Perhaps predictably, I have spent this week feeling…somewhat jaded – it turns out that while it is still very much possible to stay up all night at my age, it is perhaps not necessarily entirely advisable given the likely impact on one’s general sense of wellbeing. That said I had a very fun time – obviously none of you need or want to hear about my Fun Clubbing Experience, but I would like to share one, possibly amusing, anecdote with you.
So it’s 6am and we’re about to leave, and my friend Martin – who is very tall, and reasonably ginger and, generally, tends to stand out rather in a crowd – is, as we’re making to go, accosted by some saucer-eyed kid, all sweaty and bedraggled, with whom he’d obviously ‘made friends’ at some point in the evening. Said kid hugs Martin (having to climb him slightly to do so), and exclaims, with the sort of sense of awed wonder you can only muster when the ket’s made you uncertain as to where exactly your legs are, “I can’t believe you made it to the end! I hope I’m still doing this when I’m your age!”
Reader, we crumbled. Never had we collectively felt the full weight of our collective middle age as in that moment. Fcuk you, saucer-eyed kid, WE ARE STILL YOUNG (we are not still young).
Anyway, this weekend I intend to drink cocoa and possibly get into Airfix models or something by way of healthy contrast.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you’re lucky I managed to write this at all what with all the comedown crying.
By Peter Hujar
THE SECTION WHICH REALLY IS SICK OF A FEW THOUSAND FCUKING CNUTS FCUKING THE WORLD UP FOR THE REST OF US AND WOULD QUITE LIKE THEM TO GIVE IT A REST FOR A BIT BECAUSE WE ARE ALL VERY TIRED, PT.1:
- ADHD: We’re kicking off with a video this week, in a departure from the usual RIGIDLY PREDICTABLE Curios cadence, because I was absolutely blown away by this when I watched it last night (I might have been a *bit* ‘tired’) and I would like even those of you who don’t normally make it all the way to the bottom of this kilomatric screed (I SEE YOU) to experience its wonder. It is, though, AI – on which note, once again, I feel it important to point out that if your automatic reaction to anything AI-related is to cross yourself and invoke the gods of UNIQUELY-HUMAN CREATIVITY and WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CREATORS then, well, you probably need to think both broader and harder about this sort of thing because a) to continue to maintain that it is impossible to make art with these tools is frankly dumb; and b) you’re being a Cnut, in both senses. This is a music video called ‘ADHD’ by one IGORR – this is their first video posted to YouTube in years rather than being one of a series of AI experiments, and FCUKING HELL IT IS INCREDIBLE. The clip’s accompanying an abrasive, skittering bass and drums track, and is, seemingly, intended as a visual representation of ADHD – I don’t personally have ADHD (or at least I don’t think I do, although if I had a quid for everyone who’s attempted to pyramid sell the possibility of my own neurodivergence to me I would have, ooh, at least 15 quid), but this looks and sounds like what I occasionally imagine it must feel like – it is…uncomfortable, and odd, and unsettling, and it is SO well composed and edited and storyboarded, and while it is very obviously AI (it has that slight 1950s technicolour sheen that I associate with Midjourney for the visuals, although I am fcuked if I can tell which model(s) are actually being used here) it has a very clear directorial sensibility and is another wonderful example, along with the ever-wonderful Trisha, of the fact that, in the hands of people with interesting ideas, these tools are INCREDIBLY powerful. Honestly, watch this, put aside any luddite prejudices that you may have and just marvel at how fcuking insane this is that it can be spun up OUT OF NOTHING by someone with an imagination. Oh, and on the ‘SAVE THE ARTISTS!’ point – this is something that simply could/would not exist without AI. The amount of money it would cost to make this as a post-produced film would be *insane*, the time not-insignificant – this is not replacing ‘human creativity’, it is additive to it, because it’s enabling people with an idea to MAKE THAT IDEA REAL, which possibly makes it worth boiling the oceans and fcuking future generations’ prospects for. Probably. Maybe. Anyway, this is fcuking GREAT and I would like you all to watch it please thankyou.
- Infinite Monkeys: Ooh, this is fun – I initially thought it was a joke/fudge, but I think it might actually be a semi-legitimate attempt to make the experiment real. Infinite Monkeys is, er, an infinite canvas of monkeys – the idea is that everyone visiting the site can log in, ACTIVATE AN APE and set it typing, with said typing continuing until said apes have finally pulled their fingers out and got round to FINALLY penning the entirety of the bard’s corpus. Find a monkey whose name you like – mine is called Gozzle Bubuck, which pleases me no end – set it typing, and then check back every now and again and see how it’s doing. Gozzle has so far managed to come up with a couple of six-letter words – ‘dinged’ and ‘chomps’, since you asked – but overall the simians are still lagging slightly; the site’s homepage shows you the overall progress they’ve made towards typing every single word of Romeo, Juliet and the rest and, well, there’s probably a few millennia to go before we get to enjoy Monkey-scribed Coriolanus. I genuinely love the fact that this exists and would honestly really like whoever it is who’s in charge of the big Outernet screens at Tottenham Court Road to put this up on there for a day or so.
- Talking To Grok: There’s a nice story in this week’s Private Eye about how Elon’s ‘maximally truth seeking’ AI describes Andrew Tate when asked – users asking Grok, for information about Tate are told that he’s “a self-proclaimed mega-rich jet-setter who moved to Romania” with “unfiltered views on masculinity, pain, and fighting ‘The Matrix’”. Grok cites eight sources for this; six are posts from Tate’s own accounts. While Grok does cite a source suggesting Tate was a ‘bad kickboxer’, it declines to pull out another negative quality attributed to ‘Top G’ in the piece, specifically ‘rapist’. It turns out that if you look at the @Grok account on Twitter you can see all the replies it’s sent to people engaging with it publicly, which means you can get a feel for the sort of things that people all around the world are asking The Machine and…Jesus, it’s quite dizzying seeing the number of people that are leaning on it for betting tips, political analysis, emotional support, lols…honestly, if you want a temperature check on ‘society and AI’ this is a really eye-opening glimpse into the extent to which people worldwide have basically just added ‘asking an AI’ into their general day-to-day.
- MultiPlayer: DIGITAL VIDEO ART! This is a fun project by one Alan W Smith – plug in any video you choose via YouTube url and this page will (eventually – it is BANDWIDTH HEAVY, so possibly don’t attempt this while also opening 35 other links in this week’s Curios) load up 35 tiled instances of the clip, all of which play at *slightly* different times, creating a sort of mad wall of video which, depending on what you choose to play, can lead to some…quite unsettling results. I’ve played around with this a bit and I personally find that I rather like the effect you get if cueing this up with some old found-footage-style vids, old handicam wedding footage or similar, but I think you could probably create something interestingly-horrible by finding some visceral footage of bowel surgery or something (or, er, maybe something less bloodily-internal, up to you really). Mr Smith is something of an serial web-tinkerer, turns out, and you can see a load of his other projects collected here should you be in the market for more digital art-adjacent code/url fcukery.
- Music DNA: I am slightly bored of typing ‘the people at The Pudding really are head and shoulders above everyone else when it comes to interesting and creative webpage dataviz’ (or words to that effect), but, well, it continues to be true and is once again amply demonstrated by this latest project of theirs which explores the way in which musical elements are passed along and appropriated from artist to artist and era to era – scroll through and get a wonderful education as to some of the different ways in which songs throughout history can be linked back to the melody of Grieg’s ‘In The Hall Of The Mountain King’, with samples and clips and really clear, visual explanations of the way in which the tracks interrelate…honestly, this is not only beautifully built and designed but it’s also SO INTERESTING from a musical point of view, not least because I am the sort of cloth-eared fcuk who wouldn’t have the faintest idea about stuff like this without this sort of patient explainer.
- Vapor AI: Via Lynn’s superb compendium of AI-adjacent game experimentation comes this excellent and rather fun proof-of-concept which – and I am *slightly* guessing here because the site’s not exactly forthcoming about what is going on – spins up a new visual ‘choose your own adventure’ type story every time you load it up, with the additional gimmick that you can direct the setting and theme and art style by prompting the site a bit (so, for example, I just gave it ‘visceral corridors’ and it’s presented me with an opening featuring an unpleasantly-arterial setting and some suitably-innardy prose). You’re presented with an image which you can look around in classic 360-degree fashion – you advance the ‘narrative’ (such as it is) by selecting from the various prompts that appear in your field of vision like thought bubbles, and while it’s meandering and unfocused it’s also quite fun to see where you can end up rabbitholing to, and how you can shift the tone and feel of the experience simply by tweaking the prompts as you go. I find these things significantly more interesting if you don’t attempt to play them as ‘games’ so much as just explore them as odd semi-narrative art experiments – which, on rereading, makes me sound like a total fcuking cnut if I’m honest, so sorry about that.
- Drive The World: Another from Lynn’s newsletter (THANKS LYNN), this is – from what I can tell – something that’s basically been cobbled together using Machine-written code and which is a riff on something I remember seeing 15-odd years ago, except this time in 3d; this uses OpenStreetMap’s 3d model of the world to let you drive a boxy little 3d car along boxy little 3d representations of ANY STREET IN THE WORLD! Ok, fine, the graphics are rudimentary at best and the car handles like a cow, and the collision detection is iffy at best and means that you will often find yourself driving through buildings if you’re not careful – but, equally, I literally just drove past MY ACTUAL HOUSE and as such I will forgive this all its graphical infelicities.
- The Useless Web: A portal website which offers you the chance to click a button and be taken to a url which promises to afford you POINTLESS FUN – so you might get a webgame, or a link to an OLD MEMETIC TREASURE like Ceiling Cat, or LongDoge, or something else entirely. This is silly and frivolous and has recently added a page where the site’s owner Tim Holman interviews people about their useless websites and why they made them, which I very much approve of because, honestly, anyone who makes pointless digital distractions for the world to enjoy deserves at least this level of minimal recognition (although, honestly, I think possibly we ought to start some sort of digital blue plaque scheme for the true pioneers – I am, I realise as I type this, not even joking about this).
- Pawel Brod: Oh WOW this is a beautiful bit of work. Pawel Brod is a webdev who has made what I think might be, hands-down, the most beautiful interactive personal portfolio site I have ever seen (not hyperbole, honest) – explore his CV by navigating this sort-of bathysphere-type craft around a maze-type environment, graphically reminiscent of a scifi version of classic indie game Limbo, finding links to his work and his CV and various little Easter Eggs as you wander…honestly, this is so so so nicely made and pretty and just GORGEOUS, and the music’s lovely to boot.
- Maya’s Blogroll: I feel slightly deficient having never found Maya’s site before – she does something not-dissimilar to me and other link-sharers on her blog, which is delightful, but the true wonder of her site is her frankly fcuking *insane* list of ‘interesting websites’ which, seriously, is one of the best directories of ‘the interesting and curious and personal and creative web’ that I have ever seen. ALL OF DIGITAL LIFE IS HERE! Well, not ‘all’ of it, fine, but more than you could reasonably expect to consume in one lifetime. If you like Curios – or frankly even if you don’t and are simply reading this out of some sort of weird masochistic impulse, in which case, well, why not stop? I will honestly never know! – then you will absolutely adore every single site on this list; honestly, this is a truly incredible resource and compendium of Fascinating Online Things, and while a good 60% of the sites here were known to me there are literally dozens that I had never, ever heard of before and which have, conservatively, added approximately 90 minutes to my daily digital housekeeping so, on reflection, this has actually slightly ruined my life. THANKS MAYA.
- Play With Your Own Junk: This is a lovely idea, and one oddly-reminiscent of the…God, was it 2012? Anyway, the 2012-ish app called ‘Tiny Games’ by the now-sadly-defunct gamesmaking shop Hide & Seek, which was designed to give you at-your-fingertips access to all sorts of games you could play without counters or props or any equipment; Play With Your Own Junk looks like it aspires to becoming something similar, with a mission to provide ideas for games that can be played by anyone, anywhere – per the blurb, “Play With Your Own Junk is a carefully curated set of modern parlor games, designed to give you an easy place to find earth-friendly, affordable, and approachable ways to play with your friends and family. All the games featured on this site can be played with common household items, sometimes with the help of digital tools. You can start playing these games right now, without buying anything or spending a bunch of time prepping to play. Each game has been carefully selected to fit the goals of the website, and has a self-contained set of items to play with and instructions to follow — think of it sort of like a recipe website, but for games!” The selection’s limited to four games at the moment – and one of them is Exquisite Corpse, which personally I don’t think needs explaining, but wevs – but it’s worth bookmarking this and checking back to see what they add.
- Dutch BirdCams: Spring has officially arrived here in London, and the birds are SO HORNY, shouting and preening and generally just whoring themselves across the capital’s plane trees, cheeky little avian strumpets that they are. The same, I imagine, is true in Holland, so why not take this seasonal opportunity to enjoy some Top Quality Dutch Webcam Action in the form of this site, I think the Dutch equivalent of the RSPB, which links to a whole load of webcams letting you check out, er, various livestreams of birds nests. Soothing, and also it just taught me that the Dutch for ‘stork’ is ‘ooievaar’ – I’m sorry, but that is not a serious language.
- Clickens: This is a site maintained by one Erika, who writes: “At the end of last year, I started preparing chicken from scratch to feed my silly old doggie. I don’t typically eat chicken myself, so this was a new activity. The little guy gets a lot of attention and he goes through a LOT of chicken. So, I started feeling it was a bit unfair for chickens to go so unnoticed as living creatures. They just get tossed thoughtlessly into the nugget hopper. (Not by everyone, I know. I have friends who raise and name and love their chickens). So I decided, in exchange for boiling one or two up every week for Rupert, I would really try to see chickens, so that chickens can be seen by other people, too. As soon as I decided to paint chickens, all on the same 7×7 paper, I started knocking out chickens very quickly. (This has nothing to do with me “working on a book”.) Despite having a whole studio space for work, I paint chickens at our kitchen table. The kitchen is now full of chickens. After producing a dozen or two, I realized the paintings look like profile pics. I’d created an analog social network of pretend chicken friends. So, I started calling that corner of the kitchen Chicken Town, as one does.” And so, Clickens was born – the site presents you with a pair of Erika’s chicken portraits, and asks you to determine which is the most ‘x’ – where ‘x’ might be ‘wrathful’, or ‘egregious’, or ‘wistful’, like a sort of conceptual avian Hot Or Not. This is surprisingly addictive, and you’d be amazed how much time you (oh, ok, fine, *I*) spend trying to decide which of two watercolour chooks best embodies the quality of ‘stoical’.
- Neptune’s Heart: OH GOD THIS IS DELICIOUSLY EVIL! Have you read the novel ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’ by Douglas Adams? It’s nowhere near as good as Hitchhiker’s but is reasonably fun and contains a few excellent trademark Adams gags, including a throwaway detail about an astrologer who writes horoscopes specifically to annoy old friends with specific, mean, predictions and statements about their life (“Libra: You are ugly inside and out, Kate Challis will never go out with you and you will not win the lottery today”, that sort of thing) – Neptune’s Heart is a REAL LIFE VERSION of that, which lets you add specific directions to a faked online horoscopes site, which you can then send to your friends for the lols. This doesn’t QUITE work as well as I want it to, but I am so so thrilled by the fact that this supremely-cruel and obviously very mean site exists that I am willing to forgive it its slightly-shonky execution – seriously though, with a bit of polish and slightly more work this could be an ASTONISHINGLY fun (and, to reiterate, REALLY EVIL) toy, should anyone want to iterate on the idea a bit.
- Band Or Horses: A ZINE! You can print this out and take it to the pub for momentary analogue lols – you get various lists of names and the game is to work out if said names are of racehorses or bands – EASY, RIGHT? I have a strange feeling that we’re in the early throes of a zine resurgence, so feel free to quote me on that in six months’ time when everyone’s making with the Pritt Stick and Stanley knife.
- Jack Black: This is not in fact anything at all to do with bearded overactor – I genuinely have no idea why this site has his name as its url but, well, it does. There are 16 buttons on the webpage – each will play you a VERY SHORT snippet of a song’s intro. Can you work out what each of them are? Some of these, I warn you, will drive you absolutely fcuking insane, but this is a SUPERB ‘friday afternoon in the office when none of you are even remotely likely to even pretend to do any more work and are all frankly just waiting for it to be an acceptable time to start drinking’ timewaster.
THE SECTION WHICH REALLY IS SICK OF A FEW THOUSAND FCUKING CNUTS FCUKING THE WORLD UP FOR THE REST OF US AND WOULD QUITE LIKE THEM TO GIVE IT A REST FOR A BIT BECAUSE WE ARE ALL VERY TIRED, PT.2:
- Musical Tours of London: Ok, full disclosure here – this is a mate of mine’s project and is a REAL LIFE thing which requires you to a) be in London and b) pay money, BUT! My friend Ben, whose tours these are, is a very interesting and knowledgeable man who really can spin a yarn like few others I know, and these tours – taking you on a walk around London’s musical (and other (counter) cultural landmarks) – will, I promise, be great (Web Curios GUARANTEES it, which I am sure you will all agree is the sort of kitemark of quality that you’ve all been waiting for). Should you be planning on touristing here for a bit then I recommend checking these out – not least because strolling around London in the spring sunshine really is one of life’s great joys, and doubly so when accompanied by excellent storytelling.
- BahnhofsKatzen: I mean, I *could* have given this site its English title, but ‘bahnhofskatzen’ is fundamentally a far more pleasing word than ‘train cats’ BUT! This is an impeccably-maintained resource documenting, er, cats at train stations around the world (primarily in mainland Europe). I feel quite strongly that the UK is underrepresented here, so I would ask all of you to keep this page bookmarked on your phone for the next time you spot a platform tabby so that you can snap it and add it to the map and ensure that Britain keeps its feline end up.
- All of the Newspapers: Ooh, this is interesting and useful – this site seemingly collects the print media titles of every single country in the world in one place (or at least links to their websites), so you can get a comprehensive picture of (one aspect) of the media landscape of anywhere in the world. Obviously you’re then at the mercy of the quality or lack thereof of the linked news sites, but as a way of learning about the media environment in, say, Burundi (where I have just learned that one of the major newspapers is called Iwacu, for example, and am now reading about the rising cost of rice (or trying to, because it’s obviously all in French and it turns out that I’m not *quite* as proficient as I thought I was), this is fascinating.
- Touch Grass: No, not the app that locks your phone until you prove to it you’ve been outside – that was last week, KEEP UP! No, this is actually a range of cases for your electronic devices, which ordinarily isn’t the sort of thing I would give even half an ounce of fcuk about but which, in this case, I fcuking ADORE. Basically these people are selling astroturf for your device, so you can encase your phone in simil-grass. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT???? This is, fine, quite an expensive one-note gag, and if I’m honest I probably oughtn’t be promoting another pointless bit of plastic that’s going to be clogging up landfill until we’re all long-dead, but, well, fcuk it, everything’s going to tits, the planet is doomed and the rest of my life, whatever’s left of it, is likely to be marked by a growing sense of fear and precariety and poverty and uncertainty and lonely fear, so, well, BUY THE FCUKING PLASTIC AND BE HAPPY.
- Drum Patterns: Ooh, this is fun – Drum Patterns is a little site that, much like many others I’ve featured over the years in Curios, lets you create simple drum patterns using an in-browser synthtoy-type interface; the gimmick with this one is that you can then save your creations to the site where they can be browsed and used by anyone else, basically making this a sort of collaborative, communal repository of fun little drum loops. I got momentarily stuck on this just now – there’s something very addictive about flipping through the list of loops here and hearing all the different styles and tempos that people have crafted. None of the stuff on here is exactly sophisticated – the drum machine on-site is pretty simple and doesn’t allow for a lot of bells and whistles – but I can imagine that if you’re looking for a bit of beats-y inspiration then this might be both fun and useful.
- Your AI Guide to Rome: Given the…frankly insane bureaucratic clusterfcuk that characterises every single element of Italian state administration, I am genuinely astonished both that this exists and that, seemingly, it’s not totally awful (honestly, I can’t begin to express to you how fcuking awful it is trying to do ANYTHING official in that fcuking country; I still occasionally get painful flashbacks at the experience of having to attempt to do my mum’s tax returns in 2021 and 2022 and realising that you needed to provide ACTUAL PHYSICAL RECEIPTS for things, and breaking down in very real tears because at that stage it was all, well, just a bit much for me). This is a webpage run by Rome city council which lets you ask questions of ‘Julia’, an LLM-enabled chatbot designed to offer tourists and residents an easy interface through which to get information about the city, what’s going on, etc. I’m not sure what it’s built on, and I have only had a relatively-cursory play with it, but my brief exploration suggests it’s…not bad? I asked it for tips for things to do and see near where I used to live, and it gave some decent and not-appallingly-touristy tips, and the restaurants it suggested were, again, decent and local and, crucially, REAL. If you’re planning on visiting, this is worth a look – although, and I really mean this, should you ever go to Rome then PLEASE FEEL FREE TO ASK ME FOR TIPS, as, honestly, I really enjoy telling people about good things to do there and have a really good guide all typed and ready to go for anyone who needs it.
- The National Gallery Imaginarium: London’s National Gallery recently (ish) launched this virtual tour of (part of) its collection – this is on the one hand A N Other ‘walk down a 3d virtual corridor and click on some paintings to see them embiggened’ website, to which you might shruggingly think ‘tant pis’, but there’s enough here in the UX to make it feel worth exploring – the ‘exploration’ element is largely nonexistent, as the gallery experience is reduced to a single corridor along which all the various works are arranged, but clicking on a specific work will take you to an interactive viewer which lets you both explore the painting in close detail but which also asks you a bunch of questions about the work – which elements of it draw your eye, what you think of the composition, etc – and then shows you how others reacted to it, which adds an interesting semi-educative element and makes you consider elements of each picture you might not necessarily have given particular thought to otherwise. I liked this more the more time I spent with it, which isn’t always the case with projects like this.
- St Peter’s In Minecraft: Given the Minecraft film is now in cinemas and that I am guessing a not-insignificant number of you will have children who are fcuking obsessed with the game, it feels appropriate to link to an EDUCATIONAL AND IMPROVING spin on it – would you like to explore St Peter’s Basilica represented in blocks? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! “Peter is Here: AI for Cultural Heritage is a captivating Minecraft Education experience where students journey through 2,000 years of architectural innovation. Inspired by real-world preservation efforts, this immersive project lets young explorers use technology to restore ancient wonders, from Roman engineering to Baroque masterpieces, and investigate the history of St. Peters Basilica in Vatican City. Guided by the Sanpietrini, the community of restorers and experts, learners will step into the shoes of a conservator and explorer, tasked with preserving St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. Students will explore the basilica, learn its secrets, and restore key artifacts. Through this immersive journey, they’ll discover how technology can help protect and cultural heritage while experiencing the themes of history, cooperation, and preservation.” I don’t really do Minecraft what with, well, being a childless man in middle-age, but I have watched a couple of vids about this (don’t ever let it be said that Curios is a shoddy, phoned-in, research-light excuse for a newsletter – DON’T FCUKING SAY IT) and it looks rather cool (I mean, ok, ‘cool’, but still).
- That’s A Booklight: A subReddit dedicated to spotting the use of very banal everyday objects as props in Hollywood films. Basically if you’re enthused by the idea of posts revealing that, for example, “The torture machine console from James Bond: Spectre is a Samsung ultrasound machine” – and, frankly, what sort of a monster wouldn’t be? NO FCUKER, etc etc – then this will be all your Christmases come early.
- Artists’ Calling Cards: Oh this is WONDERFUL – this webpage collects images of the calling cards used by a dizzying range of 20thC artists (I *think* they’re all artists, though I haven’t looked at every single one) like Brancusi, or the Guerilla Girls or Satie – some of these are VERY surprising (I would not, for example, have ever guessed that Egon Schiele would have chosen *that* font, and I can’t help but think slightly less of him for having done so) and occasionally oddly-revealing, but all of them are beautiful and some of them genuinely exquisite. Patrick Bateman could never.
- Hacker Laws: A list of ‘laws’, or principles, or rules of thumb which are all vaguely code-y but many of which are interesting enough to be of potential use to a wider audience. This runs all the way from stuff like the 1-9-90 rule to the lovely ‘Principle of Least Astonishment, which I had never heard of before but which states that ‘People are part of the system. The design should match the user’s experience, expectations, and mental models.’ I get the feeling that some of these might prove to be quite useful mental models to have in the back of your head – and even if not, there’s something quite interesting about them as ‘ways of conceiving of things’.
- Project Hyperion: It doesn’t, it’s fair to say, feel like the second quarter of the 21st Century is going to be a marked improvement on the first, at least judging by the first few months of it – on which basis you might be forgiven for thinking ‘fcuk it, let’s leave all our problems here on earth and embark on an exciting new interstellar future which will see our species attain new and previously-unimagined degrees of enlightenment!’. Except, well, for that to happen we’re probably going to need to be able to create spaceships which can support life across multiple generations given that we might need to be travelling for a few hundred years – which is where Project Hyperion comes in.This is a contest – which SAYS that it’s now closed to entries, but I get the impression that they’ve not exactly been inundated and so there might be some flex here should you wish to throw your hat in – to design a prototypical generational starship. “Project Hyperion explores the feasibility of crewed interstellar travel via generation ships, using current and near-future technologies. A generation ship is a hypothetical spacecraft designed for long-duration interstellar travel, where the journey may take centuries to complete. The idea behind a generation ship is that the initial crew would live, reproduce, and die on the ship, with their descendants continuing the journey until reaching the destination. These ships are often envisioned as self-sustaining ecosystems, featuring agriculture, habitation, and other necessary life-support systems to ensure survival across multiple generations.” Basically this is your opportunity to pitch them the ship from Silent Running – and if you’re interested in reading more about the general mad scifiness of the whole ‘generational ship’ concept there’s an interesting (if long) discussion of it here.
- The Smithsonian Photo Contest Winners: LOADS of great images spanning landscape, portraiture, aerial shots, abstract arty compositions…there’s a wonderful breadth of styles and subjects on display in this year’s selection of winners, although my personal favourite is probably this shot by Michael Acheampong because it’s gorgeous and the hairstyle here depicted is frankly insane.
- A Great Thread of Actual Creative People Sharing Their Work: While this post stems from a tedious ‘ALL AI ART IS THE DEVIL’ sentiment which I am honestly so fcuking bored of hearing, it led to a truly great outcome – cartoonist Moose Allain, who draws for Private Eye among others, asked people on Bluesky who make stuff to share links to their work in the comments of his post, and HUNDREDS of people got involved – this thread is therefore just a wonderful collection of artists showing off their stuff, from illustration to photography to animation to cartoons and everything inbetween. This is worth bookmarking for next time you want to buy something nice for yourself or someone else; rather than giving the money to some dropshipping cnut or a tax-dodging corporation, why not take the opportunity to chuck an actual human being £30 for something they’ve made? WHY NOT FFS????
- The Basement Chronicles: Basement is a digital studio based out of…actually, I have no fcuking idea where they’re from and I suppose it doesn’t really matter – what DOES matter is that as a sort of ‘hey, look how good we are at making stuff!’ flex they have developed this little point-and-click adventure game which is a pleasing and silly way of spending 5 minutes, particularly if you’re of the sort of vintage for whom LucasArts games are a revered part of your personal gaming history.
- Cave of Cards: Ooh, this is fun – it will take you a few gos to get your head around the mechanics and what’s going on, but once it clicks you’ll find it’s pleasingly more-ish – “In Cave of Cards, you clear dungeons by making poker hands. The X button opens the shop dimension, and the O button lets you crouch (preventing you from banging into things). Find and unlock the exit door by clearing the dungeon. High score is based on how many hearts you have left at the end.” This is made in Pico8, which continues to be a brilliantly-flexible little games engine all these years after launch.
- CSS Clicker: Via Andy, our final game of the week is yet another fiendish clicker which will, if you let it, swallow your entire afternoon whole (IT IS STILL LESS POINTLESS THAN YOUR JOB). You know the drill by now – MAKE THE NUMBER GO UP! There’s an additional gimmick here in that the whole thing’s coded exclusively in CSS for BIG CODING CHOPS, but, honestly, even if you give as little of a sh1t about that as I do (I give not one iota of one, to be clear), this is still a Good Time (within the confines of, well, clicker games).
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Scoreboard Pressure: Not a Tumblr! You don’t care! This blog collects and shares images of scoreboards from various Aussie League grounds across the antipodes. Why? WHY MUST YOU DEMAND A REASON FFS JUST ACCEPT AND ENJOY IT. “There’s more to the humble scoreboard than meets the eye. Sure, it shows the score of a game but it can also evoke memories and stories and odds and ends. The scoreboard is an integral part of Australian Rules football – and other sports – yet it has received very little attention from the game’s authors, journalists, historians and photographers. Scoreboard pressure celebrates the variety of scoreboards and sports grounds across Australia. But it’s not just about sport. Scoreboard pressure is about people, about places, about travel. Mostly, it’s about curiosity.” So there. I like this a LOT.
- Billionaire Roleplaying: A tumblr community in which various users roleplay as billionaires. Why? WHY NOT? This is…quite juvenile and not actually that funny, if I’m honest, but I found it curious as a general finger-in-the-air assessment of current attitudes towards plutes (BREAKING: WE DO NOT LIKE THEM).
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Skulls In Churches: You don’t, I promise you, need me to explain this one any further.
- Crisis Acting: An insta feed sharing images that I might best describe as ‘somewhat chaotic’ in terms of vibe and energy, not quite cursed by very much…slightly-wrong, like they’re vibrating at a frequency slightly out of whack with everything else in the world. Yes, I know that that description is largely nonsensical but click the link and then tell me I am wrong (do not, please, feel the need to in fact tell me I am wrong; I am aware of my wrongness and it pains me more than you can possibly know).
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- ‘And Then A Miracle Happens!’: A good piece by Dave Karpf on the magical thinking at the heart of much of Venture Capital, and which is largely underpinning the current AI movement – the fundamental belief that if we just keep pushing this stuff, if we scale back the regulation and don’t fcuk it up by GETTING IN THE WAY with our pesky fears about ethics and fairness and what exactly the journey to ‘superintelligence’ might do to society before we get there, then we’re literally JUST ABOUT to get some sort of world-changing, problem-solving panacea for all of our very evident ills. Why? BECAUSE WE REALLY NEED THAT TO BE TRUE! I feel this very strongly at the moment, and the more I think on it the more uneasy it makes me – it feels quite a lot like we’re moving ourselves into a position whereby we’re effectively betting everything on AI and associated tech advancements delivering a catch-all solution to all that ails us, and, should that fail, we will have literally no eggs left and no other baskets in which to put them. While on the one hand it is of course possible that an insane breakthrough in tech will lead us to a post-labour, post-scarcity society in the next 20 years and magically reverse all the envirohorror, it’s at least AS possible that, well, it won’t, and we’ll find ourselves a quarter-century hence having reconfigured our entire society to accommodate technology that doesn’t in fact work anywhere near as well as we need it to to unfcuk everything, thereby leaving everything, and us, quite, well, fcuked. “AGI — at least the type of full-throated AGI that Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have insisted for years is just over the horizon — would be miraculous. In their unguarded moments, AGI believers talk about this technology as “digital god.” It would be the beginning of the Singularity, the start of a posthuman age where we solve all of physics and potentially conquer mortality itself. Dial the enthusiasm back a bit, and one can easily conjure up narrower ways that advanced machine intelligence could save us from some of our current messes. For example, I can picture a future where we no longer need so many air traffic controllers. Actually-existing machine intelligence is not capable of replacing air traffic controllers today. But it plausibly might, someday. How convenient would it be if that arrival date was soon, just when it is needed most?”
- Graphic Design Ruined My Life: I’ve seen some DISCOURSE this week about the fact that white collar jobs which used to be occasionally interesting and stimulating and maybe even sometimes fun are now, mostly, none of those things at all, and this piece, while ostensibly about graphic design and why it is that so many people who work in the field now say they hate it and it makes them miserable, mines similar territory. Basically the argument runs that the ends to which work is being put renders the act of the work less meaningful, and on occasion actively miserable, in a way that didn’t necessarily used to be the case – I think that if you do any sort of office/knowledge economy work, the following paragraph will resonate with you to no small degree: “The cynicism our current moment inspires appears to be, regrettably, universal. For millennials, who watched the better-world-by-design ship go down in real time, it’s hard-earned. We saw the idealist fantasy of creative autonomy, social impact, and purpose-driven work slowly unravel over the past decade, and are now left holding the bag. Gen Z designers have the same pessimism, but arrived at it from a different angle. They’re entering the field already skeptical, shaped by a job market in freefall and constant warnings of their own obsolescence. But the result is the same: an industry full of people who care deeply, but feel let down. As Shar Biggers describes it, designers are “realising that much of their work is being used to push for profit rather than change, making the rich richer, and being manipulated for misinformation. I’m constantly meeting designers who are looking to do work they believe in, and they’ve yet to find an opportunity to do that. And when they do, even that lets them down for numerous reasons.”
- Why It Is Entirely Reasonable That Marine Le Pen Be Prosecuted: As seems standard for 2025, this news story feels like it happened several years ago but was in fact only a few days ago – still, presuming you can remember what was happening in the distant, hazy past that is, er, Monday, then you might find this simple explainer by Politico about why the National Rally’s leader was convicted, what she was convicted *for*, and why it is not, contrary to what all the usual awful suspects spent 24h squawking about, any sort of SUPPRESSION OF DEMOCRACY.
- The Trader as Young Rebel: A review of YouTuber Gary Stevenson’s autobiography, currently riding high in the bestseller charts off the back of his successful online presence and a very viral Question Time performance – I confess to having been entirely ignorant of this man’s existence until a few weeks ago and am now seeing his face EVERYWHERE, and he strikes me as a particularly good example of People Who Declaim Online, a confident-sounding, confident-speaking ‘guru’ who is RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING and who embodies the YouTube/TikTok EXPERT, a particularly 2025 spin on the influencer grift. This profile in Jacobin is, as you’d expect, not wholly complimentary about Stevenson – but what I think is most interesting about it is the way it nods to the fact that so much of modern gurudom is about finding one line, one position, and fucking HAMMERING it until you find an audience and the audience is locked-in and clamouring for more, and how this inevitably lends to that ONE LINE being an incredibly-fcuking-simplistic take on life because we don’t do depth and nuance anymore.
- How The El Salvadorian Bitcoin Experiment Is Going: Let’s take a moment to check in on Nayib Bukele’s cryptostate experiment! As you will no doubt all remember, back in 2021 the El Salvadorian president made bitcoin legal tender in an attempt to ride the wave of cryptohype – so, four years on, how’s that playing out for the wider populace? Well, per this academic paper (which I promise is interesting and readable, honest), “bitcoin has not translated into financial inclusion, but instead, the bitcoin law serves as a public relations tool to capture new support from like-minded constituencies, build closer relations with them, and empower international “crypto-bros.” On the other hand, this is a tool to benefit a close circle close to the president with the use of public funds, as part of a broader historical shift of elites in El Salvador.” So, President Trump, what was it that convinced you to pivot to a pro-crypto position?
- The Mental Tyranny of AI Writing: An interesting post by John Gallagher about certain stylistic tics produced by Machine-generated prose, and why these tics might be occurring based on his understanding of how LLMs work – I can’t speak to how accurate his analysis of the ‘why’ is, but I enjoyed reading his breakdown of sentence and paragraph structure and his unpacking of how some of the specific traits of AI writing are born of the machine’s total lack of anything resembling ‘understanding’ of the words it’s spitting out. As he explains, “AI writing tools use “and” to chain together multiple ideas to be statistically correct. The statistical procedure is why AI sentences use so many lists and is so looooong. When AI writing is trained to sound fancy, it obscures the meaning in a cloak of complexity that sounds right initially. By using so many lists and hypotaxis, AI writing exhausts the reader into submission. It forces the reader to acquiesce that the sentence is probably, mostly, fairly, somewhat correct. Approximately correct.”
- The New Substack Universe: I confess to seeing the news about Substack launching a video feed and thinking to myself ‘good, I hope this is another business that is killed by pivoting to video’ – nothing against people using it as a platform, it just turns out that I am really fcuking sick of big corporate behemoths and single, profit-led entities swallowing up entire markets. Anyway, this piece in New York Magazine looks at the company’s pivot towards becoming another fcuking ‘everything’ platform, but, more interestingly, alludes to the fact that whatever the literature and the company’s ‘EVERYONE CAN BE PART OF THE CREATOR ECONOMY!!!!1111eleven’ schtick might say, the vast majority of the revenue being paid out to people on the platform is going to those who were famous elsewhere already; while there are some people who have built up audiences from scratch, the vast majority of those making Substack work for them are people who were already in possession of fanbases and reputations that make their success…possibly less of an aspirational, replicable goal. This paragraph also chilled me slightly, presaging a world in which Substack is basically ‘Linkedin, for people who make I PERFORMATIVELY LIKE WORDS their personality’: “The initial dream that Substack sold of individual journalists making a living through subscriptions has been eclipsed by a new hybrid model. More and more, people aren’t on there to make money at all but to promote their stories and books and engage with fellow media types without being trolled by Elon-worshipping Nazi bot accounts (though Substack has its own Nazi problems). Meanwhile, money can feasibly be made from sources other than subscriptions. “I felt like Substack was against brands and advertising early on. Now that more brands are joining, it does seem like it is welcoming them,” said Karten, pointing out that Substack had hosted a joint event with luxury resale platform The RealReal at the Manhattan restaurant King on Tuesday evening. “As a user, it makes me wonder if we might start to see ads in Notes. As a marketer, I see the opportunity — but it can be a slippery slope.””
- Silica Gel: I think I’ve mentioned before how much I love Scope of Work as a magazine/newsletter – it’s ALWAYS interesting, especially when telling me about things that really sound like they won’t be interesting at all. So it was with this piece, which tells you all about silica gel, of which you will be in possession of several dozen packets but which I bet you’ve never really contemplated at length before (apologies if you have in fact already conducted a thorough mental evaluation of the material and its properties, of course) – this is a story about manufacturing, chemicals, shipping and, at heart, globalisation, and it’s the most interesting thing about a really, really boring-sounding subject you will read all week.
- A Walk Down Victoria Streets: There are some streets that seem to go on forever – London’s Victoria Street, a particularly-unlovely stretch of road that runs from Victoria Station to Westminster, is such a thoroughfare. I’ve worked all down its length at various points in my life, as a lobbyist and civil servant (man, that was a brief and ill-feted career misstep!) and very reluctant contractor, I have rented black tie from the Moss Bros under the arches and been paralytic with drink in several of its pubs (this latter point isn’t, on reflection, exclusive to Victoria Street), but never have I thought so much about its architecture and history as I did when reading this piece by Samuel Hughes, who takes a look at the various different styles of building along the route and in so doing tells the history of both the area but, sort-of, of London itself, of planning and trends in design, and for anyone who loves the city this is wonderfully-nerdy and kind-of beautiful.
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: On the 25th anniversary of its publication, this article looks back at David Eggers’ debut novel, the critical reception it received at the time (rapturous), and the way it catapulted its author to a very particular and very of-its-time type of fame. Oddly, despite being someone who rereads books all the time, I’ve never gone back to AHWOSG, and it’s slightly faded from the culture in my mind, without the sort of longterm legacy enjoyed by other cool young literary sensations of a vaguely-contemporary era; on the other hand, the book’s success enabled Eggers to start McSweeney’s which has been a genuine highpoint of literary culture in the couple of decades since its creation. I really enjoyed this, partly from a sort of sense of era nostalgia but also because it’s a portrait of a sort of fame/success story that you can’t really imagine playing out anything like this any more.
- A Master Cartoonist Ages: When I was at university I discovered in my second year that the library in Manchester had a BRILLIANT graphic novels section, and as a result I basically spent a significant portion of my second and third years eschewing ‘books about philosophy’ in favour of the collected works of Dave Sim (pre-misogynist breakdown) and Frank Miller and, my favourites, Los Bros Hernandez, whose ‘Love & Rockets’ strip I absolutely fell in love with and which changed my understanding of what comics could be and what you could do with the medium. This is a beautiful profile of Jamie Hernandez which talks about his work and introduces you to the L&R universe through some lovely scrollytelling, taking you through the panels to illustrate the comics’ style, themes and vibe – if you don’t know Love & Rockets, take this as an opportunity to discover one of the greatest auteur narrative projects of the past 50 years (I am 100% serious, it really is that good).
- Long Live The Pasta Boyfriend: A *very* pleasing kicking given by Vittles to a new Instafoodie brand popup at the Standard hotel in London’s King’s X – Jordan King is some handsome fcuk who’s built up a following based on being good looking and posting vaguely-culinary food bongo on his stream, and now he’s wangled himself a ‘residency’ at a pop-up at the hotel’s restaurant. What’s it like? “Our table at Jordon King x Isla was ready soon after we arrived. It wasn’t the one we’d booked on the terrace, since that was now occupied by a private party, but another one next to the roaring fireplace inside. Looking at the surrounding empty tables, and then at each other, we made a silent agreement to commit to the night’s fever dream, peeled away all but the last layer of clothing and sat down. Our waiter explained that King was a ‘culinary extraordinaire’ with Roman heritage. ‘I like these,’ said one of my friends about the four water glasses she set down on our table. ‘I won’t tell anyone if you put one in your bag,’ she replied. With a glint in her eye, she then suggested we could have the wine glasses too, before padding quietly off, not to be seen again until after dessert. Our food, unfortunately, arrived quickly.” This is deliciously brutal.
- In The New Beijing: Long Ling writes in the LRB about Xiong’an, a new city built outside of Beijing which is intended to act as a place for the city to expand into, a sort of satellite capital to lessen pressure on Beijing’s infrastructure – this is their account of visiting with a friend, and it’s…Christ, it’s hard to know what to feel about this (beyond ‘unsettled’). We’ve got incredible examples of efficiency and productivity, we’ve got the insanely-intrusive surveillance in service of a perfectly-efficient city machinery, we’ve got the concept of the ‘smart city’ elevated to its nth degree…this is all quite astonishingly scifi, basically, and there are points during it where you have to slightly pinch yourself to remind you that this is real, modern life over there. If nothing else it’s impossible to read this and then look out of the window here in dirty old London town and think ‘yeah, we’re quite backward really, aren’t we?’. “For the purposes of data monitoring, the city is divided into sections, called ‘grids’. Grid workers, employed at the lowest level of the civil service system, are required to know the households in the grids under their jurisdiction: they need to know which apartments have elderly people, which have tenants, which have pregnant women, which have family members overseas, which are in the middle of lawsuits, which have bad relationships between mother and daughter-in-law, which have frequent quarrels, which are rich, which are poor. Even an elderly woman who doesn’t know how to use a smartphone and doesn’t watch TV is constantly feeding data into this network by turning lights on and off, using the toilet or turning on the stove. ‘With this eye of wisdom,’ Li gestured to the building around us, ‘everyone will be looked after.’”
- The Hedonist’s Checklist: Daniel Speechly writes about exploring new flavours in Korea. The prose here is a *bit* purple for my tastes, and it doesn’t quite work for me overall, but there are a couple of sections where the writing really lands and so I’m chucking it in for those – see what you think.
- Loopholes: Tice Cin writes in Granta about the geography – and psychogeography, if you’ll forgive me the w4nkiness of the term – of London’s estates, about the topography of the council block and the way they carve secret spaces out between the city’s arterial roads. This is beautiful writing about place and space and urbanism and culture and community. “Estates like Farm grow out of the mutations of Le Corbusier’s initial green and utopic plans. Corbusier always wanted ‘pedways’, walkways in the sky that allowed for residents in new builds to connect with nature and their neighbours. We know that Corbusier’s architectural philosophy was inherently flawed. In an unrealized urban masterplan called Ville Radieuse (the radiant city) he speaks of how the ideal urban housing project would require the ‘disappearance of the street’. We have seen how these ideals go wrong. To make the street disappear is to pretend that the streets are not part of our idea of home. To me, a pavement can carry the same weight as a shared balcony – our home spreads much further than the confines of a blueprint.”
- The Grotesque Cruelty of Human Nature: I absolutely adored this – Ron Currie looks back at ‘Consider The Lobster’, David Foster Wallace’s famous essay about the weirdness of the Maine Lobster Festival and whether or not it is in fact ok to potentially torture a crustacean for its delicious flesh. This isn’t really about lobsters – it’s about Wallace, his work, and depression and pain, and I thought it was beautiful even if it did leave me in tears mid-morning on Monday (I think I mentioned uptop that I have been somewhat Tired And Emotional this week).
- The Head in the Floor: Our final longread this week is this short story from 2018 by Kate Folk, which is, to my mind, a near-perfect bit of stylistic work. It is also about an actual head in the floor. These are both excellent reasons for you to read it.
By Nguan
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: