So last night my friend Tom and I went to see a piece of ‘immersive theatre’ in London (I am not going to mention its name, for reasons that will shortly become apparent); I’ve been interested in this kind of thing since doing something called Journey to the End of the Night in London c.2006 and getting to know some of the Punchdrunk people through that, and Tom’s actually made stuff like this himself, so we like to go and check out occasional variations on the theme just to see where the medium’s at these days.
ANWAY, the show was…not good, for various reasons, and at the end, as we emerged into the now-ubiquitous end-of-experience bar space (with admittedly very nice riverside views), we got a beer and launched into a…not-uncritical appraisal of what we had just seen, which included looking up the writers, the production team and the backers and doing some light Companies House investigation of the company hosting it and the Georgian billionaire’s daughter who was bankrolling the whole thing. Basically we were quite brutal in our assessment of the show and What It Said about the London arts scene and the way money works in and around creative endeavours in the capital.
And then something AWFUL happened. As we were making to leave, a woman who was sitting at a nearby table turned to us, and said that she was in fact the show’s Lead Producer and that she had heard our comments and, while she felt they were a bit harsh, she did understand where we were coming from and that she would be interested in hearing them in slightly more detail; we were obviously mortified, but offered to buy her a drink and talk to her about it. She demurred – and this is the bit that has been giving me the fcuking fantods all night and all morning – BECAUSE SHE WAS THERE WITH HER PARENTS.
Imagine – you’re a theatre producer and you’ve put something on (something MASSIVE, let’s be clear) and you bring your parents to see it one day, and they’re SO proud of you, and afterwards they’re forced to listen to two awful cnuts eviscerating your work while you just sort of slightly die of humiliation.
I am a terrible person.
Anyway, the INCREDIBLY gracious woman gave me her email address, so as soon as I am done typing this I am going to email her and say sorry and offer to buy her lunch by way of apology. Will that make it better? No, it won’t, will it?
Anyway, links. God.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you think less of me now, I know, and you are right to.
By Fred Stonehouse (pics this week mostly from TIH, for which thanks)
THE SECTION WHICH IS HONESTLY STILL SO EMBARRASSED ABOUT THE ANECDOTE UPTOP THAT IT IS STRUGGLING TO UNPRETZEL ITSELF, PT.1:
- The Last Camera Project: Do you remember Hipstamatic? I mean, to be clear, I never used the fcuking thing – I have never owned an iPhone (as a person who broadly despises the concept of ‘brands’ (this is what 20 years working in advermarketingpr will do to a man!) I find the whole ‘cult of Apple’ thing deeply distasteful and, if I’m honest, emblematic of a sort of gaping hole in people’s souls) and so was denied the opportunity to FILTER MY PHOTOS IN INTERESTING AND PERSONALITY-DEFINING WAYS in the early-00s, plus I, er, don’t really take photos, or post them anywhere, oh God what a joyless cnut I sound – but I am aware that it is the sort of thing which might raise one or two nostalgic eyebrows amongst readers of A Certain Vintage (specifically, over-30), but its makers are BACK, with what, honestly, is a really cool idea whose iPhone-exclusivity has rather annoyed me because I WANT TO PLAY TOO DESPITE MY CHINESE POVVOPHONE. Anyway, The Last Camera Project is a simple but really cute concept – everyone who downloads the app is basically placed in a virtual queue, with ‘control’ of the app passing from person to person; everyone participating gets the chance to take ONE photo, just one, which becomes their contribution to the overall project – per the app store description, “From the creators of the Hipstamatic Camera app comes an ambitious new initiative: The Last Camera Project. This invite-only iPhone app invites you to take one photo, then pass it on to the next person. Your image, along with millions of others, will remain hidden until a historic reveal at Art Basel Miami in December 2025, where we aim to set a world record for the largest disposable camera project…Inspired by the nostalgia of 1990s disposable cameras and powered by modern technology, The Last Camera Project is a global art endeavor. Each participant’s photo includes rich metadata—location, timestamp, frame number, and personal details—adding layers of context to your contribution. Together, these images will form a visually stunning tapestry of human experiences, showcased at one of the world’s most prestigious art fairs.” Honestly, my slight saltiness about being EXCLUDED FROM THE GAME aside, I genuinely love this – the concept is beautiful, I like the HIGH CONCEPT and the link to an actual gallery presentation, and the ‘you get one shot, pass it on’ nature of this is beautiful and I now want to rip it off for a bunch of different stuff (but never will because, well, I am lay and ineffectual and mostly too-stoned to act on any of the whims I occasionally express in these things. So it goes!).
- Weather Watching: This, apparently, by the same person/people who did that ‘device listening to what music is ambiently-audible at a particular street intersection in some city somewhere and posting about it automatically’ project from a while back which I, in all honesty, can’t currently be fcuked to look up (I am going to be honest with you here – I am a *little* sleepy, it’s 713 am and the whole writing process today is likely to take a while to get going (and you may well decide that, frankly, it never does, which obviously is your prerogative but also fcuk you)) – this time they have made a silly-but-also-quite-smart site which tells you what the weather is like in New York City by, er, analysing a webcam feed to see what people are wearing and whether they are carrying umbrellas, and determining, based on what it ‘sees’, whether it thinks it’s raining or otherwise. Which, to be clear, is on some level just spectacularly-pointless, but on another is a really neat case study in ‘stuff you can do with multimodal AI which is more interesting that ‘spitting out another Minion with Big Naturals’ or ‘telling you that you’re a really special and brilliant boy, no matter what the others may say’ – I remain convinced that there is huge opportunity to make Interesting And Fun Stuff with this tech, and that people are simply being miserably-unimaginative in their executional deployment of it (see also ‘Jake The Rizzbot’, which I have fallen slightly in love with this week but which could have been replicated almost exactly with nothing but an old mirror and a raspberry pi).
- Nineties Internet: I basically stopped watching television in mid-1995 – at that point I left home, aged 15, and went to international school and suddenly had FREEDOM and ACCESS TO DRUGS, and as such the concept of ‘television’ lost pretty much all of its appeal when compared to, say, going sitting in an abandoned parking garage and getting so high I lost the power of speech. Which is by way of preamble to explaining that the TV show memorialised by this website – called “cyber.cafe” (WHAT AN AMAZING AND OF ITS TIME NAME!) – is utterly unknown to me, and I never saw it when it originally aired. Having discovered this tribute/memorial site to it this week, though, I am now somewhat-obsessed; honestly, if you’re in any way interested in the evolution of ‘web culture’ and our societal relationship with the odd, at-the-time-liminal concept of ‘online space’ then this will tick an awful lot of boxes for you. “Before adverts, algorithms, apps, and AI; the internet was – for a while – serendipitous, driven by bottom-up experimentation, and peripheral. For 5 years until 2000, cyber.cafe was a racuous, late-night TV show joyously uncovering “What’s Going on Online”. We combed Compuserve, Usenet and AoL chatrooms to surface foot fetishists, anti-vegetarians, alien abductees, swinging couples, faith healers, and exhibitionists, all suddenly finding community. Celebrities were invited on, to be provoked with controversial websites. Individuals venturing online to challenge norms, support others, or serially fall in love, told their stories. The nineties internet unleashed humanity’s curiosity about itself; driven by modem squeaks, c-prompts, crude web pages, images downloading line-by-line, and exhilarated hobbyists. It was all so new and odd, network bosses insisted cyber.cafe ended each week with an offer: send a stamped addressed envelope so we can post you an explanation of the internet.” Honestly, just click the link and go to ‘clips’ and watch a couple of the excerpts and look back at all of our naive optimism about this nascent tech and think about disastrously we have fcuked so much in the intervening 30 years. OH YOU SWEET SUMMER CHILDREN HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY KNOW???
- Internet Flowers: I really like the concept here, although if I am going to nitpick (although, based on the intro I am planning to write in approximately 4.5h time, I ought probably have learnt to shut my fcuking mouth by now when it comes to ‘criticism’) it could possibly use a *touch* more exposition on-page – anyway, Internet Flowers is a project by…someone, which, as far as I can tell, involves them having a browser extension which takes a screenshot of every webpage they visit, analyses it to see if there are any flowers on said page, and if there are isolates them and screencaps them and clips them and then loads them onto this website, thereby creating a virtual ‘garden’ of all the flowers said anonymous creator has seen on their online perambulations. Which, honestly, is SUCH a nice idea and immediately set me off thinking about how many different ways one could spin this kind of idea, or how you might extend this floral concept; the idea of an actual garden planted based on this rather tickled me, for example, although I imagine that it would be fcuking impossible from the point of view of Actual, Practical Botanics, but, well FCUK THE PRACTICALITIES STEAL MY IDEA AND WIN AT CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW IN 2026.
- A Puddle of Rain: Have you enjoyed the brief taste of all our futures over the past fortnight or so? The creeping realisation that, from hereon in, every summer you’re lucky (lol!) enough to experience is going to be the hottest yet, and the direction of temperature travel is utterly-unidirectional? You know how they say the frog can’t tell it’s being boiled? Yes, well, quite. Anyway, next time you’re feeling unpleasantly hot and want some entirely-virtual relief, why not open up this website which recreates a rainy pavement in a city somewhere via the magic of WebGL? It won’t *actually* cool you down, but maybe you can stand next to your open freezer while the audio plays and dream of a pre-climate-apocalypse era in which we didn’t need to have tedious annual conversations about the fact that our cities were never designed for consistent 30+ temperatures.
- GPTease: Are you one of the millions of people who pay for a parasocial relationship with a bongo creator via the medium of OnlyFans? I do not judge – we all w4nk! It’s ok! – I merely ask because if so it’s probably worth you being aware of the fact that, if your favourite purveyor of intimate smutty content isn’t outsourcing their ‘fan engagement’ to a content farm then it’s likely that they will soon be doing so to The Machine instead, thanks to a raft of services springing up at the moment designed to let SEXY CONTENT CREATORS spend less time thinking of content and posts to appease the sweaty-palmed masturbators who pay their mortgages. GPTease (fair play, nice name) is an LLM specially designed to help OnlyFans-type creators come up with ideas for things to post – from scenarios to shot lists to accompanying captions, to scouring the web for ‘trending ideas that will resonate with your fans’, The Machine will basically act as your bongo director. Which, honestly, is sort of darkly-funny if you remember that a significant proportion of the people buying into OnlyFans as a concept are doing it because of the perceived ‘connection’ they get to feel between themselves and their favoured, er, ‘performer’ – does it matter whether said ‘performer’ is having their every contortion, pout, post and splay directed by a bunch of 1s and 0s based on what, probabilistically, is most likely to make you spaff, and then to make you spaff again on a subscription? OH GOD WE ARE ALL JUST MEATY PUPPETS DIRECTED BY THE MACHINE AND I DO NOT ENJOY THE DIRECTION OF TRAVEL.
- Dia: I’m not hugely-interested in NEW BROWSERS as a concept, but I am including this because it feels like an inevitable direction of travel and as such it’s halfway-interesting; Dia is a newly-launched, still in beta browser which basically integrates an LLM into the product – basically what this means is you can basically ask The Machine questions about anything you’re looking at in particular tab, with all the websearching and multimodal bells and whistles that you might expect from AI Right Now. Obviously there are some…potential negative externalities involved in presenting this as a LAYER OF OBJECTIVELY-TRUTHFUL ENQUIRY OVERLAID ON YOUR BROWSING EXPERIENCE (llms lie! They don’t actually know anything! Oh Christ!), but, well, this is going to be the future, at least for a while, so Be Aware.
- Google x Harley Davidson: This is a Google Arts & Culture experiment where they have partnered with ICONIC (sorry) biker brand Harley Davidson to take some of the company’s archive photographs and, using THE MAGIC OF AI, turn them into what are basically cinemagraphs (god, remember when those were an exciting and beautiful thing? Simpler, and frankly better, times) – there are a LOT of images here, loads of them really very cool indeed, and the animation tech is actually pretty good (leveraging the best-in-class Veo3 model which as of yesterday has basically been given to the whole world, which DEFINITELY isn’t a bad idea that someone should possibly have thought about a little harder), but I can’t help but feel there’s something a little bit ‘reanimator’ about the whole endeavour. Still, if you like old pictures of MEN IN LEATHERS and don’t mind the fact that this is basically an instance of ‘dead people being manipulated into movements they never actually made, without their consent, by a machine they couldn’t possibly have conceived of’ then you will LOVE this project.
- Corner: For reasons I can’t wholly explain this rubs me up slightly the wrong way; partly I think because of the clunky dissonance between its ‘hey, discover local ‘mom and pop’ stores and local experiences and nice places near you to preserve the beauty of independent retailers!’ and the fact that it is literally using AI to source stuff which is exactly the sort of flattening tech that is going to make the economics of ‘running a small business’ even less tenable than it currently is in relatively short order, and partly because of the ‘made by children of immigrants’ strapline (THE FACT THAT YOU ARE CHILDREN OF IMMIGRANTS HAS LITERALLY NO CONNECTION TO THE FACT YOU HAVE BUILT THIS APP AND YOU ARE SIMPLY USING THIS AS A HOOK FOR A CERTAIN TYPE OF BIEN-PENSANT LIBERAL, ADMIT IT! I say this, by the way, as a child of an immigrant single mother so, well, I AM ALLOWED). Anyway, the idea is as follows – you mark places you like in the map, and it learns from those and suggests more based on your tastes: “Our algorithm tailors your map to your interests and taste, guiding you to the places you’ll actually want to go—without the distractions. Whether you’re saving your hidden gems, uncovering new favorites, or making plans with friends, Corner puts your world on the map…Pin places you stumble across and don’t want to forget—like the perfect cocktail bar or a vintage boutique—and build a personalized map that grows with you….The more you use corner, the more it learns your unique taste. Every review and save refines our algorithm, giving you personalized recommendations—no matter where you go.” Ok, my saltiness aside this genuinely sounds like it could be interesting and useful, even if, per my earlier point, it feels like it’s actually, in practice, acting in direct opposition to the very thing which it purports to be celebrating.
- Animal Act: A GENUINELY BRILLIANT TIKTOK CHANNEL! OK, I can’t stress enough how fcuking amazing this is – Animal Act is a TikTok channel which posts videos of a bloke wandering around London interacting with these little cartoon animals, which I know doesn’t sound like much but the technical chops on display here are quite astonishing; the video’s presented in super-8 fisheye style, and the animals are dropped into the footage in Roger Rabbit style, and the way in which they ‘live’ in the real world is astonishingly well-executed, from the ‘weight’ of them in the world to the shadows to the quality of the animation…and then beyond that there’s something just charming and fun about the way it’s scripted and presented, the dialogue between the unseen cameraman and his nonexistent subjects feels…real, and not twee or weird, and, honestly, whoever is making this is very, very talented indeed. Please do watch it – this is exceptionally good.
- Frog Radio News: Are you increasingly finding the news ‘a bit much’, and is keeping track of it a bit like attempting to stare at the sun? OH BOOHOO FCUKING GROW UP. Ahem, sorry, that wasn’t very CARING, was it? Anyway, for those of you struggling to deal with the HARSH REALITIES WE HAVE ALL BROUGHT INTO BEING, this is a TikTok channel which runs news reports through a novelty radio where the sounds are ‘spoken’ by a frog’s face. It doesn’t make the headlines about the US introducing ACTUAL DETENTION CAMPS any less mad and awful, but you can probably use this to dissociate in some way.
- Diaper Diplomacy: Seeing as we’re ‘doing’ video, here’s a channel which presents US political content as though delivered by toddler versions of the principal actors. Would you like to see an AI-generated baby version of Donald Trump talking about his plans to deport or detain 65 million American citizens in cutesy, uwu fashion? WHY? WHAT THE FCUK IS WRONG WITH YOU??? And yet that is what, based on the view numbers on these vids, hundreds of thousands of people do in fact want. We are, objectively, cancer, aren’t we?
- Doppl: I don’t *think* this is available in the UK at present, but for the North Americans amongst you who’ve always dreamed of having a magical machine assistant who can help you plan your wardrobe choices then MERRY CHRISTMAS! Per the blurb, “Doppl is an early experimental app from Google Labs that lets you try on any look and explore your style. Experiment with bold new looks, discover unexpected combinations, and explore different parts of your personality through fashion. Simply upload a full-body photo, or select an AI model, and Doppl lets you “try on” any look or style.” You can read more about the practical experience of using the app here should you be interested and should my very much vibes-based interpretation here for some reason not sate your desire for DETAIL.
- Has A Nuke Gone Off?: Slightly-miserable that this site is satirically-viable here in 2025, but, well, here we are! This is a simple gag, but I very much like the way in which it is set up (I’m not going to explain the tech they’re using, you can click the link yourselves because it’s 0812am and I still have 5 tabs to get through before the section break chiz chiz).
- The Keyboard Keyboard: Ooh, this is FUN – this website basically maps your keyboard to notes, and then gives you instructions on how to play slightly-monotonic versions of POPULAR HITS (well, seven songs) using nothing but keypresses! This is a silly gimmick, but it’s a fun one and it’s not hard to imagine ways in which you could extend this and use it to create quite a fun laptop orchestra. If you’re in the office, why not sack of the rest of the week’s work in favour of getting all your colleagues onto this site simultaneously and creating a short-lived white collar philharmonic from the comfort of your own desks? Oh, fine, please yourselves you lazy cnuts.
- The Tokyo International Shark Film Festival: Do YOU like terrible films featuring sharks? Do YOU have the ability to be in Tokyo at some point in the next month? GREAT! You too could then enjoy the second annual Tokyo Shark Film Festival, celebrating such doubtless-wonderful titles as ‘Nano Shark’, seemingly ‘Innerspace, but instead of Martin Shaw there are lots of very small sharks in someone’s bloodstream’ and having seen that on the bill I now REALLY want to go so in the unlikely event that anyone from the festival press office sees this and unaccountably decides that Curios is a Top Tier Western Media Title and wants to offer me a jolly then, well, I am here for that.
- In The Margins: This is a newsletter – STOP MAKING NEWSLETTERS EVERYONE THERE ARE TOO MANY – about athletes and how great they are, which, obviously, interests me less than almost anything else in the world, but which I am featuring because the Substack (STOP USING THE NAZI NEWSLETTER PLATFORM FFS) in question has been set up by Nike as a BRANDED CONTENT VERTICAL, which is possibly of interest to those of you in advermarketingpr. Remember when Dollar Shave Club launched Mel Magazine? THERE IS NOTHING NEW UNDER THE FCUKING SUN.
- The Illusion of the Year Contest: This year’s BEST illusions (“tricks are what a hooker turns, Michael”), as judged by…some experts. The winning one is an interesting example of optical illusions, granted, but for my money it’s the second-placed clip that delivers the proper ‘oh fcuk that is SMART’ bang for your buck here.
- SF Personals: Oh, God, I can’t tell you how charmed I am by this, seriously. So a Reddit post showed a photo of a poster affixed to a lamppost in San Francisco featuring the legend ‘On Dating Apps? Overwhelmed by choices? Date one of my five single friends!’ along with five silhouettes and this url – the website presents some young San Franciscan friends, male and female, and some details about who they are and what they are into and what they are looking for, and it is SO CUTE and goofy and awkward and silly and, honestly, I adore it as both a way of short-circuiting the Horror Of Finding Love Online and as a sweet act of love for the friends in question. I think this is GREAT and expect to see similar things cropping up elsewhere as an antidote to the Misery of the Apps.
THE SECTION WHICH IS HONESTLY STILL SO EMBARRASSED ABOUT THE ANECDOTE UPTOP THAT IT IS STRUGGLING TO UNPRETZEL ITSELF, PT.2:
- The Anaverse: Ok, apologies but this is one of those links that I am going to present to you with a bit of a description and a slightly-shrugged ‘look, I don’t really understand this and don’t really see how it works, but there might be something here for you so it’s probably worth having a play if it sounds interesting’ – as described by its creator, the Anaverse is ‘an artist-led generative art project. It’s a 3D world you can open in your web browser. You can choose a location, settle in it, and add the things you like. Here are a few screenshots of what it looks like.’ So basically this is, I think, a space where you can create navigable 3d ‘galleries’ in virtual space, and populate them with whatever you want, pulled in from the web, which you and others can then navigate and share with anyone you like, acting as either a sort of personal portfolio or just a space where you can create things that you find interesting; there’s a tutorial which is worth checking out, and I get the feeling that for a select few people this will be really rather interesting (also, aside from anything else, I do like the aesthetic of the spaces you can spin up, all black and white and vaguely like a canvas waiting to be painted on, which, on reflection, might well be the point). Oh, I think there’s something vaguely-blockchainy about this, but it didn’t at any point attempt to sell me a ‘coin’ and so I don’t think it means you should hate it on-sight.
- Console Chat: Over the past 15 years I have seen a LOT of examples of people trying to make websites social, whether by creating a chat functionality over the top of them or by effectively adding an opt-in graffiti wall-style layer which visitors can scrawl on and see the scrawls of others…but, in general, very little of it has ever stuck. I don’t think Console Chat is likely to change that (not least because, well, the fact it requires you to use the browser terminal renders it too geeky for approximately 99% of the world, but I am still charmed by the idea as a concept. “ConsoleChat turns browser’s console into a global real-time chat. If you’re browsing a site that uses ConsoleChat you don’t need to install any software – just open up your console and join the party!” If you have a site which is frequented by people who know and not repulsed by the term ‘browser console’ then why not install this for the lols? Or the inevitable descent into fractious bullying and weird internecine conflicts, either/or.
- Epicure AI: Whatever you think of The Machine and the concept of embodiment, and whether or not there’s a natural cap on the extent to which AI can mimic ‘human’-style intelligence without any persistent idea of place/physicality (more on that later, should you in any way care – what’s that? You don’t? WELL NEITHER DO I), I am reasonably-convinced that the impossibility of software to understand what something tastes like is a pretty significant barrier to my ever wanting to eat recipes as determined by an LLM. Still, if you’re interested in food (and, to a lesser extent, AI) you might want to explore Epicure, which basically answers the question “what if The Flavour Thesaurus, but as a Machine-augmented website?’ You can pick ingredients and see AI-generated ‘maps’ of other ingredients they might pair well with based on theoretical flavour assonance, you can generate recipes drawing on this knowledge corpus, you can browse the recipes already generated by others…leaving aside the unappetising and slightly-uncanny nature of the images accompanying the recipes, I have looked through some of these and they would…theoretically work, whilst also being pretty derivative and unimaginative and the sort of thing which, honestly, you probably already know how to cook, or which you might get recommended by actual, existing humans – but equally, I haven’t played with this enough to know whether it has the ability to come up with genuinely exciting and revolutionary combinations of ingredients and flavours. Someone make a three course meal based on this and let me know how emetic it ends up being, please.
- The Catlog Pendant: Ok, this is both a) an actual, for-sale product; and b) only available in Japan as far as I can tell (oh, and c) the website’s all in Japanese), and as such it’s unlikely that any of you are ever going to experience it in practice, but I would very much like you to be aware of its existence because FCUKING HELL. The Catlog Pendant is a wearable for your feline companion, which, when attached, will monitor your beloved pet’s every action and vital sign over the course of the day so that you, anxious and needy owner that you inevitably are, can keep track of your cat’s movement, heart rate, breathing patterns, body temperature, and even VOMITING PATTERNS via the magic of AI-enabled surveillance technology. Are YOU an anxious pet owner who wants to exert a degree of fanatical observational oversight whilst at the same time remaining entirely impotent to affect said pet’s wellbeing as you monitor their vital signs (because, honestly, what the fcuk are you going to do if you’re at work and the app is telling you that Chairman Meow has puked his ringpiece seven times in the past three minutes? NOTHING, is what you are going to do, other than panic)? OH GOOD! Honestly, this is the sort of thing that would drive a certain type of person literally insane, although one might well argue that anyone contemplating buying one is probably not exactly in tip-top condition to start with.
- Thick Coins: Were Curios in the habit of giving scores to urls I would probably deduct a single point from this one for its failure to spell Thick as ‘Thicc’, but otherwise this is a great website, whose owner decided, for reasons known only to them, to take a bunch of US 5c coins and join them into a massive, thick Nickel – a ‘thnickle’, per the inventors own lexicon (and, honestly, it’s a superb word, 10/10, no notes). There were a few of these available for sale but they are all sadly gone – apparently more will be made later this year should you wish to own an entirely-pointless, but very aesthetically-pleasing, bit of metal.
- Where Is The Google Car?: I am slightly amazed that I don’t appear to have featured this on Curios before, or at least not since 2013 – this site tracks appearances of the Google Streetview Cars around the world to give you an idea of where the surveillance panopticon is currently being extended/updated. Sweden, Chile, Australia, Sweden, Spain…basically the fcuking things are everywhere. You know the whole ‘embodiment’ thing I referred to up there? Genuinely interested as to how Google’s decades-long process of real-world datagathering feeds into their efforts to surmount this barrier.
- The Pentagon Pizza Index: You may have seen the recent discourse suggesting that it’s possible to make rough predictions about the likelihood of, er, bellicose US interventions in foreign nations based on the activity of pizza restaurants in the vicinity of the White House – this site attempts to track said activity to enable you to have a slightly early-warning as to whether America is planning to, I don’t know, nuke someone tomorrow (PLEASE NO NUKING I DO NOT WANT TO HAVE TO EAT MILITARY RATIONS). It’s also got a distinctly ‘knocked up using AI’ vibe to it, and there are quite a few bits that don’t actually work properly because AGENTS DO NOT ACTUALLY FUNCTION YET, but, well, it’s a superficially-pleasing gag and we will take what we can get here at what feels increasingly like the fag-end of civilisation.
- Roads: I don’t think this will ever catch on, but it’s a really interesting idea and I think the UX/UI here is really really smart. I remember YEARS ago linking to a longread about how, in Brazil, Whatsapp voicenotes were becoming more popular than text messages, and opining that Brazilians were fundamentally sick because, well, WHO WANTS TO LISTEN TO VOICEMAILS; fast forward what is probably a decade or so (fcuking hell) and I am obviously a total voicenote convert, not least because, well, it’s actually really nice to listen to other people speaking JUST TO YOU (no I’m not lonely, YOU’RE lonely). Anyway, Roads is an app designed to let you share voicenotes with individuals or groups of people – so far, so Whatsapp, but with the added interesting wrinkle that you can basically reply to SPECIFIC ELEMENTS of a voicenote, allowing for a sort of threaded conversation that is generally harder to attain with this sort of messaging. It’s really fcuking hard to explain textually, turns out (or at least it is for someone as fundamentally-limited as I am when it comes to ‘explaining what the fcuk things are’), but there’s a helpful video (skip to two minutes, because it’s also very poorly-edited) on the homepage which explains how it all works, and I promise you the way in which they visualise the whole ‘comment on a specific bit of audio’ thing is genuinely really smart and pleasing.
- Bring Back Moshi Monsters: So this is weird – I spotted this in the wild earlier this week, and have since seen actual tube ads linking to the campaign and exhorting nostalgic millennial Londoners to GET INVOLVED, and it seems to be being run by Mind Candy who obviously owned the original IP…I have HISTORY with Moshi Monsters, oddly enough – I first met and worked with Michael Acton Smith in the closing stages of Perplex City, the ARG he founded after Firebox, and worked on the PR for the end of the whole thing, which then segued into the agency I worked for being brought on to effectively consult on this new business which, at the time, was tentatively called ‘Puzzle Monsters’ (I think I was one of the earliest non-Mind Candy playtesters – amusingly, we were offered equity in the business in exchange for continuing to help them with PR, which we turned down – FCUK’S SAKE ANOTHER GREAT BUSINESS DECISION FROM YOUR PAST MATT YOU FCUKING IDIOT), and then, later, I went on to do the PR for Tech City (ok, fine, ‘Silicon Roundabout’) when Michael was the darling of the UK tech scene and having meetings with Number 10, and appearing photographed with glamour models in the Sun more often than you would probably expect for someone like him, and who, I am reasonably confident in saying, was spending a LOT of money on, ahem, ‘fruit and flowers’ – which might explain why he fcuked up Moshi Monsters so badly by not a) anticipating the fact that mobile was going to be QUITE BIG and that they should optimise for it; and b) sticking with Flash long past the point that it was obviously obsolete. Anyway, Michael is now a very rich man thanks to pivoting to mindfulness with Calm and I have no idea what sort of weird zombie business Mind Candy in fact is in 2025, but some of you might feel enough of a warm kick of ‘when we were young’ from this to chuck them a tenner – the campaign is about halfway-funded with over a month to go, so is likely to hit its numbers I think.
- Women With Altitude: This might actually be quite well-known – apologies if I am simply the last person in the world to hear of this project – but in case you’re not familiar with it, Women With Altitude is a website celebrating COOL FEMALE ADVENTURERS FROM HISTORY! “I’m Lise Wortley [NB – I am not; I am still Matt], and I’m on a journey bringing to life the incredible stories of history’s forgotten women adventurers, by literally walking in their footsteps, re-creating their expeditions using only what was available to them at the time. Throughout history, women in the world of adventure have been overshadowed by their male counterparts and their stories often missed from history. Woman with Altitude highlights these ground-breaking women’s stories and achievements, while challenging traditional narratives of adventurers being fearless and male, and supporting women who work in the outdoor space today.” Click the ‘Women Adventurers’ tab for all the stories – this is really interesting and, for the right sort of person, probably really inspiring, so feel free to share this with any young women in your life who you feel might one day want to run off to the Antarctic or something.
- AI For Smells: This company is called Osmo, and is basically attempting to develop olfactory AI, mapping the scent landscape to enable a better understanding of how smell functions and how best it can be synthesised. Per their blurb, “we harness existing hardware to record the molecular composition of the world around us, map it using modern AI tools to see previously hidden patterns, and design new solutions around these insights. For example, our Primary Odor Map (POM) is the world’s first scent map and enables discovery of never-before-smelled fragrance ingredients.” This is interesting, if very theoretical when presented on-site, and again comes back to the embodiment thing I keep on mentioning this week in some sort of annoying verbal tic (sorry about that).
- Haptikos: This is a prototypical haptic feedback device, worn on your hand to enable a user to ‘feel’ sensory feedback from a digital experience – I am honestly including it solely because the design of the ‘glove’ is one of the most wonderfully, brilliantly scifi things I have seen in ages. Seriously, click the link, it is BEAUTIFUL and weird, and I sort of want to try one out just for the aesthetics – in fact, I want to see a whole bodysuit done in this style because it looks fcuking insane.
- Snitcher Space: This is a GREAT idea, and something which I am slightly surprised hasn’t already been done by a bank or FS provider (if it has, can someone tell me please? Thanks!) – Snitcher Space is basically a service which invites you to fwd any emails you suspect of being phishing-type scams to a specific address and which will use AI to analyse said emails and offer a perspective on the likelihood of it being legit vs nakedly-criminal; now obviously all the usual caveats about AI and its ability to ‘know’ anything apply here, but equally if you’re a bank or building society or similar I imagine you have a fcuking HUGE amount of information about how scams work and how they look and sound, which it would be relatively-trivial to train a model on to aid in exactly this sort of detection; what I’m saying, basically, is that if you work for HSBC and see this and want to steal it as an idea then a) you should, it would be smart imho; b) can I have a few thousand pounds as a linky finders’ fee, please? PLEASE? I AM SO THIN AND HUNGRY.
- Scream To Unlock: A Chrome extension which you can iunstall to block access to specific urls, unless you unlock them by screaming a specific phrase at your laptop – the idea being that the humiliation of having to shout “I’m a loser” at your computer to get access to Pornhub will curb your wnking habit a bit. Beautifully, the louder you shout the longer you are allowed access for – I think this is SUCH a fun idea and want to use it on all sorts of sites; actually, on the aforementioned bongo point, I wonder whether forcing people to say the search terms they want to use to find material out loud would be an effective way of reducing consumption of pr0n – after all, it’s one thing typing ‘twink fisting sailor moon’ into a search bar and quite another saying it out loud (don’t look at me like that, it’s not *my* fetish).
- Signs: Jack Hurley on Cluesky shares a quite exceptional thread of Comedy Signs that, seemingly, they have put up at various places around the UK. Honestly, I can’t stress enough how much some of these made me laugh, or indeed the steadily-mounting sense of impressed amazement I felt as it just kept going…and going…and going. This is the very definition of ‘commitment to the bit’, and I salute Mr Hurley for his indefatigability (and also his guerilla signmounting skills).
- Hued: ANOTHER DAILY PUZZLE GAME! This one names a colour and gives you three tries at nailing the EXACT tone of it on a colourwheel-type interface, and is the sort of thing that I imagine lots of you who are less Helen Keller-ish when it comes to visual stuff than I am might really enjoy but which, honestly, is fcuking NAILS as far as I’m concerned.
- Cursematch: Do you remember SEGA’s attempt to make its own Tetrisalike, called ‘Colours’ frome Master System/Megadrive era? No, I don’t suppose you do, it wasn’t really very good. BUT! Someone has basically cloned it as a Pico-8 title and it turns out that when it’s a free-to-play browsergame I am significantly better-disposed to it than when it was something that asked you to drop £40 on it. This is FUN.
By Irving Penn
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY EMPTY THIS WEEK!
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Gossip Goblin: Ok, fine, it’s ANOTHER Insta feed of AI-generated images and video, but it’s another one which has locked into an area of latent space which I quite appreciate – scifi-themed and cyberpunk-y and VERY tech-horror in vibe, this feels quite like an unpleasant 6.3/10 ultraviolet film that might come out in about 9 months’ time (this is, for the avoidance of doubt, a compliment).
- Medioevosplatter: In Italian, ‘splatter’ is a term used to reference a particular genre/aesthetic of horror, tending towards the bloody and grand guignol – this Insta feed shares images from medieval texts which have that vibe, and, honestly, if you have ever chuckled at weird manuscript marginalia then this will be very much up your street.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Dave an the Spectacle of Computation: Ok, this is…not exactly a particularly light opener, or that easy to parse, but I am kicking off with it this week because I think it’s quite a useful perspective given the increasing extent to which we are just going to have to sort of accept that we’re going to start getting given ‘answers’ to our online queries now rather than ‘a selection of possible sources for answers’, and that we are also going to have to learn to be critical of said ‘answers’ and where they are from. The piece looks at a specific academic paper into misinformation, and specifically a citation it makes which, when you follow the informational rabithole all the way back, leads to the realisation that, per the author, “the ultimate source for all this data is, as it turns out, some guy named “Dave.”” Why does this matter? Well, because this is already happening in academia thanks to, basically, people being slightly-lazy researchers, and this phenomenon is going to become super-accelerated in an era of AI summaries and LLM-enabled search which spits out a plausible-sounding response to any question you give it along with, we hope, a bunch of footnote citations that NOONE IS EVER GOING TO CHECK, and stuff like this, bad data from ‘some guy called dave’ is increasingly-likely to get baked into our informational corpus and get recursively-reinfornced by automatic digital agents re-referencing it, and in a few short years WE SIMPLY WON’T BE ABLE TO TRACE IT BACK ANYMORE. This doesn’t feel *good*, does it?
- A Manifesto for a Solar Web: This is, ok, not very long and not really a ‘read’ so much as a blueprint for making digital things a certain way, but, well, I don’t care I like it and I want to share it with you. Basically this is about why making stuff online that is solar powered is A Good Thing – I’ve featured a bunch of projects over the past few years which embody this exact ethos, and I honestly believe that there’s something lovely and quite…beautiful about technology that respects the diurnal cycle, and (from a horrible commercial point of view) there’s still lots of really quite fun and creative stuff you could do from a brand perspective with the ideas in here (but, well, don’t, because the concept is beautiful and pure and brands are, at heart, dead-eyed and awful and cnuty in a bad way).
- AI Is Here To Stay: A good essay, this, in a general ‘stop being a Cnut [king, not profanity] about The Machine’, which makes the good point that just because something might not be a perfectly-realised idea, or even any good, doesn’t mean that it’s going to be a flash-in-the-pan, however much you might want it to be so (I have, interestingly enough, seen something of a dawning realisation happening around AI over the past few weeks, a growing sense amongst even the I HATE IT AND IT IS ALL BAD refusniks that they probably need to actually start engaging properly about What It Means rather than just believing Ed Zitron when he says the bubble is DEFINITELY GOING TO BURST TOMORROW HONEST LADS). This is worth reading, not least because it invites you to think harder about what ‘here to stay’ means and how therefore you ought to formulate a critical response to that realisation: “AI is here to stay, as people like to tell me, and I agree. When they say it, they often use it as an explanation for why they’re using it, advocating for it, or getting more involved with it. That’s totally understandable. But I think we should stop talking about AI as ‘here to stay’ as an empty slogan. Lots of things are here to stay, but some of them don’t necessarily make our lives better, and many of them make it actively worse. I do think AI is here to stay, because it has always been here, and because too much money has been invested in it for it to entirely collapse now. If the bubble burst tomorrow, we would still see the remnants of AI embedded deep in our society for decades to come – in governments, in corporations, in schools, in mass-produced cheap t-shirts with AI-generated images on them, in jokes about people with too many fingers, in the new boom startups from people who got rich off the last ones.”
- The World Model Problem: Still, if you want to read someone talking knowledgeably about how this stuff still can’t do what the proponents seem to think it will one day be capable of, and why that inability is possibly indicative of a problem with the very nature of the current branch of AI research and development (cf LLMs) then you will LOVE this! Curios favourite and LLM sceptic Gary Marcus writes convincingly about the fact that The Machine doesn’t have any sort of working model or comprehension of reality, any understanding of objects and actions and the relationship between the two, and as such is inherently incapable of solving problems that exist in physical meatspace – obviously there’s nothing to say that this is an eternally-intractable problem, and there’s a significant body of thought that thinks that this is going to get solved through the deployment of humanoid-robots with onboard LLMs and a fcuktonne of sensors, but Marcus makes an excellent case as to why there are certain classes of problems which remain near-to-impossible for LLMs to deal with even three years since the GPT-3 revolution.
- Working With NotebookLM: Steven Johnson is a writer who in this post talks about how he’s been using Google’s NotebookLM as a research partner in the early stages of writing a new book; I am including this because I think Notebook is 100% one of the most-useful and least-used tools on the market at the moment and this piece does an excellent job both of explaining why it is useful, but also of demonstrating how AI can be a legitimate tool in the research and development process; to be clear, Johnson is NOT USING THE MACHINE TO WRITE; rather, he’s using it as a way of accessing the materials he’s using for background, interrogating them and drawing inferences to generate initial concepts which he will then expand in his own work; honestly, there’s a lot to learn here for any of you who have to do large-scale research work, I promise. IT’S NOT CHEATING IT IS JUST SMART (as long as you actually do the reading yourself too).
- Some Notes on the Copyright Stuff: If you pay any attention to the whole ‘so, is anyone going to be able to sue the big AI companies for ingesting ALL OF THE STUFF?’ question, this is an interesting overview from what I think is a reasonably-good source of What It Might Mean Long-Term – it’s worth reading the whole thing (and I promise, I know NOTHING about the law but found it to be a really user-friendly explanation as to both recent judgements and their implications), but the basic line here is ‘this isn’t decisive, but it may have the unintended consequence of simply cementing large models’ hegemony at the top of the tree for financial reasons’ – the broad upshot, though, remains ‘yeah, sorry, the world’s creatives are very unlikely to be in line for any sort of payout from these cnuts’.
- What Happens When An AI Runs A Shop?: This isn’t the first experiment of this sort to have taken place – there was an academic study earlier this year that ran something similar using multiple LLMs and comparing the results – but this writeup by Anthropic of what happened when they set up a small shop in their office and gave it to a modified instance of Claude to run is SUPER-INTERESTING. The bot was given autonomy over stocking, pricing and the like, and the post explains how it got on managing inventory, coping with the inevitable trolling by Anthropic staff and whether, in the end, it made any money (spoiler: it very much did not). This is, honestly, fascinating, both from a technical ‘how it was done’ perspective but also as a window into potential deployments of this tech in the future (should it ever get over all the multifarious problems described in the post). I am going to reiterate – if you still look at this stuff and think ‘it is all rubbish and destined to fail’ then you are, I think, an idiot or someone who is addicted to the comforting huff of copium.
- Why FPV Drones Actually Suck: Still, here’s a nice counterdose of ‘tech is sh1t, actually’ to counteract all this Machine talk – this is by someone who’s had first-hand experience of drone use in the Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion, and who is able to explain all the reasons why they are not in fact the WAR-CHANGING SILVER BULLET that they are often painted by by armchair generals and pseudo-OSINT experts. Basically, they break and they are inefficient and they are FCUKING HARD to pilot properly and they are fragile and and and. “In 2024 and 2025, I served for six months as an international volunteer on a first-person view attack drone team in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. My team was deployed in the Donbas region, in one of the hottest sectors of the front. When I joined the team, I was excited to work with a cutting-edge tool. By the end of my deployment, I was a bit disillusioned. Let me tell you why.” Really, really interesting – although also, possibly, something that will be out of date within 24 months as the tech continues to improve (it’s not like manufacturers of aerial death are going to be short on cash to drop on R&D investment in the coming years, after all).
- Will Labubu Make China Cool?: Interesting piece investigating the question of whether the irritatingly-ubiquitous troll thing will finally be the object that affords china a degree of cool cachet in the West, something which has weirdly failed to happen so far despite the increasing extent to which Chinese companies and goods are internationally-ubiquitous, and whether this is the start of the country’s own soft power incursion (to be clear, the piece totally fails to answer the question, but it’s an interesting one to contemplate imho).
- Square Theory: Ok, so this is VERY language-nerdy but also I love it SO much, both as a concept and as a very, very involved dive into linguistics and meaning and all that sort of thing. If you like crosswords and wordplay and PLAYING WITH LANGUAGE then I promise you you will absolutely adore this – I wish I could explain it to you, but it would require more time and space than I can afford right now so you will just have to trust me. Do you trust me? WHY NOT YOU FCUKS WHAT HAVE I EVER DONE TO YOU?
- On Interactive Cinema: This is a great essay by Clare Evans looking both at the history of ‘interactive cinema’, and also the modern reinvention of Full-Motion Video as a tool in videogame development thanks to people like Sam Barlow; this basically asks all sorts of interesting questions about cinema and games as distinct mediums, what both need to achieve to be considered ‘successful’, why they often haven’t been in the past, and how creators are trying to think about them in slightly-different ways to see whether there’s still potential in the concept/medium. Fascinating whether you’re interest in film, games or interactivity-design, or indeed none of those things at all.
- Observations About Learning Chinese: Having repeatedly said over the years that, in the main, I find pieces of the ‘234 things I learned from my prolapse’ variety tedious in the extreme, I have also found myself featuring a surprising number of exactly these sorts of article over the past year or so; this is another (18 things!), but I make no apology because it’s interesting and in-no-way-wooly, and features some genuinely-interesting observations about both the practice of language learning in general and about learning Chinese specifically.
- The Glory Days of the Nasty: As someone who occasionally Gets Paid For Words, there’s something deeply-dispiriting about the contrast between the per-word rates paid to hacks in 2025 (my personal nadir: 17.5p a word! From an actual print magazine! Which, in their defence, is all they can afford! Because the economics of this stuff are totally broken!) and those paid back in the golden age of magazine journalist when Graydon Carter bestrode the world like some sort of magnificently-coiffed colossus, dispensing massive checks seemingly willy-nilly to anyone with the chutzpah to demand, say, a fully-expensed three month trip to Paris to write about le beau monde. This is a brilliant look back at an era of excess and insane spending and some cracking writers flexing their muscles (and occasionally just going really long because, well, why not, eh?) – I mean, just look at this: “For its first issue, Portfolio paid Tom Wolfe a rumored $12 a word for an essay about hedge funders. Its first sentence read as follows: “Not bam bam bam bam bam bam, but bama bampa barama bam bammity bam bam bammity barampa.” The joke around the office was that the nonsense opening “was $200 right there.” The full piece ran 7,400 words, netting Mr. Wolfe roughly twice an average newspaper reporter’s annual salary.”
- The Wild Within The Walls: A lovely essay – accompanied by some equally-lovely photos – about the varied wildlife that lives in Rome, from the boars to the crabs and everything inbetween, and where it all came from and how the animals are basically part of the fabric of the city. Where I lived, the bats were fcuking AMAZING (though that’s pretty much the whole city to be fair), but my personal favourites were the thousands of turtles who live in one of the lakes at Villa Pamphili and who I used to go and visit and hang out with on occasion when all the misery and horror became Too Much. Thanks, turtles.
- The Philosophy of Checkmate: I really enjoyed this essay by Indian film director Amit Dhutta, all about his love of chess; it’s just a really nice piece of personal writing about the game, the history of both India and the director himself, about friendship and thinking and memory and the odd ways in which one can look back on one’s life and draw unexpected throughlines with the distance of time; I found this, and the authorial voice, utterly-charming.
- Milton Keynes: I thought ‘slagging off Milton Keynes’ was something that we had all grown out of in the 1990s, but seemingly noone told Theodore Dalrymple, who writes in City Journal about how much he fcuking HATED the place on visiting. This is VERY funny – in part because there are some good lines about the city, but in the main because the tone is SO stuffy and oddly-antiquated, like Dalrymple is just sort of appalled by modernity as much as he is by Milton Keynes itself. I didn’t ‘like’ this piece, but I enjoyed it very much indeed and would read ‘Theodore Dalrymple experiences things that displease him’ again as a genre.
- Making an AI ‘Podcast’: A Certain Type of Online Person’s Favourite Thinker James Ball (honestly, it’s almost a cult at this point) writes about his experience of making a ‘podcast’ with AI – an infinite stream of Machine-generated ‘presenters’ talking about the current state of Trump’s approval ratings and how they are being impacted by WHAT IS GOING ON RIGHT NOW. This is both a reasonably-detailed explanation of How He Did It (and all the ways in which it actually required far more technical chops than the simple ‘oh, let’s get the AI to spin up a stream’ premise suggests) and a very funny read about how awful the output is – there’s a link to the ‘podcast’ in the piece, and it’s obviously terrible but also it’s amazing that it was just spun up in a couple of hours.
- Top-Tipping Big Brother: An amateur translation of a piece of Chinese journalism, presented in a GDoc, all about the phenomenon of streamers and the paypigs that fund them – and what happens when one of those paypigs is your husband, and you find out that he has basically spent EVERYTHING on giving virtual flowers to some woman streaming 24/7 in exchange for cash gifts from superfans. This is obviously AWFUL and HORRORMODERN in the extreme, but is also, well, quite darkly funny if you don’t think too hard about the fact that these are real people ruining their own real lives (as soon as that realisation creeps in you may want to stop reading tbh).
- School for Flightphobics: Are you scared of flying? Does the thought of being carried tens of thousands of feet in the air inside a metal tube, held aloft only by physics that, let’s be honest, none of us really understand, fill you with terror? Are you one of those people that needs to hit the airport Spoons HARD before boarding and who then necks 4 miniatures as soon as you’re able to anaesthetise yourself sufficiently that you might maybe be able to sleep through the horror, or are you more of a ‘two bars of xanny’ coper? This is a great article in which Allison P Davis, who is, by her own declaration, not a good flyer, visits a course in London designed to help the extremely-phobic conquer their aversion to air travel; it is VERY funny, and I commend it to you entirely (especially if you tend to leave clawmarks in the arm of your travelling companion at takeoff and landing).
- Crushing Banalities: This is both a general critique of the modern ‘internet novel’ (something I’ve featured a reasonable amount of in Curios over the past year or so) and a specific review/critique of a Gernan example of the genre called Allegro Pastel. It is SUCH a good essay, honestly, about the specific peculiarities of novels about young-ish people who have existed online forever and the general problem of attempting to embody the virtual and its effects on us in written form, and about the specific failings (and, occasionally, successes) of the book in question; weirdly, despite the fact that this was in no way a positive writeup I was compelled to buy the novel immediately on finishing this essay, which is testament to how interesting I found the writing and opinions here: “The formal conceit of these novels is to represent the feeling of being online. But a novel that truly said something new about being online probably wouldn’t mention the internet at all. This hypothetical True Internet Novel would not use the words Instagram or meme, or even based. It wouldn’t be self-conscious. You would just be able to tell by the nature of the sentences that the writer of said novel had only ever known life on the internet, and nothing else. It would try to make us feel something being online could never make us feel. It would be alive, feral, scary, ruthlessly in dialogue with its digital circumstances and compulsively trying to break free of them at the very same time. I’m not sure that book exists yet.”
- Death of a College Roommate: I thought this was a beautiful piece of writing about old friends coming together as one of them is about to die, about friendship and how the people we are as kids both vanish and persist with the passing of years and the accrual of experience and memory, and, oddly, it’s not sad at all despite the obviously less-than-cheery subject matter.
- The Smoking Lounge: I adored this essay, by Celia Rose, vignettes and fragments from the final night of a boat trip taken with her parents, and others; snatches of conversation with strangers, unwanted and unwarranted shared intimacies and anecdotes. This is, I think, very good indeed: “Black water glimmers and rolls behind the port window as light creeps toward my lips. Plastic slides around in my palm sweat, bouncing into my lap after my cigarette latches onto the flame. Sucking upward, a stale stream of grey tousles the hairs along my nostril. The man next to me stretches his legs out into a ray, the relief of his popping bones pushing out a groan of glory. He vacuums the foam off the head dripping in his hands. Grey mustache with a thin line of white at the edge. His limp hand wafts his cigarette around his wrinkled forehead. A thick sphere rolls down his throat.”
- Lockwood On Plath: Finally this week, Patricia Lockwood in the LRB writes about Sylvia Plath and it is predictably magnificent, not just for the quality of Lockwood’s writing, which is predictably and typically excellent, but also for the way in which she frames Plath’s writing and reminds you of the wonderful word-by-word quality and rhythm and *weight* of her writing. It also, though, contains this line, which I momentarily considered getting as my first and only tattoo when I read it: “if you’re going to be a cnut, make an art out of it.”
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: