Last night, for the second time in my life, I found myself taking my trousers off in front of a few hundred people at a theatre in Soho (I was not being paid for this). It feels unfair that this should happen twice to be honest, and I am starting to suspect some sort of nefarious grand plan at play.
I went to see a comedy show – it was very good! There are still tickets available for tomorrow night if you also want a chance to be lightly-humiliated! – and, right at the end, there was a callback gag which resulted in an audience member having to hand over their shirt to the comedian. Which was then extended to said comedian then finding other audience members to complete the outfit – which was the point at which I began to very much regret being in the front row and being broadly speaking of comparable size to the performer. So he asked me for my trousers, I wrestled for about 0.3s with whether I wanted to be the cnut that derailed his finale, and then I took them off. Perhaps most humiliatingly of all, the guy – a good looking man of regulation weight – genuinely struggled to get into my strides, making the pipe-cleaner nature of my gams painfully apparent to every single one of the others present.
Anyway, I woke up with a not-insignificant feeling of shame, so should there be a fundamentally sheepish quality to this week’s Curios then that is why.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are probably glad you didn’t have to see that.
By Tai Shani
THE SECTION WHICH FEELS YOU ALL PROBABLY OUGHT TO TAKE A LOOK AT THIS AND THEN ADJUST YOUR PLANS ACCORDINGLY, PT.1:
- Space 0: We begin this week with one of those, I appreciate, annoying links where my description is basically going to consist of a lot of words expended to communicate the fact that, honestly, I haven’t the faintest idea what the everliving fcuk is happening here or what this is for or who made it or anything. I promise this isn’t down to authorial laziness – or, at least, not *primarily* down to authorial laziness – so much as this being a VERY chunky bit of webwork which basically succeeded in utterly overwhelming my poor, wheezing old laptop and which, if you’re going to give it a go, you should very much leave until AFTER you have closed all your other tabs. Still, should you have access to whatever the fcuk a 2025 version of a Cray Supercomputer is then I think this is potentially quite a fun toy – basically it’s a 3d world that you can WASD yourself around (so far, so banal) and which is peppered with…things, different objects all rendered in 3d which you can pick up and (and this is the bit where it starts to make the hardware complain) then combine in infinite combinations in godlike fashion, so that you can finally see what would happen if you were to merge the qualities of (say) a seahorse, a leopard and a Birkin handbag (no, really, this is exactly what happens, it is very much this odd). The hard computational work happens when you start asking the system to spin up these hybrids – I assume there’s some genAI under the hood here to create the eventual 3d models you end up with, but this gets VERY weird (and, to reiterate, unless your laptop is a LOT better than mine, VERY wheezy) very quickly indeed). If your hardware is upto it then this is a really interesting toy-slash-art-project-thing – but, seriously, don’t attempt to combine this with doing your timesheets come 6pm. Via the always-fascinating TITAA.
- Kakocomputermoyan: I’ve featured works by Filipino digital artist Chia Amisola in Curios before, but this is her latest piece which brings together projects by a variety of different creators. Per the site description, “KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN (“that’s what you get for using the computer!”) is an exhibition of internet art featuring 21 Filipino artists. Its ‘songs’ are represented as various artworks: an elegy for Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz and St. Peter, a shrine to Onel de Guzman, a simulated torrent client, to data center mythologies. These counter-narratives articulate an online third-world. From exploitation, to queerness, to appropriation, to bootlegging, many of these stories would not have been possible without the internet. Contained within the karaoke machine, the internet becomes an urgent medium for works that speak to its potential for resistance.” Which, I appreciate, doesn’t tell you a whole lot, so rather than reading this rubbish why not click and explore? I have wandered through a dozen or so of these over the past few days, and there’s a pleasing breadth of style and tone and technique at play here, with works that play with the fabric of html in interesting ways to more static, visual/narrative experiences, to animations to interactive ‘game’-type pieces…I obviously can’t speak to any of the aspects of national identity and culture being referenced here, but as a general overview of web art practice in 2025 and a view of the web from a less-Western perspective, it’s consistently interesting and, occasionally, very clever indeed. Think of it like a gallery to wander through, and, if you can, give it 20-30 mins to explore.
- The First Great Personal Portfolio Website Of 2025!: Long-time readers will be aware that I have a particular softspot for people who make needlessly-shiny and complex websites to show off their work, and this, by one Toshihito Endo, a Japanese dev who has decided that rather than spending days of their life demonstrating ‘thought leadership’ on LinkedIn they would instead create an entirely-functional 3d world via which to demonstrate their coding chops. “This is a place where I work on projects. I organise a space with “my work objects” as well as “my identity fragments” to make it comfortable and now, I’m glad to have you here! Feel free to walk around and will you find me to “say hello”?”, reads the charming welcome message, and then you get into the site and DEAR GOD this is legitimately better than about 70% of 3d gallery spaces I have ever visited online. Explore Endo’s workspace, learn about the things he likes, explore his portfolio, and, at one point, explore an model of his head rendered in glorious polygons as a representation of HIS OWN MIND inside the virtual space. Honestly, I can’t stress how beautifully-made this is and how *stylish*, and how much I wish I had a really rich client whose money I could use to employ this person because they are obviously very talented indeed.
- Mark: We are, of course, living through an age of DISRUPTION. Disruption of governments! Disruption of the broad concept of ‘democracy’! Disruption of the functional planetary environment! SO MUCH DISRUPTION! You know what hadn’t, to this point, yet been disrupted? YES THAT IS RIGHT BOOKMARKS! I am sure you’re in agreement with me when I say that one of the major factors in humanity not having yet achieved some sort of transcendental emotional epiphany has been the lack of progress made in the preceding few centuries when it comes to ‘keeping track of where you are in a book’ – thank FCUK, then, for Silicon Valley! Mark, you will be THRILLED to learn, is a bookmark…POWERED BY AI!!!!! Yes, throw away your dumb, oh-so-19thC faux-leather numbers because this device will catapult your reading habits into the 22nd Century. Basically the gimmick here is that the bookmark will not only MAGICALLY REMEMBER where in the book you are, but it will also ‘read’ and summarise everything that you have read using the MAGIC OF THE MACHINE, thereby neatly-obviating the need for you to actually concentrate as you’re turning the pages. “Today”, runs the blurb on-site, “book readers struggle to retain everything they read” (SPEAK FOR YOUR FCUKING SELVES PLEASE) and so this solves that issue by, er, giving said readers a wafer-thin AI summary of the contents so that rather than reading a foundational text you can instead experience it as though filtered through the utterly-mediocre minds of a bunch of cnuts on LinkedIn. Although, judging by the books used as ‘example’ texts in the screenshots here, this is squarely aimed at the sorts of people who believe that Yuval Noah Harari is anything other than a stupid person’s idea of a smart person, or that Peter Thiel is a thought leader rather than, say, a cryptofascist. Is it clear from my tone that I wish genuine and long-term physical harm both on the people who want to get rich from this and from their target customers in equal measure? Because, really, I do. This is like some sort of ur-parody of techcnutery – from the absurd claims that THIS is the staggering innovation that will change humankind’s relationship to written texts forever, to the boast that it’s made from the same materials as a Boeing 777 – MATE IT IS A FCUKING BOOKMARK GYAC – to the seemingly-sincere promise that each year it will deliver you a ‘wrapped’ summary of ALL THE KNOWLEDGE YOU HAVE CONSUMED THAT YEAR (can you imagine a GPT-spun ‘summary’ of all the things you have ever read? Can you imagine how utterly miserable that would be, flattened into insignificance? Yes, well, EXACTLY), to the fact that I think it’s going to retail at around…wait for it…$200, this is the sort of thing I am slightly amazed exists in the wake of the humane debacle. I hate literally everything about this!
- Revenge Font: A legitimately clever little PR stunt, this, by London agency Dude – their office is on Regent’s Canal, and was, towards the end of last year, tagged in fairly large-scale fashion by some charming local kids with questionable spraywork. So, to TAKE BACK CONTROL, Dude have decided to take the style of the tag and appropriate it themselves – they used it to create a brand new font which they have aptly decided to call ‘Revenge’, available to download from this site and free-to-use, thereby turning some frankly ugly graffwork into a nice little calling card for their creativity (and, actually, not a bad font in its own right tbh). There’s a link to donate to East London arts organisations on-page too for some nice CSR feelgoods, and, generally, this is a smart bit of creative work that I hope will have won them some extra business this year.
- Claude Plays Pokemon: This has been going for over a week now – SO LATE! – but, given the AI’s seeming lack of sufficient token memory to have a consistent picture of what the fcuk it is doing, it’s quite likely that it’ll take a few more before it gets anywhere near completion. This is a Twitch stream featuring Anthropic’s Claude model attempting to play Pokemon, while a crowd of kids comment on its progress. What’s really interesting is that I think it’s using a reason-y model (3.7 Sonnet?) and as such you can watch The Machine’s ‘thought processes’ as it plays; there’s something really quite amazing about seeing the way in which it ‘thinks’ (it doesn’t think) and the ways in which this mimics the shape, but very much not the function, of human thought, and the ways in which it gets stuck in loops and into obsessional cul-de-sacs; on the one hand, it’s hard not to watch this for 5 minutes and think that we really should stop listening to people like Altman when they say things like “AGI NEXT TUESDAY!!!”; on the other, it’s also absolutely fcuking astonishing to think that this is something that would have been literal witchcraft 3 years ago and now is so accepted that I can be blase about it in poor quality prose.
- Queer Communist Peter: Not just him, though – there’s Trans Lesbian Peter Griffin too! And RadFem Peter! And Punk Rock Peter! Why are the kids spinning up AI-juiced brainrot accounts featuring alternate-universe variants on the Family Guy character waxing lyrical about social justice issues? I DON’T KNOW BUT THEY ARE! This feels adjacent to that ‘communist ASMR’ page I linked to last week, with the brainrot style being the spoonful of sugar making the leftist discourse easier to swallow, and I suppose there’s a degree to which this all makes sense – it’s also undeniably true that there’s something really quite jarring about hearing, say, the theories of Adorno being delivered to you via the medium of a poorly-cloned version of Seth Mcfarland while Minecraft loops play in the background. For more on this you can read Taylor Lorenz’s ESSENTIAL (not in any way essential) deep dive into the phenomenon at User Mag – but, also, you might just want to keep it vague and puzzling and mysterious, because, honestly, even knowing more about the ‘why’ doesn’t really make it make sense (oh, by the way, there’s a line in the writeup about the guy who’s trying to set himself up as a sponsorship broker for these accounts who talks with all apparent sincerity about having a ‘monetisable stable of peters’ (I paraphrase, but) which nearly broke me).
- A Truly Amazing Library of Music Bits: I think this one came to me via B3ta (THANKS ROB) – wherever it’s from, it’s a fcuking astonishing collection of what I think are original musical elements, small loops and samples that are all entirely free to download and use as you see fit, and, seriously, there are fcuking THOUSANDS here, spanning all sorts of genres and exactly the sort of thing you might want to play with were you a budding music producer or making game SFX or, basically, anything at all involving digital composition. This is, apparently, all the work of one Andre Louis – THANKYOU MYSTERIOUS STRANGER ANDRE LOUIS!
- Turn Any Image Into An Explorable 3d Landscape: You…you want more of a description than that? FFS. Look, take any image you like, plug it into this website and then wander around it/through it as though it were a 3d gameworld – HAPPY NOW? This works best with map-type imagery – I think the software somehow ‘sees’ roads and topography and tries to work with them – but will render anything you feed it, which is how I found myself on Wednesday morning getting very lost in the, turns out, unsettlingly-craggy landscape that is my face.
- The Saltcraft Studio: PREPOSTEROUS WASTE OF LUXE CLIENT BUDGET OF THE WEEK! This time it’s the turn of perfumier Issey Miyake to have its wallet inspected by some enterprising agency or another – the brand has a scent which, I presume, is somehow redolent, or the embodiment, of SALT, and so, obviously, decided to create an INTERACTIVE ARTISTIC WEBSITE EXPERIENCE where YOU, the putative scent-enjoyer, can craft your VERY OWN salt-themed digital artwork, which creative process involves, er, clicking a bunch of times to create your own UNIQUE SALT CRYSTAL and then choose from a bunch of different backgrounds and flourishes to make your own PERSONAL SALT SCULPTURE THINGY! No, you’re right, there is literally no reason why anyone would want to do this – beautifully upon completion of the user journey your special crystalline creation is inducted into a SALTY HALL OF FAME along with all the other works created by Issey Miyake fans worldwide – now, while I can’t be certain that the site doesn’t only display a limited number of finalised designs it strikes me as an unlikely and unnecessary limitation…which might then suggest that, per this morning when I found it two long hours ago, a grand total of 11 people have bothered to interact with this. Anyone want to speculate as to the cost-per-user of this? WELL DONE EVERYONE (especially the client handling person on the agency side).
- Photos of the Old West: Via my friend Alex, some great photos of the America at the turn of the 20thC. You can almost taste the sarsaparilla (I have no idea what sarsaparilla is).
- Time Gradient: Timezones, mapped to a greyscale gradient. Click, drag and hold to experience a very pleasing visual effect indeed – I very much like this as a way of displaying multiple time locations simultaneously.
- Shuffled: Via Curios reader Dave Whiteland (THANKYOU DAVE!) comes this very niche little newsletter which each week will email you with a short overview of which countries in the world have changed leader over the past 7 days. Want to keep track with the health of democracy in Tuvalu? Need a nudge when the Vanuatans next choose to exercise their democratic right? OH GOOD! This actually covers major cabinet appointments and departmental/structural changes to the machinery of Government, and, my slightly-arch commentary aside, might be genuinely useful for…actually, no, sorry, I cannot for a second conceive of a situation in which anyone who NEEDS this information isn’t already getting it elsewhere, but I am very glad that anyone REALLY keen on knowing more about global governance has this as an additional resource.
- Cold Album Drumming: A website-slash-YouTube channel with a single purpose – to whit: “Brad Frost plays drums to the albums he knows intimately, but has never drummed to before. Cover to cover. No warm-up. No prep. Totally cold. What could possibly go wrong?” I have only dipped into this briefly, and I think you probably need to be a drummer to really get this, but Frost is talented and a charming guide/companion, and there’s something honestly heartwarming about how much FUN he seems to be having as he smashes the fcuk out of his symbols in rhythmic fashion.
- Bookwatch: Like the idea of books but hate reading? Ok, great, in which case enjoy audiobooks! But! What if…what if audio isn’t enough? What if you HATE READING but find merely listening to words sadly lacking? What if you need visual stimuli to ENGAGE YOUR MIND? Welcome, then, to Bookwatch, a website which takes a bunch of books (per all of these things, when they say ‘books’ they mean ‘the same fcuking laundry list of terrible self-help w4nk that every single tedious, cookie-cutter tech fcuk pretends to read so as to be able to have the same tedious, cookie-cutter opinions and beliefs as every single other tedious, cookie-cutter tech fcuk’) and presents them as…videos! I am 99% sure this is all being AI’d, with the summary being machine-generated from the core text and then the videos then being spun up from the summary copy, and, honestly, the idea of getting a fat-free AI-generated video summary of these already-largely-valueless texts is…entirely-dispiriting, frankly, but if YOU know someone whose tedious drive to self-optimise has seen them begin to inject the Huel directly into their stomachs to minimise digestion time then this may well be the innovation for them (also, please poison them; it’s for the wider benefit of the species, I promise).
- Rejected Vanity Plates: It is a wonderful quirk of the Californian system that every application for a vanity number plate has its approval or rejection made part of the public record, meaning that each year it’s possible to marvel at some of the things people honestly thought that the State would approve for them to have stuck to their car. Refresh the page to get a new one – honestly, some of these are AMAZING, as are the official interpretations and reasons for approval/rejection. I for one am STUNNED that the person who wanted ‘SHE BANGS’ as their number plate was turned down.
THE SECTION WHICH FEELS YOU ALL PROBABLY OUGHT TO TAKE A LOOK AT THIS AND THEN ADJUST YOUR PLANS ACCORDINGLY, PT.2:
- Left Field Dating: Surely it can only be a matter of months now before someone attempts to DISRUPT DATING for the final time be reintroducing the concept of arranged marriages and dowries but this time DIGITAL AND MOBILE-ENABLED, thus bringing us neatly full-circle? As we wait for that possibly-inevitable moment to arrive, welcome to the latest attempt to SOLVE LOVE – Left Field Dating is a new US-only (so far) app (and only a few cities in the US, I think), whose gimmick is LOCATION-BASED SERENDIPITY; as far as I can tell, you create your profile in the standard way and then, rather than having to swipe the misery carousel, you instead let THE MYSTERIOUS AI pair you with people based on its assessment of your potential compatibility (based on your profile and OTHER SIGNALS), with the gimmick that you will only be suggested matches when you’re both vaguely-proximate to each other. So the idea is that if you’re, say, killing time for 3h somewhere you could turn the app on and be notified if anyone the system thinks you might be up for fingering wanders through the vague vicinity – while this obviously sounds like an absolute fcuking safety nightmare, the FAQ suggests that no specific locations are given out, meaning that you’re in theory safe from a stranger suddenly approaching you with a gleam in their eye and ‘the app says we should fcuk’ on their tongue. This sounds simultaneously like ALMOST a great idea and also something with one or two too many obvious flaws to ever work, but let’s see if it ever escapes the NYC/campus ghetto. BONUS LOCATION-BASED PEOPLEFINDER! Pie is also-US-only, also in a limited number of cities, but rather than Left Field is a FRIENDSHIP rather than boning app – with this one you can flag you’re going to a specific event or location and get matched with other users who’ve also expressed an interest, which, honestly, feels *quite* a lot like how Facebook worked c.2010ish, but there is nothing new under the sun.
- Noosphere: Another week, another attempt to FIX NEWS! No, this one isn’t going to work either, sorry. Noospehere is a newly-launched app-based news platform (iOS-only at present, and possibly US-only too so far) which, as far as I can tell, has decided to take the slightly odd market position of ‘a social app where you only follow journalists and get links to all their work and reporting’, which, honestly, is basically ‘Twitter in the old days’ as far as I’m concerned. Per their description, “Noosphere is a place where premium, quality journalists bring their best work, connecting authentically with their fans and followers, while building a sustainable business for the next era of news. A beautiful, intuitive design includes Articles and Briefs – in Text, Audio Photos and Video – never before published and trustworthy, straight from the source. Each reporter’s bio is accessible and transparent. Journalists update you regularly, including Alerts options so you are the first to have breaking news or in-the-field visibility on everything from politics, to climate change, conflict zones and beyond.“ There’s some interesting detail about the monetisation policy buried in this writeup here – effectively this seems designed to put cash directly in the pockets of the journalists themselves rather than a media organisation (although obviously Noosphere is not a charity) – but the pricepoint is…honestly incredibly fcuking punchy, because $240 a year feels like a LOT to pay for a disparate bunch of voices that may or may not provide a balanced and wide-ranging overview of What Is Going On, especially when there’s no guarantee at all that this will develop the critical mass of either journalists posting or users reading to sustain itself beyond the initial VC fund runway.
- The Great Wikipedia Race: Riffing on last week’s SUPERB ‘3d navigable museum of Wikipedia’ (which if you are yet to download and play with, WHAT THE FCUK IS WRONG WITH YOU??), comedian Sean Morl is running a GLOBAL WIKIPEDIA 3D RACE CHALLENGE THING on Monday 17th March 2025, all being streamed live for lols. The idea is simple – on the day, a randomly-generated bingo card of potential Wikipedia entries will be given to all participants, who will then have two hours to run through the museum attempting to complete a whole ‘line’ of topics in any order they please. Silly, pointless and antithetical to actually learning anything, I find the idea of people streaming themselves running through a weirdly-liminal gallery space attempting to find the, I don’t know, ‘gangrene’ section infinitely pleasing.
- Chance Vision: I could attempt to explain or describe this to you, but I would instead invite you to click the link, to scroll down the page and, using the words arranged on the Page, and to attempt to work out what the everliving fcuk this…product? App? THING? thinks it is meant to be. “What if seeing truly meant understanding? We bridge the gap between curiosity and knowledge, empowering you to uncover the stories, meaning, and cultural context behind everything you see. We believe understanding the world should be effortless – a natural extension of your curiosity. With Chance AI, visual discovery becomes intuitive, human, and deeply meaningful – just as it’s meant to be.” YES OK BUT WHAT THE FCUK DO YOU DO WHAT ARE YOU FOR? As far as I can tell this is basically a packaged up LLM with photoanalysis capabilities, available as a standalone app for anyone who hasn’t yet realised that you can do all of this stuff with a standard GPT login these days, but, well, I am featuring it mainly for being the most utterly-meaningless piece of copywriting I have seen all year, for which sincere congratulations.
- Night Earth: The earth! At night! As a composite made up of loads of satellite images from 2012! This is rather beautiful, although there’s also something sobering about the thought that the reality of this image a whole 13 years on will be a planet that is so much brighter – burning so much more! – than it was back then.
- Webring.fun: Part of the growing OLD WEB nostalgiaboom, we are BRINGING BACK THE WEBRING! Webrings, for the children or less-terminally-online, were a thing of the early-ish internet era whereby sites of similar theme or tone or style would organise into loose collectives (webrings) characterised by a shared sense of community and mutual hyperlinking, with the broad theory that webrings were useful ways of arranging sites into broad groupings to aid with discovery and thematic clustering the early, pre-indexing days. This is a very new attempt to revitalise the concept, and there are only a dozen or so sites signed up to this one, but I am going to try and add Curios this week and if you own a small, personal, bloggish site then you may want to add yourself to it as a vaguely-community-minded nod to an earlier and more innocent era when we still believed that this would make things better rather than, as inevitably happened, it making things far, far worse.
- Middle School: Another superb piece of work by The Pudding looking at a specific demographic cohort in the US through the lens of MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF DATA. This time they’re looking at Middle Schoolers – a term that means the square root of fcuk-all to me, not being North American or a product of its scholastic system, but which as far as I can tell basically means 11-14ish – and how they FEEL ABOUT LIFE and, as is always the case with these guys, it’s an object lesson in how to tell stories with data and bring numbers to life in a way in which humanises and personalises them. Leaving aside the beauty of the presentation and the effectiveness of the presentation, WOW does it seem like tweens in the US are miserable (lol I wonder why).
- Extraordinary Male Living Space: The description for this is lifted directly from Ryan, where I found the link originally – it will take you to a Reddit post, from which you MUST click the main image and then enjoy the carousel of psychedelia. Can you IMAGINE the headaches that spending longer than approximately 10 minutes in this house would induce? It’s also important that you read OP’s accompanying description, because there’s something unbelievably-poignant about the ‘after three failed relationships’ line – this is very much the home decoration choice of a man who has fully embraced ‘forever alone’ as a lifestyle choice. MEN, WHAT IS WRONG WITH US????
- Circle of Attraction: I went for a few beers and a stroll with my friend Ben this week, and we were reminiscing about the halcyon times of 13-ish years ago when it seemed like we couldn’t leave the house without someone attempting to throw money at us in exchange for some sort of ill-defined service provision. It’s fair to say that here in tough old 2025 times are…somewhat less flush, turns out, and the magic money tree really does seem to have succumbed to Dutch Elm, and I imagine many of us could do with some sort of magical, serendipitous windfall to take the edge off slightly. Well, thankfully it turns out that the secret to turning your financial fortunes around is, er, playing some YouTube videos in the background! Circle of Attraction is a YT channel which posts videos whose purpose, it is claimed, “is to help you manifest a rich and beautiful life with the Law of Attraction, by providing you with POWERFUL money meditation music, visualization videos, and inspirational texts and affirmations regularly. You are capable of achieving an EASIER and WEALTHIER life!” Beautifully, the site then goes on to offer this slightly-more-grounded disclaimer, noting “our music and videos will not make you rich overnight, but serve you as powerful tools to help activate the Law of Attraction in your life so that you can attract money, wealth, and abundance.” So, er, CAVEAT EMPTOR! Still, if you think that watching an hour-long video featuring an AI-generated bundle of notes hovering over a dollarsign background while new age music plays gently as a bed – “Tap into the MEGA-MILLIONAIRE FREQUENCY of 432Hz x 777Hz and open the door to wealth in just 7 minutes. Let this session shift your energy and align you with financial abundance, making it easier for money and success to flow into your life!” – then, well, ENJOY! Also, should any of you find that you magically DO become plutocratically wealthy after availing yourself of the services here offered, then, well, REMEMBER WHERE YOU HEARD ABOUT IT PLEASE.
- Percussive City: A small project by artist collective Uncle Friend, this webpage presents a series of videos answering the question ‘what would the city sound like if you attempted to turn various disparate elements of it into percussive instruments?’ – the answer, by the way, is ‘surprisingly good’ and I would really enjoy hearing a whole ambient-y, breaks-y album produced solely from sound fragments born of London’s street furniture so, well, if one of you would like to crack on and make that for me that would be nice thankyou (ONE DAY someone will read one of these exhortations and do what I ask. ONE FCUKING DAY).
- Cool Tools: Are you the sort of person who before buying something, however trivial, feels it essential to compile some sort of seventeen-tab spreadsheet comparing different models’ featuresets and review scores and price points so as to ensure you’re getting the VERY BEST OF THE BEST? How is that working out for you? Is it not really time consuming and annoying? Maybe…try giving less of a fcuk? Or, alternatively, avail yourself of this useful new site pulled together by the people behind long-running recommendations newsletter ‘Recommendo’, which for years has been, er, recommending things its curators think are good to its readership. The database of past recommendations has now been tagged and made searchable on this site, meaning if you want to ask it for the VERY BEST (say) trainers or air fryers or knives then it will probably have an opinion; Recomendo is, to the best of my knowledge, independent and all-human, and as such this feels like a decently-objective addition to your ‘product recommendations’ rolodex (if you’re enough of a weirdo to have such a thing in the first place).
- 3d Words With Some Perspective: Type in two words and this site will create you a little 3d model that basically combines them so as that when you rotate the model a certain way one is visible and vice-versa. Which, yes, makes the square root of no sense at all, but will be entirely clear once you click. I REALLY want a 3d printer so I can get a couple of physical ones of these made – ideally reading something vaguely profane and silly, like ‘wnking turtles’ (no, me neither, but that is what is in my head RIGHT NOW at 934am).
- 70s Scifi Book Cover Generator: Someone’s trained an AI model on a bunch of pulp scifi cover designs from the 70s and chucked it up on Glif for anyone to play with – sadly as with all of the cheaper models it fcuks up text rendering something chronic, meaning the books are often blessed with titles like “The Langfluider Slihntzlx”, but the graphical styles and general composition here are spot-on and there’s something quite interesting in exploring what others have chosen to spin up.
- Emoji Stretcher: Make emoji, but wide. Emoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooji, if you will (but you inevitably won’t).
- HORRIBLE AI BONGO CORNER: NB CLICKING THIS LINK WILL TAKE YOU ONTO A SITE WHERE YOU ARE ONLY A FEW CLICKS AWAY FROM SOME POTENTIALLY REALLY HORRIBLE STUFF WHICH YOU MIGHT NOT WANT TO SEE. Also, I think there’s some AI-generated nudity on the landing page. So, well, sorry about that. BUT, equally, I wanted to bring you this link because I am increasingly intrigued as to what is going to happen to us when it becomes trivial to spin up whatever flavour of smut anyone wants, unconstrained by previously-limiting factors like ‘basic human physiognomy’. Every time a new OpenSource TTV model drops, within hours the bongo-themed LORAs emerge – so it is with whatever Chinese variant this is, which has been manipulated by weirdos so as to be able to generate incredibly-realistic looking videos of ‘sexy’ women with, er, two heads. Yes, that’s right, two heads. Two ‘SEXY’ heads, but two heads nonetheless. I can’t stress enough how INTENSELY weird it feels to look at this – really quite deeply, viscerally wrong in a way that felt somehow newly-awful – and I felt it quite important that I share it with you so I didn’t have to suffer alone. Again, I am sorry (also, by the way, I wasn’t joking about the rest of that site, I really don’t recommend clicking around much unless you’re feeling a reasonable degree of emotional fortitude because it will not do wonders for your faith in humanity (or, more accurately, men)).
- Fly Pieter: Since I found this a link to it’s apparently been shared by That Fcuking Man and so it’s entirely possible you’ll have seen it – if not, though, Fly Pieter is a VERY simple, almost rudimentary, in-browser flight sim which is distinguished by dint of it being in large part ‘coded by machine’ – it’s actually quite a lot more complex than that, as outlined in this writeup, and not simply a case of typing ‘make me a flight sim’ into Grok, but it’s true that, basically, the bulk of the work in getting this running was done by The Machine. It’s only ‘fun’ in the most loose of senses but it feels like a small watershed moment in terms of what is possible in terms of building with automation. If you squint it’s almost possible to be hopeful about the new era of limitless digital creativity that we might be about to usher in (or, alternatively, to be pessimistic about the terminal weight of digital cruft we’re about to be buried under; either/or).
- Social Democracy: Ok, I tried with this but it was simply TOO DRY for me – for any of you for whom The Rest is History is the BEST thing in the world, though, this might well be catnip. A browsergame in which it is Germany in 1928 and you need to try and stop the Nazis getting into power using only the power of POLITICAL PROCESS and TECHNICAL GOVERNMENTAL SYSTEMS. As I said, it’s not exactly a light game of Tetris – “Play as the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1928, and try to stop the NSDAP from taking power. Guide the party through elections and parliamentary politics. Deal with the Great Depression and the spiraling political violence that characterized the late “Weimar Republic”.” – but if you’re a very specific type of weird history nerd then this could be the best link of the week.
- 368 Chickens: This, by contrast, is very simple and very easy to understand, but absolutely fcuking FIENDISH in its execution and made me momentarily very frustrated on Monday before I decided to put it down and move on with my life. You have 368 chickens to place on a board. When you place three or more chickens of the same type in a line, they vanish. EXHAUST YOUR CHICKENS.
- The Beast of Glenkildove: Finally this week, an interactive, choose your own adventure-type novel! Ok, you only get the first three chapters for free and beyond that you need to pony up for the full thing, but there’s a good 20-25m of play here before you hit the paywall and it is REALLY nicely done – curious and better-written than I’d expected and full of decisions that feel MEANINGFUL and IMPACTFUL, and if you’re the sort of person who ever enjoyed Fighting Fantasy books as a kid then you will get a powerful kick of nostalgia from this (except this is in fact a lot better than Fighting Fantasy books because, honestly, they were mostly a bit sh1t).
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Manuscript Miniatures: Not a Tumblr! I don’t care! “ManuscriptMiniatures.com is an image collection of miniatures depicting armoured figures from the medieval period. Miniatures are sourced from manuscripts created before 1450 in countries across Europe.” There are over 16000 here, so if you can’t find something that pleases you then you are almost certainly morally deficient in some significant way.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Lordess Foudre: Poster-ish art and design which is very much channeling the whole ‘digital end of days’ vibe which I like to think is what keeps you all flocking back to Web Curios week after week, and which I am continually tempted to buy because, well, just click the link, it is ACE.
- Jordanna Kalman: One of Kalman’s images is a feature photo in the newsletter this week, but I wanted to link to their Insta feed too because I think the work is beautiful and I would like you all to pay attention to it.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- AI and the Limits of Vocabulary: So this is an academic paper – wait! No! Come back! This is interesting, I promise! – all about the extent to which language defines our ability to conceive of subjects/topics, and how, if one takes that premise, that our extant language may be insufficient or inadequate to enable us to have helpful conversations about the emergent world of AI: “This position paper argues that, in order to understand AI, we cannot rely on our existing vocabulary of human words. Instead, we should strive to develop neologisms: new words that represent precise human concepts that we want to teach machines, or machine concepts that we need to learn. We start from the premise that humans and machines have differing concepts. This means interpretability can be framed as a communication problem: humans must be able to reference and control machine concepts, and communicate human concepts to machines. Creating a shared human-machine language through developing neologisms, we believe, could solve this communication problem.” Obviously this is all VERY Wittgenstinian, but it doesn’t get too knotty, I promise, and even if you’re someone for whom the idea of reading a philosophy paper is approximately as appealing as dental surgery this is a relatively light read. I find the concept of ‘latent space’ a useful example of this, a term which has emerged as a manner of conceiving of the way in which The Machine categorises and links information and ‘meaning’ and without which I don’t think I would be able to ‘understand’ (lol) any of this stuff anywhere near as well – seriously, this is really really really fascinating, and gets moreso the longer you sit with it.
- If You’re So Smart, Why Can’t You Die?: OK, this is VERY LONG and quite…discursive and a but rambly, but also it’s SUCH an interesting and smart exploration of what we mean when we talk about ‘machine intelligence’ or indeed ‘intelligence’ in general, and the difference between specific and general intelligence, and how thinking of these distinctions can be useful when considering what we mean when we talk about ‘artificial intelligence’ or even whether we should be using the ‘i’ word in this context at all. Really can’t recommend this highly enough if you have the time to spare and the will to put in a bit of effort. Look, here are the opening few paras to give you a taste – honestly, this thought example alone struck me as a really smart way of framing the premise, and it gets smarter as it goes on: “When a coffee shop makes a bagel, it’s a pretty good bet they can make a croissant as well. Not every shop that has one has the other, but they’re pretty strongly correlated. We call this correlation “baking”. This sounds like a weird way to say it. We call “this correlation” baking? It just…is baking, isn’t it? But the steps you follow aren’t literally the exact same. The procedure to make a bagel and the procedure to make a croissant happen to be similar enough, achieving similar enough ends, of interest to similar enough people, that those similarities can be compactly described by the one word “baking”. But there’s nothing special about the word “baking” uniting these on any fundamental level. The similarities came first, and the word after. Now imagine a coffee shop that’s been tasked to “achieve superbaking”. They make one bagel on Monday, ten bagels on Tuesday, and eighty million bagels on Wednesday. They’ve never made a croissant. Have they achieved superbaking?” BONUS AGI-ISH ARTICLE: here’s Gary Marcus patiently explaining why AGI still isn’t imminent despite what an awful lot of people with a vested interest in telling you otherwise might be wanting you to believe.
- The World Is Flattened: I’m including this not because I necessarily think it’s spot-on but because, given Ted Gioia’s increasing prominence as a Cultural Thinker, it’s likely to get a lot of traction and appear in a reasonable number of people’s ‘borrowed opinions’ folder in the next few months. Following on from his superviral ‘where is culture at?’ post from 2024 in which he outlined his theory on the rise of ‘dopamine culture’, Gioia defines 2025 an era in which we have reached ‘peak flat’: “I still participate in many web platforms—I need to do it for my vocation. (But do I really? I’ve started to wonder.) But now they feel constraining. Even worse, they now all feel the same. Instead of connecting with people all over the world, I now get “streaming content” 24/7. Facebook no longer wants me stay in touch with friends overseas, or former classmates, or distant relatives. Instead it serves up memes and stupid short videos. And they are the exact same memes and videos playing non-stop on TikTok—and Instagram, Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, YouTube shorts, etc. Every big web platforms feels the exact same. That whole rich tapestry of my friends and family and colleagues has been replaced by the most shallow and flattened digital fluff. And this feeling of flattening is intensified by the lack of context or community. The only ruling principle is the total absence of purpose or seriousness.” I agree with this broad point – what I agree with less is Gioia’s ‘THIS IS THE FAULT OF 30 TECH LEADERS’ line, which strikes me as…I don’t know, willfully ignoring the manner in which the entire world has become driven entirely by data over the past 5 decades, and this is an inevitable question of THE FCUKING BELL CURVE and automatic systems designed to optimise for market capture and how that, even if you’re Carole Cadwalldr, probably isn’t ONLY Mark Zuckerberg’s fault. Gioia also seems to suggest we’re on the verge of some sort of mass response to this and the beginning of a new era of pushback against this homogeneity…which might be true! Equally, though, it might not! Anyway, this is about 55% there, I think, and another nice datapoint to use in your ‘and this is why the small/cosy/artisanal/craft/homemade web is something we should lean into in 2025-6’ presentation. BONUS FLAT CULTURE LINK: this is an interesting piece which, while looking at Substack in particular, also nudges to the inevitable way in which audience maximisation tends inevitably towards a certain homogeneity within any given field.
- Hanging With The MAGA Gays: Trying to keep the US politics stuff to a minimum here at the moment because, well, you don’t need another fcuking source of it, do you, but this article in GQ is not only very well-written but also feels like a perfect piece of ‘I never thought the leopards would eat MY face!’ foreshadowing. Meet the gay men who caped for Trump, who don’t believe that the TQ+ bits of the LGBTQ+ spectrum have anything to do with them, and who are presumably shocked and baffled at the stats coming out of the States this week suggesting that popular support for gay marriage has fallen across the country alongside the rise of MAGA conservatism. Again, this feels less about gay/straight and more about the unashamed return of the sense of ‘droit de seigneur’ amongst the rich and ‘beautiful’ and the feeling that, actually, social natural selection is absolutely fine as long as I am on the right side of the dividing line thankyouverymuchindeed.
- Meet Brian Armstrong: You won’t enjoy meeting Brian, admittedly, but I think it’s important you do. Brian is CEO of crypto exchange Coinbase, and an increasingly influential figure in Washington as the Trumpian regime prepares to go all-in on digital currencies and magic beans (for reasons that are in NO WAY connected to the massive enrichment of some of the principal actors at the heart of the administration, no siree!). This profile gives some background on the man and his politics, which – and you might be surprised by this, so maybe sit down – lean towards the creation of independent, largely-unregulated tax haven city states for the super-rich! WHAT THE FCUK IS IT WITH THESE CNUTS AND THEIR WISH TO SECEDE ENTIRELY FROM SOCIETY? And, if they want to do it, can they instead do it in terminal fashion rather than through endlessly trying and failing to create their own fcuking countries? This sounds good, doesn’t it? Like the sort of thing that the world’s richest people should definitely be into? FCUK’S SAKE. ““I do think crypto has implications far beyond just payments and money,” Armstrong said during a podcast interview in August, when asked about crypto’s relationship to the Network State. He said that he’s “definitely very interested” in special economic zones—in which typically cash-strapped countries cede land to tech bros who want to play a real-life version of SimCity—and other “ways that you can tokenize real estate and actual physical land to create better forms of society…We’re actually losing freedoms,” added Armstrong, who has an estimated net worth of $8.4 billion. “So I would like us to all in crypto think about how we actually go create physical places in the world to preserve freedom over the long term. I think that’s ultimately crypto’s destiny.”
- Human Gunk: Jay Springett makes his pitch for linguistic immortality and brings us a useful concept which sits alongside AI slop – human gunk! “Gunk is what happens when content isn’t made to inform, entertain, or create meaning, but only to be seen. It’s the accumulated, suffocating residue of media optimised for machine visibility instead of human readability. Like the filth of the Augean Stables, it has built up all across the internet over the years of the last decade or so—layer upon layer of clickbait, regurgitated press releases, SEO-padding, and engagement bait. It’s made by people, but produced like sludge. It’s all Gunk. Human Gunk…Gunk is all the awkward, keyword-stuffed sentences at the top and in the middle of every article. The personal sob stories about someone’s grandma you have to scroll past before you get to a recipe. It’s all the endless think pieces that say nothing but mention product names. It’s all the LinkedIn posts that read like they were ghostwritten by a sentient press release. It’s corporate blog spam that exists only to trap search traffic. The same five insights repackaged in a thousand different ways, all slightly worse than the last.” Or, you might argue, the latest linky newsletter containing all the same links as all the other linky newsletters (chiz chiz chiz). There’s an interesting question at the heart of Springett’s essay here as to whether the slop era is meaningfully worse, or whether it’s simply an inevitable evolution of what we’ve been doing to ourselves for a decade. Either way, gunk is a genuinely useful addition to the vocabulary of the now.
- Why People Believe Fake Things: Ordinarily I really dislike the Q&A as a written interview format, but I will make an exception for this as the content is so interesting – this is an interview with one Flint Dibble (WHAT a name!), an archaeologist who spends time trying to debunk fake archaeological theories and who recently took on the thankless task of going on the Joe Rogan show to patiently explain to the philosopher lunkhead why, in fact, it was reasonably-unlikely that Atlantis had in fact ever existed, despite what a significant number of people inside Joe’s phone seem to think. This is fascinating throughout, and Dibble obviously has the patient of several saints – this bit is worth quoting in full, because while it’s something I think I probably instinctually ‘knew’ already it’s also the first time I’ve seen it articulated this clearly – this is in reference to science, but applies pretty universally imho: “ As soon as there’s somebody saying this entire discipline is trying to cancel me, that should be a red flag immediately. This person is probably creating a narrative of them as a savior that knows more than an entire discipline and therefore is probably full of crap. When you look at the people who actually did make major paradigm shifts in various scientific fields, they never claimed they were being canceled. Where’s Albert Einstein going on air and saying physicists are canceling me for proposing new ideas? No. Real archeologists and historians that propose new ideas are plentiful, and they’re my colleagues and friends. We talk about Galileo being burned by the Church. Galileo was not being burned by his colleagues. And so there’s a big difference there. As soon as somebody’s using that kind of language of, “I am being canceled, there’s a conspiracy against me to shut me down because these people don’t want their truth challenged,” that should immediately be a red flag. Why is this person using this kind of rhetoric? They’re only using it to convince you, rather than to convince you of the veracity of their ideas. Because what they’re doing is they’re appealing to the public rather than the experts who understand all the evidence.”
- The Kebab / Train Station Study: Ok, so this isn’t technically much of a read (unless you REALLY enjoy reading Python scripts) but I am very much a fan of the project’s existence. James Pae came across a post on social media positing that there was a strong negative correlation between the proximity of a kebab joint to Metro stations in Paris and said kebabs being ropey, and decided to see if he could write code to test said hypothesis – this is an explanation of how he did it and what he learned. VERY geeky, but also interesting from a functional ‘how’ point of view (and even if, like me, you are a no-code moron, it’s fascinating to see how one would put this together if one were not in fact a no-code moron).
- Cybersigilism: OOH, A NEW AESTHETIC! To me, at least – Cybersigilism is…basically it’s a sort of weird mashup of ‘cyberdog aesthetics’ and ‘death metal band logo aesthetics’, cybergoth-ish and vaguely-witchy, and I am very much a fan. “Drawing on the visual languages of HR Giger and the logos of metal bands (particularly those designed by Christophe Szpajdel), the spiderweb-like aesthetic fuses hints of cyberpunk and futurism with seemingly mystical amulets. Often, the designs look like alien vascular networks or Art Nouveau electrical currents, while appearing both organic and mechanical simultaneously. “I’ve seen people say it looks like a witch’s curse,” said Aingelblood, a tattoo artist from LA who goes by @cybersigilism on Instagram. “And honestly, I love that metaphor.” But then there are others who refer to it in more layman’s terms: Gen Z tribal.” PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE can one of you spend some time attempting to get a consumer-facing brand to embrace this? Just for me?
- The Millennial Redemption Arc: Or, “it turns out that everything feels so sh1tty now that kids are starting to express nostalgia for peak girlboss flat-design capitalism”, or “oh ZIRP era, how we miss you!”. I felt a genine pang of sadness for a generation when I read this para, ngl: “Gen Z didn’t get a real college experience. Gen Z doesn’t do happy hours with their coworkers. Gen Z doesn’t meet people outside dating apps. Every headline Gen Z reads today would have been a Millennial’s 30 Rock joke 10 years ago. While Gen Z can claim innovations like TikTok, all of Gen Z culture has been created under the thumb of some kind of existential threat, be it climate change or a coup. Gen Z has never, in other words, had their Girls era.”
- Seeing Like A Simulation: A great (admittedly a few months old, but I missed it last year) piece in the LARB, itself a review of a new book looking back at the history of Will Wright’s seminal Sim City, the videogame that trained an entire generation of people that nuclear power was fundamentally dangerous and that mass transit probably wasn’t worth the hassle of lining up all the subways properly. What this does brilliantly is get under the hood of the (necessary) simplifications and abstractions that underpin the engine and the extent to which the nature of said simplifications and abstractions makes Sim City – as with any designed system of any kind – an innately political project by its nature.
- Meet Billy Possum: I had, I confess, forgotten that the ‘Teddy Bear’ is a result of Theodore Roosevelt once allegedly refusing to shoot a bear; I had NEVER known that, in the early 20thC, an entrepreneurial woman named Susie W Allgood attempted to wrest the title of ‘best-loved cuddly mammalian kids toy’ from the teddy bear by creating her own alternative – BILLY POSSUM. As you might surmise from the fact that, well, you’ve never fcuking heard of him, Billy Possum was not the runaway success his creator had hoped for, but the story of how far Allgood went in attempting to Make Billy Possum Happen is a cracking one (also, the press officer in me was SCREAMING at some of the details in here). There’s a moment about halfway through the piece where they present a photo of a rare, surviving example of a Billy Possum toy, sold at auction in 2005, and you will suddenly realise that perhaps Ms Allgood was…maybe a *touch* on the delusional side, let’s say.
- Can You Sous Vide Sausages In Condoms?: Is a rare example of a question which, before it was committed to digital ink via the medium of this blogpost, has almost certainly never been written down anywhere else in human history. The answer, by the way, is ‘yes you can, and apparently they can be quite nice too’ – but the main draw here is obviously the incredibly-phallic photos and phrases like ‘the prophylactic wiener’.
- 10 Observations About Tokyo: Just a really nice, short piece about travel and cities and cultural differences and customs. I thought this point was particularly interesting and semi-universal (or at least, not Japan-specific): “If Tokyo is disconcertingly functional, that’s in part because it’s a parasitic organism sucking the life out of the rest of Japan. All the good jobs are here, all the opportunities, and so all the ambitious young people are here too. This one megacity is Japan’s New York, D.C. and LA all rolled into one. Living here, it’s easy to forget the huge demographic chaos Japan faces due to its collapsed birthrate and fast-aging population: stay in Tokyo and you’d never know the country has an acute shortage of young people. But the demographic sh1tshow is painfully evident the second you get out into Japan’s second- and third-tier cities: boarded-up shops, ghost neighborhoods, shuttered primary schools, abandoned houses: a Children of Men dystopia. The miraculous metropolis all around me thrives because the rest of Japan doesn’t. Every politician talks about this. None has a good idea for what to do about it.”
- Meet Tyler Cowen: John Phipps profiles blogger and insane polymath Tyler Cowen for the Economist’s 1843 Mag – this is both really interesting and really well written, sharp without being at any point unpleasant, but, for me at least, it was also a BIT close to the bone; Cowen is significantly smarter than I am (I would not be so hubristic as to attempt a comparison), but there are…not-insignificant parts of this that I read and thought ‘oh God that feels like me…oh God that feels like me’ which is, honestly, quite odd and not wholly-pleasant (not least because the only thing worse than realising that you’re probably quite similar to someone who in many respects is…very flawed is realising you are quite similar *but also significantly less good*). Anyway, I really enjoyed this in a complicated way – oh, if you do read it, be prepared for one specific line which, if you are anything like me at all, will make you SO jealous of this man that you will have to get up from your device and go for a calming walk to regain your composure, all the while muttering ‘seriously, why can’t I be like that???’.
- Real Tennis: We’re finishing up the longreads this week with three pieces from the new edition of Granta which really does have some cracking stuff in it – should any of these end up paywalling you then I think they are currently doing a digital-only subscription for £1, which is a frankly insane offer and 100% worth the money. This first essay is all about the famously, fabulously, eccentric sport of Real Tennis, as described by enthusiast Clare Bucknell, who writes with affection and a pleasing degree of self-awareness about the sport’s origins and the culture that surrounds it. As per usual in descriptions of Real Tennis, it is literally IMPOSSIBLE to conceive of what it looks like being played from the textual descriptions – this is no fault of Bucknell’s so much as it is the fault of the sport for being absolutely-fcuking-impenetrable (watch this if you want a quick primer) – but, honestly, that doesn’t really matter as this is all TONE AND TEXTURE AND VIBE.
- Round One: A story about trying to conceive and, specifically, about a man having to produce a sample and not feeling quite up to it (it is not, to be clear, solely about that moment, but it *is* very funny indeed), and about the oddity of how the process of IVF sort-of divorces the biology from the practice traditionally required to achieve the outcome and how that odd disconnect plays out in a relationship…this is very good, though perhaps not one to read if this is an experience you’re currently going through.
- Flesh: Finally this week, I think this is a stellar piece of writing by David Szalay about an age-gap relationship between a young man in Central Europe (I am going to guess at Hungary) and the woman in the nearby apartment who he helps with the shopping. Sad and poignant and funny and beautiful and weirdly sexy and simultaneously very much not, this absolutely captivated me up until the last line which caused me, and I am not exaggerating here, to let out a small, audible ‘oof’ which I think will be felt by many of you (you will know why). Please read this one, it is GLORIOUS and deserves to be shared.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: