HELLO I AM BACK I AM REFRESHED AND I AM READY TO STUFF YOU FULL OF LINKS ONCE AGAIN!
How have you been? For those of you in the UK, have you taken the rest of the country’s lead and decided to spend the past few weeks becoming massively racist (or, more troublingly, just becoming more comfortable displaying said massive racism via the medium of a hastily-scrawled cross)? For those of you in the US, have you spent them instead feverishly worrying at a Trumpian effigy in the hope that you can will him into the netherworld?
I, by contrast, have had quite a nice time catching up on sleep and generally not spending quite as much time online as I might otherwise have done, and occasionally wondering to myself what it might be like if I were to spend all these hours I waste on Curios doing something better and more useful and less-psychologically-damaging…and yet here I found myself once again at six am, girding my metaphorical loins, rolling up my sleeves and preparing to type as if my life depended on it. Why? FOR YOU FOR FCUK’S SAKE IT’S LIKE YOU DON’T EVEN NOTICE OR CARE IT IS ALWAYS FOR YOU ALWAYS AND FOREVER.
Not for them. For YOU.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you know where the unsubscribe button is (I love you, I need you, don’t leave me).
OH BY THE WAY THE TINY AWARDS WINNER GETS ANNOUNCED NEXT WEEK SO STAY TUNED!
THE SECTION WHICH THINKS IT’S GOOD TO SEE WE’VE FINALLY GOTTEN RID OF ALL THE SEXISM AND CLASSISM THAT HAS FOR YEARS MARRED UK POLITICAL AND MEDIA DISCOURSE, PT.1:
- Infinite Canvas: A nice, gentle link to ease you back into ‘it’ (or to ease ‘it’ back into you, depending on how you like to conceive of the whole Curios experience), this (via Lynn) is a really nice use of generative AI to riff on the whole ‘infinite canvas for collaborative play’ genre – the idea here is that there’s a seemingly-neverending world to be populated on this webpage made up of individuals squares on a grid – each square can be filled with a scene create by genAI, defined by whatever prompt you give it, and set up so that it’s forced to do a SEAMLESS BLEND with everything around it, so creating a neverending landscape patchworked together by the shared endeavour of us and The Machine. Honestly, this is really fun – pick a blank square, use your imagination and modify the standard prompt to get it to create something genuinely strange in amongst the Ghibli-ish noodlings that the AI seems to be instructed to default to…honestly, this is cute and feels like something that could be tweaked and reinterpreted around a specific IP or central aesthetic theme; come on, someone remake this but the ‘Dantean Hell’ version, TAKE SOME RISKS.
- Tyko TV: OK, I think I might love this more than almost anything else I have seen this year. This is a project by one Tyko Say, a writer and illustrator from Prague who, as far as I can tell, has taken a frankly terrifying quantity of old VHS footage and chucked it up on this website as a sort of weird digital TV channel – per the VERY MINIMAL description here, this is ‘a video vault featuring hundreds of hours of VHS footage shot by Tyko Say in Prague’ – but that doesn’t really give you a feel for the ‘VIBE’ here, which I can best describe as ‘it’s 1994 and you have come home from a night out but you don’t want to go to bed yet and so you turn on the TV and it’s that weird part of the night where the normal broadcast seemingly gets taken over by slightly-unsettling and very unfamiliar stuff from central Europe which you don’t in any way understand but which you keep watching because, well, it’s oddly-compelling and there’s the outside chance that there might be a nipple or two if you keep watching’. There is, seemingly NO rhyme or reason to any of this – I have clicked through some weird music videos, a Christmas broadcast from the late-80s in the US, some sort of jazz-art freakout entitled ‘POETRY DOESN’T EXIST’…seriously, this really is absolutely wonderful and SO SO ODD; in the unlikely event that you ever see this, Tyko, could you email me and explain where the fcuk all this video comes from please? Anyway, this is GREAT and you could do worse than spend at least part of this weekend getting stoned out of your gourd and just enjoying the show.
- Strolling Club: Via Kris, a small site that, much like the first one I linked to, presents a seemingly-infinite canvas which you (YES YOU!) the visitor can mould to your liking – each square of this digital space can be annotated (just click ‘add note’ in the top-left), meaning you can leave a small message along with an icon to whomsoever passes by and happens to read it; you can tell which squares have messages attached as they’re highlighted slightly, and you can read said messages by clicking the ‘read note’ icon, also in the top left. It’s a bit clunky and VERY lofi, but there’s something genuinely lovely about the way anyone at all can leave behind a small record of themselves and their presence – a thought, a link to a website, a poem, whatever they fancy, and I rather enjoyed wandering through this for a few minutes reading people’s short prose leavings, and you might too.
- Beats By AI: You may not have been keeping a close eye – ear! Ffs Matt! It was right there! – on the evolution of AI music over the course of the past few months, but the short update for you is ‘it’s actually pretty good and can pretty much approximate a ‘tune’ these days, even though listening to any of it still gives you the weird feeling that’s a bit like the aural equivalent of eating sweets with very realistic but still identifiably-synthetic fruit flavourings, if you see what I mean (you do, don’t you?)’. So it is that this TikTok account now exists, which, as far as I can tell, posts nothing but songs in the modern country and western style, generated by AI, whose lyrics are…well, they’re filthy, in that very specific, slightly-childish American style. You want a song all about country girls, ahem, ‘pleasuring’ themselves with corncobs? WHY, YOU WEIRDO??? But, regardless of my distaste for your proclivities, you can find one here! You want a song about a cowboy resentful at the lack of fellatio in his life? NO, OF COURSE NOT! And yet, here one is! This is obviously all sorts of terrible, the lyrics are the sort of thing I would have found HILARIOUS at the age of 13 but which I find…less-funny now, and the music is execrable (but, equally, no worse than a lot of actual modern C&W bilge if you ask me), but, well, someone is watching – lots of these have hundreds of thousands of views. Oh, and if you’re curious, people are making AI MUSIC SATIRE now too – click here for a very, very unfunny and incredibly-classist rap video about Angela Rayner! Or, maybe don’t!
- More Explorable 3d Worlds Made by AI: It seems not a week goes by at the moment without another variant on the general ‘here’s some tech that sort of lets you explore a 2d scene as though it were a 3d world, with everything being spun up on the fly by The Machine!’ theme – this kit is called Mirage2, which does the same as the other ones you might have seen but with an additional degree of shine and polish; you can give it a prompt, it will imagine a scene with a character in it, you can then navigate within that scene in the manner of a rudimentary videogame. Still hugely impressive from a conceptual point of view, still very slow and clunky and not in any meaningful way ‘fun’ in practice, this is, though, getting more and more polished with each iteration of the tech, and it’s not hard to imagine a variant on this in a year or so that does a basic, browser-game level of interaction. Oh, and if you’re curious, here’s something similar by Runway which effectively explores the same sort of idea – this feels very much like something that is On Its Way.
- GeoNav: OH GOD I LOVE THIS IT IS SO SILLY. GeoNav is a simple idea – what if navigating a website, but with geography? – made real. Per the site, “This is an experiment in using GPS as website navigation. For this, you will need to share your location when prompted. For shear portability, this site works best on mobile.” What does this mean in practice? Basically this is a webpage where your navigational ‘clicks’ (ie clicking on a menu item, or button, on the webpage) are tied not to mouse movements and inputs but instead by your GPS location – so to physically open specific pages on the site, you will need to physically change your location until you’re at the required GPS coordinates required to trigger the click. SO SILLY! But, also, SURELY something that you could do really fun things with from the point of view of a treasure hunt or COLLABORATIVE BRAND ACTIVATION, or maybe even something less soul-destroyingly commercial. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a collaborative ‘unlock the thing’ mechanic that required people to all congregate in the same space to activate, for example? OK, fine, that doesn’t ACTUALLY need this website to work, but hopefully you get the idea. LOOK IT HAS BEEN TWO WEEKS I AM RUSTY FFS.
- A Map Of WebProjects: Leia S Chang makes small webart projects; this website is a map of them, based on the sort of project they are and the how they are built. Each of the projects linked to here is a tiny piece of digital art, and I rather like the way that Chang has arranged them based on certain qualities they share – there’s something quite cool about the information design here, aside from the works themselves. Have a click and a play.
- The AI Darwin Awards: One for all of you who HATE THE MACHINE and think it is stupid and evil and must be BURNED lest it END US FOREVER (whilst I can broadly appreciate your concerns on this point, by the way, let me also just point out that the problem here is not, in fact, The Machine, it is instead us), the AI Darwin Awards isn’t really so much an awards ceremony as it is a list of instances in which people have made predictions about AI being ace and have subsequently been proven to be full of sh1t – AI-related hubris, basically. This loses points for not, in fact, having any awards anyone can win, but as a place to track examples of people being very, very dumb about technology this is possibly worth bookmarking – I do like the fact that they point out when submissions are ineligible and explain why, which is a nice touch and a commitment to INTEGRITY that I can get behind.
- Rabbitholes: Ooh, I really like this – a super-clever little idea which basically just spins up another entirely-random (not, probably, entirely random) noun/adjective combination and then searches both wikipedia and Google for said noun/adjective to see what comes up; the really nice touch here is that the site is built on frames, so you can click the Google links and read the Wiki entry on-page, which is a small but significant bit of quality of life design which I think deserves a tiny round of applause. Through this I have just found out that ‘unwelcome alcohol’ is a surprisingly-fertile google rabbithole to which I am likely to return just as soon as I’ve stopped typing this rubbish for you disinterested ingrates.
- The RA 1000: Resident Advisor has been going 24 years (GOD I FEEL OLD) and as part of some anniversary celebrations they have put up 1000 mixes on this newly-refreshed site and, honestly, if you want a potted history of the past quarter-century of electronic music and DJing and club culture then this is a pretty good jumping off point. I have only scratched the surface of the selection here, but even a cursory glance will tell you that it spans genres and tempos and styles and there really is something for everyone in here should you be bothered to have a bit of a dig and a search (and you really should, trust me, this is a veritable treasure trove of music).
- Strudel: Speaking of music (SEAMLESS), Strudel is something quite cool-looking that is sadly technically a bit beyond me – basically you can code music live into the interface. They make it sound really simple, the gits, calling Strudel “a new live coding platform to write dynamic music pieces in the browser! It is free and open-source and made for beginners and experts alike. To get started: 1. hit play – 2. change something – 3. hit update” – but trust me when I say I found it a *bit* more complex than that. Still, if you’re less of a no-code moron than me (or, er, if you actually understand music, which obviously I don’t) then you might find some joy in this – oh, and if the phrase ‘livecoding music’ makes you feel vaguely-tumescent then you might enjoy this very cool clip of someone doing exactly that, very well indeed.
- An Auction of Calculators: Would YOU like to own an ancient counting device? No? Well you SAY that, but click this link and I defy you not to covet one of the weird, grenadelike, one-hand calculating machines from the mid-20thC. See? IMPOSSIBLE. The auction starts in just over a week, so you have plenty of time to work out exactly which of the mahogany-encased Babbage machines you want to bankrupt yourself for (look, everything’s going to tits and you’re likely not going to live long enough to make full use of your pension, why not spunk all the nest egg on a fancy abacus? YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO!).
- PoemCam: OK, this is code rather than an actual thing you can play with, but, well, MUST I SPOON-FEED YOU EVERYTHING? Jesus. Anyway, this github repo features code that will basically turn any webcam you like into an AI-anabled polaroid – it will take a photo, slowly ‘develop’ it onto a screen, and at the same time use the LLM to generate a short, appropriate poem to go along with it. OK, so the poem will inevitably be dogsh1t given The Machine is singularly incapable of understanding what ‘syllables’ are (for the same reasons it can’t do the ‘r’ in ‘strawberry’ thing) but there’s something rather nice about the idea here and I am going to keep wanging on about how you’re all missing a trick with your unwillingness to bring The Machine into physical objects because, well, I am right.
- TinCan: Did you worry that we were running out of oldschool products to reimagine for the digital age? Did you think that Elon Musk’s attempt to rebrand ‘underground transport networks’ as ‘HYPERLOOP’ was the most-ridiculous example of tech people attempting to reinvent the wheel, but, well, worse? WELL SAY HELLO TO TINCAN!!! Have you ever thought to yourself ‘wow, I really want my kid to be able to talk to their friends, but I really don’t like the idea of them having a smartphone – there is literally NO SOLUTION to this problem!!!!’? No, of course you haven’t, you’re not an idiot and you are aware of the concept of ‘telephones’ or ‘dumbphones’. There must be, however, people for whom the concept of ‘a landline’ is so distant and antediluvian that it has been scrubbed forever from their minds, for how else can you describe the presentation of TinCan? IT’S A PHONE! BUT ON WIFI! WITH AN APP!!! Per the blurb, “Our super-magical WiFi landline for kids. It doesn’t have apps, texting, or games—just real conversation with friends, neighbors, Grandma, or whoever you add to your approved contact list.” OK, fine, the pre-approved contacts only thing is a new gimmick – although one which you could replicate by, I don’t know, being ex-directory – but there is nothing here AT ALL that you couldn’t also do with, er, a standard telephone. And of COURSE there’s a subscription plan – you can use the free plan which only allows you to speak to other TinCan devices, but if you pay a tenner a month you get the ability to use it like a normal phone, dial anyone you like and (and this is the bit that really fcuking ended me) CALL 911!!!! That’s right, unless you fork out for the premium subscription your kids won’t be able to call for an ambulance or fire engine from their MAGIC, SAFE INTERNET COMMUNICATIONS DEVICES! Seriously, this might be the most stupid thing I have seen all year, and I have seen a LOT of terrible AI stuff.
- Yin and Yang Screensaver: Ok, fine, this doesn’t do anything, but it is very hypnotic and I could happily watch it for a very, very long time indeed.
- The Comic Caption Swapper: This works far better than it feels like it should – this takes a pair of single-panel, captioned US comics and swaps the captions, meaning you get (for example) a Dennis The Menace cartoon captionswapped with, say a Far Side panel. While these can occasionally result in some moderately-amusing juxtapositions, what this mainly proves beyond any doubt is that the vast majority of syndicated comics in the US (where this is from) really aren’t funny in the slightest (I refuse to believe that ANYONE has cracked a smile at Heathcliffe since the late-70s). I would like this for VIZ, please.
- Whose Penis?: Someone has made a ‘kids’ book about all the different interesting penises of the animal kingdom – which isn’t really my sort of thing, if I’m honest (although I confess to loving the word ‘baculum’), but the website that has been created to promote it is CHARMING and an object lesson in how a little bit of a sense of fun can go a long way in webdesign (the fruit machine game is a particularly fun gimmick that I would like to see other people replicate).
- The Byte Archive: OK, this was entirely new to me but I get the impression that there might be a few of you for whom this is nostalgia catnip: “Before Hackernews, before Twitter, before blogs, before the web had been spun, when the internet was just four universities in a trenchcoat, there was *BYTE*. A monthly mainline of the entire personal computing universe, delivered on dead trees for a generation of hackers. Running from September 1975 to July 1998, its 277 issues chronicled the Cambrian explosion of the microcomputer, from bare-metal kits to the dawn of the commercial internet…This zoomable map shows every page of every issue of BYTE starting from the front cover of the first issue (top left) to the last page of the final edition (bottom right).” If you’re interested in the history of computing then you will basically prolapse with excitement over this (figuratively, please).
- Paul’s Journeys: Ah, St Paul – the most modern of all the Apostles, being as he was a late convert to the Christian cause who then became its most vocal hypeman, desperately proselytising all over the world and sending letters and generally banging on about Jesus and his wonder in much the manner of a newly-minted vegan or swinger about the benefits of seitan/polyamory. Anway, if you’d like to explore some of Paul’s peregrinations via the medium of annotated maps that you can click into to see video depictions of the areas he visited and the peoples he met, along with reflections on his travels and their impact, then, well, ENJOY! This is cute but a BIT clunky; still, if you’re interested in learning about Jesus’ most annoying mate (hands-down, no question) then you will like this a lot.
- Dusty Tabs: A Chrome extension which will, if you install it, slowly add digital ‘dust’ to your tabs the longer they’ve been open; dust which you can ‘blow’ off by blowing into your device’s mic. Why? WHY NOT WHY MUST YOU ALWAYS RUIN THIS WITH YOUR INCESSANT QUESTIONING???
- The Pong Clock: A clock, where the displayed time is determined by the game of Pong frantically being played onscreen – this is VERY stupid but at the same time also weirdly quite smart, and EXACTLY the sort of thing that you should put up on one of the big screens in reception, just to watch everyone get slowly mesmerised by it as they inevitably will.
By Nona Inescu
THE SECTION WHICH THINKS IT’S GOOD TO SEE WE’VE FINALLY GOTTEN RID OF ALL THE SEXISM AND CLASSISM THAT HAS FOR YEARS MARRED UK POLITICAL AND MEDIA DISCOURSE, PT.2:
- VTV: Indefatigable purveyor of Fun Web Ephemera Matt Round has created a BRILLIANT digital resource – an version of MTV where the selection is drawn SOLELY from the corpus of godawful novelty songs that have at one point or another had UK culture and the charts in a chokehold. Not only do you get the tracks – and their videos! – but you also get some rather nice MTV-style interstitial channel animations, which is a lovely touch. I’ve just scrubbed through a few songs and we’ve had that godawful ‘Sunscreen’ song by Baz Luhrmann, ‘King Tut’ by Steve Martin, and ‘Granddad’ by Clive Dunn, suggesting that the underlying corpus of dreadful ‘songs’ is very well-stocked. Joyful – conceptually, if not as an actual sonic experience.
- The Atlas of Space: Space! In all of its INSANE ENORMITY! Here depicted in HTML, as a series of orbiting patterns which let you see all the various bits of the cosmos, or at least our galaxy, and how they interact. Click on the bits, learn more, boggle at the vast infinite canvas that makes up the firmament, quiver slightly in fear at your general insignificance in the face of the majesty of the ineffable, etc etc. Not quite as shiny as previous Google efforts in this, er, space, but still interesting and worth a dig.
- Macrowave: Ooh, this feels fun, even as someone who thinks the CULT OF MAC is pathetic and annoying – basically this turns your Mac into its own radio station, broadcasting whatever’s playing out of your computer’s audio to whoever wants to listen in on the appropriate link. Which feels like the sort of thing you could have a LOT of fun with, albeit not necessarily appropriate fun – it reminds me of a time in my first ever job when we persuaded our colleague Martin to go into what we all knew was going to be a…’challenging’ appraisal with his phone on, having already called us up in one of the offices, so that half a dozen of us were able to crowd round the speakerphone and listen to him get threatened with the sack..look, it was a slow Tuesday. Anyway, you can all OBVIOUSLY think of more fun things to do with this – it’s a simple but smart idea, described thusly on the site: “Macrowave allows users to share their system audio with anyone who has the link. Listeners can tune in through native macOS and iOS apps or directly through their web browsers, making it accessible to everyone regardless of their platform.” Give it a go, this could prove interesting.
- Rolling A Sandwich: Ok, this might be a perfect TikTok account. It is doing one thing and one thing only – each day it films a video of its owner ‘rolling’ a sandwich. You sort of need to watch one of the videos to get the gist – or, you know, I could attempt to explain it to you, otherwise what the fcuk is the point o…oh. OH… Ahem, ok, so the deal here is that each ‘sandwich’ is made up of 6 components; each component is decided upon by rolling a dice. So you might end up with a sandwich composed of, say, in order: mustard, ketchup, bread, ham, mustard, ham. Why is this fun to watch? I DON’T KNOW IT JUST IS ALRIGHT FFS. Beautifully, if you look at the account’s grid you can see that it tried a few other things in its first few days of existence and hit paydirt, meaning its owner is now trapped in the neverending audience capture cycle of never being able to evolve or iterate lest they lose the precious attention they have garnered – SUCH IS THE LOT OF THE CREATOR, chiz chiz.
- Caricature Bot: What’s the going rate for the grifting caricaturists in Leicester Square these days (please feel free to replace ‘leicester sq’ here with your local tourist trap hellhole of choice)? Because I wonder whether this service is pitching itself quite right – the idea here is that you can, should you inexplicably desire, upload a photo of yourself to the website, pay $25 and get a caricature of yourself, as designed by AI, drawn by an ACTUAL ROBOT – or, rather, a robot arm/plotter-type thing, holding a pen. Given you could pop into the basement of the science museum a decade or so ago and get this done for free – or that you can go to pretty much any fading seaside skaghole in the UK and find a machine that, for a fiver, will do something VERY similar – it feels like the pricing here might be a little off; why not buy the requisite kit off someone in Shenzhen and then undercut this survive by, say, $7 on a .co.uk web address? GO ON DO SOME BUSINESS. Beautifully, some of the copy on the site suggests that you will receive a ‘numbered and signed collectors’ item’, which makes me wonder who the fcuk the imagined collectors are for some shonky robot-’drawn’ images of a bunsh of weird strangers off the internet. MAYBE THAT COLLECTOR IS YOU???
- Synaptic Spiral: FRACTALS! EXPLORE THE FRACTALS! TAKE SOME ACID AND EXPLORE THE FRACTALS!
- Nothing To Watch: This is a really nice bit of coding/dataviz for the film buffs; taking data showing the most popular 50,000 films, based on scores, from TMBD, this presents the posters for said films on an animated, scrollable grid, with the highest-rated films in the centre; this absolutely FCUKS my laptop every time I load it up, suggesting I probably ought to buy a new one, and so I’m not sure whether there’s any other taxonomical arrangement going on here whether by theme, etc, but it’s a really impressive piece of visualisation (if you computer stops wheezing long enough to render it).
- Behold: A Kickstarter! Like it’s 2015 or something, and we haven’t lost all hope that things might get better, or in the revolutionary and transformative power of the web! Ahem. Behold is a smart-looking project that’s 3x funded with a month to go, so you can buy in with…some confidence that you might one day receive the thing you’ve paid for (I backed a graphic novel in, I think, 2016, which is scheduled for delivery next year – IT’S A LONG GAME, CREATIVITY), which basically sells itself as ‘a smart garden camera to help you see all the fascinating wildlife that lives in your backyard but which you never see because you’re asleep, or because the animals are fundamentally-terrified of you’. The gimmick, of course, is AI – the camera promises to ONLY identify animals, meaning you will never get accidental footage of the postman, or the stalker, or you taking a drunken garden p1ss at 3am, instead only capturing the critters as they pass. Obviously there’s no guarantee that the AI here will ACTUALLY WORK, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt because it is a very cute idea (but, to be clear, USELESS as a security cam, unless you’re expecting to be knocked off by the weasels).
- The Greatest Books of All Time: HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM. Can you hear my skepticism? I am…wary of any ‘best of all time’ lists at the best of times, but especially ones that purport to have RIGOUR and ANALYSIS behind them because, well, I am not sure that you can apply said RIGOUR and ANALYSIS to something so entirely subjective as ‘best of’ lists. Still, the people behind this site are DEFINITELY trying to do exactly that – the way this works is that it keeps track of all the various ‘best book EVER’ lists being published all over the place and breaks them down, deciding whether they are ‘eligible’ lists and, if so, giving scores to their selected books based on a slightly-arcane weighting system. So, for example, if Pride and Prejudice appears as the ‘BEST’ novel across loads of lists it will score highly – but its exact score would depend on how those individual lists were weighted based on the breadth of the list, whether it’s the views of a selection of critics or just one person, etc etc. Your appetite for this will obviously vary – to me it smacks *slightly* of phrenology (don’t ask me to explain that, it just does) and weird obsession, but you might well think it a spectacularly-worthwhile and hyperrational endeavour. Anyway, per this, Ulysses is the best book ever, followed by ‘A La Recherche…’, which personally I think tells you ALL you need to know about the way in which this is being weighted.
- State of Sound: A BRAND NEW ONLINE MUSIC MAGAZINE!! Per the blurb, “State of Sound is a new independent online music magazine. Aiming to provide the highest quality writing, we run the full gamut, from in-depth essays about music’s icons to articles about emerging independents, all with sensitivity to music’s connections to the wider world.” It publishes new essays on Saturdays, and, from what I can see, is aimed pretty squarely at the sort of person (man) who might occasionally buy MOJO (ie you are OLD). They don’t, sadly, pay contributors, which makes me rather worry that this is going to die a death within the year, but it’s equally possible I suppose that there’s a certain coterie of middle-aged people (men) who will be willing to write an infinite quantity of words about their favourite Dylan albums and why the Yardbirds were good actually.
- Caperture: An interesting idea, this – an app (waitlist only at present) which will use AI analysis to assess the quality of the pics in your camera roll, advise you on which ones to ditch, and offer you tips on taking better photos based on what it ‘sees’ on your phone. Leaving aside that this sort of tech is 100% going to be built in as standard to every single OS from hereon in and that as such this app is doomed to almost-immediate obsolescence as soon as it comes out, this feels like a non-terrible idea.
- Unheard FM: Oh, this is interesting – a Spotify-linked webapp that basically lets you brute force the platform into giving you playlists based on what YOU tell it you want rather than what its algorithm thinks you want. “Unheard.FM is a music discovery web app for Spotify that generates fresh playlists based on your rules, not your listening history. It delivers unbiased, non-sponsored content by focusing on what you want to hear.” So basically what this means is that you can tell it what genres – and subgenres – you’re interested in, what years you want to find music from, and it will generate playlists, which you can then edit, flagging particular favourite tracks to influence the app’s own algo to better understand your tastes. Will this be better than Spotify’s own MAGIC MATHS PICKS? No clue, I don’t use Spotify, but this might be an interesting way both of exploring new music in a different fashion and of training (or retraining) the algos that feed you tunes.
- Rumicat: A TINY NEWSLETTER PLATFORM! Look, if you want to reach THOUSANDS then this isn’t for you, but if you’re happy sending an occasional note out to a small group of people then Rumicat looks like a lovely, simple, free way of doing so. Ok, there’s a subscription version for upto 5k subs at $5 a month – which feels really reasonable – but the main draw here is that it’s a lightweight, quick solution to let anyone newsletter to a small community with minimal barriers to entry, which feels like A Good Thing as far as I’m concerned.
- The Larder Kitchen: Ok, so not technically an internetty thing, but I was charmed by this and it has a website so, well, here! Larderkitchen is basically a small plywood, er, kitchen unit, that you can basically fit onto the back of a bike as a trailer and carry with you, letting you set up a minimal cooking and serving station wherever you may wander. It’s a very cool bit of simple, functional design, and I really like the idea of being able to bring surfaces and a gas stove to the park so you can have a small, non-barbecue cookout – if I were a different sort of person with different sorts of friends (ANY FRIENDS) I would very much like one of these.
- Draw Studio: A synthtoy! Draw the notes onto the grid! Change the tempo! Pick the instruments! Make a horrible, atonal mess of noise! This is fun, even if, like me, you find it impossible to make anything that doesn’t sound broadly horrid.
- Just Holes: A Bluesky account which only posts photos of holes, but promises that they will never be NSFW. A promise I think we can all get behind.
- Etteilla: A website dedicated to beautiful playing cards from the past. “The Etteilla Foundation is dedicated to preserving and promoting the rich cultural heritage of playing cards. We nurture partnerships with museums and cultural organizations, fostering a deeper public understanding and appreciation of the cultural significance, intricate symbolism, and exquisite artistry embodied in playing cards. We strive to democratize access to this unique art form, its history, and its secret role in occult practices by making the hundreds of decks we preserve alongside key historical documents freely accessible.” OCCULT PRACTICES!!! To be honest the main draw of these are the wonderful, I presume vaguely-of-their-time-satirical, illustrations on the cards – I want to go back to an era in which the Queen of Spades was depicted as a hard-smoking, rolling pin-wielding matriarch with a fag on the go.
- Google’s AI Storybooks: Use various bits of Google’s AI tools to create STORYBOOKS! Storybooks about anything you like! Obviously the results here are paper-thin and fail miserably as something you would actually want to give to a child (unless you hated them); HOWEVER, as long as you steer clear of the obvious guardrailing (you’re not going to get far asking it to come up with a kids’ picturebook version of ‘how to titrate 2CB’) then you can have a LOT of fun; childishly I just got it to create me something about the importance of regular bowel movements, just because, but I would imagine you can think of FAR better satirical targets for Google to get its teeth into.
- Email WTF: A short game about what email addresses are valid and which aren’t. YES OK FINE BUT I BET YOU LEARN SOMETHING.
- Circuits: Ooh, this is fun and made my brain itch slightly, in a good way – Circuits is a game where you are presented with a single word and need to come up with other words that can go either ahead of or after it to make a phrase. The gimmick is that you’re playing against other people in realtime, so not only do you have to come up with answers but you have to come up with answers that noone else has guessed yet, against the clock, to win the most points. This is an enjoyable way to spend a few minutes, as long as you remember to turn the infuriating music off and don’t get too annoyed when it doesn’t validate your EXCELLENT suggestions (look, it’s North American, they’re weird over there and don’t really understand language, let them be).
- Headlines: Guess the missing words in the NYT headlines, from a limited selection – you can only use each word once per game, so CHOOSE CAREFULLY. I was slightly depressed by how good I am at this, and I don’t even read the NYT that closely – I am obviously just completely fcuking poisoned by MEDIA, which, well, feels about right tbh.
- Reload Clicker: I go away for a few weeks and Matt Round makes not one but TWO fun webthings! This is a clicker game which I am not going to explain to you because, well, it’s a fcuking clicker game and time’s against me and FFS DO YOU NEED EVERYTHING SPOONFED TO YOU FFS?
- Gary and the Infinite Forest: A SLIGHTLY-POINTLESS FRENCH BROWSERGAME! Gallic retailer Garance has for reasons known only to its marketing team decided that the best way to get people to shop with them is to build a, er, small, massively-derivative browsergame in which you control a bear, bounding up your screen, collecting…things…look, you know the drill by now, this is by no means original but it IS a fun three-minute distraction and, well, the bear’s called Gary and I am a sucker for that. Just say it in your head in a French accent – Gah-ree! C’est magnifique!
- A Bird’s Minute: This is SO beautifully-designed and SO clever and, honestly, I am so impressed that it exists as a tiny little browsergame – this is basically a timeloop puzzle, which challenges you with WAKING THE CUCKOO (not, as far as I can tell, a euphemism). Per the blurb, “As the clock strikes noon, the cuckoo in the bell tower has not sung. One minute goes round and round, waiting for him. But will anyone wake him up? Get out of this time loop by making the most of the events that occur in it.” Honestly, this is LOVELY, please do try it.
- The Interactive Fiction Awards 2025: Our final miscellaneous link of the week contains enough wordy ludic distraction to keep you going for a month – this is the (growing) list of entries for the 2025 Interactive Fiction competition, for, er, interactive fictions, or, as readers of an older vintage might be more comfortable thinking of them, ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’-type games. Some are built in Twine, some are classic text adventures in the ‘Use lubricant on stump’ style, others still have more experimental interfaces, but this is a selection of literally hundreds of interactive stories, some short and some long, of varying degrees of complexity, covering topics as diverse as space exploration, body horror, making breakfast and death (THE FULL GAMUT OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE!!!) – honestly, I have only played a handful of these but I am going to spend quite a lot of what I expect to be a violently-hungover Sunday exploring them in my pants, and I suggest you do the same (although you don’t need to be hungover, and you can wear whatever you like).
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- The Lost Stones of ASDA: This has done the rounds a bit while I’ve been off, but in case you missed it this is a long-dormant Tumblr which has recently been resurrected, seeking to track down all the various monumental stones which, for a period of time, accompanied the opening of every new ASDA supermarket in the UK. Why did ASDA choose to briefly decide to provide hand-carved signs to each of its new shops? NO IDEA! Still, I can’t help but love this, not only for the very specific and pointless focus but also for the fact it went dark for 10 WHOLE YEARS before its owner decided to resurrect their quest. This is the sort of commitment I can very much get behind.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Serena Brown: Serena Brown is a very talented photographer working in the UK, taking pictures of local community life, and her work is excellent. The stuff here around women’s football and fashion is particularly good imho, but the whole portfolio is superb.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The Third Algorithm: I did a talk while I was off (I AM AVAILABLE FOR SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS IF YOU WOULD LIKE A SHAMBOLIC, POORLY-DRESSED MAN TO TURN UP UNDERPREPARED AND SWEAR AT YOU ABOUT AI, THE INTERNET AND/OR THE FUTURE! MY RATES ARE REASONABLE!) during which I was asked a question about ‘the algorithm’ and my heart sank rather – not because ‘algorithms’ aren’t still important, but because it feels like asking about ‘the algorithm’ rather fails to understand how the conversation has moved on since the advent of LLMs a few years ago. Which, perhaps, is why I enjoyed this essay, in which Nicholas Grossman argues that we are now entering the third algorithmic age, after the Google search algoage and the Feed algoage, and that we should think about this in terms of the overall societal impacts that this will have – in much the same way as search and social have reshaped society, for better or ill (LOL!!), so will LLMs, and we should probably take more of a macro view of How That Might Look than we currently do. This isn’t the best-written or most-insightful thing in here this week, but it’s a useful framing of how previous algorithmic interventions have warped society and how the current new algotyranny is already doing the same without us seemingly paying much attention, which feels…I don’t know, bad, maybe?
- You’re Sad Because You Make Nothing: To be clear, I don’t mean YOU – I am sure you’re happy and fulfilled and I don’t for a second want to suggest that you don’t make anything! I promise! But, well, I did very much enjoy this essay by Steffi Cao, in which she argues that many people’s MODERN EXISTENTIAL MALAISE might in some way be linked to the fact that they are not creating anything, making anything that lasts. Riffing off the recent-ish TikTok trend of (primarily young) people complaining that they didn’t dream about capitalism labour when growing up, Cao argues that, actually, labour can be inherently positive…just, maybe, not the labour that many of us are most engaged in/with: “You really don’t dream of labor? Any labor? I kind of think you do. I think you dream of creating something with your own two hands and cradling it with the satisfaction that it belongs to you alone, even if it is as small as making a meal for yourself and a friend. I think you quietly dream of making something that you can be proud of, so that the time spent in your flesh bag of a body isn’t solely remembered by digital transmissions of Excel charts and emails that legally belong to a corporation.” Making things on the web counts, by the way.
- Your Ignorance Doesn’t Make You An Expert: This is very much about the US, and specifically about the weaponised ignorance being deployed by RFK and his MAHA bullsh1t – NO VACCINE MANDATE IN FLORIDA SOUNDS LIKE A BAD IDEA, ROBBY! – but you could also apply it to a LOT of modern ‘discourse’ and an awful lot of the polarised ‘debates’ (not debates – ‘debate’ to me implies some sort of informational underpinning to both sides of an argument, which doesn’t necessarily hold true here in 2025!) around any issue you care to mention. This is long, and a bit overwritten in places (lol pottle!), but there’s a lot to like in here (the division of internet personalities into ‘shout guy’ and ‘whisper girl’ is something that is going to stick with me), not least the reasonable way in which the author, AR Moxon, frames the central ‘ignorance as expression of expertise’ question: “Those who want answers to questions go seeking them by learning from those who know, and by observing, and testing, and sharing what they’ve learned. In so doing you know they are committed to learning. Those who want to maintain their ignorance about those questions start with their conclusions, and find the answers that support them, then refuse to acknowledge when these proofs are debunked, and refuse to accept that there could be greater knowledge than the knowledge they personally accept, and use their skepticism and ignorance as proof that not only is the knowledge not possible, but that knowledge categorically does not exist. In so doing, you know they are committed to ignorance.”
- Signs of AI Writing: The fact that Wikipedians (the last ‘good’ community on the internet? Arguably) have had to codify their ‘list of tells for AI-written edits’ so that editors can have guidance on spotting weaponised LLM-generated copy being injected into the Wikipedian corpus feels…bad? But, equally, the writeup here is useful from the point of view of the current suite of giveaways for LLM prose – as the authors point out, these are guidelines rather than hard-and-fast rules, but it’s worth reading and maybe bookmarking so you can keep track of the latest developments in divining the machine copy. It’s not just useful; it’s vital (DO YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE?). BONUS WRITING ABOUT LLM-GENERATED COPY! Here’s some analysis suggesting that LLMs are being used by Parliamentarians in the UK to help them draft speeches, because why would you want your elected representatives actually putting thought into their speeches?
- Welcome To The AI Propaganda Wars: One of those piece where you read it and think ‘well, yes, obviously this is going on, it would be foolish of me to think it isn’t, but wow does it feel bad when you read it all laid out like this’ – this is The Intercept writing about the Pentagon’s use of AI in its propaganda efforts, and the fact that this is very much now a global THING with China, Russia and, well, everyone else deploying LLMs in a race to flood more of the world with THEIR messaging and THEIR viewpoints. “SOCOM believes it needs technology that closely matches the reported Chinese capabilities, with bots scouring and ingesting large volumes of internet chatter to better persuade a targeted population, or an individual, on any given subject. SOCOM says it specifically wants “automated systems to scrape the information environment, analyze the situation and respond with messages that are in line with MISO objectives. This technology should be able to respond to post(s), suppress dissenting arguments, and produce source material that can be referenced to support friendly arguments and messages.” What I like most of all about this is the repeated refrain throughout of experts being quoted as saying ‘this might not work…’ – STILL, FCUK IT, LET’S DO IT ANYWAY JUST IN CASE.
- What Music Do LLMs Like?: This is a really interesting bit of research which I am surprised hasn’t been picked up more widely, not least as it feels like the basis for some potentially-fun creative endeavours…Tyler Cosgrove decided he would ask all of the major LLM models what they ‘thought’ the best songs EVER were, and recorded the answers – there’s some really interesting stuff in here, including the odd wrinkles around later models seeming to ‘prefer’ tracks with numbers in the title, to the extent to which different models pitch normie vs esoteric…anyway, I think there’s an interesting/fun project here around creating different streaming stations based on the choices of each, or having LLM-curated shows, or a website that pitches the various LLMs’ ‘tastes’ against each other to determine which WE think is the better selector…anyway, I am sure you can come up with your own fun ideas, so PROVE IT.
- E-Waste In India: A slightly-sobering look at the e-waste market in India, and the differing pictures of what ‘recycling’ looks like at the top and bottom of the income scale – on the one hand you have the robotics-enabled, shiny factory settings in which the big-business end operates, with workers in protective gear and lots of subsidies to promote India’s circular economy; at the other end you have 14 year old kids working 16 hour days in shacks, inhaling copper dust as they attempt to salvage the wiring from the innards of whatever tat you had dropshipped to you during some passing viral fad in 2021 and which has now made its way circuitously to the subcontinent’s landfills. This is fascinating, but won’t, be warned, make you feel any better about the real impact of ‘recycling’ as an activity. “In addition to India’s self-generated e-waste, the country became a destination for the material from abroad. Old appliances flowed in from the U.S. and other wealthier countries, matching a global phenomenon: By 2005, developed countries were shipping nearly a quarter of their domestic e-waste to lower-income countries. By 2009, India generated 5.9 million metric tons of hazardous waste domestically and imported 6.4 million metric tons more…Noor made 50 cents for picking through 10 kilograms of e-waste, which can take eight hours. She pays $120 a month to rent a flat next door for her family of five. Her son, 15, works at another trader’s warehouse in the next alley.”
- Neuralink’s Patient One: I don’t think anyone reading Curios over the years can have any doubts about my feelings towards Elon ‘Apartheid Toad’ Musk – let’s be clear, I fcuking hate the cnut and he’s currently…ooh, third, I think, on my list of ‘people who I think would genuinely improve the world were they to cease to exist’ – but, equally, I think it’s important to be fair-minded about things and, much as it pains me, I do feel it’s important to point out when companies owned by terrible people do things that might actually be good. So it is with this profile – a puff-piece, fine, but still – of Neuralink’s first ever patient, who, at a distance of 18 months since having the experimental brain computer attached to his grey matter, seems pretty pleased with the impact on his life. Now obviously this is a sample size of one, ok’d by the Neuralink PR team, and we are FAR away from this being declared an unqualified success, but as someone who watched a relative lose their speech, their ability to move and eventually their life, as a result of a degenerative neurological disorder I can’t pretend that the potential for this tech to transform the lives of some very unlucky people didn’t make me get a TINY bit tearful. He’s still a racist cnut, though, let’s be clear.
- Robot Dolls In South Korea: I know I have covered ‘robots as a solution to the coming crisis in elderly care’ in here before, but I thought this writeup in Rest of World about their use in South Korea was really interesting – this is all about how a range of robots called Hyodol have been deployed in with the country’s army of senior citizens to provide companionship and mental/emotional stimuli to the geriatric population, and how the older people in question are responding to them. It’s a largely-positive writeup – the devices seem useful, the patients seem to respond well to them, etc – but it also does a good job of flagging concerns around data, privacy and ethics, as well as what it means for the role of care assistants who are now having to assume the dual role of technician as well as careworker, because, OBVIOUSLY, there’s a cost-cutting angle here too. Welcome to all of our futures (lol, like we;re going to live that long!).
- El Salvador: Over the years I;ve featured quite a few write ups as to how Bukele is doing in El Salvador, mostly focusing on the madness of his crypto endeavours – this piece, in the LRB, is slightly different as it focuses on the nuts and bolts of the government, how it works, what it has achieved, its ties to the US and its role as a sort of Trumpian outpost – there’s no mention at all of the crypto stuff, which in a sense tells its own story about how significant it has been in terms of ameliorating the lives of ordinary El Salvadorians (clue: not at all!), but it’s a really good rundown of the practical realities of the man’s rule, the slow, inevitable shift towards…slightly-more dictatorial trappings, and the impact on the day-to-day lives of the people who live there.
- Making the Dutch Golden Age in Minecraft: Look, there’s not actually that much to read in this link, but there is an awful lot of imagery and video of people basically making really beautiful landscapes in Minecraft and, seriously, this is LOVELY and SOOTHING and a nice midpoint palate cleanse in amongst all of this week’s longreads, so ENJOY IT.
- Speedrunning a Rubik’s Cube: OK, fine, this one’s not exactly wordy either, but it’s SUCH a nice example of digital storytelling by the NYT that I felt compelled to include it – it’s a small explainer on how professional Rubik’s Cube solvers (not professionals, obvs, but you know what I mean) do it, along with accompanying video to show you, in hyperslowed fashion, exactly how they achieve their record times. Honestly, this is REALLY nicely made, to the point that I found myself scrolling up and down to get a better view of Rubik’s savant Max Park’s finger movements as he worried at the faces and facets. Really, really well-done, this, possibly one of the most impressive scrollytelling (LOOK I AM SORRY BUT NOONE HAS COME UP WITH A BETTER TERM FOR THIS YET) things I’ve seen in years.
- Inside Jesus’ Inbox: Excuse my MASSIVE self-indulgence here in linking to a piece by, well, me (and one that’s not even that long ffs, Matt you SHAMELESS hack), but it’s quite fun, I thought, and you might like it. My friend Scott has a very singular email address that he acquired 20 years ago; here, he talks to me about what it’s like owning Jesus’ inbox. Honestly, this is SUCH a good story and I feel, retrospectively, like a total d1ck for spunking it on a 900 word column rather than pitching it as a bigger feature chiz chiz.
- The Myth of Phineas Gage: Anyone who’s ever studied neuroscience in any capacity, or spoken to anyone who has, will at some point have come across the amazing story of Phineas Gage who (and I am being VERY reductive here) basically had his whole personality altered as a result of the small-but-not-insignificant fact of having a massive, fcuk off metal spike driven through a significant part of his head. Except, as this fascinating article notes, it’s entirely possible that this didn’t actually happen quite the way the history an neuroscience books present it as having happened. This is a really interesting article, not only about the history of Poor Phineas (and photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who allegedly suffered a parallel incident and side-effects) but about how history is created, about sources and ‘truth’ and how we construct stories and narratives, and while this is very much About The Past it also feels oddly pertinent to the very weird now in terms of certainty and the vanishing likelihood of ever really experiencing it again at a species-wide level.
- Walking Shibuya: Once again I point you towards the writing of Craig Mod, who in this essay writes about walking around Shibuya in Tokyo, a district which is apparently the source of many people’s mental models of what they think when they here ‘Tokyo’ – I loved this SO MUCH, mainly because of the way Mod writes about the way in which a sense of place is constructed, and the way in which some parts of a city can be entirely performatively ‘themselves; I thought this passage was a nice encapsulation of the whole: “In this sense, it was fascinating. Horrifying but also kind of … cool? Hordes, yes, but international in a way Tokyo should aspire to, and with a laudible placidity and straightforwardness to their desires. Nobody was lying. Everyone was authentic in their hunger. Tourists rapacious for overpriced knickknacks and waiting in line for substandard food. Tourists chowing down on white-bread egg sandos, guided by: a billion hours of staring at hand computers, flick-flicking through TikToks and Reels, the Algorithm rewarding the most garish over the most thoughtful, rewarding extremes over silence, travel-fluencers, a full realization of what happens when you scale late-stage capitalism through the lens of omnipresent technology with no guardrails. You get Center Gai in 2025. And Sam and I stood in the middle of it, stunned.” What’s perhaps most interesting about this is that I think you could pick any of the world’s top…what, 30, cities, and find a place (or places) within each that give you this very specific feeling. Is that good? No idea, it just is.
- British Chaos Goes Global: Curios favourite Clive Martin goes long for VICE on what exactly has fueled the rise of the UK influencer, from the TopJaw cnut to the Ibiza Final Boss cnut (remember him? OH HOW QUICKLY THE WHEEL OF VIRAL FAME TURNS! He’s 100% coming to a second-tier fresher’s week near YOU very soon!) to all the other gurning MADFERRIT new lad cnuts clogging up the feed with the into-camera shouty exhortations to BRITISH BLOKEYNESS (it feels very male, this stuff), and what it is that drives both the creators and their appeal. “Perhaps one of the reasons Brits do chaos content so well is because of our long-established tribal lines and regional divides, with each local identity bringing its own brand of madness to the party. If you look at the work of vox poppers like Dilan Kurt and Stephen Sarpong, who go around asking the citizens of satellite towns like Ilford or Luton or Croydon where they were when Michael Jackson died—or what they would ask God, given the chance—you’ll find a kind of idiot ethnography, accidental moments of profundity from a cast of bewildered pensioners, Deliveroo drivers, and street drinkers, dispatches from a divided island. “Like all good sitcom characters, they have catchphrases,” observes Farrell. “Our parents might have quoted Basil Fawlty or Del Boy to each other, but we have Mikey Menace, because nobody watches TV anymore. “I remember hearing once that you have to have a recognizable silhouette to be a good stand-up comedian, and I think all these British Chaos characters have that,” continues Farrell. “Someone like Dannyboy83 reminds us of someone you’d meet on a package holiday, being an absolute nightmare at the beach. They’re the sort of people that once might have just been a ‘local character’ in a pub in Stevenage, or wherever they’re from, but have become international celebrities.”” On the one hand, this is a great, readable piece and I love Clive’s writing; on the other, this is a very long-winded way of basically saying ‘cheap gak’.
- Icecream Hysteria: I loved this longread all about the ice cream van business in the UK – honestly, this is charming and nostalgic and interesting and informative, and made me really, really want a 99. Also, I had totally forgotten about raspberry sauce being called ‘Monkey’s Blood’ in the North East.
- Being on Bake-Off: I’ve never really gotten into bake off, but I am a sucker for a ‘this is what it was like being on a famous TV show’ expose’, and here Ruby Tandoh (who’s a far better writer than most of the people who end up on TV cooking shows, I think) writes about her experience of being inside the most famous tent on telly. This is a GREAT read, genuinely informative about the process of making the show but even moreso on the odd psychology of the contestant and the weird question of what it is that people WANT from these appearances and brushes with fame. This made me very, very peckish, though, so caveat lector and all that.
- An Open Letter to Marge Simpson: I know this is on McSweeney’s and as such might technically be designated ‘comedy’ writing, but I found this really quite moving in ways I wasn’t expecting to. “It would take me thirty years to understand your context, Marge. The flawed euphoria of the mid-’90s. The dot-com bubble that wasn’t yet understood as a bubble. The notion that, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the “end of history” had been reached. There were no more wars between superpowers. Quality of life was high! Racism and sexism were relics of the past! Never mind that there wasn’t a single woman on The Simpsons writing staff for the first six seasons—by which point your character’s identity had already been cemented. Your dourness was an instrumental foil that allowed Homer’s happy-go-luckiness, Lisa’s idealism, and Bart’s moxie to shine. “Marge’s pain,” a longtime Simpsons writer once told me, drove her plot. In the eyes of the writing staff, you and your pain were the same.”
- Princess Idiot: A short story by Grace Byron about friendship and growing up and sexuality and embarrassment and shame and and and. I thought this was beautiful.
- The Domme Songs: I’m not personally a masochist (at least not sexually-speaking; one might argue about what my continuing to do Curios says about me, but, well, I’d rather one didn’t if I’m honest), but I found this account, by Michael Robbins in Harper’s, all about his relationship with his domme and the vague fact of the world falling apart, to be honest and brutal and sad and very, very funny indeed, and, honestly, even if you have no interest in reading about a middle-aged man having curling irons applied to the tip of his penis (“G burns the head of my penis with a curling iron (my idea; she didn’t want to do it; should have listened to her).”) then I can still recommend this unreservedly.
- Ghost Kitchens: Finally this week a piece by Nikesh Shukla for Vittles about food and memory and grief, which for one specific temporal reason made me absolutely lose my sh1t when I read it on Monday and which I think might be one of the most beautiful things I have read all year. I promise you, this is a superb, heartbreaking piece of writing: “Most of the food spots you took me to years ago don’t even exist anymore. Like you, they’re long gone, consigned to memory. The thought hits me one summer morning, a few years after your death, when, walking to work down High Holborn, I realise I’m about to walk past the last place I saw you. I cross the road immediately, almost stepping out into traffic, not ready to confront your ghost, which is trapped forever at a bench in the window, urging me to try your bánh mi.”
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: