I am approximately 38 minutes away from one of my godchildren showing up and demanding to be fed and, presumably, entertained (I plan on showing them Web Curios and then going to the pub, alone); as such, we’re once again cutting the intro short this week because, well, I really don’t still want to be in my pants when she gets here (and she wants that even less, I don’t doubt).
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you may be wondering who the fcuk would entrust someone like me with the moral and spiritual guidance of a young mind and, honestly, you would be right to.
THE SECTION WHICH THINKS IT’S PROBABLY NOT A GOOD SIGN THAT THE JASON ARDAY STORY HAS LED THE NEWS FOR THE PAST FEW DAYS, PT.1:
- BingeBuster: It’s Friday (or at least it is for me; I appreciate that there may well be some of you perverts who unaccountably don’t sit waiting by your inboxes for Curios to drop, instead choosing to open it on other days, but frankly your non-canonical consumption of my work means nothing to me and I don’t entirely believe you to be real), and as such some of you might be in the mood to sit back with a film tonight; do you remember, back in the Good Old Days (as ever, there’s no such thing; the days have always been like this, the only difference is that you were younger and less aware of death’s fetid breath on your nape), when you’d go to the video shop and spend a pleasant 20 minutes wandering aimlessly round the stacks, taking in the new releases and side-eyeing the ‘erotic thrillers’ out of the corner of your gaze, knowing full well that the weight of social mores would preclude you from ever actually plucking up the courage to rent our ‘Wild Desires 3: Passion Unbound’? Would you like to experience that exact feeling again, but IN YOUR BROWSER? OH GOOD! BingeBuster is a beautifully-made little nostalgiasim which lets you browse films available across streamers as though you’re in an old video rental store; films are arranged on virtual shelves, by genre, and you can wander round the shop in FPS style, perusing, picking up and eventually deciding what to watch (each case on the shelves links you to the various streaming platforms so you can seamlessly click-to-watch). This is obviously a hugely-inefficient way of choosing a film, but then again so’s scrolling blankly through 300+ pages of 5.3-rated dross while you try and fail to find something that piques your interest, and this looks cooler.
- A Box of Letters: I think this is a really beautiful bit of family history work, and a decent example of ‘AI, but used well’ (also, lol that I am the arbiter of anything, listen to me, what a hubristic cnut!); it was sent to me by Paul Levine, who wrote (in an annoyingly Claude-assisted email, but we spoke and I have forgiven him): “My family found a box of 100+ century-old letters last year, half in Yiddish, and a friend and I used consumer AI tools (Transkribus, Claude, Gemini) to transcribe, translate, and turn them into a real site with a full narrative — the kind of thing that’s normally a funded institution’s project, a team of scholars, years to decades of work.” This is SUCH a nice idea – my one kvetch is that the ‘leaning on AI to make the site’ has resulted in quite of the lot of the copy carrying the carrion flavour of Machine Prose – seriously, if anyone’s reading this (lol) and is thinking about using Claude or whatever to make a website then PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD REDO THE FRONT END AND REWRITE THE FCUKING COPY. Anyway, leaving aside the whiff of Machine that the project carries, it’s a fascinating piece of small personal history, and the site does a really good job of marrying the personal and small-scope with the Big History stuff; I learned LOADS about the practical realities of emigration to the US in the early-20thC, but there’s also so much about the individuals and their relationships contained within the letters which is personal and poignant and sort-of beautiful. Honestly, this is really lovely – so much so that I think it’s a real shame that the whole thing looks and feels so machine-y, given the essentially incredibly human nature of the stories. BONUS CLAUDE-Y HISTORY PROJECT: Oddly enough I also found this this week, which occupies a vaguely-similar position in creative latent space; this is a digitisation of the war diaries of a soldier named Francois Stevens, whose writings from WWII have been collated and analysed and made available to explore and read with the asssistance of AI.
- Draw Your Own Drum: Ok, I can’t pretend for a second to understand the sonics here – there’s physics going on, and all sorts of Complicated Stuff to do with vibrations, but I comprehend not one iota of that and instead just like the fact that I can play my doodles like a bongo. Have you ever wondered ‘how would the acoustics of a drum sound were that drum to be in the shape of a crudely-drawn phallus?’? OF COURSE YOU HAVE YOU ARE ONLY HUMAN! Now you get to find out – basically this site lets you explore how the way a drum sounds is determined by its shape, and how the sound is made. There is LOTS OF MATHS here and, honestly, I don’t understand ANY of it; I am a smooth-brained numbers moron, what can I say? There’s something undeniably pleasing about the way you can literally SEE how form defines sonic output; also, you can play bongos, what’s not to love?
- Supercut: Friend of Curios Andy Baio has resurrected his old web project Supercuts, a website collecting examples of that most-10s of a media format, the, er, supercut! Come on, you remember those – videos which clip together all the instances of, for example, someone saying ‘fcuk’ in Goodfellas, say, or every single time the Rock did the People’s Eyebrow (man, brains are weird; I don’t like wrestling, I don’t think I ever watched it in the era in which Dwayne Johnson bestrode the ‘sport’ like some sort of mahogany colossus, and yet here we are)…WEREN’T THEY GREAT? Anyway, this is a whole site dedicated to collecting them – if you’ve ever thought to yourself “God, I wish there were a place where I could find both a video featuring every single instance of the word ‘humbug’s’ use in A Christmas Carol AND a load of people from films and TV shows saying the name ‘David’”, then you can now die happy. Andy’s written up a short post about the site’s refresh and resurrection, which is interesting from the point of view of web archiving and preservation, should you be interested.
- I Love The 90s: Ooh, this is fun! The mysteriously-named BJ Barretta got in touch with me this week and sent me this – I am going to include their description in full, because it tells you most of what you need to know, but basically the site exists to replicate the media experience of ‘spending a night at home in the early-to-mid-90s: “There’s TV with nineteen channels, and you don’t pick an episode; there’s no on-demand. You turn it on and get whatever’s playing, the same as everyone else watching at that moment. There’s a radio station with 4,600 90s hits and deeper cuts, and no algorithm behind it. It plays what it plays. You can skip a song, but you can’t go back and you can’t queue anything up. Also in the media player is a CD burner. You fill up a CD-R like a real one (add songs off the radio as they play, or build the perfect one track by track from the library), and when you have your 74 minutes you name it, burn it, and get a link you can hand to somebody, because the best part of making the perfect mix CD was giving it away. There’s a chat room, with Buddies and Instant Messages. And there’s the web of the time — GeoCities, AltaVista, Napster, Yahoo — pulled from the Internet Archive.” Honestly, there’s so much to love about this – while the ‘single, shared, realtime streaming’ thing isn’t necessarily new (and, yes, the site is Clauded, but BJ was upfront about that and it doesn’t look entirely generic, so webs), this is well-curated and nicely done (if with a culturally North American skew), but my absolute favourite is the ‘mixtape’ feature which is so, so cute and a really beautiful idea nicely-executed. I am aware from friends who have had the misfortune to breed and now have teenage offspring that 90s nostalgia is very real and very prevalent amongst many of today’s teens (leaving aside whether it’s possible to be nostalgic for an era you were never alive to experience yourself); if you have young people in your life, why not give them this link, £20’s worth of genuinely terrible soap bar (ideally with a large chunk of mysterious plastic lodged inside it), a two-litre bottle of Diamond White and a packet of Lambert & Butler to truly recreate the ‘fun’ of the era!
- 911 Realtime: Another really impressive and nicely-made project sent in to me – actually, while I’m here, let me just say that WOW have we crossed a rubicon in terms of the volume of AI-assisted projects coming my way at the moment, and WOW is the quality variable, and FCUK ME AM I SICK OF PEOPLE SENDING ME THINGS THAT HAVE BEEN WRITTEN WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE I NEVER, EVER WANT TO SEE ANOTHER EMAIL SPAT OUT BY AN LLM THE PROSE MAKES ME SO SAD, THE TICKS ARE SO TRANSPARENT, THE CLUNK IS AUDIBLE! Ahem. Anyway, this is a site made by Robbie Byrd, who wrote: “I’m an independent developer, and I’ve spent 6 years building the 9/11 Realtime Archive: a free site that synchronizes the TV, radio, and news coverage of September 9–20, 2001, so you can experience the day minute by minute, exactly as it aired — both forward and backward through time, all inside a faithful recreation of a Mac OS 8 desktop. I’ve also added flight tracks from 9/11 of every plane in the air, intercepted NYC pager messages, newspapers, and an AOL Instant Messenger style chat bot who is contextually aware, with more to come.” This is obviously made by a North American and the focus is therefore on US media, but as someone who obviously experienced the day on the other side of the planet and from a very different perspective this was honestly fascinating – and incredibly affecting, honestly, even at a distance of 25 years. This is SO nicely done, from the radio to the audio to the websites, to the interface, and is a very clever example of how to do a studied, stylised bit of time capsule-ing using publicly available archive materials, and any of you with a passing interest in history – and the history of media and communications – should really spend some time with this (a small aside: MAN is the audio sting from the BBC World channel in 2001 a weirdly-Pavlovian thing for me, turns out).
- Stowaway Live: Ooh, I rather love this although I am *slightly* confused as to how accurate it is in terms of what it shows you (but, honestly, who cares? YOU GET TO FLY!). Let the site access your location and it will give you a realtime impression of the planes flying over your head RIGHT NOW – click on any of those planes in the virtual sky and you will be MAGICALLY TRANSPORTED several thousand feet into the air so you can get the view from all the way up there in the sky. Yes, fine, the view from all the way up there in the sky is, in the main, ‘more sky’, but you can also see a sort of Google Earth-type view of the topography below you, and I think, should you have less of a fcuked and emphysemic laptop than I do, you might be able to get some decent-ish views of landscapes from above (it’s built on Open Street Map afaict). Actually, now that I think about it, I wonder if it lets you experience the thrill of landing? Can someone check for me? Thanks. Oh, unrelated but based on my experience of being on a couple of flights last month I am going to call it – clapping when the plane lands is making a comeback, and I for one am THRILLED about this.
- Ascension: Oh I do love me a ‘website made to accompany an album launch’ and this is, er, exactly that! The album’s not out til next week, but the artist behind it messaged me and explained: “It is called Ascension. It is one page. You put a word into a cloud, it rains, a tree grows. One day, there are going to be three worlds stacked on top of each other and you travel between them by going up and down. There is no account, score, tutorial, text telling you what to do. It is deliberately a place that was not built for you, and finding out how it works is most of it. On August 12, at 19:24 Paris time (18:24 UTC), there is a partial solar eclipse over western Europe, which is around 95% where I live, and low on the horizon in the evening, which should be the good part. The site is built around that moment and it enters a state on that evening that it has never been in. It is also deeper than it looks, and I would rather not say more than that.” MYSTERIOUS! This is odd, atmospheric, and minimalistically rather beautiful; play around with it and see what happens when you click around, is my advice, and bookmark this and make a note to come back to it next Wednesday to see what happens (and to listen to the album, possibly). BONUS ECLIPSE LINK: you can see where it’s going to be visible using this handy map.
- The Usenet Archives: I was never a Usenet person – I was too young and hadn’t yet fallen into the…troublingly-symbiotic relationship with the web that I appear to have alighted upon in my latter years – but I imagine that for many of you it was a formative digital playground where you cut your teeth and honed your skills and first learned the crucial techniques that enabled you to eventually glory in the status of ‘massive webmong’ (I SEE YOU). This site is a (partial, I think) and searchable archive of Usenet posts from as far back as the mid-90s(!), covering everything from US politics of the day (CHRIST HOW INNOCENT IT ALL LOOKS) to music to psychedelics to (obviously) sex…this isn’t necessarily useful (although if you have half-remembered recollections of specific threads or discussions then there’s an outside chance you will be able to dig them out using this), but it is a fascinating time capsule, and a reminder of an era when people can and did post freely because, honestly, they never considered the idea that anyone who wasn’t involved in the conversation would ever see it, the idea of ‘virality’ or a post from a forum finding an audience outside that forum was…insane and inconceivable, and…God, it *was* better, wasn’t it? Ugh, FINE, some nostalgia is acceptable I suppose. Ish.
- ChatTJB: Oh, this is cute – you may have read this week about the billboards that went up in San Francisco advertising a new LLM and inviting people to log onto it…which was, in fact, just one bloke sitting at his computer answering questions, as a sort of art project-type thing…anyway, it blew up, he was getting 5,000 queries a day by all accounts, and now the project is apparently pivoting to be a network of volunteers who will work to man the site 24/7…the whole thing is still being worked out, per the holding page, but you can still visit the site and post a question or query; you just might have to wait a few days to get a response. This is, basically, a slightly-less-cool version of that site from earlier in the year which connected people asking questions with people answering them via a simple peer-to-peer interface, but well done the guy behind it for all the publicity I guess (billboards, it seems, do still work!).
- Electronic Literature: OH I LOVE THIS! A collection of examples of ‘Electronic Literature’ – that is, writing where the HTML is a core constituent part of the text, whether straight Interactive Fiction or stuff that’s a little more involved – presented by the University of Central Florida: “Electronic literature has always occupied a productive tension between structure and openness. Every digital work is shaped by systems—interfaces, platforms, protocols, algorithms, archives, institutions—yet each also invites readers to exceed those structures through interpretation, play, resistance, and care. The works gathered in the ELOnline 2026 Media Exhibition explore this tension from multiple perspectives, offering a rich response to this year’s conference theme, (Un)Supervised. While contemporary discussions of supervision are inevitably framed by large language models and generative AI, this exhibition demonstrates that the question is considerably older and broader. What supervises reading? What supervises writing? Who maintains digital culture, and who is excluded from it? What forms of creativity emerge within constraint, and what possibilities become visible only when systems fail, decay, or are deliberately reimagined?” I spent a couple of hours last Sunday looking through these and some are beautiful and some are weird and some sad, and if you like words and are curious about experiments in narrative then you should set some time aside to explore this collection; here’s just one example which I found particularly affecting, combining text and images and audio to poignant effect.
- Stego Links: There’s a video that’s done the rounds a bit this week in which a YouTuber explains a variety of ways you can use steganography to effectively embed media within other media; this is a list of tools you can use to ‘simply’ (actually it is pretty simple, if you ignore the Actual Complicated Stuff about how it in fact works) do things like, I don’t know, “embedding and extracting hidden payloads inside audio tracks” or “hiding a second song inside a song) and digital files (hiding zips, pdfs, images, or text files inside audio)”. Why would you want to do that? USE YOUR FCUKING IMAGINATION FOR ONCE. This feels like an EXCELLENT Easter Egg delivery mechanism, if nothing else.
- MVNT: This is interesting – MVNT is an app, designed by a professional choreographer who has worked with all sorts of Big Kpop Names, most of whom I’m not going to pretend to have heard of, which is designed to both help you come up with new dance routines AND to capture your original bits of choreography so that you can in theory ensure you don’t get ripped off by Fortnite without some sort of remuneration. I am…not 100% convinced at the idea of being able to produce a Universal Catalogue of Attributed Moves, but I admire the ambition; exactly how that seems to square with the app’s parallel use of AI to generate choreography based on an audio track is…less clear tbh, but I am sure they’ve thought it all through! There’s something quite cool about seeing the 3d model adapt and react to whatever track you feed it, and the fact you can upload images to create ‘custom’ dancers opens up a truly horrible world in which you can turn anyone you like into a capering marionette for your amusement.
- AI Animation in 2026: This link takes you to a vid on Reddit posted by someone who downloaded a new Chinese model, running it off an old processor, and got it to spit out a whole host of different clips in varying animation styles, just as a proof of concept; it’s worth taking a look because (and I keep saying this) the pace of improvement of the open source stuff (which, lest you forget, can be run locally and which, now they are in the wild, ARE NOT GOING TO GO AWAY) is fcuking WILD right now, and some of the examples here are pretty stunning (with all of the standard caveats about the floaty, weightless nature of AI-generated video).
- Shieldfont: A font which is designed to fool AI scrapers, readable to humans but which, when The Machine tries to parse it, renders as something else entirely. Will this prevent the wholesale ingestion of the rest of the web and all of human thinking by AI? No, of course it won’t, but it’s nice to think of oneself as part of some sort of imagined ‘resistance’, isn’t it?
- Outernet Explorer: This is an interesting idea, although I continue to be slightly wary of ‘solutions’ to the problem of ‘people spending too much time online’ that are delivered via the medium of apps. Still, the Outernet Explorer feels broadly-benign; the idea is that it’s an app which allows you to collect and collate ‘things to do’ from across the web in one place; the idea is that you will often see things floating across your timeline and think ‘ooh, that looks fun’, but that you then lose them in the endless flow of content detritus and don’t, in fact, end up doing anything. Outernet Explorer’s solution is that when you see something that looks fun you save it in the app (with a tap or two); the app then lets you easily invite friends, keep track of events you have planned, plot them on a map, get directions, etc etc. Do…do we need another app for this? Is this something that requires another layer of digital admin and management to achieve? WHY??? Still, maybe this appeals to you, you weirdo, in which case you can try it out if you’re on iOS.
- 197 Histories: Another cool digital history project, this time from South America; Per the site’s explanatory text, “between the 1970s and 1980s, both Uruguay and Argentina endured civic-military dictatorships that left a deep mark on their societies…197 illustrated stories is a project that seeks to share the lives of each of the people forcibly disappeared who were born in Uruguay, or under the responsibility of the Uruguayan State, during the sixties, seventies and eighties. The number 197 is not arbitrary, nor does it necessarily reflect the total number of disappeared people. There are 197 because that is the number of complaints approved by the National Human Rights Institution and Ombudsman’s Office (INDDHH) to date. A number appears in this book, but what truly matters are the stories. People like you and me — like your grandfather, your neighbour, my cousin, the teacher or the greengrocer. People who were not at peace with the reality of their time: some took to the streets to protest, others handed out flyers, some painted walls or organised in groups. All of them had dreams, families, friends and passions.” This is a period of South American history I really know very little about; the portraits here are small, sad, beautifully-illustrated by a range of artists, and the whole project is a beautiful bit of historical commemoration of normal people fcuked by the regimes.
- Send Henry Poems: I do not know Henry. I know nothing about him, let alone why he has seen fit to set up a small thermal printer in his home which will print out anything you choose to send it through this website; Henry has specifically requested poems, but there doesn’t appear to be anything preventing any of you from sending him…well, whatever text you prefer. NO NOT LIKE THAT, POOR HENRY! I would be genuinely thrilled if you could send Henry some examples of verse that you like, and maybe tell him where you found this site – but, please, NO FILTH. Unless, er, it’s in the form of a really dirty sestina.
THE SECTION WHICH THINKS IT’S PROBABLY NOT A GOOD SIGN THAT THE JASON ARDAY STORY HAS LED THE NEWS FOR THE PAST FEW DAYS, PT.2:
- Picodevil: I’ve mentioned a few times this year that the algorave and livecoding scene is having something of a renassance at the moment, seemingly in part centred on London, and there has been a boom in webtoys which work alongside the scene to help people better craft music and visuals on the fly…Picodevil is another such toy, built by the perennially-talented V Buckenham and which basically lets you do ‘cool visual stuff with streaming video from around the web’. You will – FULL, TERRIFYING DISCLOSURE – need to code a bit to make this work, but it’s admirably simple and intuitive, to the extent that even I (who knows not one fcuking line of html like the useless normie moron I fundamentally am) was able to make it do some stuff. This is really quite fun to play with; you can read a bit more here if you’re curious about how it works and why it exists.
- Keyboard Sounds: I AM SORRY FOR THE CLAUDESLOP I AM SORRY. Look, I promise, there is going to be a TIGHT editorial line on stuff that looks like this from hereon in, if I see one more salmon-hued site I am going to…well, obviously I am going to do nothing beyond moan about it online and send whoever’s sent it to me a moderately-p1ssy email, but you get my point. Anyway, leaving aside the entirely-generic look and feel of this one it’s actually…quite cute, letting you pick from the sound of various Keyboards From The Past so that you can experience the joy of, er, typing as though you’re using a Steelseries Apex V2. I KNOW I AM SO TUMESCENT RIGHT NOW.
- I Move U: Oh this is GREAT! There was a time back in the day when agencies really could persuade large corporate clients to make any old mad sh1t on the web because, well, noone really understood it or what it was for or what it could do or how people might use it and how all of this might intersect with the demands of BIG CAPITALISM, and so you ended up with stuff like this – a very old site now resurrected via the MAGIC OF CODE – which was made for Mitsubishi in…what, the late-90s/early-00s? Anyway, it’s SO ODD – a collection of largely-unexplained little…what, games? Vignettes? Interactive environments? ALL OF THE ABOVE! You won’t understand ANYTHING about what is going on here – not least ‘hang on, how in the name of fcuk does this have anything to do with a massive Japanese electronics manufacturer?’ – but I encourage you just to click and use your keypad to navigate the little figure through the 3d landscapes, and just SEE WHAT HAPPENS. OK, fine, should you have been someone who wanted to, I don’t know, order a bunch of superconductors, I am sure this website was entirely infuriating, but for the rest of us isn’t this SO much better and more fun than, I don’t know, full-bleed video and some tediously-neat dropdowns? Yes it is, fcuk off.
- Star Patrol: ANOTHER site sent in to me by its creator; I confess, I was initially quite down on this because a) it’s Claudeslop; and b) the guy who emailed me did so using AI prose and, er, I sent him *quite* a sh1tty reply, but then I took the time to actually explore it and, you know what, this is Actually Quite Cool. I’m not going to reproduce his email because, well, it’s horrible, AI-generated crap, but the basic premise here is that this is a browsergame, loosely-framed as a space exploration and shooting-type experience, which is designed specifically to help people learn and become familiar with American Sign Language – it uses your webcam to track your hand movements (with incredibly-impressive fidelity, I have to say), encouraging you to sign on demand to shoot down opponents and the like; honestly, this is nicely made, and fun, and polished, and FREE, and is such a nice idea, well-executed. I would like it a lot more with human-written copy, but I also appreciate that, well, that takes time and not everyone has that at their disposal; could someone maybe make a version of this for the British equivalent, please (although that would obviously be harder as it would require the tracking of both hands, on reflection)? Anyway, if you’d like to learn ASL then, honestly, this is a pretty decent way of starting out I think.
- Past Catalogs: Do YOU have an inexplicable interest in a very narrow range of old 20th century catalogues from North America, specifically catalogues belonging to electronics retailers like Radio Shack? Do YOU wish that there were a website that collected digitised copies of said catalogues from The Past? Are…are you ok? ANYWAY! “Welcome to the “Past Catalog Archive” where ALL catalogs may be downloaded! The purpose of this site is to provide access to download and view old outdated catalogs for everyone interested. There is no reason to keep these old catalogs to myself, or only allow them to be viewed. Share them and let everyone take a trip down memory lane.” Honestly, I genuinely adore the altruistic cast of that ‘about’ text – sadly the site hasn’t been updated since 2023, but, well, there are a lot of catalogues in here regardless. I hope you are ok, catalogue curator, whoever you may be.
- Drought UK: You may have noticed or heard that it is…quite dry in the UK right now (it did actually rain in my part of London this week, for a whole 120 seconds); this is a map showing you how dry it is, where, and how that compares to Droughts Of The Past – my overall takeaway is ‘wow, we have droughts more often than I would have expected’ (as well as ‘hm, does rather feel we should have invested in desalination technology ahead of this period in history given the fact that we are literally SURROUNDED BY FCUKING WATER’ – actually, I learned that we do have at least one here in the UK but, for reasons I don’t adequately understand, it was ‘built wrong’ and as such has run for a grand total of about two hours since its construction, which, honestly, is just some chef’s kiss Angloconstruction, well done everyone), but also ‘oh man, this feels Quite Bad’.
- Essential Words: A NEW PUDDING DATAVIZ! This one is about WORDS, making it doubly-appealing to me; per the explanation, there was a list published in 2023 of the most commonly-used words in the English language (specifically, “about 2,800 words, shown to cover over 90% of general English use”); this itself was an updated version of a list published some 70 years previously, and this piece compares the two lists, analysing new entrants and which words have fallen by the wayside, and What That Tells Us About Culture and Society and Stuff. The change was significant – “between the two lists, 70 years apart, about 600 words were dropped, and over 1,100 were added” – and there is so much fascinating analysis in here. The newer list includes far more references to ideas, concepts and feelings than the one from the 50s did, for example, and we have lost a significant number relating to physical objects and experiences, which is just such an interesting observation when you start to think about the ‘why’ behind it…honestly, this is WONDERFUL and a gift for all you wordcels out there. BONUS PUDDING! This is another nice explainer about how to mow a lawn efficiently, containing a nice little interactive game thing which made me feel really thick.
- Jerry’s Map: I’ve not featured Jerry’s Map in here before because, while it’s very much My Sort Of Thing, it’s not really a webthing – the map, which is one bloke’s lifelong outsider art project creating what is effectively an evolving, procedurally-generated map of an imaginary territory and culture based on set rules, composed of drawn/painted tiles which are recomposed over time based on his self-created…algorithm, I suppose you’d call it, exists very much as a physical artwork and while there is a website which explains the project and shows it off a bit, it’s very much NOT an internet project. Anyway, this link is to a Bluesky account which shares images of bits of the map, which is a nice way to occasionally dip into the imaginary world of a very singular mind indeed.
- Gesture Synth: There’s obviously been an improvement in the quality of the handtracking code on github in the past few months because there’s been a real uptick in projects using the tech in the past few months; this is a REALLY fun little music toy which I think someone just vibecoded together and which lets you control synths with your hands; I can’t make anything that doesn’t sound like a selection of particularly-distressed highland cows, but you might be more talented than I am (and hate looking at yourself less than me – turns out an instrument that requires me to look at my hideous baggy face and skeletal limbs is not, in fact, for me!). BONUS INTERACTIVE MUSIC TOY THING! This does something similar – but different! – with handtracking, have a play.
- The IKEA Complexity Index: This is a clever idea, although as someone who has vowed to never again make another piece of flatpack furniture unless someone asks VERY NICELY INDEED I am not really able to judge how accurate it is; still, someone known only as ‘Greg’ has built this site which aims to offer a comprehensive ranking of how complex or otherwise various bits of IKEA furniture are to build, based on: “”complexity” = steps x total parts; “est. time” = “complexity” x empirical factor (based on self-reported build times); “ease rating” = average ease-of-assembly rating (1–5, higher = easier) left by reviewers on ikea.com. “~” ratings are averaged across combo products.” Should you be curious, by the way, the PAX Corner Wardrobe is, per Greg’s assessment criteria, the biggest b4stard of the IKEA multiverse.
- Make Your Own Burgerslop: There’s something of a trend for people spotting AI-generated images being used on local fast food menus, depicting impossible, inedible non-food burgers and wings and drinks; but it doesn’t matter, because noone has expected the food to match the image for decades now, and the imagery on a fast food menu exists more as a piece of loose iconography than any sort of realistic depiction of what you might be likely to get when you order a Whopper, say (and, again, NORMAL PEOPLE DON’T CARE FFS). Anyway, this is a wrapper for AN Other AI image generator which lets you create your very own mad, nonsensical slopburger (and drink, and side) and generate an image of it which you can then…Christ , fcuk knows what you might do with this, it’s pointless as all fcuk but the food does look pleasingly-mad so maybe that’s enough.
- French Weird: Obviously the usual ‘I don’t listen to podcasts, I have no idea if this is any good or not’ caveat applies here, but I saw this and thought that the description sounded like something you might possibly find curious – do you? VALIDATE ME YOU FCUKS. Ahem. Anyway, this is what it is, see what you think: “Welcome to French Weird, a podcast dedicated to exploring the counterculture, obscure art and bizarre anomalies of contemporary France. Channeling cultural theory, esoterica and the love of a good book this shows investigates what falls through the cracks of mainstream French culture. We are tracking the liminal spaces, the bizarre subcultures and the beautiful freak-outs from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. What exactly is the French Weird? It is the territory where high philosophy meets the profoundly bizarre. In each episode, we trace the threads of a proudly rational nation simultaneously digesting global weirdness and exporting its own brand of the mysterious. French Weird explores how France’s hidden eccentricities reveal the truths about its politics, literature, culture and – maybe even – identity.” Allez mes braves, etc etc.
- Recent Reborn: Ooh, this is genuinely quite a cool and interesting tool, and very much the sort of thing which you shouldn’t have to fcuking pay for ffs. Anyway, Recent Reborn is a (paid-for, to be clear!) service which basically reinstates the ‘see new posts as they are posted’ functionality to social media, effectively letting you SEE THE FIREHOSE for Insta or TT or whatever, narrowed to whatever search criteria and parameters you choose. Basically this is being sold as a means of being able to see popular posts by big creators early, thereby getting a ‘first comment’ visibility boost which is helpful for engagement and traffic driving and the like; this could be HUGELY useful, even if, again, it’s insane that this is a third-party product rather than, you know, just a platform feature.
- Branch: Oh this is LOVELY! Take a picture of a branch, or a plant, and add it to this ever-growing, infinite, collaborative, organic-feeling collage of branch photos, itself creating a…branching visual, a branch of branches, vines of vines, a sort of together collage where every piece is itself an image of the thing the collage is itself representing…Just a lovely piece of digital art, and something I am going to keep open in a tab on my phone so that I can contribute to it whenever I am near a tree.
- The Game Industry Hardship Fund Bundle: The games industry is, seemingly, yet another that is fcuked beyond the point of repair, holed below the waterline and not really salvageable in its current form (I mean, obviously it could be salvaged! Obviously! It would just require a complete rejection of the corporate ownership structures that underpin the triple-A system! Simple!); while this won’t save it, this initiative is a nice way of donating money to hardship funds designed to support workers suffering layoffs while also securing a truly-mindfcuking quantity of titles to play. You pay $10 to a good cause, you get access to OVER 120 INDIVIDUAL FULL GAMES! More than you will ever realistically play! Many of these are apparently quite good, though obviously there will also be a degree of filler – still, give a sh1t, 120+ GAMES FOR A TENNER TO CHARITY! You need never leave the house ever again (but, please, do leave the house).
- Romentis: ANOTHER Claude-d project sent to me by its creator – I really, really dislike the look and feel of this (like, dude, IT DOESN’T NEED ALL THE VERBIAGE FFS (and yes, I know, I know, fcuk off)), but its developer seems like a nice man and I have to say the puzzles are…quite fun. Basically there are a whole bunch of surprisingly-deep logic problems in here, arranged over various levels, and while I could have done without ALL THE TEDIOUS AND POORLY-WRITTEN CLAUDESLOP, the general Roman Empire framing of the puzzles and their brainteaser-ish quality is enough to make me overlook some of the…AI-ish elements. Seriously, though, this is a perfect example of a site that is significantly worse with the AI writing than it would have been had all the copy been written in staccato, non-native English, can we please start to learn this lesson? Eh? Oh ffs, fine.
- World of Claudecraft: Oddly enough I first saw this a few months ago and totally failed to include it, partly because I couldn’t quite get it to work; it floated across my field of vision again this week and this time I managed to get it to load and, yes, this really is a remarkably-robust and feature-complete clone of an MMO, apparently all built in Claude and with LOADS of players online. Pick a class, create a character and…er…get reminded why MMOs are fundamentally really sh1t and boring to actually play (or at least that’s what happened to me, your mileage may vary). Still, if you want to be told to ‘kill 10 chickens’ while a child in Manila calls you a ‘fcuktard’ over text chat then JUMP RIGHT IN (objectively it is MAD that this has been vibecoded, to be clear, it’s just that MMOs are rubbish by nature).
- Murdoku: Are you one of those people who goes on long journeys clutching the sort of Big Compendium of Logic Puzzles books, a pencil and a flask of weak lemon drink? OH WOW WILL YOU LOVE THIS! Murdoku is a game which basically combines logic puzzles with Sudoku, alongside a light ‘A MURDER HAS OCCURRED!’ dressing; I didn’t click with this AT ALL, honestly, but I appreciate that that is a skill issue on my part and that those of you who are more, well, logical than I am may find much to love in here.
- Gridtown: This is cute and really nicely-made, by one Trevor Hinkle – basically it’s like Sim City, if Sim City cared LOADS more about you creating a sustainable energy grid for your city. There’s a daily challenge, a free build mode, and, generally, this is a very impressive browsertoy with a light (really, it’s not intrusive at all) educational layer attached to it. MAKE YOUR GREEN METROPOLIS!
- Centurions: Our final game this week is a Premier League variant on that ‘pick a team, play a tournament with that team and see if your picks can win it’ theme that cropped up around the world cup; this time you’re tasked with picking an 11 from Premier League squads from over the years; can YOU win the league with a motley crew of stars including the likes of Paul Warhurst, Erland Johnsen and Seba Veron? Not if you’re me you can’t, but perhaps you’ve a better nose for this sort of thing as you continue to manage Football Withdrawal (it will be back in two weeks ffs, what is WRONG with you?).
By Jimmy Marble
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- They Might Be Giants: TMBG (as I am assured their fans abbreviate them to) are a band I only really know for their one UK hit ‘Birdhouse in Your Soul’ but which I know have a devoted and dedicated following, and I love their Tumblr presence which is just delightfully oldschool, all fan interactions and inside jokes and PLEASING QUAINTNESS; this feels almost of another time, and I am thrilled it’s still channeling the late-90s like this (how innocent we all were, how unsullied, how naive).
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Warming Watch: Look, I can totally see why you wouldn’t necessarily want to subscribe to an Insta feed sharing short animated explainers about exactly how the climate is changing (SPOILERS: IT IS NOT GETTING COOLER) given, well, the fact that we can’t do anything about it (as individuals, at least; obviously solutions are available to us, but, realistically, we don’t want to take them! They would be inconvenient, and we really like ‘making money’ and ‘having access to stuff!’), but these are rather nicely done so maybe just enjoy the design and smooth-brain past the fact that the content is screaming ‘LADS, LADS, WE APPEAR TO BE QUITE FCUKED’ at the top of its lungs.
- Quinn Finite: Quinn Finite is an OnlyFans person who, as is standard, maintains a SFW presence across other platforms; her Insta is a very weird mix of skits, sketches and bits, with a…unique persona and vibe which is very much ‘11am Fringe slot performer, but with buttplugs’. This was sent to me by a friend who asked that I maintain his anonymity – I will, but here’s the message they sent me just in case any of you know me irl and want to speculate as to which pervert wrote the following: “You are not allowed to judge me for this, but I am fascinated by the existence of Quin Finite, who is a not-particularly-hot OnlyFans girl, but who is also potentially a genius and earns a fortune making weird uncategorisable Trevor Bstard-esque videos while also sometimes having a buttplug in.”
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- NEETS: The question of young people, their education and their path towards a future in which they might, with a bit of luck and a prevailing wind, possibly, maybe, get, I don’t know, a *job* or something mad like that, has been swirling around the UK political discourse over the past week, what with Our Andy’s promise to REVAMP THE SYSTEM (again) with a focus on vocational training and skills and, look, this is Laudable Stuff that in general it’s hard to argue against the theory of but which I am also old enough to remember hearing variants of from every single government since I have been old enough to vote, so. Anyway, that’s by way of contextualising preamble to this excellent essay in the LRB, in which William Davies examines the particular question of why it is that prospects for young people seem to be notably worse in the UK, across multiple vectors, than they seem in other developed countries, what it is about the country and the previous three decades that has led to this state of affairs, and what the likely recommendations of the ongoing Milburn Review into the issue are set to be. This is interesting throughout – what I particularly appreciate was Davies’ insistence of being serious about the multifaceted complexity underpinning the statistics, and the fact that looking for a ‘single’ determinant factor (it’s the phones! It’s COVID! It’s AI! It’s the climate crisis!) possibly misses the overall picture that There Is A Fcuktonne Of Stuff Happening And Lots Of It Impacts Young People Significantly And Uniquely. This isn’t cheering, but it feels honest and clear-eyed throughout: “young people in Britain are experiencing much higher levels of distress than they used to, and higher levels than in comparable countries. Survey evidence shows that between the late 1990s and the early 2020s, the number of young people suffering a loss of self-esteem, social anxiety, an inability to concentrate and the lack of a sense of purpose rose significantly. Interestingly, it seems that over the same period, problems associated with anger, lying and transgression declined. If, as Winnicott proposed, ‘delinquency is a sign of hope’ (indicating that the young person feels sufficiently secure that they aren’t too worried about the consequences of their aggression), it seems that hope has been gradually snuffed out since the New Labour period. Negative feelings are being turned inwards. Efforts to separate a mental health epidemic from this wider social malaise are dishonest, and will do nothing in the longer term to confront the challenge of rising disability and inactivity. As Milburn’s interim report puts it, there has been a fall in the ‘functional capacity’ of young people, regardless of the labels applied to them or by whom.”
- Why Bordeaux is Burning: It is hot here, but it is REALLY hot in France, and a frankly-upsetting amount of it is on fire (or has been in recent weeks); I thought this was a particularly good explainer as to why the issue of fires is particularly bad there, especially in terms of the (again, complex and interlinked) physical geography/land management issues that have contributed to this particular state of affairs. The short answer is ‘we have lost a bunch of old industries which, it turns out, played a load-bearing role in ensuring that the land didn’t become this susceptible to catching fire all the time, and we didn’t replace them, and now look where we are’, but the whole piece is worth reading because it really does communicate how complex and multifaceded this is.
- The Iranian Disruption: I found the tone of this AP piece, looking at the impact of the conflict in Iran, and the subsequent effect it has had on oil prices and therefore energy costs worldwide, a *touch* on the heartstring-tuggy side; that said, it’s a really interesting overview of how people’s lives in various countries around the world have been fcuked in different ways by That Fcuking Senile Old Cnut’s pointless and seemingly-foreverwar (it is April; Donald Trump announces that a peace deal has been reached; it is August, Donald Trump announces that a peace deal has been reached…much like with Musk, can we just stop reporting this cnut’s every utterance like it means anything? It doesn’t! These men just say things! We don’t have to listen to them!).
- Rod Liddle: Ok, for the non-Anglos amongst you…Rod Liddle is a formerly-very-influential journalist here in the UK who used to be vaguely-left-wing, or at least a bit ‘progressive’, and who over the course of the past 20 years became increasingly mad and toxic and did and said some incredibly mad and toxic and racist (and worse!) things in print, and whose death this week gave a sort of weird in-relief topography of Where We Are Now in the culture wars, with figures from the left lining up to exhume his worst passages alongside ‘fcuk this cnut into hell’ summaries, while the right (and an upsetting number of ‘mainstream’ hacks who honestly should have known better) queued up to eulogise him as a ‘fearless skewerer of the wokerati’ and other such euphemisms for ‘someone who stopped caring about whether anyone thought he was racist and therefore said all the stuff that we would like to say but can’t because we want to stay inside the tent for the moment’. The link up top takes you to Mic Wright’s rundown of some of the reasons why Liddle was considered beyond the pale by many; to Wright’s credit he sticks solely to the stuff the man wrote down or said on-air and he doesn’t even touch the wifebeating and the whole ‘posting insanely racist things on a Millwall supporters’ forum under a pseudonym’ stuff, he just lets the man’s words do the talking and what they say is “this man was a cnut”. If you can stomach it, by far the best piece of writing from another hack about Liddle and their relationship with him was this one, by Zoe Williams in the Guardian, who wrote genuinely affectingly about watching a colleague get old and mad and racist and horrible, and why it is that that might have happened, and how sad it is.
- The Creator Economy is Still a Fcuking Lie: Ok, fine, not TECHNICALLY the title of this one, but I am going to keep on banging this drum. The impetus for this piece is the apparent growing trend in Substackers complaining that the platform’s simply not delivering the returns it used to be, whether in terms of raw numbers or paying subs – the answer (WHICH IS TRUE AND WHICH APPLIES TO EVERY SINGLE BIT OF THE ‘CREATOR’ ECONOMY FFS) is that supply of newsletters has outstripped the amount of disposable income people have to pay for newsletters; fundamentally-speaking, as the piece makes clear, most people will at most take, what, 2-3 monthly paid subs (and that, to be clear, is ‘most people’ out of the wider ‘people who might consider paying money for words’, which itself is…not a growth demographic!), and that as the volume of people trying to become Content Creators via the medium of newsletters grows so does the pot of cash get spread more thinly (or, alternatively, concentrated with a few big players), meaning that the idea of ‘being able to make a living through newslettering’ is even more risible than it was five years ago. Also, lol at the fact that the author of this piece has also alighted on ‘magazines’ as a solution.
- The GEOfication of Reddit: While the advermarketingpr industry is, to a large extent, Quite Fcuked, one of the few bright spots in recent months has been the realisation that you can repackage all your old ‘content for SEO’ pitches as ‘content to influence the output of LLMs’ strategies and once again charge money for old rope that you barely know works. So it is that every single agency in the fcuking world is currently peddling GEO strategies to clients, desperate to convince them that they and only they can ensure that Product X is always top-of-latent-space for GPT, Claude et al; coincidentally and conveniently, this is achieved by the time-honoured method of…getting coverage in trusted media (PR!) and the other places AIs like to look for information, like Reddit (social media engagement strategies!). Honestly, you read the presentations about this stuff and it’s literally like 2010 all over again – LISTEN, THEN ENGAGE! Anyway, this piece is all about how Reddit is being fcuked in half by the volume of terrible PR-led AI-baiting content, and what the site is doing to try and prevent it from being swamped entirely.
- The ‘Song of the Summer’ is AI: Obviously the headline is rubbish – there’s no such thing as the ‘song of the summer’ anymore because we all exist in infinitely-fractured algoprisons! – but the piece is interesting; this is all about how a track called ‘Rubberz’ was AIvestigated (yes, this is a word, fcuk off) and found to be the work of a tool called Treblo – which, you might be interested to know, I featured in Curios earlier this year when it was called Sonauto, pointing out how it did not give one fcuk about copyright. Anyway, this is interesting because of the degree to which the track’s fans…don’t seem to care, and that it doesn’t really seem to have impacted its streams, and it’s AGAIN an interesting counterpoint to the whole ‘the kids all hate AI!’ narrative that is very popular to parrot for numbers on Bluesky; some kids do! Some kids don’t! But I guarantee you that as time passes and this stuff gets more embedded, we are going to pass a point when noone can tell at all where the person starts and the machine ends and…we probably won’t care then either.
- Nothing Online Is Real Anymore: Ok, fine, not NOTHING, but a fcuktonne of stuff really isn’t; the main link is to a piece about people posting videos on TiKTok which are set up as being ‘candid storytimes’ about people’s workplace travails but are in fact smartly-disguised bits of sponcon for various apps which are designed to drop small references to a product and its benefits into a wider, compelling narrative; effectively reinventing the soap opera (in the original sense of the genre, when they were literally vehicles to promote soap powders to housewives) for the digital age; of COURSE none of the creators disclose this stuff! Meanwhile, here’s Ryan in Garbage Day talking about how so much of current online discourse is being driven by people who are LITERALLY SAYING THINGS TO TICKLE THE ALGO FOR PAYOUTS; again, this is about payment structures and incentives and how it’s probably wise to assume that anyone saying anything mad/controversial on video in 2026 is probably doing so because they want some of that lovely creator fund income rather than because they believe any of what they are saying. Oh, and if you want an AI angle to this, here’s a piece in 404 Media about AI-generated wellness influencers peddling quack remedies via the medium of fake creator videos. You know how I have been saying for three years now that we’ve totally fcuked ourselves from an epistemological perspective? Well, that.
- GenZ Isn’t Dating Because Of Money: A piece in the New York Times which probably doesn’t need a great deal of explanation beyond the headline; it’s interesting to me the degree to which much of the current handwringing around young people, dating, sex and the like is oddly-reminiscent of Italy back in the day. When I was growing up, it was common for Italian kids to be virgins MUCH longer than kids here, which, I realised after a while, was a result of the fact that they lived with their parents for MUCH longer, traditionally didn’t go away to university, and so weren’t afforded the ability to fcuk outside of the parental home and as such…basically didn’t fcuk (or, if they did, did so in horribly uncomfortable places like the back of a 500, which, honestly, no sex is worth that sort of lumbar discomfort).
- Boring Millennial Fiction: I enjoyed this piece a great deal, although your mileage will vary depending on the extent to which you enjoy the current crop of slightly-affectless, post-Rooney ‘millennials having a sad and empty time’ novels, characterised by (eg) Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (which I enjoyed) and, more recently, I Want You To Be Happy by Jem Calder, which I really didn’t. The article, by Hillary Kelly in The Atlantic, argues that the quality that separates the best of the genre from the worst is curiosity – both that displayed by the characters, but also that of the author for the why behind their creations’ ennui. See what you think – I really felt this: “Calder, however, lacks even a hint of humor. I Want You to Be Happy has the ambience of a dentist’s waiting room: lots of barely stifled dread accompanied by relentless scrolling. Calder may have mistaken writing about boredom for writing boredom. His prose about phone usage emphasizes physical acts (“He gaze-unlocked his phone, thumbed to his conversation with Joey, absently flexed his free hand open and closed beside the screen, then relocked his device”) rather than immersing us in the stuff that has his characters (and so many of us) in its thrall. Cellphones are, to be fair, a problem for novelists: Their presence eliminates the face-to-face dynamism that so much classic literature uses to its advantage. (Just imagine Mr. Darcy proposing in text-speak.) But phones are also surprisingly similar to novels—both ask people to doggedly follow and emotionally invest in the lives of strangers. They are a narrative boon to any writer interested in human longing. All of which makes Calder’s book a major missed opportunity.”
- The Right’s Perfect Trans Athlete: In what is proving a generally Bad Year for the rights of trans people around the world, the US is currently having a Discourse Moment about trans women in sports; this is a good article in Defector that neatly points out that the ‘trans woman in women’s sports’ that is currently being debated is a fiction that doesn’t in fact exist in real life; that there are no sports in the US in which trans women compete at any sort of high level, and that the handwringing and worry about the impact on cis women and girls and their participation is born entirely of an imagined threat which doesn’t at present exist at all, and which there is no evidence to suggest will exist.
- The Zynification of Everything: A mate of mine’s kid is 14, and in the past year has become ENTIRELY addicted to nicotine pouches, which is quite mad when you stop to think about it. Testament, I suppose, to how effectively they have been marketed and their attractiveness to kids as ‘drugs, but oddly-clean and socially-acceptable!’. This is a good piece in Business Insider about how the delivery mechanism is being coopted for EVERYTHING – not least wellnessw4nk – to ride the wave; the small caveat, of course, is that (for various reasons that are explained in the piece), pouches are unlikely to really work as a delivery mechanism for lots of the stuff being touted – still, who cares, none of it’s regulated! Expect to see ‘Protein CBD’ pouches being sold to morons within the year!
- You Don’t Want To Time Travel: Douglas Giles with an interesting-if-very-geeky explainer why Actual Time Travel would be less about ‘having a fun time looking at the dinosaurs and assassinating Hitler’ and more ‘being smeared, jamlike, across the surface of the earth thanks to various complicating factors such as ‘physics’’.
- Being An Older Life Model: I really enjoyed this account, by Alyssia Abbott, of deciding to pose naked for her life drawing class at the age of fiftysomething; this isn’t exceptional writing, but there’s something charming about the sense of defiance throughout.
- Inside VICE: An account of What It Was Like working at VICE in the mag’s heyday, by Mitchell Jackson, who was hired to work there in 2012 – just when things got REALLY rich, and hence really quite mad. I have to say upfront that I think Jackson sounds like a d1ck throughout this piece, and I disliked them intensely by the end (I am sure they would fcuking hate Curios, just like most other people, so should you see this Mitchell know that I know the feeling is probably mutual!); that said, there are some GREAT anecdotes in this if you can block out the tediously-self-aggrandising ‘but obviously I had the last laugh’ tone of so much of it. As someone who has once worked in an office that kept cocaine in the breadbin for mornings when it was all A Bit Much, I had some…quite strong feelings about this, and it’s an interesting picture of a time when media still thought it had a future.
- The Lost Brutalist Estate of Elephant and Castle: This is a really interesting piece in The Londoner, about the now-demolished Heygate Estate and why, when some examples of Brutalist architecture around the city are feted and marked for preservation (cf the Trellick, etc), this one found no champions and was reduced to dusty rubble as part of the area’s regeneration/gentrification (delete per your personal beliefs) a few years back. You don’t really need to know London, or Elephant, to find this fascinating (although it will help); anyone who’s curious about how cities evolve and change, and how much of it is down to individuals and brute luck, will find this a good read.
- The First Tomato To Know Everything: OH GOD THIS IS SO INTERESTING! This is all about the phenomenon of ‘grey’ magazines – that is, hyperspecialist publications crafted by companies that aren’t, specifically, publishers. “Grey literature stands for manifold document types produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in print and electronic formats that are protected by intellectual property rights, of sufficient quality to be collected and preserved by library holdings or institutional repositories, but not controlled by commercial publishers i.e., where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body.” Got it? GOOD! This is all about the industry that exists to make this stuff, and, in particular, the Webster’s Timeline History series which collects information about VERY SPECIFIC topics and produces…very, very bad timelines about them for tiny audiences of obsessives. Honestly,this is SO interesting and, perhaps best of all, neatly proves my point that ‘slop’ isn’t a property of AI, and that we have been churning it out for years without needing any help from The Machine thankyou very much indeed. Just enjoy the opening and then click the link and read the rest – this is WONDERFUL: “In my modest collection of gray literature, the specialist title that comes closest to a blockbuster is Jean Aspin’s Vaginal Examination: A Unique Pocket Guide (ca. 1980s). Or perhaps it’s Dovea Genetics’s Beef Directory (2014). Aspin was a community midwife in Luton and Dunstable University Hospital’s maternity wing. Her pocket guide is a well-produced, ring-bound, wipe-clean, tongue-shaped booklet, published by the baby milk company Cow & Gate. Its Latinate lists, labeled diagrams, and die-cut holes of increasing diameters, representing vaginal dilation, step a midwife through the assessment of fetal skull position during labor. The Beef Directory promises “Rock Solid Beef Genetics.” It peddles not anonymous meat but the sperm of individual bulls with names that sound like variety acts: Tonroe Lord Ian! Utile Ben! Virginia Andy! Vagabond! Mornity Handyman! Pinocchio! Seaview Tommy! Atok Socrates! Kilowatt D’Ochain! Immense D’Yvoir! It is richly illustrated, suitably glossy, and a chilling ode to muscle. (Behold the bulging rumps of Belgian Blues!)”
- The Golden Age of British Ice Cream: Ruby Tandoh writes in Vittles, exploring the industrial production of ice cream in 20thC Britain and the technical innovations that underpinned it, and, look, I know I have just made it sound boring as fcuk but trust me when I tell you that Tandoh is a great writer and this is funny and fascinating and will make you want a Mivvi.
- The Steven Bartlett Hiring Process: On the one hand, linking to my own writing in my own newsletter feels…gross, honestly; on the other, I thought this piece was quite funny and it lifts the lid on the genuinely-sociopathic recruitment practices of the man responsible for The Diary of a CEO podcast, so see what you think (you will have to hand over an email address to access this, but, to the best of my knowledge, nothing bad will happen as a result).
- My Dad and Steve Zizzou: A lovely little bit of family history by Molly Cooper, writing in the Paris Review, about her dad’s sole appearance onscreen, opposite Bill Murray in Wes Anderson’s ‘A Life Aquatic’. This is poignant and funny and affectionate and beautiful: “Around lunchtime, I went to look for my father and found him sitting in a makeup chair in front of a bank of theater mirrors. His navy-blue blazer and scuffed Rockports had been traded for a roomy Italian suit, dove gray with white pinstripes, and sleek, honey-colored dress shoes. A white tissue had been fixed under his glasses to shield them from the buff makeup coating his face, and a stylist was coiffing his hair. It was hard to talk much amid these ministrations, but even in our brief exchange he imparted an air of deep dismay. Just as I was getting back to my desk, the phone rang. The voice was familiar: it was Bill Murray, and he had a question. He had known Anderson to cast people with no previous acting experience. He had worked with some of these people in the past. “Has your father ever acted before?” he asked. His tone sounded somewhere between amused and alarmed. I explained, regretfully, that he had not. There was silence, followed by a long sigh.”
- Beautifying The Dead: Our last longread of the week is this superb essay in Harper’s; John Semley attends the Restorative Art Technical Showcase, a contest in which mortuary workers who specialise in preparing bodies for open casket viewings compete to perform the best reconstructive work on mutilated dummy heads. This is GORGEOUS; honestly, I cannot recommend this enough, it’s funny and macabre and dark and emotional and creepy and WEIRD and you will think about it for a lot longer than it takes you to read, I promise. “When the morticians reunited with their heads on day two of the showcase, most of the major injuries had already been redressed. Now the object for the competitors was to make their silicone subjects look casket-worthy. Back at his station, Saldivar fussed over imperfections in the dark-pink wax around his dummy’s earlobes and eye sockets before air-brushing on a few base layers of foundation, which PMRC provided in shades ranging from Pink White to Gold Earth to the frankly delicious-sounding Rice Pudding. To make this blank canvas look more skinlike, he then dipped a chip brush into a darker shade of special-effects paint and dangled it a few inches above the head, running his thumb along the bristles to splatter the pigment and create layers of fleshy depth.”
By Jake Kennedy
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!