Does it feel like a good idea to encourage a country with a not-insignificantly-problematic relationship to booze, a general vibe that might best be described as ‘a bit febrile’, and where the link between ‘poor national team performance’ and ‘really horrible spikes in all sorts of violence, not least domestic’, is PRETTY FCUKING CLEAR, to drink like absolute motherfcukers ahead of an emotional sporting tie which there are better-than-even odds they will not win?
Well it does if you’re demob-happy Keir! Although, er, he’s still going to be in charge should we all awake on Sunday morning to some devastated high streets and ‘fun’ new graffiti, so it’s very much still His Problem. I look forward to seeing the sober analysis of how Hangover Monday will affect Britain’s legendarily-miserable productivity stats!
Or, am I just being an annoying scold (heaven forfend!)? Am I just an Anyone But England Killjoy who will only be happy if England get tonked 4-0 with at least two of the players ending the game in an oxygen tent? Should I instead just shut up and let you all EMBRACE THE SESH?
One way or another Sunday night and Monday morning will have VIBES – the question as to their quality, though, is very much up-in-the-air. And isn’t this what we all want from a sporting event? The vague, creeping feeling that we’re one dodgy offside call from some sort of massed uprising of red-faced men off their tits on pubgak? YES IT IS MATT SHUT UP YOU KILLJOY YOU ARE JUST BITTER BECAUSE OF ITALY.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios and, honestly, you don’t want to go to the pub at 7pm on Sunday night for a 1am kickoff, it will not end well.
THE SECTION WHICH NEVER, EVER WANTS TO HEAR “LIVIN’ ON A PRAYER” EVER AGAIN, SO THANKS FOR THAT FIFA YOU CNUTS, PT.1:
- Meanderware: Our first site this week is a BEAUTY, which, er, I’m not really able to explain to you in any meaningful way because a) it’s 7:03am and I ran out of teabags yesterday and forgot to replenish them and so am attempting to sustain myself with some decaf stuff I found at the back of the cupboard and, honestly, it doesn’t fcuking work WHERE IS MY MAGIC WAKEUP DRUG FFS????; and b) because, honestly, it’s sort-of beyond description. What’s that? “It’s the point of this fcuking newsletter, Matt, without descriptions of the url what the fcuk are you *FOR*??” Hm, a reasonable point, fine (is it…is it normal to conduct an entirely-imagined dialogue with an entirely-imagined reader sockpuppet? Yeah, probably). SO. Meanderware is…basically it’s an interconnected series of webpages which together form a sort of…what, weird html poem? Strange digital CONTENT MAZE? Honestly, I have no idea, but I strongly encourage you to click the first link and then just sort of go exploring, because MAN is there some infinitely, fractally weird stuff going on in here, from the odd first-person shooter I found myself in, to my brief trip to the ERROR ZONE, to the cat which for reasons I don’t quite understand fell into the page from the top of my browser, there’s a strange sort of visual poetry to the whole thing – this is the only sort of explanatory text I can find, which I will share with you here: “A long time ago, on the early internet…I made a net-art website that was all about exploring poetry. Some people called it meanderware. I think about that label a lot. Back then cyberspace was an adventure that you explored. A visitor following hyperlinks to unknown places. It was enough to just exist in a digital space. That was the purpose.” I think this is ACE.
- 8ball TV Club: Nothing whatsoever to do with Sean Monahan, this is instead the TV station offshoot of NYC art collective 8ball, who also make zines and run a radio station and, somehow, find the time and the money to keep a constantly-broadcasting streaming TV platform going, which, ngl, is currently making me feel like a VERY unproductive member of society. This localises to wherever you are, so the schedule is universal – right now it’s playing its early-morning segment ‘Greeting The New Day’, which is basically just some slightly-apocalyptic looking sunrise pics with some…really quite threatening industrial throb playing over the top of it (I tell you, this is compelling!), but in an hour or so you will be able to enjoy whatever the fcuk ‘Girlpool LIVE’ is, while later on there’s a screening of Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’ and an uplifting-sounding lolfest called ‘Exploring The Means of Resistance”. This is, basically, a sort of artschool MTV – the channel will take submissions, so if you’ve got an experimental short film in the can that you think would be ADORED by an audience of 17 queer kids at the New York School of the Arts then THESE ARE YOUR PEOPLE!
- Plant Talk: I continue to be slightly dismayed at the lack of genuine imagination shown by people building things with AI – WHERE IS THE WEIRD STUFF, WHERE IS THE REAL-WORLD INTERACTION FFS? – but this really heartened me and I would like one of you more technical people to perhaps give this a go and tell me how it works. Do you talk to your plants? Do you sometimes wish that they could talk back to you without you needing to ingest several mg of LSD to achieve the effect? OH DO I HAVE A PRESENT FOR YOU! PlantTalk is a github repo which, as long as you have the requisite bits of kit (a camera, an arduino, a bunch of different potential other sensors) will let your plant TALK TO YOU! “Plant Talk is a houseplant you can have a conversation with using ChatGPT. Using just a computer (equipped with a webcam and a microphone) and the OpenAI API, Plant Talk gives a plant a voice. Level up the project with an Arduino or similar microcontroller and you’ll be able to add more interesting data like moisture and light too. Ask how it is doing and it can check its recent observations, look at its current environment, and more.” Honestly, this is SUCH a fun idea – the only obvious downside is the extent to which the natural voice of The Machine will likely ensure that your houseplants are INCREDIBLYFCUKING DULL interlocutors, but the idea of being able to just ask your plant “do you need watering right now you needy little green fcuk?” and have it tell you is (at least to someone like me, whose fingers are not so much green as black) incredibly appealing. SOMEONE EQUIP EVERY PLANT IN THE KEW GARDENS GREENHOUSE WITH THIS KIT AND LET THEM SPEAK!
- The Infinite Almanac: This is rather lovely; a different short line of text for each day of the year, drawing from the chinese lunisolar calendar – this is basically just a very simple calendar, fine, but I found the lines here oddly-soothing whenever I dropped in this week, and, oddly, the slightly-windchimey audio made me significantly less stabby than windchimes generally tend to. “The chinese lunisolar calendar (黄历) is a traditional time-tracking system meant to be useful to villagers and farmers for agricultural and cultural purposes. The history of the calendar is vast and complex (and spans different cultural contexts), but at its core tracks both the cycles of the moon and the sun. The calendar is divided into 24 solar terms (节气), each marking a specific astronomical event or natural phenomenon throughout the year. These solar terms can be further divided into three seasons (候), each lasting about five days, which often reflect a particular aspect of nature or change during that period. The Infinite Almanac is inspired by this traditional system and expands the 72 lines to a full calendar cycle of 365 days. Written in a style inspired by the renga, each line corresponds to a day of the year and reflects the changing seasons, natural phenomena, and cultural events associated with that day, and is intended to be read in any order throughout the year.”
- AI Fiction In The Wild: One of the interesting wrinkles in the use of AI is seeing exactly HOW people use it – all the available data I’ve seen has suggested that, outside of the use of the tech for practical/professional purposes (eg coding, infogathering, etc), one of the primary uses is story development and the crafting of fiction, with lots of users seemingly enjoying ‘co-creating’ stories with The Machine. Leaving aside whatever personal feelings you might have about the, er, ‘quality threshold’ of the stories you’ll be getting if you do this, there’s something very curious about what sort of stories, exactly, people are choosing to write – and this site gives you a small window into what it is that we want when we ask an LLM for fictions. The site explains: “this website hosts ChatGPT-user conversations that were classified as containing some form of fiction. The data is drawn from WildChat, which includes millions of chat logs that were collected voluntarily, and with explicit user consent, through an interface hosted on the website HuggingFace.” SO. What is that people want? FILTH, THEY WANT FILTH! My biggest takeaway from this is that the total corpus comprises some 190,000 individual stories – of which some 80,000 contain explicit material or ‘adult’ prompting themes. ALL WE WANT IS FOR THE SILICON TO HELP US ORGASM! Which, on reflection, may be the saddest thing I have written in 16 years of this stupid fcuking project. Anyway, you can search the texts, explore clusters of themes via the ‘map’ view, and WOW is there something quite…I don’t know, intimate maybe, about seeing these logs, anonymous though they are, and the things that people are asking for. I don’t know whether this is fascinating, sad or an odd, uncanny combination of both, but I spent quite a lot of time with this this week because I think there’s something very curious indeed about watching people express their desires, wants, needs and fears via the medium of slightly-clunky interactive fiction. Also, special shout out to the person I found just now who seemingly managed to jailbreak GPT to the extent that it was willing to write a speculative piece of Fallout-based fanfic which goes into…troubling detail about the Super Mutant penis and its relative size, and then for being willing to share that chat with the rest of humanity.
- Torlink: ANOTHER LINK TO HELP YOU FIND FREE FILMS AND STUFF ONLINE! Although, per my note last week, Web Curios OBVIOUSLY believes in Paying Fairly For Art! But, also, y’know, in this economy?, etc etc. SO, this is another slightly-techy (but this time only minimally so) project which exists on Github but which basically only requires you to install Nodejs and then access the program through that – once you’re in, this basically lets you type in any piece of media you want to find; the program will then go off and search a pre-approved list of ‘Good’ torrenting sites (vetted for malware, scams and stuff), come back with options for you to download said media, and then let you pick one for it to grab for you – by all accounts this is quick, easy and it really fcuking works, so, er, PIRACY IS BAD but also we are all poor and everything costs 10million quid so, equally, fill your boots kids.
- Still Saying Good Morning: I have a Bad Anniversary coming up next week – don’t worry, though, it’s only one of many! – and so this momentarily fcuked me in half when I found it (via Kris, who is on Summer holidays), but it is a lovely project and I think it’s rather beautiful. I am going to reproduce the explanation in full, because: “Still Saying Good Morning is a continuously updated living archive that collects the ‘good morning’ memes my mother has sent me almost every morning since 2024. These images usually appear in my chat window at a similar time each day. I used to swipe past them, while my phone treated them as removable cache. Through visual archaeology, the website lifts these memes out of the fleeting flow of daily chat and rearranges them according to the time of day they were sent. Each screen represents one month. On the left side of the page, a 24-hour timeline maps a full day, where one minute equals one pixel grid. The archive itself becomes a form of visual evidence. It no longer treats these images as isolated, unoriginal fragments of information. Instead, it makes visible the rhythm hidden within daily repetition. Through linear time sequencing, it shows how these low-resolution, repeatedly forwarded and often aesthetically dismissed images can form a fragile but persistent visual bond through everyday circulation.” Honestly, if you’re from or have any personal link to a culture where the parental/familial sending of vaguely-inspirational and positive visual memes on Whatsapp is A Thing then this will resonate with you deeply.
- No Clean Sheet: I haven’t been as upset about an England result since 1990 when the cnuts beat Cameroon as I was this week following DR Congo’s defeat to Harry’s Boys, and in general I am slightly struggling to engage with the WorldCup this time around – this might have something to do with the fact that it feels like FIFA Ultimate Team rather than football, with the ceaseless focus on ELITE INDIVIDUALS, but it might also be linked to Italy’s absence and the fact that I am a desperately-jaded man who struggles with a generalised sense of anhedonia. Who can tell? Anyway, if you’ve ever wondered who would be winning the world cup were it to be judged on criteria other than ‘who scored the most goals?’, this site might ‘amuse’ you – each fixture in the tournament is presented as a contest between countries based on various human rights indicators, etc (hence the name of the project, because, well, WE ALL SUCK IN SOME WAYS!!) – so countries are judged on their relative performance on things like child poverty stats, press freedom and the like. A nice-if-fundamentally-pointless attempt to draw attention to IMPORTANT MATTERS, which are all forgotten because FOOTBALL BULLDOZES EVERYTHING BEFORE IT. BONUS SIMILAR WORLD CUP PROJECT: this is basically a similar idea, but a bit less nicely-designed, although it lets you play through a whole tournament bracket in which each team’s performance is dictated by its demographic stats which is kind of a nice touch.
- Moments: ANOTHER APP ON WHICH YOU CAN SHARE PHOTOS! Why? Well, presumably because Flickr’s horrible to use and Insta is now television, meaning there’s no obvious single ‘best’ home for anyone who is into photography to put their stuff so that a) someone will see it, least of all people you like; b) it’s theoretically discoverable by anyone else. SO, here is Moments, a nascent new ‘photo community app thing’, which promises that you can put your pics here and that people will be able to browse them in a non-algo feed, and that you can share them with friends…and, yes, fine, I can see the ‘why’ here but, honestly, who the fcuk is still going to bet on things like this existing longer than a year or so? I think it sort of behooves companies like this to make some sort of vague nod to the amount of runway they have – like, ‘we guarantee the hosting of your images for at least X years’ or something, because, honestly, the likelihood that this is going to gain enough traction to last is…small, and do you really want to commit your beautiful pics to a bunch of servers that are going to be wiped, taking all your work with it, in 18 months? I am going to posit that most of you do not. Still, er, GOOD LUCK LADS!
- Text Music: Ooh, I like this – although it made me feel quite, er, ‘seen’. Basically take any text you like and paste it into this site and it will run some light analysis on it based on sentence length; the copy will get colourcoded based on the length of each visual sentence, so you can get a visualised feel for the…what, the cadence, maybe, the rhythm of your prose. So obviously I did this with Curios and, er, fcuk me do I have a very real problem with long sentences (this was not, on reflection, hugely surprising to me), and I am SO SO SORRY about all this because basically the whole thing was a wall of RED (and I am doing it again here, aren’t I, Jesus I have a fcuking problem) (also, LONG SENTENCES AREN’T BAD FUCK YOU RAYMOND CARVER YOU HAVE RUINED STYLE). Ahem. Anyway, plug your words in, feel judged is basically how I would sell this.
- The Peninsula: Via Lynn, a neat little 3d representation of the San Francisco Bay Area which lets you see where all the tech companies are so that you can plan the bombi…NO, NOT FOR THAT PURPOSE, NEVER THE BOMBS! Ahem. If you’ve ever wanted to have a CG version of the city’s tech cluster that shows where all the big players are situated and gives you little backgrounds on them when you click on the buildings then a) why? ASK FOR MORE FROM LIFE!; and b) this will make you very happy. This is, admittedly, really nicely-rendered, but it did, honestly, make me really consider how much you could improve the world with approximately six very strategically placed loads of Semtex.
- Interactive Bags: POINTLESS SHINY LUXE WEBSITE CORNER! This week it’s the turn of Miu Miu, Prada’s ‘we’re cool, honest!’ side-brand, which is attempting to sell you very, very expensive handbags (and, probably, loads more besides) via the medium of a typically-shiny, typically-fcuking-dull-and-empty luxury brand website. Click through the different ‘rooms’! Find INSPIRATIONAL LINES to ‘write’ in a ‘notebook’! Enjoy some very, very low-level interactivity! Wonder what the point is! My absolute FAVOURITE thing about this is how, on the opening screen, it exhorts you, the viewer, to BREAK THE RULES and BE REBELLIOUS AND INDEPENDENT (seemingly via the medium of buying very, very expensive accessories) and then…tells you to click a particular part of the screen and gives you NO CHOICE WHATSOEVER beyond that. Rebellion, via the medium of following very, very specific instructions given to you by one of the world’s largest fashion houses! SO PUNK!
- Unseen Image of the Year Award: PHOTOS OF VERY VERY SMALL THINGS! This is, apparently, the sixth edition of this award which serves to celebrate the best in scientific microscopic imaging. These are very, very beautiful in mostly-abstract ways – the shot of ‘lignin fibre’ (whatever the fcuk that is; yes, I could check, but I like the mystery) is GORGEOUS, but all of the featured pics are kind-of amazing.
- Forgot My Dice: For those of you who play TTRPGs and who need MANY-SIDED DICE, this is a nice little site which lets you virtually roll a selection of the fcukers in pleasingly-rendered 3d. Although I imagine if you play TTRPGs you probably have thousands of the b4stard things, probably in a variety of small felt bags (I SEE YOU) and so might not in fact need this at all. Wevs.
- Hackercouch: This is…quite a sweet idea I think. Hackercouch is basically ‘airbnb but for people who code and who literally just want somewhere to kip’, and is a very minimalist series of listings by people around the world who say they are happy to let itinerant codemonkeys stop by and sleep on their sofa for a bit. There are couches here from Medellin to Bristol to Bangalore, and, honestly, this is just a really nice community throwback site to when the web was MORE INNOCENT. Obviously Web Curios accepts no responsibility for any terrible smells, weird people or lost kidneys that may ensue from engaging with this site – CAVEAT FCUKING EMPTOR, LADS – but, well, let’s assume that everyone posting here is nice and normal and doesn’t in fact want to make someone else’s skin into a dressing gown.
- Reddit Thread Analyser: OK, technically this Chrome extension is called ‘FiFi’, but, well, that means fcuk all and I feel I ought to signpost these a *little* bit. Built by Jesse in Australia, who wrote to me this week saying: “I’m a solo dev in Brisbane and I built a small Chrome extension called FIFI. The idea: on Reddit, the top comment is usually just the safest, most upvoted thing, but the actually interesting part of a thread — the real back-and-forth — tends to be buried a few replies deep in a branch nobody scrolls to. FIFI finds those buried high-engagement exchanges and surfaces them, so you get to the good bit without the digging.” This is potentially-useful, I think – THANKYOU JESSE FOR MAKING IT AND SENDING IT TO ME!
- Cycle Archive: One for the RaphaDads (YOU BORING FCUKS)! Actually, sorry, that’s unfair – on the website, to be clear, not on the incredibly dull middle-aged men who make cycling literally their entire personality. “The Cycle Archive is a non-commercial project for the historical preservation, study, and enjoyment of early cycling literature…These magazines capture cycling at its most experimental moment. Every issue has someone inventing a new brake, debating wheel sizes, or arguing about whether bicycles would replace horses (spoiler: they didn’t — cars did). The social history is just as rich: you can watch cycling go from a rich man’s hobby to a middle-class craze to something that sparked genuine moral panic about women’s independence.”
- Infowars: The Onion, as you know, bought Infowars from Tragic Mad Bankrupt Conspiracist Alex Jones – they have now relaunched the YouTube channel, there is a show up on there and…look, this might be the sort of thing you find really funny and if you do then that is great, and yay the Onion and all that jazz, but, also, I can’t be fcuked to watch 50 mins of Americans Doing Satire, sorry, so you will just have to suck this one and see so to speak.
- Scare Factory: It’s only 4(ish) months til Hallowe’en, you know (and if you didn’t, you do now), so for those of you with MASSIVE houses and a party to plan and basically infinite money then WOW do I have the site for you. Scare Factory is a US-based retailer that basically peddles large-scale animatronic and generally IMPRESSIVE scary…things with which to adorn your shop or fairground or haunted house. Want a 9 foot tall skeletal zombie gocddat…thing to tower over your terrified guests? They have you covered! Want, er, a slightly-baffling tower of ‘zombie pumpkins’? I mean, er, why? Pumpkins aren’t scary, round things can’t be scary! Still, there is a LOT to enjoy in here and I now covet the ‘insulting scarecrow’ (how does it insult you? Can these insults be customised?! TAKE MY MONEY (please do not, I cannot afford the insulting scarecrow) and there will definitely be something in here which tickles your flight reflex.
THE SECTION WHICH NEVER, EVER WANTS TO HEAR “LIVIN’ ON A PRAYER” EVER AGAIN, SO THANKS FOR THAT FIFA YOU CNUTS, PT.2:
- Hospitalithings: Via blort, this is a lovely-if-largely-entirely-useless website which collects images of objects found in mid-range hotels, a sort of weird IKEA catalogue of corporate banality in interior design. Writes its creator/curator, “whenever I enter a hotel room. I meticulously photograph the same eleven objects: decoration, door handle, hairdryer, keys, lamp, light switch, personal hygiene toiletries, remote control, shower drain, shower tap and the toilet roll holder. I preserve these moments in the Instagram-friendly square format, embracing the authenticity of the scene, without any embellishments. Over the years, this collection has grown, encompassing hundreds of photos from seven different countries. Yet these images lay dormant on my computer, waiting for the right moment to be shared. Finally I found the inspiration to breathe life into my collection. As a web developer, it was only natural that I decided to create a website. I also christened my photographic pursuit with a fitting name: “Hospitalithings.” This name pays homage to these objects of hospitality.” Honestly, I really like this as an extended art project, but I think my favourite thing about this is the line “whenever I enter a hotel room. I meticulously photograph the same eleven objects” which (and I say this with affection, anonymous curator of hotel interiors, I really do!) is the most autistic-coded thing in this week’s Curios, and it’s a fcuking strong lineup.
- Fizz: How many times have you thought of late ‘you know, someone really should recreate the OG Facebook when it was just about sharing photos and status updates and pokes with people you know in real life’? YOU HAVE NEVER THOUGHT THAT DO NOT LIE THAT ERA OF LIFE IS OVER AND WE CAN NEVER GO BACK. And yet! Someone – specifically, the someone behind new app Fizz – has basically done exactly that and created a very, very similar product to the early days of the Zuckerbergian Big Blue Misery Factory. Like FB, this has initially been rolled out to college students in the US only, but now, inevitably, it’s got a big injection of VC funding and is set to go MAINSTREAM. Will anyone care? Fcuk knows, but keep it on your radar in case you’re weirdly bullish about social media making a comeback in 2027.
- Diane Lindo: I’ve featured the stop-motion animation of Diane Lindo before in here, but they now have a website and so I get to tell you how ace it is all over again. For any of you who’ve had a gaping void in their lives that can only be filled by animated shorts in which unpleasantly-grubby barbie dolls do weird and troubling things with fruit (not, to be clear, in a sex way, it’s not THAT sort of website ffs you perverts) then this will absolutely fill it – I must warn you that the animations are available for sale as NFTs because, well, some people still believe (TO THE MOON, you poor, sad, delusional b4stards!), but you don’t need to engage with that AT ALL if you don’t want to, and you can just click onto the website and ‘enjoy’ some really quite unsettling videos, the sort of thing Salad Fingers would probably quite like were he not an animated and entirely fictional creation.
- Museum Department: One for the design heads amongst you, this is “an indexed archive of contemporary design and typography. Every studio, project, foundry, font, and person is documented, credited, and interconnected. Projects link to the studios that created them, the fonts they use, and everyone who worked on them. Search by studio, project, foundry, font, person, location, category, and discipline. As the archive grows, patterns across studios, projects, and fonts emerge. Museum Department is built for discovery and reference, designed to surface work that would otherwise disappear.” Does that sound like something you might be interested in? I don’t know who you are or what you like or anything, I just throw these links at you like fish at an enclosure full of bemused penguins tbh.
- Evil Genius Quotes: A TikTok account which is promoting a forthcoming Kickstarter (a sentence which honestly oughtn’t make sense and which I resent for being parsable by me) for a book about Evil Geniuses in popular culture, and their ‘wisdom’ – I can’t pretend to give anything resembling half a fcuk about the eventual tome, but I do rather enjoy the collection of clips being amassed on the account, from Blofeld to the Child Catcher (not sure what wisdom there is to take from a guy who abducted kids! Feels problematic!) and a whole bunch more. Aside from anything else, I am genuinely curious about the TikTok-to-Kickstarter marketing pipeline (what a sad little life, etc etc) and how it performs, but, er, the villains are cool too!
- Galacto: I am not wholly sure what’s going on here, but as far as I can tell it’s an in-browser rendering of a galaxy of some sort, all swirling lights and celestial bodies and…er…can you tell that I don’t know the first fcuking thing about what I’m talking about here, or what this is really depicting? Sadly this is one of those tabs that my increasingly-fcuked laptop (I have had to restart it three times so far this morning, I am, it’s fair to say, not exactly enjoying the sausagemaking process today – apologies for the slightly bitter notes that will inevitably come through in the prose) really struggles with, but, er, LOOK! A BIG SWIRLY GALAXY TO EXPLORE!
- The Greatest Music: FINALLY, A DEFINITIVE RANKING OF WHAT MUSIC IS THE BEST MUSIC!!! Thank GOD we can finally stop with all the debates and the lists and put this one to bed! Lol, obvs that will never happen, we will NEVER STOP RANKING THINGS – that said, though, I quite approve of this initiative which tries to take data from ALL OF THE RANKINGS EVER and parse them into a single, consolidated list of the best tunes. There’s actually some quite complex weighting and the rest underpinning the whole project, which you can read more about on the site, but basically this is a sort of mega list-of-lists-type thing which has SCIENTIFICALLY DETERMINED that “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” is the best song ever and, well, that’s it, isn’t it? Here’s a brief overview of How It All Works: “Most “best of” aggregation sites just count how many lists something appears on and call it a day. We think that misses the point. Not all lists are created equal — a carefully curated ranking by music critics carries different weight than a fan poll on a random forum. Our algorithm takes that into account. Every list in our system starts with a base quality score. From there, we evaluate each list across several dimensions — who voted, how many people voted, what the list covers, and whether it focuses on a specific niche or tries to be comprehensive. Lists that are more credible and broader in scope naturally carry more weight in the final rankings. Items that appear on multiple high-quality lists rise to the top. But we also give credit to items that land on a single exceptional list — consensus matters, but so does expert recognition.” If you’re interested in music or, er, DATA AND ALGORITHMIC WEIGHTING, then you will enjoy this a lot I think (and if you’re a specific type of person this will give you and your annoying friends something to argue about for DAYS).
- Warp Point: Oh this is a lovely idea – Warp Point is an oldschool COLLECTION OF WEBSITES! I KNOW! LIKE IN THE BEFORE TIMES! For those of you who are either young or who had better things to do than spend far too much time online when you were younger, back in the day people would build webpages to collate links to loose collections of special interest websites aggregated around a certain theme (The Spice Girls, say, or Extreme Latex Breath Play) – this is that, but for ‘sites about videogames’. Click the link and you can filter by the broad site type, but there’s a full directory which gives you overview info, the link to the site and its socials and a bunch of other info – there’s also a light bit of WEBRING functionality, which…oh, God, I am going to have to explain webrings too, aren’t I? Basically they act as collectives of sites which all signposted to each other, so you could spend a few hours moving between a community of sites and writers all clustered around a similar theme, which, honestly, is such a nice way to browse the web and find new, interesting voices and places and spaces. If you’re into videogames then this is a really great resource – so many good, interesting and new-to-me sites – and you will definitely find something you love in here.
- Cobloc: Look, this is something do with architecture – here’s the blurb: “Cobloc advocates for an architecture that is both rooted and contemporary, an architecture born from its environment, belonging entirely to it and unable to exist elsewhere. Each project is a sensitive response to its surroundings, a work shaped by its context, its materials and its history.” That make sense to you? Good, because, honestly, it means pretty much the square root of fcuk-all to me, BUT I don’t care because it’s such a fabulously-stylist site; honestly, every element of it is SO pleasing to me, from the way in which the elements move and interrelate when you scroll to the CG materials they use for the logo lettertypes, this is really just a beautiful piece of webwork so well done to whoever made it despite me having no real clue what is happening here beyond, broadly, ‘nice-looking buildings’.
- Write Anything In Pictures: You remember that NASA toy that lets you write your name in letters composed of satellite imagery? YES YOU DO IT WAS IN CURIOS IN 2024 WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T REMEMBER WHAT THE FCUK ARE YOU SENILE? Well this is like that, but it takes a wider range of images (some of them are objects, etc, rather than being aerial landscape shots), and unlike the NASA version there’s no profanity filter on this and so, objectively, it is Better (in your face, NASA, you prudes).
- Jesus Swimming: Would you like a website whose seeming sole purpose is to show you a very poorly-drawn and equally-poorly animated infinitely-looping animation of Jesus, swimming? No, I can’t imagine for a second that you do, but I am bestowing it upon you anyway because sometimes you just have to take what you’re fcuking given. Think of it as a motivational message, maybe – if Jesus can keep swimming against the tide (even with the holed palms, which, honestly, can’t make it easier) then so can you!
- Domino Club: LOTS OF WEIRD LITTLE GAMES MADE BY WEIRD LITTLE FREAKS! Ok, so I don’t actually know that the people behind the games are ‘weird little freaks’ but, well, they might be, and it’s meant affectionately so, er, please don’t write in and complain. “DOMINO CLUB is a loose collective of digital artists coming together to participate in anonymous game jams, inspired by BELIEVEINTHE.NET’S 1JAM. DOMINO CLUB is interested in: small tools, web tools, low-tech tools, ditherpunk, low-poly, sustainability, narrative-heavy experiences, digital spaces, dark matter, web 1.0, DIY, piracy, remix, being gay & doing crimes, goofing off, zines, skeletons, glitches, little guys, hole.” YES, “HOLE”, WHAT OF IT??? Anyway, there are links to game jams over the past 5 years, as well as a bunch of other miscellaneous games produced by the collective as standalones, and if you can’t find something interesting and fun to play through this page then you should probably stop reading Curios and go and play with spreadsheets or something.
- Bayeux Go!: Chris Barker has made a silly little infinite runner game with the Bayeux Tapestry as a theme – honestly, as someone who saw the thing in France years ago I can tell you honestly that it’s just a really sh1t, really long comic and you can 100% skip it – just play this instead, honestly, it’s about as good (this is, mostly, a joke, and obviously it is a VERY CULTURALLY SIGNIFICANT ARTEFACT, but, also, it is VERY long and it’s really not that interesting to the layman so maybe spend your cash on something else and spare yourself the fcuking hordes, honestly).
- Zanagrams: “Find the 10 hidden words”, the game tells you, as that’s in some way SIMPLE or EASY or something – it’s not, it’s really hard (or at least is for me), and I had a right strop when this comprehensively defeated me the other day. BUT! I am a moron, and you are not, and you will probably ace this on your first try (please do not tell me that you have done this).
- Spenny: Ooh, this is quite fun (if you live in the UK, if you’re weirdly-keen on knowing how much stuff costs) – the game gives you a receipt from a grocery shop and your task is to guess how much each item costs in real life, with points won based on how close you get to the actual price. As I typed this, I had a horrible, slow, creeping realisation that my describing a ‘game’ in which you’re tasked with accurately guessing the price of a packet of dark chocolate Hobnobs is both THE most middle-aged, dull thing I think I have ever written AND possibly the strongest indicator yet of the fact that something is fundamentally-broken in the relationship between earnings, costs and spending and that – but, er, it’s FUN! Honest!
- Mechstorm: A game about MECHS! It’s quite shiny and 3d and you get to wander round and SHOOT MISSILES and FLY and stuff! I have to say I failed to warm to this particularly, but it’s undeniably nicely-done and plays nicely even on the asthmatic potato device on which I am currently penning this stupid fcuking newsletter.
- Spin The Squid: OOOH THIS IS GOOD. Spin The Squid is a nice little Pico-8 game which has a mechanic that genuinely slightly broke my brain (this says more about my complete and utter lack of anything resembling spatial awareness than it does the difficulty of the game tbh, but it really is very clever – effectively you can use your character, the titular squid, as a sort of screwdriver or ratchet, to turn gears in-game, which adds a really nice layer to the puzzling as you have to work out how best to move so that you engage the teeth in the right way, at the right angle, at the right time. Which, I promise, will make at least 60% more sense when you start playing.
- The Capybara Delivery Game: This is a game in which you are inexplicably tasked with taking on the role of a capybara which is delivering food to residents of an unnamed metropolis. Why? WELL SOMEONE HAS TO DELIVER THE FOOD FFS, WHY MUST IT BE SOMEONE WITH OPPOSABLE THUMBS??? Jesus, speciesists, all of you. This is only moderately-fun, but it was all coded in Claude which is fcuking amazing and the theme song is a lovely sort of bossa track which just repeats ‘capybara’ over and over again and which, honestly, I might just keep on in the background for the rest of Curios as it’s SO SOOTHING.
- Prince Chazz: Our final game this week is very simple but SO SO GOOD – basically this is an escalating chess-ish puzzle game, where your job is to take as many pieces as you can before being taken yourself; I’m not going to try and explain the rules because I would make SUCH a pig’s ear of it, but know that this is simultaneously VERY simple and VERY fiendish and it has an incredibly-moreish quality and I have been playing this a LOT all week. Seriously, this is a really neat bit of gamedesign and I commend it to you utterly.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Weird Side Projects: AN ACTUAL TUMBLR!!!! This is the home of the short-form experiments in code, text, street art, food, and feelings by April Soetarman – I like these a lot, there’s some very fun creativity on display here.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Ali El Madani: Via Jana, this is a lovely photography feed by a guy in Casablanca; there’s no particular theme that I can discern, these are just great photos of a city and its people and its landscapes and sometimes that’s all you want (ie now).
- Thenextselleb: An Insta feed which posts nothing more than trend matrices – IF YOU KNOW YOU KNOW – about everything under the sun; London restaurants, summer internships, that sort of jazz. There will be at least one thing on here which you will find INFURIATINGLY WRONG, which is exactly the point.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Burnham’s Political Economy: APOLOGIES MORE PROVINCIAL UK POLITICS CHAT. Still, we’re looking set to get an EXCITING NEW POLITICAL HATEFIGURE in a mere fortnight’s time so we may as well attempt to get some sort of an idea of exactly which nebulous, poorly-articulated version of ‘change’ we’re set to be presented with this time around. In fairness to Landfill Andy (this won’t catch on, I know, but it made me laugh when I coined it just now so, er, let’s just pretend that you both get the ‘gag’ and find it funny) the whole regionalism thing is distinct, as is the lipservice towards a vague idea of ‘being more leftwing’ – although exactly how that squares with budgetary requirements and the apparent inclination to continue pursuing incredibly-punitive policies towards (to pick just two) asylum seekers and the trans community is as-yet…unclear! Anyway, that’s by way of needlessly-long (MOI??) preamble to this excellent LRB article by William Davies which posits that, at heart, the central question the electorate is most-concerned about is that most people don’t feel they can afford to have a life that they particularly enjoy living and that most other questions are in fact downstream of that: “Given the multiple electorates Burnham has to satisfy – the people of Makerfield, the Parliamentary Labour Party, the Labour Party membership, and eventually the British electorate – it is perhaps no surprise that he hasn’t committed to a specific radical ideological direction. At present, he is a retail product: someone who appears relaxed around ordinary people and on camera, and although he has spent plenty of time in Westminster, hasn’t (yet) become reassociated with that much loathed place. Whatever rash remarks he may have made about the bond markets or spending commitments, Burnham understands something that Starmer grasped too late: the unaffordability of everyday life has become the central issue in British politics, around which everything else revolves.”
- Noone Escapes The Permanent Underclass: Ok, I need to point out upfront that there are lots of bits of this piece that I don’t necessarily think are right or accurate, and that my assessment of How AI Will Impact Jobs is slightly different to that presented by the author of the piece, Fernando Boretti; that said, I do think that this is one of the clearest articulations of What Will Actually Happen when The Machine Eats Labour. What’s interesting about the argument in general is that I’m seeing a wave of ‘actually it’s not going to be that bad’ takes cropping up in the past few weeks, which, of course, may well be right but which, I think, also fails to take into account the twin realities of a) improving models and the rise of open source; and b) THE IMPERATIVES OF SHAREHOLDER CAPITALISM. Anyway, this is VERY scifi and makes a whole load of AGI-ish assumptions that I don’t agree with (or certainly don’t see happening anytime soon), but I think it’s worth reading because the scenario here described – or at least elements on the way it it – is still very much on the table in terms of ‘possible outcomes of this whole fcuking mess’. “Let’s start from this premise: AI can do all cognitive and physical work, at human level or better, and cheaper than humans. I can’t prove this will happen, but the goal of this post is to argue that if it happens, then everything else follows. And it’s absurd to think it can’t. Five years ago this technology barely existed: if you sent a transcript of a conversation with Claude Fable back in time to 2020 or thereabouts, nobody would believe it was real. So, the year is 2036 (likely earlier), businesses have replaced most human workers with AI in the pursuit of profit maximization. Corporations are a small raft of human executives, floating on top of a vast ocean of AIs and robots. The AIs can do all cognitive and physical work at human level or above, and they are cheaper overall. Imagine a pyramid. At the base you have the AIs and robots doing all economic activity. At the top you have the state, which has the monopoly on violence. The state enforces, and therefore can alter the definition of, property rights. In the middle you have this hair-thin layer of people with shares in the companies that foomed and catabolized the whole economy: the permanent overclass. They own the companies, maybe sit on the board, some might still be CEOs but it’s a purely ceremonial role since AIs do all the actual organization work.”
- The Forgotten War of Myanmar: To be clear, not forgotten by anyone affected by it, but certainly by the rest of the world (specifically: me). This is a very good piece of reporting in the New York Times which details exactly how fcuked the country is – man, do you remember when we all believed that Aung San Suu Kyi was going to make everything better? WILD TIMES, and also WOW am I never, ever believing in the power of an exiled leader to return from the wilderness and make things better ever again (looking at you Andyzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz). Anyway, this is bleak and miserable but also, I think, an important read, not least because this is another FCUK ME THE PRESENT IS GIBSONIAN car crash of the very very modern with the very very very 20thC-feeling vibes of the country overall. Wonder if this ever keeps Mark Zuckerberg up at night? No, I don’t think so either, despite the very clear ‘YOU CONTRIBUTED TO THIS’ evidence of years past.
- The Cult of Optimisation: I think that this is perhaps the fourth or fifth piece I’ve read in recent weeks (and definitely the second I’ve featured in here) that makes the broad ‘you know, maybe all this tracking and data isn’t making anything better or any of us happy?’ point (annoyingly this is something I have been saying for YEARS chiz chiz prophet, honour, etc), and broadly suggests that maybe, just maybe, quantification is not in fact the source of all good. This is an excellent piece, delving into the history of data and optimisation and its impact on business practice in the 20thC, and its corollary knock-on effects on society, and it’s a really smart bit of writing and analysis.”Even when optimizers aren’t sealing sick people in their homes, as the Chinese state did during the pandemic, they are often so focused on their objective that they don’t notice the damage they’re doing. Whatever is not relevant to the objective can be shrugged off as a so-called externality. Witness corporations optimizing their operations to maximize profits or the price of their shares. Some squeeze pay or working conditions; others pollute with abandon, or exploit their dominant market position to force down their suppliers’ prices, regardless of the impact. And the problem with optimization is not just a matter of unfortunate side-effects. We are seeing the emergence of what we might call “social optimization”—the belief that this idea offers a way to transform society as a whole. But as Porter’s work suggests, this is not a matter of neutrally making things better. Optimization privileges the measurable over the unmeasurable. And it places the onus for improving society on the ever-striving individual rather than asking more fundamental, structural questions about why systems work as they do and whom they empower and disempower. This is not an explicit ideology. No doubt, businesses and governments often are simply following the logic and opportunities implicit in new digital technology, from smartphones to the cameras and sensors that can now cheaply and efficiently monitor a wide range of activities. Nonetheless, as new technology has made it possible to gather ever more numerical data, optimization has begun to embed its implicit values into our lives.”
- The Dream of Passive Income: Do you remember…what, when was it, 15 years ago now, at the highpoint of millennial-focused capitalism and the boom in DTC brands which saw a few companies selling generic tat behind a nice logo get catapulted to stratospheric success, and an awful lot more people get suckered into the dream of HUGE EARNINGS VIA DROPSHIPPING? Of course you do! You probably once bought some kitchenware from one of them c.2014! Anyway, the era was also characterised by a bunch of articles – all of which appeared about 18 months after that sort of business model stopped being viable due to massive oversupply – which suggested to naive readers that this was, in fact, a great way to earn a living…and now we have it again with this piece about ‘passive income’ in the NYT, which, honestly, made me quite angry. I mean, listen to this line about a guy who’s made a bunch of voiceclones and licenses them to ‘creators’ via ElevenLabs for, he claims, $3k of effortless income per month: “Ebso doesn’t think there is anything special about his voice. His background in audio engineering may explain some of his success, but he said anyone could do just as well with a few hundred dollars’ worth of recording equipment.” NO NO NO THIS IS NOT HOW THIS STUFF WORKS THERE IS NOT AN INFINITE MARKET FOR THIS STUFF AND THERE IS NO MOAT AND THERE WILL NOT BE ROOM FOR MORE THAN A HANDFUL OF ACTUALLY-SUCCESSFUL PLAYERS IN A SPACE LIKE THIS AND THE LONG-TERM MOAT DOES NOT EXIST WHAT THE ACTUAL FCUK. Anyway, this is all about the US but, honestly, this is literally The Dream for seemingly every single fcuking young man under 30 in the West, as far as I can tell, which is…hmmmm.
- Data Can’t Predict Crime: This is a great piece of reporting in WIRED, looking into a programme deployed by Avon & Somerset Police in the UK to attempt to use data to predictively model crime and all the reasons why it not only didn’t work perfectly but, in many respects, really didn’t work at all. This is the summary opening, but, honestly, this really is worth reading because FCUK ME does it not feel like a good idea that police forces across the UK are blithely doing more of this stuff. “WIRED, working in partnership with the nonprofit newsroom Liberty Investigates, plus the Bristol Cable and Lighthouse Reports, obtained hundreds of pages of documentation from public records requests to build the most comprehensive picture to date of Avon and Somerset’s regional experiment with data collection and predictive analytics. (Liberty, the parent organization of Liberty Investigates, had some early involvement in a potential legal challenge to the program and continues to support Pegram’s litigation.) The investigation reveals that at least two of these risk-scoring models were quietly abandoned after Bristol City Council staff deemed they could no longer trust them. Previously unreported documents show government inspectors and independent reviewers highlighting a startling lack of transparency about some elements of the program and warning that the systems could undermine public trust. Police data disclosed to WIRED—comprising more than 36,000 model performance scores—appear in some cases to show “genuinely poor predictive performance,” according to an independent analyst who reviewed the data for WIRED.”
- A Non-Adman At Cannes: Jason Koebler of tech outlet 404 Media was at Cannes the other week – as was my friend Luke, who told me that he got ‘do you know who I am?’-ed by some ‘creator’ cunt brandishing an Insta profile with 900k followers at him to try and get into the Spotify party, which, lol, sweetheart, come back when you’re at 5million – and this is his series of impressions of the Adcnut’s Glastonbury from someone who is not an Adcnut. When seen from the outside, it all feels…very…silly: “Nominally, Cannes Lions is an award show that honors the most creative and innovative advertisement campaigns of the past year. The basement of the Palais des Festivals, which is basically a huge convention center, is filled with images of iconic ads from the last few decades, and there is a red carpet and daily awards ceremonies. The Cannes Lions website notes it is “where creativity drives progress,” and states that “The Awards underpin everything that makes Cannes Lions what it is—the home of creative excellence and effectiveness—and each year a new global benchmark for creativity is set.” Inspirational messages inside the Palais highlighted creativity and the human touch with empty little platitudes; one read “Personal growth is no longer a nice to have. It’s a must have.” Another said “DRIVE PROGRESS. THIS IS YOUR MOMENT.” A third said “CREATE EMOTIONAL STORIES.””
- Being A Fake Success Online: Another Jason Koebler piece, this time on how easy it is in 2026 to create shortform content for top-of-funnel engagement which portrays you as a super-successful hustlepreneur with multiple passive income streams, complete with the Huracan and the Lear…all thanks to a short-term vehicle rental and some spoof dashboards. Honestly, if I had teenage sons I would a) be really sad; and b) I would force them to read this and then go through their FYP and point out all of the fcuking content cnuts who are lying to them about how rich they are.
- The AI Influencer Army: Over the past year or so I have featured various platforms which offer paying customers the opportunity to spin up armies of AI-generated influencers, beautiful of face and shiny of hair and white of tooth and entirely nonexistent, all to flog very real products to unwitting consumers who are increasingly unable to distinguish a real human who’s been filtered to fcuk from a fake human who just LOOKS like they have been filtered to fcuk, all managed by phonefarms to manufacture enough authenticity to fool, say, TikTok into thinking it’s a device owned by a Real Person. This is a profile of someone behind one of these platforms, and, er, look, let’s just say that you don’t leave this piece feeling GREAT about the future informational integrity of, well, anything at all.
- Living With The Palantir Coat: Got to be honest, I am…unsure what to make of this, but it left me feeling…quite…icky. Saahil Desai cops one of the coveted blue Palatir coats which have been doing numbers on resale sites and spends the day wearing to see what wearing (admittedly very stylish) clothing promoting a brand that is both a surveillance panopticon AND a dealer of fiery skydeath (not to mention being the personal brand extension of one of the world’s very worst human beings – and WHAT a crowded field that is in 2026!) feels like and how people react; honestly, this is all…quite…depressing. “When the chore coat was announced in April, it became an instant grail for Palantir’s many devotees, who are drawn to the hard-core ethos of the CEO, Alex Karp (or “Daddy Karp, as he’s sometimes known online). [AUTHORIAL/EDITORIAL NOTE: ANYONE WHO HAS EVER SAID THAT EVEN IN JEST SHOULD BE MURDERED, I AM NOT EVEN REALLY JOKING] Palantir is proudly America First—Karp has said that his goal is “making America more lethal—and sure enough, the company’s marketing emphasizes that the jacket is made in America with 100 percent American-grown cotton. The jacket also has been easy to mock. Here is a foray into fashion from a nearly $300 billion company that is automating warfare. People have dubbed the coat “the worst clothing release this year and darkly wondered, “Is this the uniform that will be issued after we are all put in labor camps?” In a ranking of despicability, New York magazine’s “Approval Matrix” placed the Palantir chore coat near flesh-eating bacteria. In the name of journalism, I decided to buy one. What would it be like to drape myself in the sartorial expression of one of the most polarizing companies in the United States? The minute that pre-orders went live, I refreshed Palantir’s website, frantically typed out my credit-card number, and paid $252, including shipping and tax. Within hours, all of the coats had sold out. Mine arrived two weeks later in a giant box labeled SOFT WEAR COLLECTION. The package included a placard signed by Sankar, a SOFTWARE DOMINATION sticker, a postcard urging me to CHEW THE GLASS, and a luxurious cedar hangar embossed with Palantir’s name and logo. A plastic card certified that this was a genuine Palantir chore coat, No. 191 of 200.”
- The Norwegian With An Indian Accent: Along with ‘you never take me to Bangladesh’, this is 100% my favourite ‘weird internet thing’ of the past few weeks. Who is the white guy with the very, very Indian accent? Is he REALLY a Norwegian who was abandoned there as a child and has grown up effectively as a native Indian? Vice, apparently still zombie-ing along here in 2026, does the investigative work and, unsurprisingly, comes up with no definitive answers whatsoever. LET US ENJOY THE MYSTERY FFS! “I tuned into Lasse Lund’s Instagram Live this weekend for the same reason as everyone else: to work out if he’s telling the truth. The basic details of his story are that he ended up living on the streets of Mumbai between the ages of 11 and 17 after his father moved back to Norway and his mother was jailed for overstaying her visa. He claims the authorities failed to support him on his return to Norway and, due to his lack of education, he ended up working in factories doing manual labor. He’s now returned to India to film a documentary telling his story and says he wants to give back to the people who helped him survive his childhood. I can see why you might think it sounds too good to be true.”
- I Found Jesus At A Drone Show: This is, technically, about how they go about putting on those massive coordinated drone shows that create pixel art in the sky – again, a sentence which is sort-of amazing to write when you think how little sense it would make to someone a relatively short number of years ago – but it is also about the amazing sense of wonder engendered by seeing a massive pair of gladly hands appear in the sky and wave beatifically at you. Honestly, I found this…oddly moving, which is testament to some excellent writing by Sheon Han.
- Would You Eat This Guy?: I cannot stress enough how thrilled I was to read this account of what, to my mind, is the best scientific experiment I have heard of in YEARS. Basically a bunch of researchers are seeking to answer the question of ‘exactly how much does the manner in which an edible ‘thing’ presents itself affect the likelihood that someone will indeed eat said thing” – in this case, the ‘thing’ is a weird little guy who looks slightly humanoid, and who researchers imbue with different personality types to see whether someone is, basically, more likely to eat something that presents as ‘baby’ or something that presents as ‘god’. Yes, I know, but I promise this will all come together when you read the piece – this is SO WEIRD and also very interesting indeed. I mean, look, just enjoy the opener and tell me you don’t want to read on: “Imagine you are seated at a table. A guy sits across from you. He is vaguely humanoid, with a long torso and two arms raised in fist-like clubs. His full name is Edible Agent, but we will call him Eddie and use he/him pronouns. There’s something about Eddie that makes you feel at ease. Maybe it’s his fragrance, which reminds you of apple juice, of childhood. Maybe it’s his two black eyes that gaze upon you without judgment. You decide to unburden yourself to him. You tell him that you’ve been making mistakes at work, and you are so afraid of your boss’s criticism that you have developed stomach pain. “Fear will only bar the path you are meant to walk,” Eddie tells you, wiggling his edible arms to show you he understands. You tell him that to cope with your stress, you’ve been drinking every day. “There is no solace for those who seek refuge in dependence,” Eddie tells you, wiggling once again. When you tell him that you can find no other way to deal with this burden, Eddie tells you to confront the problem, to contemplate your next step forward. “Only by tempering oneself and holding fast to one’s convictions can one overcome the burdens one bears,” Eddie says, wiggling. This encounter changes you profoundly. Then comes the question: After all you have been through together, would you eat Eddie?”
- The TikTok Farlands: Every couple of years we get a new ‘hack’ designed to help curious users find The Weird Hinterlands Of Social Media – a few years ago we had the obsession with “FYP Pulls”, now it’s “The TikTok Farlands”, here described in an interesting piece on the BBC website of all places. “TikTok has a reputation for serving up an endless stream of videos that are, in general, fairly positive. Some detractors even call it sanitised. But beneath the surface are billions of videos TikTok normally won’t show you. Some are boring. Some are bizarre. Some of them are truly unsettling. Rumour has it if you stay up too late, scrolling for hours until you exhaust TikTok’s normal recommendations, you might get a momentary glimpse. But users of the platform say they’ve found a way to go deeper. With the right tricks, you can reach this uncanny digital space, that’s weirder, darker and more grotesque than the happy path the algorithm typically steers you along. It’s known as the “TikTok Farlands”. The best way to reach it, apparently, is to plug in a string of random numbers and letters that another user has posted in the comments of a video.”
- The Most Prolific Writers: So I just happened to check the wordcount while opening this link and, er, I’ve hit 10k and there’s still another 10 longreads and the videos to go and OH GOD I REALLY DO HAVE A PROBLEM I AM SORRY. But! I am obviously not the only one – this is a great piece by Brennan Day about the most prolific writers in history (not writing, mostly just typing), their practice and the nature of their compulsion; sometimes it was the pressing demands of ‘making rent’, but more often it seems like there’s a set of people who just REALLY need to get the words out – the Words Georg of copy, if you will. For example, this lad – I HONESTLY FEEL YOU SO SO MUCH: “a writer who goes by Jue: a 26-year-old in northwestern China who fell into web fiction writing after a broken leg ended his career plans, and he now earns his living on the platform Qidian writing time-travel historical fiction. So long as he hits 10,000 words a day. On a good day, he can do that in two and a half hours, racing against writer friends in a practice they call pīnzì, “linking words,” a competitive sprint where strangers log on together just to out-pace each other into productivity. On a bad day, the same 10,000 words eat the whole day. There’s no such thing as a day off when you’re serializing; the only way to rest is to write enough buffer in advance to afford it. And the devotion runs deeper than any one writer’s grind. The article also mentions Tang Jia San Shao, China’s highest-earning web author, who is said to have written every single day since 2008, the only exception being his first wife’s terminal illness and mourning her death.”
- Libraries in Videogames: An unexpectedly-interesting piece on the website of the National Library of Scotland, looking at some of the ways in which libraries are depicted in games and the roles they fulfil in narrative, and how game mechanics can sometimes intersect with the workings of libraries and their systems…this looks at Tomb Raider, Skyrim, Assassin’s Creed and others, and is honestly a really smart investigation of the function the library as a type of space can be used to ludonarrative effect (he says, with a flourish of unforgivable pretension sorry sorry sorry).
- Intuitive Cooking: This is a lovely bit of writing, on the beauty of cooking by feel – the author is specifically a baker, and obviously baking is sui generis when it comes to the way in which flour (and gluten etc etc) react to heat and moisture, requiring a far more flexible hand than other forms of cooking, but the general vibe here (of going by feel, smell, taste, being guided by senses and what you want RIGHT NOW) is lovely; if you enjoy cooking, you will love this I think.
- Untranslateable Food Words: A gorgeous article on Vittles in which several food writers whose backgrounds span the world share words about food or eating from their culture which don’t have a clear analogue in English – this is so so so lovely, and made me VERY HUNGRY: “For me – like many others – English is the language of work and writing, but not the language of feeling, or life. I live in Hindustani (the Hindi–Urdu hybrid that is one of Delhi’s languages), surrounded by my family’s Tamil, and my neighbourhood’s other languages (Punjabi, Haryanvi, Nepali). When I write, I still struggle to bring the entirety of my life into the English language. No matter how hard I try, something always gets missed in translation – especially when it comes to expressions of eating and cooking. This is too much that goes on here that English simply cannot hold. Take ‘khayali pulao’ (پلاؤ خیالی ; खयाली पुलाव्)), which translates from Urdu and Hindi as ‘pulao of the imagination’. It refers to an activity akin to daydreaming – expectations that can amount to fiction, anticipation that can have the weight of fantasy. The closest equivalent in English is perhaps ‘building castles in the sky’, but that phrase feels – to my South Asian ears at least – too judgemental or instructive. It doesn’t capture the pleasure of possibility that ‘khayali pulao’ invokes. Every language around the world is strewn with similarly untranslatable phrases. So, we asked seven writers to write about their favourite food-related idioms in their primary languages, from Arabic to Tamil, Yoruba to Thai.”
- Another Old Rock Star Story: After last week’s Nick Cave bit, this is a story about being an old musician from the other end of the fame spectrum. I have featured Tom Mcrae’s writing in here before – this is him talking about a recent support slot he played in Paris, in a venue he used to headline back in his (still relatively modest) pomp, and it is a lovely piece of writing – sad and funny and ever-so-slightly-bitter, but not so’s it sours the prose at all.
- The Grey Whale Die-Off: Yes, ok, I know that you probably don’t THINK you want to read a few thousand words about whales dying en-masse and, yes, fine, it’s a BIT depressing in part, but also it’s SO interesting, and Vauhini Vara’s writing about the animals, both the living and the dead ones, is gorgeous at times (but, also, it’s quite hard not to read the stories about the whales apparently dying of starvation and think “Hm, this does not feel like a plotpoint in a story about a healthy ecosystem”). “Calambokidis, the researcher in Washington, had observed that once upon a time, you could identify the perpetrator of a crime, his weapon, and the scene—this captain, that harpoon, this lagoon. Later, you could at least narrow down one whale’s death to a particular cause—a ship strike, say, or entanglement. But when you suspect that a whole species is imperiled—not by a harpooner, or even by a boat, but by the sudden and unprecedented transmutation of its vast habitat, following decades of environmental violence for which no one in particular is responsible—how can you begin to define the threat, let alone corral the political will required to meet it?”
- I Ain’t Got Time To Bleed: For several years now, Tom Usher has written about men’s mental health – his own, that of others, the collective state of the UK’s masculine ID – and this is another sensitively-written piece that positions the modern approach to ISSUES as one which is, fundamentally, dissociative, and frames that through the lens of class. I thought this was very good: “In the sci-fi action horror classic Predator, an elite team of juiced to the gills commandos are killing generic guerillas in a jungle. In the crossfire, Ramirez, the ‘still huge but wears glasses so he’s the nerd’ of the comically alpha male soldiers group, points to the impossibly large bicep of Blain, played by former WWE wrestler Jesse Ventura and says: “You’re hit. You’re bleeding, man.” in a state of quiet panic. Without flinching, turning around, or taking his eye off his next target, Blain replies: “I ain’t got time to bleed.” I recently read a book called The Melancholia of Class, by Cynthia Cruz, in which she repeatedly discusses the distance with which middle class people can view sadness. When I feel sad, through comedowns, heartbreak, or a myriad of self-inflicted or relatively minor problems, I’m essentially outside of it looking in.”
- The Dunham Memoir: Lena Dunham’s memoir came out earlier this year and was extensively – and positively – reviewed all over the place; a few months later, the LRB has dropped its analysis of the book, Dunham, her work and What It All Tells Us About Culture and Women and Society and Fame, and, look, I personally have no connection of Dunham and her work at all, but this is a really good piece of writing and analysis which, while broadly reaching the same overall conclusion as the other reviews I read (mainly: this is an exceptionally smart and talented woman who has been through a LOT but who is also undeniably a very, very annoying person), made me think a lot more about the wider context around her than the others and is therefore BETTER.
- The Year is 2063 and You Were Never Interesting: This is a month old (SORRY) but I only came across it this week and I enjoyed it SO MUCH. On scrolling and screens and what we are replacing when we fill so much of ourselves with Other People’s Lives: “You have a smartphone now. The ‘others’ aren’t just university students in the south, now – they’re celebrities, bloggers, trust fund babies in Manhattan. You are blown away by the banality of your own life. It’s official, now: your hobbies are the gym, partying, and this. The word “influencer” exists, to you, for the first time ever. They are curators. You delete all your old photos, erasing evidence of your entire adolescence in a fit of insecurity. These women hike mountains in the pre-dawn darkness to capture sunrise in evening gowns without crowds. They lay on the ground, smiling, their long shining hair coiled in ringlets around them, coquettishly posing with a camera. You have only a dim awareness that any of this might not be real. You copy them. They influence you to go to Bali and when you go, you pack a suitcase of outfits: shoes, earrings, everything matching. Before, you’d bring a carry-on; now you have to check a bag. You beg your friend to take photos of you, snapping photo after photo. Your most vivid memory of the 10 days there was posing with an acai bowl in a pineapple printed polyester set – how well the picture turned out, the smoothie lukewarm by the time you finally eat it.
- The World Makes Me Nauseous So I Be Disgusting: Finally this week, a piece of writing which I enjoyed SO MUCH – perhaps more from the point of view of vibes and style and feel and voice than ‘content’ – and which reminded me of all sorts of different, excellent things; the experimental 90s fiction of Mark Leyner, the films of Gregg Araki and Harmony Korine, the 7-8am shift at the sketchiest afters you’ve ever been to…honestly, this is VERY RICH but I was floored by it and maybe you will be too: “He was speaking of gamma ray frequencies, and I was maintaining, with my phone between the pillow and my drooling cheek, that the gamma rays fell underneath the umbrella of “cuz.” After a while of normal litigious repartee, I called God to the stand to maintain that he indeed drew the firmament in the image of “just ‘cuz,” and he, the plaintiff, objected due to bias witness, and I in turn said it was rather reductive to presume that God was a staunch creationist, that that was rather a container his disciples had shoved Him into, and then he begged me to go back to the hotel one more time, and I fell asleep listening to him **y. I felt bad I was never honest with him and that he didn’t know I was disgusting, because I’d never told him, because had I, it would have come out in a stammer, I would’ve basically said, “‘The World Makes Me Nauseous So I Be Disgusting, I have glimpsed the thing you only can with the certain movie theater glasses, and I am condemned to it for the rest of my life and so we could never be, you are basically the Latter Day Saint and I am The Whale, but you wouldn’t know a thing from this.” I wonder how many pervert economists there are alongside me, skinwalking around skin people in our gimp suits. A gimp suit is still a gimp suit even if it’s decorated like a twenty-six inch waist woman with Bangladeshi hair on. I found the same Hyatt Times Square room for 349 and thought I might go back alone, where I wouldn’t be implicating anyone. It was a really nice room.”
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!