Leaving aside the obvious tragedy of the attack on Manchester synagogue and the deaths that resulted, and the miserable reality of the continued rise in antisemitism being seen the world over, it was also miserable to be able to broadly predict the way in which the attack and its perpetrator are likely to be used by some of the worst people in the world over the coming weeks in order to keep peddling the same racist arguments as they have been all summer. Shall we all collectively agree not to listen to those cnuts this time? Eh? What? Oh.
Anyway, it’s been Something Of A Week – a selection of links to largely-pointless webspaff accompanied by Too Many Words is unlikely to make anything better, but console yourself with the fact that what follows is, at the very least, unlikely to make anything appreciably worse.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you ought to know better by now.
THE SECTION WHICH DIDN’T EXPECT TRAVIS KELCE TO BE CAST IN THE YOKO ROLE BUT FEELS IT’S NOW INEVITABLE, PT.1:
- Messenger: Regular readers – or at least those of you who pay some sort of minimal attention to what goes into this weird, lumpen digital gruel each week – will be aware that I normally tend to save anything that might vaguely be described as a ‘game’ until the end of the miscellaneous links; I feel, though, that it’s been something of A Week for many of us and as such you might want something gentle and soothing and, well, *nice* upfront to ease your ingestion of all the lumpier and more, er, challenging bits that come later on (actually this is a reasonably-benign edition, I think, so DON’T BE SCARED!). As such, we kick off this week with a site which is both lovely and SO TECHNICALLY IMPRESSIVE – Messenger is a little in-browser game in which you play as a, er, messenger kid of some sort; you’re dropped onto a TINY PLANET and your task, should you choose to engage with it, is to run around said planet’s surface delivering messages to its various inhabitants. It’s all very simple – talk to person x, travel to destination alpha, deliver message y, rinse, repeat – and there’s not a lot of depth here, fine, but it’s whimsical and cute and SO PRETTY! The graphics are nicely cel-shaded (ish), the music is unobtrusive and pleasant, and in general it’s just nice to run through the streets of the tiny world here presented and just enjoy the seaside-ish moderately-Eastern vibes. This is SO CUTE and the fact that it can run on your browser is frankly astonishing – if you need a sort of mental palate-cleanser then this will work wonders. Oh, and there’s also a light multiplayer element in that you will occasionally bump into other players currently online and have limited emoji ‘conversations’ with them (why the developers thought it necessary to give you a toilet roll emote is, I confess, troubling me slightly), which lends a nice air of community to the whole thing – honestly, this is VERY impressive and generally just a nice, soothing time for all the family.
- Weird Web October: In another week in which I saw a post decrying the fact that there was nothing fun on the internet anymore doing numbers – PULL YOUR FCUKING FINGER OUT AND LOOK HARDER YOU BOVINE FUCK, HAVE YOUR CURIOSITY AND DISCOVERY MUSCLES ATROPHIED ENTIRELY??? – an antidote! It will not have escaped your notice that it is October (it certainly hasn’t escaped mine, a generally hateful month and frankly I would quite happily hibernate until January should anyone have access to some high-quality sedatives and some sort of medical setup to keep me fed, hydrated, clean and free of bedsores until 2026) – but it is not just *any* October! Oh no! This is WEIRD WEB OCTOBER, in which you (well, anyone really, but you’re the one reading this so let’s presumed it’s aimed squarely at YOU) are encouraged to MAKE STUFF ONLINE! “Weird Web October is a challenge to try and make a website every day of October, based on the theme for each day, inspired by Inktober. It’s open to you and everyone!…We want to bring back the WEIRD WEB. When people just put fun and silly stuff on the internet, not for followers or likes but just for the joy of making something and sharing it.” Each day has a different theme to inspire you should you want a directional prompt to inspire you, and there are instructions on the page as to how to share your creation with the world and link it to the rest of the movement – I’ll keep an eye on this over the next few weeks and share some nice examples, but, well, why don’t YOU make something? GO ON IT ISN’T THAT HARD. (please, though, not another fcuking substack, what is wrong with you? And the same goes for podcasts, before you start).
- Foom: Well, it’s been a BIG WEEK for AI-generated video and the general evolution of the concept of ‘AI telly’ – we will get to Sora in the longreads (seeing as the fcuks at OpenAI have made it US and invite code only, and I am neither in the US (thank Christ) nor in possession of a MAGICAL ACCESS KEY, chiz chiz, and am therefore yet to try it out), but this is FOOM, a new (ish) 24/7 AI video feed by Runway, which, per the blurb, offers “A 24/7 broadcast of AI culture. Weekly shows, interviews, films, research discussions, endless inspiration, livestreams and experimental new programming.” Does anyone want this? NOONE ASKED YOU SIT BACK AND SHUT UP AND WATCH YOUR AI TELLY FEED, PEONS (AFTER ALL YOU CAN’T AFFORD TO GO OUTSIDE DUE TO THE SEEMINGLY-UNIVERSAL £20 ‘LEAVING THE HOUSE’ TAX WHICH NOW SEEMS TO APPLY TO ALL CITIZENS)! I have only given a relatively cursory degree of attention to this – I don’t watch actual, human-made telly so my interest in machine-made video feeds is…minimal – but the little that I have seen suggests that programming skews further towards the ‘slightly-pretentious pseudo-arthouse documentary’ – right now there’s some sort of elaborate Kinect-ish serious of flythroughs around some Gaussian interiors, but it’s curious enough in general to warrant a click and a gawp, even if only a quick one. It does rather feel we have crossed a rubicon, though – again, remember that just because YOU don’t need or want this stuff, and just because YOU think it is gross and an anti-artistic aberration built on theft and greed and all the rest, it doesn’t mean that the majority of the rest of the world is going to feel the same, and if you’re a media or creative worker posting on Bluesky you are, it’s fair to say, significantly less representative of What The World Wants than, say, a bunch of kids in India happily scrolling through the slopfeed with nary a care in the world.
- The Crewkerne Gazette: Speaking of AI video (SEAMLESS!), welcome to the era of SATAIRE (not a typo, this time)! Crewkerne, for those of you not aware, is a town in Somerset (my friend Dave grew up there, his recollections of it mainly seem to revolve around terrible soapbar and a lot of teenage ennui, although I can’t guarantee that’s a representative picture) – this is not, despite what the name might suggest, a website for its local paper, but instead a YouTube channel which about a month ago pivoted from AI-generated ‘history’ videos about Somerset witches (and a very odd parody Louis Theroux episode about a man enjoying congress with a Henry Hoover) to instead producing fast-turnaround ‘comedy’ videos about the government with a ‘satirical’ bent. So you have videos about Keir Starmer and Lord Ali’s ‘gay relationship’ (perhaps my favourite mad conspiracy theory from the UK (sorry, YOOKAY) populist fringe, to some sadly-predictable stuff about migrants, Angela Rayner, the ‘brit card’, all now dropping at a cadence of about one a day, all seemingly made with either Grok Premium Plus or Veo3 or, perhaps more likely, some of the Chinese models…you will be unsurprised to learn that the ‘satire’ is leaden and the music is terrible, and the lyrics banal (this isn’t my politics, I promise, this stuff is just objectively bad), but the point is less about the quality and more about the fact that this stuff is now relatively-trivial to produce at pace, and the costs are low enough that it’s worth someone’s time to churn these out in the hope of going a bit viral and earning some algopennies here and there. They’re not super-popular with the most ‘viral’ topping out at 65kish views, but you imagine that there is a LOT of this out there (see the other Rayner rap vid I posted a month or so ago which was from somewhere else entirely). Oh, and I was curious as to how they managed to generate this fairly-astonishing rip-off of Lily Allen’s ‘Smile’ for this execrable little track – have a listen, it’s quite the ‘tribute’.
- Forgotten Languages: OOH, SOME PROPER INTERNET WEIRD! Ok, this is VERY strange, and another one of the seemingly-endless number of websites I am amazed that I have never seen before (see? I don’t spend ALL my time online!) – Forgotten Languages has been going for over 15 years, as far as I can tell, and is a series of posts…Oh, Christ. Ok, so everything on the site is in…cypher? Basically it’s all in code, apart from some bits that are in English for reasons that make no sense to the casual observer, and, while it might look like it’s gibberish, over the years various intrepid internet sleuths have sought to uncover the meaning of the site and to crack its code, and, to the extent anyone has managed, it seems that…it’s all about aliens? And, er, bioreprogramming humans? And, er, us as a ‘seed planet’? And it turns out that various people have over the years corresponded to a small degree with some of the ‘people’ behind the site, who, it transpires, may or may not in fact be extraterrestrial beings? Look, I am not saying that they ARE, just that, well, that’s what they seem to claim to be. You can learn a little more about the site and what people have managed to find out about it here, and here, but I can’t promise that it will really help much. This is either a byproduct of possible schizophrenia, or a portal into an alien intelligence – I’ll leave it to you to decide which is most likely.
- The Creative Cheat Sheet: Do YOU work in advermarketingpr? Do YOU still have a job? I mean, on one level LUCKY YOU! Anyway, you might find this useful: “The Creative Cheat Sheet was built to help advertising creatives come up with great ideas, share them effectively, and find success in the ad industry.” Basically there are links here to loads of resources which you might find useful should you be employed to make people feel or do things they wouldn’t otherwise feel or do without your intervention – GO WILD!
- Alter Ego: We’re at a very strange inflection point when it comes to our relationship to technology; on the one hand, after the past 15 years or so of having the world slowly coopted by Silicon Valley’s socially-inadequate god emperors we’re all *fairly* agreed that, possibly, it’s not all bein an unalloyed success, and maybe, in the future, we might want to do a *touch* more thinking, planning and research before moving into the ‘fcuking around’ and ‘finding out’ phases; on the other, we’re also increasingly-clearly only going to get out of this NOT INSIGNIFICANT species-wide bind we currently find ourselves in vis a vis the environment without, well, a pretty-spectacular tech hail mary – WHAT TO DO? Well, whatever your perspective, I would suggest what we should be doing is killing ideas like Alter Ego at birth – because, honestly, listen to this: “Introducing AlterEgo, the first near-telepathic interface, designed to make technology as intuitive as using your inner voice.” YES THAT’S RIGHT IT’S A FCUKING DEVICE THAT PROMISES TO LITERALLY READ YOUR THOUGHTS SO YOU CAN, I DON’T KNOW, OPEN TIKTOK. Except, obviously, if you watch the video it reassures you that it will only be able to read the thoughts you WANT it to read – yes, guv, of COURSE it will! The devs sell it as “a breakthrough technology, developed at MIT, that connects you with AI through a minimal, non-invasive device. Using Silent Sense, it understands what you intend to say without speaking, allowing you to extend your thinking without the need to type, tap, or talk out loud” – and look, this is VERY prototypical and not really anything more than vaporware at this point, but I can’t help but think that if you have to repeatedly put phrases like “AlterEgo only responds to intentional, silent speech. Your private thoughts stay private, and you direct every interaction” in the blurb then maybe, just maybe, you have invented something potentially evil and should possibly just, well, stop inventing it.
- The GDELT Project: This is quite possibly one of the most ambitious data projects I have ever seen or heard of, and I had no idea at all it existed before this week – “the GDELT Project monitors the world’s broadcast, print, and web news from nearly every corner of every country in over 100 languages and identifies the people, locations, organizations, themes, sources, emotions, counts, quotes, images and events driving our global society every second of every day, creating a free open platform for computing on the entire world.” Basically this is a whole bunch of datasets that researchers can access to attempt to draw patterns and map information networks across the world, about…anything? Honestly, I only came across this yesterday thanks to Shardcore and haven’t really had time to dig too deeply – and it’s very much something designed for researchers and academics rather than for casual spelunking – but the scope is BOGGLING and the potential use-cases absolutely fascinating if the data is of the quality promised. The website is HORRIBLE, mind (as I sort-of think always ought to be the case for anything SERIOUS and VAGUELY-ACADEMIC like this).
- The Doomsday Scoreboard: An excellent website tracking all the different predictions that we’ve made as a species about when the world is going to end (‘end’ is a pretty elastic quality, turns out – I always wondered with The Rapture, for example, whether all the faithful who get spirited up to heaven then get to spend some fun, indulgent popcorn time gazing down on all the poor unfortunates that didn’t, watching them suffering through the biblical apocalypse like the world’s best disaster film – because, well, that doesn’t sound very Christian, does it?), and keeping a list of the remaining active predictions we’re still waiting on (8, at the time of writing – our next is an asteroid collision expected in 2026 which will end us forever, according to one Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi, should you be curious).
- Marble: Via Lynn’s excellent newsletter on AI and assorted interactive/storytelling gubbins comes this latest iteration of ‘we can let you explore a single image thanks to the magic of AI!’ – this particular iteration is quick, and smooth, and has all sorts of interesting features for the curious and engaged which let you stitch together various scenes to traverse between them. As ever with this stuff, the interesting part here is more ‘wow, look at what you can do!’ than ‘cor, this is fun’, but I do rather like the aesthetic you get at the edge of the images when the AI loses track of what it’s trying to imagine and the whole thing starts falling apart. BONUS AI-IMAGINED NAVIGABLE SCENES – also via Lynn, this is a nice little screensaver-ish sort of thing which cycles you through different scenarios as you ‘move’ through them, and which is weirdly soothing.
- Air Fiesta: Another fun website – SEE THEY DO EXIST PULL YOUR FCUKING FINGERS OUT AND STOP WHINGING – (again from Lynn) which uses Google Earth data to let you pilot a hot air balloon around a virtual representation of THE WHOLE WORLD! It doesn’t explain itself hugely well, so know that you will have to click a few of the pin icons to access all the features you’ll need to move freely around the world, but once you can then you can pass a really lovely time gently floating about an accurately-rendered version of the planet, tuning into local radio stations and looking at the scenery as you go; I promise, this really is very relaxing indeed, and, were I the sort of person who believed in stuff like this, I might even call it ‘meditative’ at a push.
- Offline Church: Speaking of meditative (SEAMLESS!), this is a cute idea. Open this site on your mobile (I always assume that none of you are the sort of sickos who put yourself through the miserable horror of reading Curios on mobile), then turn on airplane mode and MARVEL AT WHAT HAPPENS (you get a short meditative exercise designed to let you INHABIT THE MOMENT, it’s not that exciting). I actually think there’s quite a nice riff on this that you could do in places where people often have to spend a lot of time waiting – doctor’s, dentists, etc – which might be worth exploring; but, also, I am just some cnut writing a newsletter in his pants at 818am and you probably don’t need to listen to me.
- Grok vs MAGA: A TikTok account sharing examples of people on the right in (mostly) the US getting annoyed when Apartheid Toad’s pet AI Grok doesn’t give answers that conform to their particular worldview – I personally don’t find stuff like this anything other than exhausting and sad (“ALAN YOU ARE SHOUTING AT MATHS, AND YOUR WIFE AND CHILDREN STILL HATE YOU”), but depending on your tolerance for ‘MAGA CHUD GETS OWNED BY BASED AI’-type content then you may enjoy it more than I do.
- Classic Web: A Belusky account sharing regular screenshots of websites from THE GOOD OLD DAYS (they were not good! The days have always, in the main, been mediocre for the vast majority of people!) – even if you’re not some sort of retropilled nostalgiafetishist this is worth a look, mainly to see the wide, wonderful range of design applied to sites back in the day, compared to the slightly-more cookie-cutter look and feel applied to the more professional web of 2025. BRING BACK CREATIVE USE OF HTML PLEASE.
- The Sovereign Citadel: When I found this I was convinced it was AI-generated and put it on The List as my inaugural example of a Machine-penned Substack – but now I look at it again I wonder whether the writing is too…idiosyncratically-bad to be fully AI? No, hang on, look at the cadence, this HAS to be AI-assisted. Or the author is, er, VERY COMMITTED. Anyway, the Sovereign Citadel is a newsletter for MEN about, er, BEAUTY and TRUTH and SELF-IMPROVEMENT, and occasionally about why modern women are disappointing (OBVS) – I mean, listen to this INSIGHT: “A woman who is obsessed with herself can never master a man, because to master a man is to be obsessed with understanding him more than she seeks to understand herself. Most women lack a curiosity beyond endless self-exploration, and so do not even begin to chart the soul of the man they deem worthy.” ASTONISHING. Anyway, this fcuker is posting 2-3 times a day, which seems…unusual, frankly, take a look and see what you think (but don’t read too much of it, it will make you at least 3% more stupid than you currently are).
- Black Dot Tattoo: Tattoos are ART (not always good art, fine, but ART nonetheless) and there is something very human about letting another person mark you forever with their work – except not any more, thanks to Black Dot Tattoo which is a company that’s invented a TATTOO MACHINE, which will do the whole thing automatically and which will, according to the business model let artists anywhere upload their designs to the corpus so that they can be worn by anyone anywhere…this is either a sensible tech evolution of an ancient practice or a fundamental traducement of What It Means To Get Inked – to me it feels like it reduces the whole thing to the same sort of level as ‘getting your face printed onto the foam of your cappuccino while hungover in Cannes’, but see what you think. There’s currently only one of these in the world, in NYC, but they’re inviting applications for other tatt studios or ‘appropriate partners’ who might wish to get in on the act, so expect to see these in your local ‘Spoons in ~3y time.
- On The Internet Everyone Knows You Had A Dog: A tribute to tributes to people’s dogs. This, I warn you, might be a bit close to home for some of you.
THE SECTION WHICH DIDN’T EXPECT TRAVIS KELCE TO BE CAST IN THE YOKO ROLE BUT FEELS IT’S NOW INEVITABLE, PT.2:
- Ambienst: I am an absolute sucker for projects whose central premise is ‘making stuff with words’ – this is a ‘turn words into sounds’ toy, which lets you plug in any text you like (or select from some examples) and use it to create MUSIC! Ok, fine, ‘music’ is possibly a bit of a stretch, but certainly ‘sounds’ – each word corresponds to a note/tone (you can change the nature of how they correspond in the settings) and so there’s a very real sense that every single combination of words can and will create a new soundscape, but the effect is much more ‘ambient noodling’ rather than ‘tuneful melody’ – still, I rather like it and found the excerpt from a past Curios I just listened to rather soothing, so give it a try and see what you think.
- Episode: I went for a drink with Jay Springett earlier this week who told me all about Episodes, a whole narrative storytelling experience for mobile which is, apparently, FCUKING MASSIVE with children and which is making some people a LOT of money through creating stories on the platform, and which I had literally NEVER heard of before he told me about it – this is interesting, partly as a vector in ‘stories are still really popular, turns out, partly in terms of the rise of the visual novel, partly as a new frontier in the ‘creator economy’… as far as I can tell (and I am obviously VERY far away from the target audience for this stuff) the stories tend to be aimed at girls, tend towards the romance genre, and feature pretty simple mechanics (there’s limited interactivity, the storytelling is largely linear)…but millions and millions of people are lapping this stuff up. Super-interesting (conceptually, at least – I don’t think I am going to be rushing to watch any of these things myself, unless one of you tells me about the secret, miserable existential angst channel).
- Anisota: This is an interesting idea, although I don’t *quite* understand it (no, shut up, that IS a valid thing to say, leave me alone) – anisota basically lets you experience Bluesky as a series of cards rather than a scrolling feed, each post presented as an individual element which you read and then discard. Except there are obviously layers to this – there’s a ‘stamina’ gauge which depletes with each ‘card’ you look at, and presumably disables you from looking at any more once it hits 0; you can collect ‘items’ in various categories, and there appears to be some sort of…bestiary buried in the interface somewhere? Basically it feels like there’s some sort of a weird ludic element to this that I am yet to discover or work out, so, er, if one of you would like to find out how it works and what it is that would be great, thanks!
- Work In Charities: Are YOU looking for a job in the charitable or third sector? Would YOU like a website that lets you search every single (ok, I can’t guarantee this, but let’s presume) charity job currently being advertised in the UK? GREAT! Built by someone at Newspeak House by scraping all the UK charity websites for job listings and then filleting and representing the info, this is a super-useful resource and something I figure a few of you might find useful. There are currently 8k+ roles being advertised on there, which you may or may not find reassuring.
- The Unwritten She: Are you a woman? Do you have an inspiring story to tell? Are you worried that your inspiring story might never find its audience because you simply don’t have the time or the energy to commit to writing the important memoir that you know that the world deserves? WELL LOOK NO FURTHER! The Unwritten She is the brainchild of one Shannon St Hilaire (a great name, unquestionably), author of a couple of novels (which may or may not be self-published, it’s hard to tell), who is offering YOU, yes YOU, the chance to work with her to bring your story to the page. St Hilaire is offering upto three people a year the opportunity to work with her to write their memoir – as the website puts it, “Our process is a deep-dive into your life’s work and core truths. Through immersive interviews directly with you and meticulous research, we capture the authentic voice, philosophy, and spirit that define you as a founder, matriarch, or trailblazer.” And what do you pay for this privilege? Between “$10-25,000+”, with the finished work delivered in 6-12 months apparently – which…I don’t know, man, feels a bit steep? Not sure what sort of length we’re looking at here, or indeed what the final step of ‘guiding your manuscript through a premium publication process’ means, but, well, it’s probably all legit! I especially liked this specific example from the FAQs: “What if we don’t have many materials to work with? Some of the most powerful books begin with a single, powerful truth. Our expertise lies in our interview process, where we help you unearth the profound stories and wisdom you already hold. Your life is the only archive we truly need.” And in this particular case, I get the impression that Ms St Hilaire’s ‘single, powerful truth’ is ‘there’s one born every minute’ (or, more accurately, three a year). I really hope she doesn’t Google herself, on reflection.
- DeArrow: I think we might have passed the point of Peak Thumbnail in terms of YouTube generations, but this might still be of interest to some of you who spend a lot of time on there: “DeArrow is an open source browser extension for crowdsourcing better titles and thumbnails on YouTube. The goal is to make titles accurate and reduce sensationalism. No more arrows, ridiculous faces, and no more clickbait” – if for some reason you find Creator Thumbnail Face insufferable then this will improve your YT experience a thousandfold.
- Moving Paintings: I’m normally a huge fan of Google Arts & Culture’s work, but this feels to me like it’s a rare misstep – in collaboration with Japan’s Fukuda Art Museum, this project takes a bunch of paintings from their collections and animates them using Google’s Veo3, giving a bit of voice-over explosion to explain a little more about the painting, its history, the artist, the cultural context it was created within…there’s nothing nasty about the concept per se, but the way it’s executed ends up looking a bit, well, shonky, which isn’t something you tend to associate with Google’s stuff in my experience, and it feels like it detracts from the works rather than adding anything to them in a meaningful sense. See what you think – personally I think the works don’t need this sort of w4nk.
- Play Snake In The Address Bar: Click the link. Look at the address bar in the newly-opened window. Yes, that’s right, it’s snake, You can play it RIGHT THERE in the bit you type the url into. Amazing, isn’t it? Eh? Fcuk’s sake you joyless cnut, CAN YOU FOR ONCE NOT JUST BE CHARMED???
- Canes: An old friend of my grandfather’s was an enthusiastic amateur woodcarver, which is why I have in my possession a hand-carved cane-cum-walking stick, made from a single branch of…some tree or another, whose head has been carved into the shape of a curious hound. It is ACE, but it would be immeasurably better had its creator seen fit to embed some sort of blade into it and turn it into a canine sword stick. Anyway, this is a forthcoming auction of various canes soon to take place at Bonhams – some of these are BEAUTIFUL, and while I haven’t checked all of the lots it seems plausible to me that at least one of them will double as a concealed bladed weapon because some of these *really* look the part…oh, balls this was in fact yesterday, how galling. Sorry to all those of you who had momentarily dreamed of owning some sort of malacca beauty – still, it’s worth checking out the lots because there were some beauties in there.
- Bird Photo of the Year: Another week, another selection of photographs of tiny dinosaurs, this time from entrants into the Bird Photographer of the Year contest – I always say this, but there really ARE some great shots; my absolute favourite is the ‘Bloody Petrel’ pic because honestly it looks like a painting in the best possible way and I want it in my house.
- Record Welsh Place Names: ARE ANY OF YOU WELSH? Would you like to contribute to the preservation of the language and culture of your country? OH GOOD! This is a project looking to record the old Welsh names for places, landmarks and the like which are in the main not officially part of the geographical record – per the site, “we want to ensure that as many place names in Wales as possible are collected and shared so that they can be used now and by future generations…At present, many Welsh and historic place names do not appear on online maps. If you have names for these, or any other elements of the Welsh natural, topographic or built landscape, you can help us by using this online form to record them. We’ll share the information with Wikipedia, Mapio Cymru / Open Street Map, and the List of Historic Place Names of Wales, so that the names you have contributed appear on as many different resources as possible, encouraging their use.” A laudable project which we should all share with all the Welsh people we know and then bully them into participating.
- Lastill: This is…odd, I don’t quite understand it and it unsettles me a bit if I’m honest. It’s the website for a fictitious tool manufacturing company – Lastill – which presents as a silly, superficial joke…which it is, obviously, except…well, it just goes on a bit too long, and too deep, and it all feels a bit like something that starts funny but which eventually becomes sinister because someone maintains eye contact a bit too long, or laughs a little too hard, or keeps touching your hand in a way that you realise might be a cry for help…there is a LOT in here, and some of it is quite…odd, and while there’s a page buried here that does acknowledge it’s a gag there’s also something…sinister about it. I don’t know, man, feels…strange.
- IKEA Catalogues: Would you like to explore seven decades of IKEA catalogues? OH GOOD! This goes all the way back to 1950 and whether or not you have an personal interest in utilitarian Scandi furniture – and I personally don’t – this is a FASCINATING archive of design trends, both from the point of view of the furniture being shown off but also in the way in which said furniture is presented in each year’s catalogue…in many respects this is a hugely-significant part of the modern era from the point of view of aesthetics and mass-consumerism, and for some of you this is quite possibly the best and most interesting thing in here this week.
- Swearsky: Dave ‘Bagpuss’ Forsey (we don’t ask) returns with another little project building on the Bluesky API – this time it tracks how sweary the site is at any given point, specifically “the % of English Bluesky posts that contain one or more swear word in the last 10 minutes. Graphs show the average each hour (so changes a bit over the day). Posts every ~4 hours if the index remains normal, but makes extra posts if 1% above the 7-day average.” At the time of writing, the site is 3% sweary, down from an overnight high of 4.4% (what WERE all you Americans so exercised abo…oh, yes, of course, sorry).
- Fashtermind: A depressing little game that asks you to guess which charming funster was responsible for a selection of unpleasantly-fashy quotes. Was it Hitler? Was it Nigel? Was it Donny? WHO CAN EVEN TELL ANYMORE!! Ah, the overton window!
- Oh It’s That Guy: Literally the least-suitable game for someone like me who doesn’t know the first thing about cinema or who any actors are or what they look like – still, if you’re a film buff then this might well be catnip for you. You’re presented with five actors each day and a selection of films – your job for each is to correctly guess which of said films that particular actor was in. Honestly, this was embarrassingly impossible for me when I played it earlier this week.
- Chartle: Via Giuseppe, Chartle is, er, Wordle but for charts! Each day you’re presented with a different chart and asked to guess what a particular highlighted element of it refers to – so today’s is a graphed ranking of different nations’ CO2 outputs over time, with your job being to guess which country the highlighted line refers to. Which, ok, doesn’t sound hugely fun! And, ok, fine, compared to, say, sex, or crack cocaine, or playing FIFA (it will always be FIFA, don’t look at me like that) it probably isn’t, but it’s QUITE fun and sometimes that has to suffice.
- Doors: I love this! A philosophical point-and-click game which explores the nature of image and representation via the medium of a gently-amusing LucasArts-style point and click adventure all about, er, doors! Look, I know that I have just made it sound awful and tedious but I promise you this is a lot more fun than my frankly-shoddy description might have initially suggested.
- I Will Strangle A Horse: Finally this week, a small, very silly, very funny little Twine game by Guy Kelly. You do not, to be very clear, need to at any point actually strangle a horse; also, you will die repeatedly. You will, though, also laugh, and that is probably worth the risk of committing accidental equine murder.
By Von Wolfe
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Sleezy Dad: Despite the fact that you will need to VPN yourself outside the UK to see this – unless you have a verified Tumblr account – this is not bongo; it feels bongo-adjacent, true, but there’s nothing on here that is in any way NSFW; it’s just got very strong fetish vibes, but I quite like the overall aesthetic despite not personally being Into This Sort Of Thing.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Xania Monet: A NEW AI ‘MUSICIAN’ (LOL) EMERGES! This is ‘Xania Monet’, a project where an actual musician (per the lore, at least) writes the lyrics and then uses Suno to set them to music, and then uses a bunch of other tools to create the visual persona to go along with the tracks and act as a virtual front person…I mean, look, this is a long way from being My Sort Of Thing, musically-speaking (it’s R&B, and pretty by-the-numbers stuff), but at least one of the tracks has 3.2m views on YT and the lack of a video means that an awful lot of people don’t seem to have clocked that ‘Xania’ is nothing more than maths… I have said this before and I will keep saying it – LOTS OF PEOPLE SIMPLY DO NOT KNOW AND DO NOT CARE AND TO SOME DEGREE AI MUSIC IS INEVITABLY GOING TO BECOME A THING. I AM SORRY.
- Rato Milton: By way of a palate cleanser to the last link, this Insta feed posts a different video each day featuring a slightly-blocky CG rat dancing. Why? WHY NOT IT IS A DANCING RAT FFS TAKE THE SMALL MOMENTS OF JOY WHERE YOU CAN BECAUSE SOON THEY WILL ALL BE GONE FOREVER.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- False Prophecies: We begin this week’s longreads with another selection of articles that are shamelessly-parochial and UK-centric in focus; those of you who couldn’t give two hoots about my homeland’s increasingly-desperate-looking flailing can skip forward a couple, but, for the rest of you, this is a really good piece by Sunder Kutwala looking at the ‘memo’ that was allegedly circulating at Labour conference ahead of Starmer’s speech this week, which effectively seemed to cede significant portions of the argument on immigration and associated issues to the Farageiste wing; Sutwala does a good job of neatly unpacking why that’s b0llocks, and, while the whole piece is very much worth reading in full, I thought this section was worth reproducing as a good precis of the article’s scope: “Britain certainly faces real challenges of identity and integration. But that is a statement that is less true about the United Kingdom in 2025 than of any other multi-ethnic democracy in western Europe or the Anglosphere. To cast eight million ethnic minority Britains as unfamiliar out of reach others, living parallel and pillarised lives – without contact with British symbols, social norms or opportunities to study, work or live alongside their fellow citizens – is the kind of atomised nonsense that can only be propagated by an online scribbler who mistakes the increasingly skewed and radicalised X platform for the society that they live in.” BONUS LINK ABOUT UK POLITICS!: this is VERY wonky, and will only be of interest if you’re the sort of person who wants to get into the weeds about voter bloc demographics, but, if you are, then a) I am glad you exist; and b) you will really enjoy this analysis by Ben Ansell which looks at how different professional types voted, how that has changed over time, and how the idea of the ‘working class voter’ doesn’t really work as a monolithic construct in 2025. It’s quite hard not to look at this and want a three-way leftist coalition at the next election but, well, I think we all know how likely or even possible that is, so.
- Some Thoughts of Digital ID: I think I have mentioned Rachel Coldicutt’s work in here before, but she is both smart and knowledgeable when it comes to questions of government digital and its implementation, and this list of initial thoughts on the UK Government’s planned Digital ID ‘right to work’ scheme is a sensible, practical set of considerations which are worth thinking about when critiquing the policy; per my comment last week, I would point at this section near the end as being worth remembering while we all get frothy about the details: “This is a very ambitious programme to deliver in four years — particularly given the welcome commitments to consultation and inclusive design. And the government has set itself a particularly difficult challenge: working out exactly what form this digital ID will take will be hard enough, building it to a satisfactory level of quality so that it is secure, reliable and robust enough to support the livelihoods of more than 40m adults and 5.5m businesses is also a non-trivial task. But the hardest part will be rolling it out — ensuring that adoption is easy and trustworthy for everyone who needs it will require a huge communications and customer support effort. And that is just the software.”
- From Posting to Policy: Long-term readers of this fcuking blognewslettertypething might have noticed over time that I am not…hugely-positive about the ability and intellectual acuity of the world’s communications professionals, in the main characterising them as pointless double-figure IQ dullards who wouldn’t know how to think if you paid them (which is ironic, considering that is ostensibly what they are often in fact paid to do!). AND YET! Occasionally an agency will write something and I will read it and think ‘hang on, this isn’t totally stupid or facile!’ – and this is one such occasion. REJOICE! SLAUGHTER THE FATTED CALF! Ok, this isn’t AMAZING, but it’s an interesting look at the way in which the ‘conversation on X’ to ‘media/Westminster bubble talking point’ works in 2025, and how, terrifyingly, being part of the right lunatic fringe on Elon’s fash-simpatico platform is now basically a direct route to the ears of the more online-addled members of the (right wing, in the main) political classes. You won’t necessarily be surprised by any of this, but it’s a decent account of how the sh1t flows through the pipes, so to speak. Lest you think I am being too charitable about the lobbyists who penned this, by the way, I encourage you to click the ‘people’ tab of the website here and check out the diversity on display – MAN do they all look like people who would happily counsel the world’s worst people on how to protect their interests with naught but a bloodless smile and a quiet line about how ‘everyone is deserving of representation’! Hello, by the way, to anyone from Montfort who happens to read this!
- Computers That Want Things: James Meek on excellent form in the LRB, with a (long) piece about AI and ‘artificial general intelligence’, and the question of how ‘desire’ is itself an element of intelligence and how that can and might work within an artificial one, and ideology and embodiment…If you’re someone who’s been following this and reading closely around it for the past few years this won’t be new to you, but it’s a really decent overview of some of the questions around where we are trying to get to with this stuff, whether we in fact will, and what it might look like should we ever arrive, and it’s a pretty good ‘where we are right now’ overview in terms of the general push towards AGI (spoilers: WE ARE ALMOST CERTAINLY NOT GETTING AGI VIA THIS PATH WHATEVER ANY OF THE FROTHY CNUTS WITH THE VESTED INTERESTS WANT (AND INCREASINGLY NEED) INVESTORS TO BELIEVE).
- Sora2: So, the week’s big AI news is the launch of OpenAI’s new text-to-video model, Sora2 – it’s only available in the US, with an invite code, and if you want the app then you will need to be on iOS, but from the examples coming out of the States over the past few days it looks very much like a new best-in-class off-the-shelf model. The big news, of course, was the app, which offers users both the promise of an infinite feed of scrollable AI-generated video (muchlike Meta’s ‘Vibes’ thing, which I didn’t mention last week because all they have done is renamed the existing ‘discover’ feed on Meta AI which I wrote about ~4m ago) and the chance for all users to create AI avatars of themselves – ‘Cameos’ – which can then be dropped into your AI-generated videos, and can also been made available for free use by anyone else. AND THAT CAN’T POSSIBLY GO BADLY! Muchlike Grok, aside from some ‘no, you can’t make a video of that famous unless they have specifically allowed their Cameo to be messed with’ guardrails, this has obviously been trained on ALL SORTS of copyrighted material– which is why people are making all sorts of unholy pop-culture mashups, and which will probably drive a LOT of usage amongst kids and middle-of-the-road types for whom ‘put me in Forest Gump! Put me in Harry Potter!’ is the apogee of the imagined digital experience. A lot of the coverage has been focused on ‘wow, they’re going to get sued into oblivion’ and…I mean, look, I am no lawyer, but it’s interesting to me how Grok’s been letting you do this for 6m (admittedly static only, but still) and there’s been not a peep from the content owners, so, well, I wouldn’t be hugely certain because, again, there’s no obvious guarantee that they would be victorious in a court of law. Anyway, it will be interesting to see whether the FEED OF SLOP (copyright every tedious cnut on Bluesky) will catch on – what’s interesting to me is that every single article I have read about this since launch has featured the journalist admitting, almost begrudgingly, that they got sucked in by the feed of AI video – I think this stuff is probably JUST good enough to scratch a TikTokish itch, personally speaking. Anyway, between this and Veo3 you really can kiss goodbye to any semblance of widely-agreed ‘this is what is happening and what is real’ consensus – so, er, GREAT NEWS EVERYONE! Oh, and look at all the sh1t people are doing with Gemini now – THE RUBICON IS IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR, BYE!
- On W4nk: Iris Meredith writes a LONG, but very persuasive, essay about how we need to add another term to the lexicon of modern dreck – to whit, ‘w4nk’ used to connote a specific type of communication which is “motivated, not by a desire to communicate or make a fact known, but by feeling: it aims to make the person speaking, in one way or another, feel better about themselves…[and] that having made the statement, and having been unconsciously deceptive about what the statement is for, challenges to the statement are then treated, unconsciously, as an attack on the self.” Honestly, take those two qualities and frame them in your mind, and then hop onto the social platform of your choice and look at, say, a dozen posts and FCUK ME DO YOU NOTICE IT. In particular, this bit had me nodding furiously to the point I thought my head might fall off: “When groups are built around w4nk-statements that both purport to be objective and have the full measure of emotion and identity preventing challenge or implementation, you have to be able to agree exactly with the statement being made to be a part of the group: if you question the foundational assumptions even a little, you’re labelled an enemy. This phenomenon, I think, is largely the reason behind the tendency of leftist groups to split and infight: holding to objective statements about the world as an emotional support mechanism is bound to make everything kinda go to sh1t.”
- The EA/Saudi Deal: A rare post about BUSINESS now – except it’s not so much about BUSINESS as it is about soft power and geopolitics, and how everyone’s favourite pivoting petrostate is continuing its gameswatching project after its efforts over the past 8-10 years to cosy up to the eSports community by pouring a fcuktonne of money into it. This feels like smart analysis of the hows, whys and wherefores of the whole deal, which – and you might be surprised by this – seems to have benefited Jared Kushner…not insignificantly!
- Reddit Guys: Charlie Kirk getting ventilated feels like literally YEARS ago, but, er, turns out it wasn’t; this is a really good piece on Max Read’s newsletter about ‘Reddit Guys’, people like the shooter who were very online, not very funny, a bit awkward, memepilled…honestly, there was something very odd about this because I realised that the person being described here was…quite a lot like one of my little brothers (rip you poor little fcuks), and how sad and lonely it all sounds. Seriously, pitch “All The Sad Young Posting Men” as a novel concept NOW, you will get bites, 100%: “Kind of cloying, desperate for approval, really liable to get into unfunny in-jokes, furry references. “Hey fascist, catch this”–an epic video game reference.3 I don’t know if you could use the word “epic” in [redacted publication], but that’s really the best word to describe this. He’s trying to be epic. He’s trying to be cool. He’s trying to put these little references to video games and online in-jokes and stuff. And it’s not funny. I know this isn’t the relevant thing here, but I was just immediately struck by how unfunny it was. It’s just making these stupid references to these stupid memes that were old a decade ago.”
- Notes From China: Jasmine Sun writes about her experiences of visiting Shenzhen, Shanghai and a few other cities – I really enjoyed this, partly because I can’t help but find China fascinating right now (in the main because it seems fairly clear to me that the next 20-ish years will be driven by its culture significantly more than they will be driven by our) and partly because Sun’s open and honest about her thoughts and feelings about the trip, the country and What She Thinks It All Means. This is told through quite a startup/tech/BUSINESS lens, but as long as you bear that in mind I think it’s a fascinating piece of writing and series of observations. “Someone once told me that China is the best place in the world to be a consumer. You can see such innovation shine brightest in the tea-drinking accoutrements: disposable cups for cold-brew that filter out leaves, carrier handles for take-out cups, flavors like Manner’s “osmanthus longjing latte” that actually taste good. Urban hubs feature other exotic conveniences too: battery packs on every block that you can rent for $0.75 an hour and drop off wherever, tiny electric fans to relieve you from 100 degree August days, LED screens in form factors that the West has never seen—building facades, foldable phones, and smart glasses much lighter weight than the Vision Pro. In the Hangzhou spa, we donned pink pajamas; dined on an AYCE buffet of crab, dragonfruit, and coconuts; lay down in camp-themed nap pods; and restored our chakras in Himalayan salt saunas.”
- The Sugar Daddy Crash: I was not expecting to read a piece about how the parlous state of the employment and wage market have impacted the ability of ‘sugar daddies’ to keep on keeping their, er, ‘charges’ in the style to which they might have become accustomed; this is, in some ways, a very funny piece, as long as you ignore the sort of basic economic horror that underpins all of it; it’s also a lot more explicit about the fact that this is in many, many cases a very straightforward transactional relationship in the traditional ‘oldest profession in the world’ sense rather than some sort of newfangled findom-type arrangement. “For some, sugaring doesn’t look that different from a traditional relationship, with biweekly dates and shared vacations. The way they see it, all relationships are transactional in some way — they’re just making the implicit parts explicit. For other daddies, “pay per meet” dates provide a way to fulfill specific fantasies, be with more beautiful women, or get a leg up in a hostile dating market. “I’ve been with models, people who posed for Playboy,” says Jay. “And also everyday girls who are better-looking than what I’d get on the dating scene.”” MY DUDE, YOU ARE PAYING FOR SEX FFS.
- The Crisis PR Industry: Despite having worked in PR for quite a long time, I have never done celebrity-type work (thank Christ) – as such, the world described in this piece, all about the behind-the-scenes work done by various teams of publicists and, more grubbily, astroturfers or bot army owners, was entirely new to me. It is a GREAT read, although you will want a brisk shower after reading it.
- An Oral History of Deltron3030: I didn’t realise that this album turned 25 this year – this piece is very much one for the fans, but if you remember it with nostalgic fondness (and you really, really should) then you will like this article looking back at its genesis and speaking to the three principals behind its genesis.
- The Product of the Railways is the Timetable: Ok, fine, I know that this sounds DEATHLY DULL, but I promise you that ACTUALLY it’s a really interesting essay about what the important parts of systems or processes are, and how this can, should and does inform the strategy for the running of said railways. IT IS NOT REALLY ABOUT TRAINS I PROMISE YOU COME BACK!
- Self-Help Books Are Turning Us Into Cnuts: Oh, ok, fine, I am possibly giving it a SLIGHTLY stronger title than the editors at the NYT did – basically, though, that is very much the thrust of this article, which argues that the current wave of self-help literature (and indeed the general ‘self-help industrial complex’ around it, comprising podcasts and TikTokers and YouTubers and and and and) is, fundamentally, selfish and solipsistic and is encouraging people to focus solely on their own wants and desires and perceived wellbeing at the exclusion of all others, and that this is…not good? I mean, look, I have never read a self-help book and the only part of my self that I am interested in optimising is the ‘how quickly and painlessly can I die when I decide I have had enough of this sh1t’ part, but based on my interactions with, well, EVERYONE ELSE over the past decade or so I can certainly say that this *feels* right.
- Returning To Narnia: Ok, you will need to have read the Chronicles of Narnia books to make this worthwhile – and to have at least a passing recollection of their contents – but if you do then this will be a TREAT. Nathan Goldwag revisits all 7 of the Narnia books as an adult, capturing his feelings on revisiting his childhood but also analysing them as both stories and works of Christian allegory (Goldwag is not a Christian, to be clear) – seriously, if you were the sort of kid who read these over and over and over again (hello!) then this will speak to something deep in your childish soul. This is part 1 – part 2 is linked at the bottom of the post. Honestly, this is LOVELY.
- The Flag of Ahab: A great – if LONG – essay about charisma, specifically charismatic characters in literature, and what qualities ‘charisma’ requires a character to possess, and how that reflects the ways in which charisma manifests itself in characters in the real world…this is just excellent writing, smart and interesting and compelling throughout, and you don’t even need to have read the works it references (least of all Moby Dick) to enjoy and get something from this, promise.
- Going To Fake Oxford: Did you know that at some point in the mid-90s there was a private University just outside Oxford which fooled a bunch of Americans into thinking it was part of the ACTUAL Oxford University, and which convinced them to pay money to travel across the world to go to an institution which, while being physically proximate to the real thing, very much wasn’t? WELL YOU DO NOW! This is a great story – I love how totally unrepentant the guy behind it is, and, while you can obviously make allowances for the fact that we’re in a pre-web era and as such fact-checking was trickier than it is now, you do sort of feel that the yanks here could possibly have done a TINY bit more due diligence than they in fact ended up doing.
- Hanging With The Witches: The FT really is the most interesting newspaper in the UK at the moment, which feels like a mad thing for someone who doesn’t have a proper job and who doesn’t understand either business or, really, money to say – but it’s true! Here is Jemima Kelly writing about her experience of hanging out with witches – this is interesting and open and non-judgmental, and generally just a good read: “Aspinall discovered she was a witch when she was a teenager and realised she could “manifest things” for herself (making boys fancy her was one), though she kept her gift largely private for a long time, afraid of a negative reaction. After coming across a couple of witchcraft pages on Facebook that seemed inauthentic, she decided to set up a coven with a social media presence of its own: the Coven of Gaia, which now has 19 members aged 32 to 70. One of those is my dance partner Mark Ashley, 64, one of three male witches in the coven, an auctioneer who appears on the TV programme Bargain Hunt. I initially made the mistake of calling him a “wizard” (in my defence he is the exact image of what that word conjures up) but he corrects me. “Wizard’s a bit Harry Pottery,” he says. “I’m a witch, which in old English just meant ‘wise person’; it was gender-non-specific.””
- All The Young Dudes: The second week in a row in which I’m featuring a piece on older female sexuality, which I promise is just a coincidence – this is another really good piece by Sari Botton, on ageing, on finding (and being found) attractive, on gender politics and the differing ways in which men and women are taught to expect that desire works… it’s funny and personal and I felt GOOD after reading it, and perhaps you will too.
- The 5g Conspiracy King: We all know that we’re living in a time of crackpot theories and lunatic fringes, but I do like a sensitively-written dispatch from the edges; this is a very good piece of journalism by Jake Shepherd in The Dispatch, about a man who’s rallying the troops against 5g – I think what struck me most about this was that, at heart, this feels quite a lot like…a lot of lonely people finding community, which I’m increasingly starting to believe is the root cause of a metric fcuktonne of mad radicalisation at present: “As the founder of the political group Save Us Now, Steele regularly appears at rallies and addresses more than 20,000 subscribers on his Telegram channel. “Trafalgar Square was a big turnout,” Steele, now in his mid-60s, told me earlier this year from his home in Gateshead. “It was brilliant.” He was wearing a pale-yellow shirt and his signature black rectangular wraparound sunglasses. They were, he explained in a thick Geordie accent, designed to shield his eyes from what he believes are harmful microwaves emitted by 5G towers, streetlights and traffic lights…Steele’s theories do not end there. He believes the defence industry exerts “total control” over extreme weather events. He speaks of satanic cults — which include P Diddy and Justice Secretary David Lammy — and their murderous agendas. “My whole life is wrapped into exposing this criminality,” he said, adding that he was currently facing legal action on “the front foot and the back foot””
- I Don’t Want To Be This Kind of Animal Anymore: Our final longread this week is about perennial Curios obsession Disco Elysium, the stellar videogame which, I maintain, is the best book I have ever played and the best game I have ever read, and how the manner in which the player reconstructs the protagonist into whatever shape they want is analogous to the trans experience, and I found this beautiful and smart and sad, and it made me look at the game in a way I hadn’t done previously, and, even if you’ve not played it, I think this is a lovely bit of writing which deserves an audience.
By Ofer Dabush
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS !:
- This one is a few weeks old now, but it is so PERFECTLY oldschool in both beats and bars, and the video’s lovely, and it’s a classic bit of Madlib production and, honestly, it has taken me RIGHT back; this is called ‘The Edge’ and it’s by Madlib & Your Old Droog ft. Killer Mike and it’s basically a 30 year time machine.