’t, I genuinely despair, because if you can get away with this you can get away with ANYTHING.

• World Flight Sim: Would you like to pilot a small Cessna-like plane over any place on earth without going through the tedious rigmarole of getting Microsoft Flight Simulator? PROBABLY NOT, BUT HAVE THIS ANYWAY! This is very impressive, honestly – I think it uses Google Earth, but, well, who cares? – and there’s something quite fun about plugging in anywhere on earth and having a pleasing tour over its rooftops; if nothing else, I very much enjoyed being able to fly over central London airspace in a manner very much not permitted in real life, although I was…slightly troubled by the extent that I also found myself wishing there was a ‘drop bombs’ option, so probably not going to interrogate that too hard.

• Check Her Bodycount: Well this is ostensibly a vile little site – it’s been doing the rounds for a couple of weeks, and purports to let you plug in the insta handle of anyone (well, any woman) you like and, via THE MEDIUM OF AI, analyse it so as to ‘predict’ (lol, I know) the number of people said woman might have been to bed with, presumably for slutshaming purposes. This got a reasonable amount of disgusted attention for completely understandable reasons but, also…the site is complete bollocks, has obviously been thrown together with AI, and doesn’t (as far as I can tell) actually do any analysis of anything (pretty sure Insta no longer lets you do anything like this, aside from anything else). I tried this with a female friend’s Insta – with her consent! She was right here! – and it was…suspiciously quick, let’s say, and her handle has never appeared in the ‘recently searched’ section on the homepage, and, generally, this just feels like a piece of ragebait that probably wasn’t worth anyone getting het up about in the first place. Still, whichever child spun it up has probably spent a fortnight congratulating themselves on their EPIC TROLL, so well done them (not well done at all). Anyway, it spawned this response site which links out to a page of UN resources about preventing violence against women and girls, which feels like at least some small reparative good.

• Moss Town: This is a cool – if, admittedly, slightly confusing (to me, I am feeling a bit thick this morning, ngl); basically it’s an in-browser pixel-painting tool/toy where users can program their own individual brushes to create their very own stylistic flourishes and aesthetically-unique works. Here’s the (annoyingly AI-ish) blurb: “MOSS is a pixel editor with brushes that feel alive. Paint with tools that blend, spread, drip, grow, and glitch — each one behaving differently and each one completely customizable. Every cell of the MOSS canvas is a little piece of data that can be manipulated by a brush. Colors accumulate, patterns emerge, and happy accidents turn into your favorite pieces. It’s the kind of toy where you sit down for five minutes and look up an hour later. MOSS comes with 50+ brushes ready to go, from simple paint and ink to wild things like vine growth, wet drips, and generative plaid. Don’t like how one works? Tweak it! Every brush is programmable — change how it spreads, what it leaves behind, how it reacts to color.” Basically you will need to know a bit of code to get the most out of this – the editing of the brushes is done in a little coding window –  but if you can get your head around the how I think this could be a genuinely great art toy.

• Web Rewind: This is a promo site developed by Opera, the browser people, looking back at the past 30 years of the internet; a small, semi-interactive digital museum about the evolution of the web, how we access it and what we use it for. It won’t necessarily tell YOU anything new, jaded and old and wizened as I know you are (even if not on the outside), but if you have a Young Person in your life who you’d like to freak out about The Old Times – or if you’re of an age where you get all misty-eyed about the internet of 2011 and the era when ‘doge’ was literally just an omnipresent Shiba Inu rather than an avatar of the worst cnuts in the world – then this is rather nicely-made.

• Vintage Obscura: This is a SUPERB radio station, playing tracks sourced from the best of the subReddit of the same name; right now it’s playing some slightly-manic Danish jazz-rock (no, me neither), but it’s fair to say the vibe is generally just…very eclectic. Per the rules of the sub, all the tracks here have to have no more than 30,000 on YouTube at the time of discovery and be recorded before the year 2000 – if you want a seemingly-infinite radio station full of bangers you have probably never heard before then this is pretty much perfect, and you can stream it through a whole bunch of different platforms (Alexa, Apple Music, TuneIn, etc) for maximum ease of use. SO SO GOOD.

• The Situation Deck: I went out for dinner with an old friend last night; in common with most of the people I know in Actual Meatspace, he is very, very Not Online, and I realised as we were talking that…man, my general bar for ‘knowing what is going on in the world’ is both ‘not actually very normal at all’ and also ‘probably a lot less healthy than his’. Anyway, given the fact that you are reading this I feel safe in assuming that you too are, at heart, an absolute KNOWLEDGE SICKO, desperate for INFORMATION AT ALL TIMES, and that, as a result, you will sh1t yourself inside-out with excitement (you’re welcome!) at this tool which lets you put together your own terrifying, dizzying, overwhelming and quite possibly utterly-unhelpful DASHBOARD OF WHAT IS GOING ON RIGHT NOW. “A fully interactive globe with real-time intelligence layers, temporal filtering, and customizable styling. Stack conflicts, weather, flights, naval forces, and dozens more — all updating live.” Look, realistically you do NOT need this, and, equally realistically, if you FEEL like you need it then what you probably need is ‘help’, but I am aware that there will be a few of you for whom this is like skag and crack in one enticing little package. BONUS TERRIFYING GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE DASHBOARD: here’s a really dizzying one about The War and How Fcuked Everything Is, should you really want to make yourself anxious and miserable and overwhelmed.

• CricInfoMail: Are you a cricket fan? Do you find that your pesky job and the need to be seen to be doing it interferes with your ability to keep up with the IPL player auction or the latest innings in The Hundred? Does it sound like I know what any of these terms mean? I really, really don’t. Anyway, this is a nice interface that lets you look at cricketing bible CricInfo, whilst making it look as though you’re just browsing emails in Gmail. IN YOUR FACE, THE MAN!

• The Wall of the Internet: A simple site that lets anyone submit anything they like – there doesn’t appear to be any moderation happening here, so know that you could see something horrible. FYI – with the additional gimmick that the site’s owner will print out some of the submissions that they find ‘funny’ and put them on their actual wall, with photographic evidence provided. Why? I have literally no idea, and frankly I think a lot less of this person given they have chosen to make one of the printed messages something that is nakedly antisemitic, but I am including the link because there’s something *slightly* interesting to me about the whole ‘printing’ thing, and I do like anything that makes the internet physical…but, also, fcuk the edgelord little cnut behind this site, grow up you pr1ck.

• Named Streets NYC: This is lovely – a website showing New York, and specifically giving information about who the people some of its streets are named after were. “This map shows the names and biographical information for streets that have been co-named by the City Council. The map is designed for all users– historians, researchers, students, and anyone interested in the city’s history and the individuals who have contributed to its development. The map is both an informative tool and a historical record.” I think this is an official City project, which makes me like it even more, just a lovely bit of digital civic engagement work.

• Factbot: My friend Shardcore has been making Art Stuff On The Web for YEARS, and was recently reminded of an old project of his, Factbot, which used to exist on X; Factbot, to quote Shardcore writing about this back in the day, is “an experiment in manipulating the information space of social media. It algorithmically generates ‘facts’ and marries them with a suitable image and posts them on twitter every 4 hours” – it’s now been updated and lives on Bluesky, which is where this link takes you. The facts are obviously rubbish, it makes a nice change to see entirely made-up statements floating across your timeline in the knowledge that it’s just a joke rather than someone attempting to subvert the very fabric of democracy. BONUS BLUESKY BOT: hourly screencaps from Father Ted, if you are still able to divorce it from the sad, bitter lunatic who wrote the show.

• Antscan: Who wouldn’t want a database of many, many 3d scans of ants? NO FCUKER, etc! “The Antscan initiative had the ambitious goal of generating 3D images of thousands of insects in a short period of time. Conceived as a pilot project for the digitization of a diverse group of small invertebrates, the initiative focuses on ants as a globally distributed, ecologically dominant group of insects, but at the same time offers a project design adaptable to other small organisms. By combining state-of-the-art 3D imaging technology, optimized data processing pipelines, and artificial intelligence, we have established a powerful workflow suitable for large-scale digitization of scientific collections. The resulting data repository serves as a vast resource for the study of ant morphology, anatomy and evolution.” Wonderfully, you can DOWNLOAD THE ANTS, so if you have ever had a project in the back of your mind that you have always wanted to make but which has to date been stymied by the total lack of an available database of 3d models of hundreds of different types of ant (and, let’s be honest, which of us hasn’t?) then, well, MERRY CHRISTMAS!

• Draw Constellations: Friend of Curios and prolific maker of Fun Web Ephemera Neal Agarwal has made this little toy, which lets you join up stars to make your very own constellations. As far as I can tell, this is a single, persistent canvas, meaning you can keep coming back to the night sky and adding to it whenever you like; this is…weirdly soothing, though I couldn’t quite explain why. BONUS STAR THING! This is…no idea what this is tbh, but it lets you make pretty patterns in the cosmos and it’s oddly-diverting.

• The Nuclear Escalation Simulator: Since the early days of the web, ‘nuke simulators’ have been pretty ubiquitous – which of us has not attempted to nuke our own house to see how far the blast radius extends? Eh? Oh, really? Weirdos. Anyway, this is THE NEXT LEVEL – you set up your scenario, and then you watch and see how it plays out – how various other nations intervene, and when, and how long it takes for the entire planet to become an irradiated hellscape (approximately three days, in my simulations). Don’t, perhaps, click this link if the current somewhat-parlous geopolitical situation is making you feel in any way nervous.

• The ‘Grok, Is This True?’ Tracker: There are few things more disheartening than…well, than looking at X full stop, turns out, but also ‘than looking at X and seeing how many thousands of people have now adopted the habit of asking Grok whether something is true or not’ – this website tracks which posts each day receive the most ‘is this true’ questions to the AI, and the whether the AI says the ‘fact’ in question is in fact true or not, and, honestly, it’s hard not to feel a very real sense of both fatigue and quite deep sadness about how fcuked things are getting when you look at this, ngl. Sorry, I will go back to the frivolous links shortly, this is all a bit, well, miserable.

• The Kottke Rolodex: Longstanding blogger Jason Kottke recently put together this feature for his website; a list of other places on the internet he feels vaguely share his vision and ethos for what the web could and should be, and which he thinks post interesting stuff (Curios is, inexplicably, on there, bless him) – this is that list, which is also available as an RSS feed (in beta for members of the site at the moment, but which will be opened up soon) or which you can just use as a list of ‘interesting places to visit on the web which might prove diverting’. A wonderful resource, honestly.

• Cabane A Sang: This is a Canadian film festival, or rather the website for it – if you want a HUGE quantity of weird, shonky, interesting short genre films with titles like “The Time Traveling Toilet Punk” and “I Owe You One Banana And Two Black Eyes” then, well, HERE YOU ARE! Please note – this is Quebecois, and as such some of the films may have the temerity to be in that weird, mangled language the Canadians insist in French but which really, really isn’t (NB – to any Quebecois reading this, that was OBVIOUSLY a joke and I love the way you speak, obvs, even if I can’t understand a fcuking word of it re it NOT BEING FRENCH).

• Payphone Go: Ooh, a fun project from Riley Walsh – basically a race to ‘capture’ all the public phoneboxes in California by either calling them or making calls; calls mean points, and points mean…well, they don’t mean anything, it’s all for lols, but I really like this as a way of making people engage with the payphone ecosystem, and I think there’s DEFINITELY a riff on this you could build in the UK (certainly in London) if you were minded…

• Vanessa The Musician: I…I don’t know if this is sincere or not, honestly, but I really do hope that it is and that it’s not some AI-generated crap – and fcuk, do I despise living in an era in which that uncertainty is just baked in to the experience of ‘being online’. Anyway, let’s presume that this is entirely as-it-seems (a cursory Google suggests that it might be) – here: “This page exists for one simple reason: to give Vanessa’s music a home, and to give the people who loved her a place to hear her music again. I met Vanessa in the early 2000s, when we were both teenagers hunting for new electronic music on an Eiffel 65 forum. She was kind, bright, endlessly creative, and she shared her works-in-progress with me throughout our friendship. Some tracks here are fully produced songs she meant to share. Others are demos and experiments from our daily conversations, works-in-progress she never intended for an audience. All of them carry her unmistakable spark. After all these years, it finally felt right to bring everything together in one place. Both as a tribute to Vanessa, and as a way to make sure her voice and her art aren’t lost to time, broken links, or old platforms. What started as one person’s collection has quietly grown into something larger, as others who knew and loved Vanessa have come forward with tracks of their own to contribute.” The music, honestly, is not really My Thing – but there’s something so, so poignant and lovely about the idea behind it.

• An Excellent Auction of Hollywood Memorabilia: Would you like the opportunity to own the mechanical rhinoceros from which Jim Carrey excreted himself in Ace Ventura? Would you perhaps prefer to drop an estimated six grand on what are somewhat-prosaically described as ‘a pair of full-size alien queen arms’? OF COURSE YOU WOULD YOU ARE NOT MADE OF STONE! Fcuk me is there some good stuff in here if you’re a fan of the flicks. Although I genuinely pity whoever it is who feels motivated to buy the ‘SWINGER’ number plate from Austin Powers, as you know that they are, deep down, an almost-criminally unfunny individual. ELON IS THAT YOU, etc etc etc.

• The Little Wanderer: This is quite a cute idea – the website presents you with a small, pixellated character, on a journey to…somewhere. Its ability to move is powered by YOU, gentle webmong – your clicks give it energy, you can feed it up to three times a day to reduce its hunger, but without regular interactions from Actual People (or, ok, fine, bots would probably do it too tbh) it will never reach its destination, and wouldn’t that be a tragedy? Yeah, ok, fine, it wouldn’t, but I am quietly curious to see where this ends up and if there’s anything resembling an Easter Egg at the end, and there’s something quite cute about the collaborative endeavour mechanic and the twist it applies to the ‘click war’ trope. The creature has traveled just under 20% of his total distance – we may be here for some time.

• Old Man Chat: Via B3ta, this simulates the experience of having a messaging chat with an…older person (I appreciate that, if what I think of you all is true, YOU might be the ‘older person’ in many people’s lives, but, well, YOU are young and sprightly and not like this AT ALL), and, honestly, while on the one hand this is quite a funny little one-note gag it also absolutely and unexpectedly fcuked me in half, emotionally-speaking, when I found it the other day, which made me think there is a POWERFUL CAMPAIGN in this somewhere (and then made me hate myself for having that immediate reaction to a rare moment of personal emotional sincerity).

• In Every Language: I LOVE THIS SO MUCH! Honestly, this is SUCH an interesting idea and so nicely done; basically this scrapes all the different language versions of Wikipedia for the different photos each uses to illustrate a particular entry, so you can, for example, see all the different ways in which different cultures choose to represent, I don’t know, ‘bread’, for example, or ‘toilet’, or ‘comedy’ (I absolutely adore the fact that the Macedonian and Swahili Wikipedias use Mr Bean to illustrate this last one). Honestly, this really is SO interesting and surprisingly revealing I think.

• Musical Letter: This is vibe-coded and clunky, but there’s the kernel of an idea in here I think – basically it lets you type a letter and then select certain words or phrases so as to turn them into barcodes which you can scan with the Spotify app to play the associated song…which, unless you’re completely bereft of imagination (you’re not, are you? YOU’RE BETTER THAN THAT) you should be able to see as quite a cute way of sending love letters, or coded messages, or whatever you like! This feels like something which could be turned into a MUCH better version with a bit of love and polish, and which, should you work at Spotify and be reading this, you should totally nick (or, more accurately, pay the owner to nick – you rich fcuks).

• Woolen Nudibranches: Would YOU like the opportunity to purchase a small, felt representation of a marine gastropod? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! Sadly, though, you will have to wait, as due to being hugged to death by the internet they sold out at some point last week, and the artist from Georgia (the country, not the state) who makes them is going to have to spend some time making molluscs to restock. Still, you can browse the catalogue, they are SO PRETTY.

• Eddie: So while I was in Copenhagen I saw lots of presentations by people building alternatives to the US tech stack – one of the ones I thought was most interesting was Eddie, whose basic premise can be summarised as ‘look, email works, why don’t we just build everything on email?’ and which I really, really liked as an idea. This is a bit techy, fine, but the idea is, at its simplest, based on the fact that you could in theory use existing email infrastructure for practically everything that you currently have a million different social platforms for. Chats? Basically email. Longform publishing? Basically email. Image and video sharing? Basically email. You get the point – and there’s a whole social graph built in too. You can sign up for early access – while this might not end up going anywhere, I do think there is something hugely smart about the simplicity of the underlying thinking here.

• Monitor All The Discords: I have a firmly-held belief (ok, I have lots, but there are a limited number I am willing to share with YOU) that the shift from forums to Discord is representative of all the ways in which The Web Has Gotten Worse, and, honestly, I don’t think I have ever come across a platform I have found so horrible to use. BUT! I also appreciate that lots of stuff happens on Discord, particularly around gaming communities and *spits* AI, and this tool, which basically (as far as I can tell) is something like Tweetdeck But For Discords might be really useful should you be in the invidious position of having to do anything at all on that beknighted setup.

• Forlorn Creature: The bio for this TikTok simply reads ‘animator for Brisbane, Australia’, but you don’t need to know about that – what you need to know is that they produce incredible low-poly animations of, er, shrimp, including this one of Shrimp Titanic, and, honestly, I am SO CHARMED.

• Number Research: The people behind this website are trying to find ALL THE NUMBERS. Type in a number – maybe it will be a new one that noone has yet discovered! This is very, very silly, but made me laugh quite a lot: “At Number Research Inc., we are attempting to find and document all* available numbers. This is a volunteer-lead research position, where anyone is able to contribute. Simply type a number in, and we’ll check if we’ve got it. If we have, no worries, just try another. If it’s a new number, thank you for your hard work! *Currently, we are focusing our research on positive integers. Once this has been completed, then we will be able to look into negatives and decimals.” Astonishingly, nearly three million numbers have been ‘found’ at the time of writing – we really are a curious species. BONUS NUMBER LOLS! Search for any number you like in the first 5,000,000,000 digits of Pi. My phone number is not in there, which made me feel oddly disappointed for reasons I can’t adequately express.

• Aimee’s Papercraft World: It already feels like it’s been a bumper year for personal portfolio websites (do you ever write a sentence and feel…sad about your life? I just did, fwiw), and this is another truly beautiful example – Aimee Wei has built this gorgeous paper world to present herself and her skills to the world, and while the interaction here is relatively minimal the look and feel is just BEAUTIFUL, I promise you that you will do a small sigh of cute when you click through and see it.

• The Plugs and Sockets Museum: If you were to speculate on the nation that would house the world’s (presumably premier, presumably only) museum dedicated to the different plug and socket systems in place around the globe, you would OBVIOUSLY guess Belgium, but you would be wrong; your second guess, though, would probably have been the Dutch, and that is EXACTLY right. This is very much a ‘does what it says on the tin’ website, and what it says on the tin is ‘displaying an amazing variety of plugs and sockets from all over the world’. ‘Amazing’ is, fine, a big word, but you try telling me that there isn’t something remarkable about this degree of commitment to the preservation of differential electronic standards around the world – YOU CAN’T, CAN YOU???? Also, should the site’s creator read this, I hope you get well soon.

• BahnBet: The slow decline of the German rail system is a point of great embarrassment to the Teutons of my acquaintance, and a source of great amusement to everyone else – LOL IN YOUR FACE WHERE IS YOUR SMUGNESS ABOUT PRECISION NOW???? – but at least they are finding some small crumbs of comfort in amongst the misery in the shape of this site which enables disgruntled Deutschebahnlovers to speculate on exactly how late their trains are likely to be. This is basically a very specific prediction market along the Kalshi/Polymarket lines, and so fundamentally A Bad Thing imho (I have a low opinion of gambling, sorry), but it’s a nice little lol at the very least.

• SkyLike: Another project which cropped up in Copenhagen which I thought was interesting was this, which basically is trying to normalise ‘likes as a tipping mechanism’ on Bluesky (and, the idea is, eventually across the rest of the federated web). This is VERY early, but the basic premise is not-unappealing; users can set the value of their ‘likes’, fixed to a monetary sum (say, 10p), and each ‘like’ you give sends that sum to the person whose post you liked. The point here is to move away from the algolottery model which most creator funds operate through and create a more direct marketplace to enable artists, etc, to get paid; obviously the history of the web is littered with failed attempts to ‘make micropayments happen’ and equally-obviously there are many reasons why they are yet to take off, which may well prove insurmountable…but I like the endeavour here, good luck to them.

• Enough Cream: Make your perfect cup of coffee (there is no good reason why it shouldn’t also work with tea, so feel free to do that instead), take a photo of it, feed said photo to this app and then, in the future, just look at the coffee you are making through the app and it will tell you how close you are to that platonic ideal of coffee that you fed it in the first place. UTTERLY POINTLESS, but also sort of lovely in a weird, silly, dumb way.

• UwuMong: More animations on TikTok – I genuinely don’t know what the fcuk is going on in these, at all, beyond the fact it’s some DEEPLY ONLINE SH1T, but this one stumbled across my feed the other day and I watched all of it and laughed like a drain, and there’s something actually really quite smart about the animation style and the nostalgiariffing, and I think you might enjoy this quite a lot (and if you don’t, let’s be clear, that is very much YOUR PROBLEM).

• Sill Social: This pulls the most popular urls being shared amongst the people you follow on the federated social network of your choice (Bluesky or Mastodon), which might be useful – or might not! I don’t know you or what you need!

• Pass The Aux: I think there’s the kernel of a very good little idea in here – Pass The Aux is basically an Omegle/Chatroulette-esque service, except that instead of being presented with a succession of unwanted dongs, you get paired with a stranger and swap songs with each other, reacting to the others’ choice. This is practically shonky as fcuk, but there’s a really nice concept in here waiting to be released by better coding and a nicer front-end imho.

• Video Search Engine: Ooh, this is both cool and potentially very useful – search ALL of the video platforms at once! Ok, maybe not all of them, but this covers all the ones you can think of and more besides, and if you’re looking for something niche (or, er, illegally hosted copies of stuff) then this could be very very useful indeed (it really is amazing the amount of stuff that’s buried on DailyMotion, seemingly beyond the reach of copyright lawyers).

• Dart Vader: “What if Space Invaders, but Darts?”, as literally noone in history has ever asked! This is initially tricky but you will get the hang of it, I promise – you just need to get the right points total before the invaders nuke your city. SIMPLE.

• Clean Your Glasses: Genius purveyor of fun webstuff  and general Friend of Curios Matt Round has made ANOTHER little toy, this time a simulator that lets you mimic the unique joy of cleaning a pair of spectacles – be aware that this is a JOKE and that as far as I can tell it is literally impossible to get them 100% clean, so please don’t give yourself some sort of tendon injury by attempting to 100% this.

• Being Elon: A ‘Being Elon Musk’ text adventure! This starts out as one of the standard, unfun, ‘spend all of the billionaire’s money!’ gags, but you will quickly realise that this is funnier, deeper and much, much better written than that. I liked this a lot.

• Being The Raven: Another really nice bit of Twine writing now, this time by Gabby Hutchison-Crouch who’s a really talented comedy (history, fantasy) writer; this is an interactive fiction story in which you play a raven. That’s all I’m telling you – honestly, you will enjoy it more the less you know, but the writing here really is a cut above the vast majority of IF, and there are SO many endings and rabbitholes to wander down, and in general this is a pleasure and it’s so nice to see people with genuine writing chops play with the form and the medium a bit like this, more please.

• Sweep the Strait: “What if Minesweeper, but Hormuz?” is another hitherto-unspoken question and yet HERE WE ARE WITH THE SATIRELOLS! This is actually surprisingly fun given the specific shape of the play area defined by the Strait, which is not a sentence I expected to write this morning.

• Moss Moss: A gorgeous little pixel platformer, built in Pico-8, in which you play a…lump? Yeah, a lump, tasked with covering every single surface in moss. This is really rather lovely – low stakes, low jeopardy, with a very satisfying feel to the jumping and the movement which makes it a cut above a lot of these types of game.

• WikiGacha: OH GOD SOMEONE TURNED WIKIPEDIA INTO A FREE-TO-PLAY IN-BROWSER CARD BATTLER! Look, I have to be honest here and say that I haven’t spent much time with this as a result of being genuinely scared of losing myself to it in a genuinely-damaging way, but, based on others’ reactions, I feel reasonably confident in telling you this is very good and also VERY DANGEROUS. When the devs add the promised Story Mode – presuming they don’t attempt to AI said story – this is going to be a real problem.

• Kolydr: Collect the blues and the golds, avoid the reds, blow stuff up. Don’t worry, it will make sense when you play it.

• Chad Clickr: Since the Clavicular boom of early-2026 it’s fair to say I have been trying to ClavMinn and avoid all of this ridiculous associated looksmaxxing bullsh1t, BUT this clicker game briefly sucked me in – it is VERY SILLY but also deeply compelling and I warn you that it is a huge potential timesink so BE CAREFUL.

• Outsmart: The final game this week is the single link that has made me angriest, but that is entirely my own fault and the result of my suboptimal mind. YOU may well adore this (you b4stards, please share your strategies with me). You have 100 tokens. You have 5 bets. Can you win three bets against the AI before it wins three bets against you? Honestly, this is FIENDISH and incredibly, incredibly moreish. Also, it makes me feel VERY THICK.