Well, even in its partially incomplete form that’s a, er, miserable-looking set of electoral results, isn’t it? Good to see, based on the extent to which the Reform vote maps closely to the Brexit vote, that you CAN in fact fool people twice! Well done everyone! Well done!
Anyway, that’s all too miserable to talk about; let me take a moment to tell you instead about the joint stag/hen weekend I went on while I should have been writing Curios last week (don’t worry, it’s going to be light on detail – I know you don’t care, we don’t have that sort (or indeed any sort) of parasocial relationship and, honestly, that is entirely fine by me).
A few observations, as someone who has been on…more stag parties than he cares to remember, and has the unpleasant memory of police interactions and a very questionable floor of a very questionable B&B on the Isle of White to show for them: a) it turns out that having a mixed-sex party is simply BETTER, and everyone should do it. Seriously, fcuk gender essentialism and all go on the piss together, it is GREAT and means that there is very little chance of strippers or penis-shaped straws happening; b) there is literally NO activity more genuinely wholesome that spending an afternoon on a beach making crazy golf holes from sand and driftwood and I recommend it unreservedly to ALL of you (and I say this as someone who fcuking DESPISES the word ‘wholesome’ and who basically has dust where their soul should be); and c) it turns out that if you’re hanging out with a bunch of left-leaning millennials you really do need to be careful when you say you ‘write about AI’ lest they think you LOVE THE MACHINE and decide you are a pr1ck rather than merely a twat (this may be about me).
Anyway, I had a lovely time and didn’t miss any of you at al…oh, who am I kidding, I took my fcuking laptop because I was TOO SCARED TO LEAVE THE LINKS BEHIND, I am a pathetic and broken man whose addictions have come to define him entirely and who largely ceases to function when unable to suckle at the Teat of Web. So be it.
Anyway, on with the links – this is, even by my standards, something of a LONG ONE, so, er, sorry about that. SKIM AND ENJOY is the technique (and frankly the ‘enjoy’ is optimistic and optional).
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and while I am pretty sure that this will apply to none of you, if you voted for that frog-faced cnut’s lot then you can stop reading right now, unsubscribe and fcuk off.
By Txema Yeste
THE SECTION WHICH IS THRILLED THAT WE APPEAR TO BE GEARING UP FOR ANOTHER GENERATIONAL ACT OF NATIONAL SELF-HARM COME THE NEXT GENERAL ELECTION AND DOES START TO WONDER AT WHICH POINT WE HAVE TO ACCEPT WE JUST SORT OF DESERVE WHAT’S COMING TO US, PT.1:
- Cursor Camp: Due to my selfish decision to take last week off, this link has already been in the wild for a while now and deservedly attracting a lot of love, but there’s a chance that the less-terminally-online of you (lol, like anyone whose face isn’t basically grafted to the web reads this sh1t, honestly) won’t have seen it and, honestly, you must check it out because it is BEAUTIFUL. Friend of Curios and previous Tiny Award judge Neal Agarwal has once again created something gorgeous and playful and FUN in the shape of Cursor Camp, a, er, summercamp for cursors. Which, obviously, when I type it out sounds nonsensical but which becomes perfectly reasonable when you click the link and find yourself (as a cursor) in a beautifully-drawn 2d map of a traditional (or at least I guess traditional – not being North American means that I have no idea what summer camp actually entails beyond being, I don’t know, picked off one by one by a masked assassin or something) summer camp – move your cursor around and the map scrolls, letting you explore the environment and discover the literally HUNDREDS of fun games and toys and easter eggs that Neal’s scattered across the map, the treehouse you can wander into and the river you can float down and the football pitch you can have a kickabout on…there are items of clothing to collect and hats to wear and SECRETS to find, and, perhaps best of all, you can see the cursors of all the other people currently visiting the page (or at least a selection of them), giving you a really nice sense of community…honestly, this is really, really nice work and you could quite happily spend 20 minutes fcuking about here BUT THERE IS LOTS TO GET THROUGH WE HAVE NO TIME TO DAWDLE, ONWARDS!
- Vaskange: Much like the last link, this is quite a remarkable thing – Vaskange is a browsergame which is based on exploring the environment and finding pickups, but the interesting thing is that it all takes place on what appears to be a single, infinite canvas – effectively you explore everything by zooming in ever further into a series of nested illustrations, each of which is a portal to a new, smaller, illustrated world within it. You remember in the early days of the web (WHEN WE WERE YOUNG) and you would occasionally find those websites that would do an infinite zoom into an image (like this one, from…2004? Fcuk’s sake)? Well this is like that, basically, but interactive and therefore BETTER. There’s a Kickstarter sitting behind this to turn it into a full game – obviously good luck to the creator, but I personally think it’s sort-of perfect as is, and quite a remarkable technical achievement.
- RedditTok: I have, as the more filthily-minded amongst you almost certainly remember, linked to websites and apps that do the whole ‘turn all the media posted to a specific subReddit into an infinite feed a la TikTok’ thing before, but if I recall correctly those have always been focused on bongo – by contrast, this version lets you do it to ANY sub you like, meaning if you want nothing but an infinite feed of crustacea to scroll through like a slack-jawed crab obsessive then NOW YOU CAN! Tbh you can probably use this for bongo as well, I will never know. Actually, now that that has occurred to me I just checked and it a) does work for NSFW stuff; and b) doesn’t require any sort of login beyond a quick ‘yep, I am 18!’ toggle in the settings, so, well, IN YOUR FACE, ONLINE SAFETY ACT! (can we just take a moment to point out that stuff like this does rather prove that effective age-gating of anything online is FCUKING DIFFICULT unless you do it at a device level? What’s that? You don’t come here for tedious discussion of online regulation? Oh, fine, suit yourselves). BONUS ADDITIONAL TIMEWASTING INFINITE CONTENT LINK! This is a website which hosts ONLY old Flash clips and games – 6,817 of them, apparently – which you can cycle through at random. All of them are apparently vetted and entirely SFW, so should you want to deaden your senses and dull your mind with an almost-entirely-incoherent and unconnected collection of media from the mid-00s delivered via the medium of looping gifs and the odd Flashgame (delivered in Ruffle, RIP Flash) then HERE YOU GO!
- Blind Data: A READER WRITES! Rory Flint emailed me with this SUPERB bit of datawork digging into the statistics behind cult weekly Guardian newspaper column ‘Blind Date’, in which…actually, no, I really don’t need to explain the concept of a column called ‘Blind Date’, I’ll leave it to Rory, “I’ve just launched a site that scrapes and analyses every edition of the Guardian’s Blind Date column (a long-running UK feature where two strangers are sent on a date and then publicly rate each other and the experience). The site looks at things like whether the marks out of 10 actually correlate between daters, what topics come up most often, and whether self-reported awkwardness predicts a second date.” As someone who has been obsessed with the column for YEARS – special shout out to the lesbians who lost their pants, still a high watermark – this is basically catnip for me. 233 kisses from 877 dates feels…ok to be honest, and possibly a better hit rate than the apps at this point. Oh, Rory told me that the heavy lifting here in terms of building the site was obviously Claude – the design has the stench of machine – but don’t let that put you off, this is super-interesting (admittedly moreso if you know the column, but still).
- Eurovision Data: Another reader data project! Friend of Curios and owner of the excellent Puntofisso newsletter Giuseppe Sollazzo has made a sort of scrollytelling dataanalysis of Eurovision entries over the past few decades, looking at the lyrical themes that have come to dominate and how that has changed over time, and if you are one of those people (and I understand they exist, although I personally don’t quite understand them) for whom Eurovision is basically your Christmas, your Hallowe’en and your Valentine’s all in one then, well, you will sh1t yourself inside-out with excitement at this. I personally found this observation quite interesting, but the whole thing really is worth a scroll and a read as, aside from anything else, it’s really nicely put together in terms of the viz here: “Eurovision’s themes are adapting to changing times. Love (red) still dominates but is no longer the majority. Empowerment (blue) becomes prominent in the the 2010s, and Peace crests in the early 1980s.”
- The NTK Archive: Many years ago when Former Editor Paul hosted this newsletter on his website Imperica (RIP I want to run to u) he compared this newsletter to NTK – I, er, never actually knew what NTK was, but just nodded along because I just sort of assumed it was accurate. Anyway, this week I happened to stumble across this archive of old NTK newsletters and FCUK ME IT IS LIKE MEETING ME FROM THE PAST. So NTK stands for (stood for) Need To Know, and was a weekly newsletter collecting links which ran for 10 years from 1997(!!!!!) to 2007, and which…look, this is quite weird for me because, honestly, the similarities between it and Curios are…uncanny. The dense, hypertext feel, the…occasionally-overwrought prose, the fact that there is FAR TOO MUCH OF IT…it really is like looking in a mirror at a (trimmer, better-looking) version of me. Anyway, this is the whole archive of the NTK project – it’s more of a timecapsule at this point than anything else, given that, inevitably, I don’t think any of the urls will work any more (which, again, is a sad reminder of all that we have lost – not suggesting that anything in here is VITAL FOR TEH SPECIES or anything but there’s something honestly sad about the fact that all the websites and projects and THINGS in here, all made by people for no reason other than that they wanted to, have fallen prey to the ravages of linkrot. Still, if you want to step back in time and see what people were talking about online when you were still in short trousers then this is a quite amazing resource.
- The Sample Text Project: This is another reader-submitted link, and another that I think is rather wonderful. Chris G (presumably Kenny’s brother, though I forgot to ask) writes: “It basically started as an inside joke with a few friends in a group chat where we got a chatgpt powered bot to write plugins for itself. Egging the hapless AI on, we somehow ouija-boarded onto one plugin that would make it fetch a random image from Wikipedia and then place words from the same article onto it. Often times it would just be mangled garbage or incoherent but every now and then something astoundingly funny would break through (if you have that certain 2005 idiotic internet humor that we/I certainly suffer from). What if we put that onto shirts and let people, completely at the whim of the algorithm, buy them if they like them?” This is a WONDERFUL idea – the random juxtaposition mechanic is old but occasionally throws up some truly beautiful combinations of images and words. Once you find one you like you can adjust the font, the tshirt colour and size and automatically order it from whatever dropshipping outfit Chris is using in the back end (he tells me the site has sold seven to date – noone is getting rich off this, let’s be clear, but that’s not the point). To give you an example, my second tshirt ‘pull’ just now just gave me a plate of bloody meat superimposed with the text ‘in America’ which, you know, ACCIDENTAL SATIRE, so have a play and see if you can find some vaguely web2.0 fashion via the magic of the machine lottery.
- The State of AI Models Visualiser: I’ve stopped really concerning myself with frontier model capability changes of late because, well, life’s too short, but also because the incremental gains at the moment for most users feel relatively marginal and the models are all largely comparable at this stage. If you’d like a neat visual overview of how they all perform across a single task, though, Ethan Mollick cobbled together this nice little site (via Claude, obvs) which shows how a selection of the top models as of April 2026 performed on the one-shot task “build me a procedurally generated 3D simulation showing the evolution of a harbor town from 3000 BCE to 3000 AD, it should look beautiful and allow me to have some control over it.” This is SO interesting in terms of the different ways in which each model chooses to respond to the prompt and the differences in visual style and UX/UI that each produces – basically there’s a clear gap between the big ones and everyone else, but it’s another pretty amazing example of just how much these things can do now and how much the capabilities have improved in the past year or so.
- Land Lines: This is a beautiful little webexperiment from the people at Google which uses data and imagery from Google maps to let you mess around to find map elements from across the world whose details conform to whatever linear shapes you draw. Which, sorry, is an absolutely hideous description – what that basically means is that you can draw a line in your browser and the toy will pull images from Google Maps which track that line, whether in terms of roads or coastlines or whatever. The REALLY run bit, though, is if you click ‘drag’ – you can then drag your mouse around and the system will pull together a chained set of image tiles whose contours match the trajectory drawn by your cursor, making a sort of weaving, sinuous collage of landscape in your wake. Which, again, probably doesn’t make any sense but FFS WHAT DO I HAVE TO SPOONFEED YOU EVERYTHING JUST FCUKING TRY IT AND STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT.
- Last Night’s Sunset: This page takes your location data and uses it to render a colour gradient image of what the sunset looked like last night, wherever you are in the world. It is BEAUTIFUL, and another part of an ongoing project by Matt Wheeler (I featured another part of it the other week, that webpage that tracked a bunch of semi-whimsical, moderately-terrifying stats about the world from the time you open it) which lives here. There’s another part going live tomorrow, which Matt is kindly giving all of YOU early access to via this link – it tells you all the things the page knows about you simply because of your browser/device footprint, which is…well, it oughtn’t be any fcuking surprise really, how long have you been online for now? Anyway, this is a nice collection of projects, well done Matt and thanks for sending them in.
- Flipbook: Ooh, this is a fun little toy – slightly-reminiscent of the sort of thing I was getting quite excited by a few years back, those toys where The Machine would imagine entire worlds and ecosystems and let you mess with them textually…anyway, this is basically a Machine-generated infinite visual encyclopedia – type in anything you like and it will spin up a sort of…yep, visual encyclopedia entry for it, complete with points of interest you can click on to take you to another, related page of the visual encyclopedia, which again gets spun up on the fly…which, I realise, is once again an almost-entirely-useless explanation in terms of helping you understand what the fcuk is happening here, so I suggest you just click and play and see how you get on. Basically, try something like ‘the reproductive system of a cow’ or ‘how is the eyeball structured?’ and it will start to make sense (and if it doesn’t I really don’t know how to help you). What’s interesting – and what means that you really SHOULDN’T use this for anything other than fun – is that there’s no sourcing to anything, meaning I would be willing to bet that a significant proportion of everything it throws up is entirely made-up, which personally I think adds to the slightly-surreal fun of the whole project.
- The Apocalypse Early Warning System: Would…would you want to know? I have to be honest, quite a large part of me would want to have literally no idea of the fact that the bomb was on its way; personally I’d prefer my first inkling of the apocalypse to be my flesh being reduced to ash and my blood to vapour, but I appreciate that there are those of you who might want, I don’t know, fit in a few phonecalls to loved ones, or one last esoteric bongo session or something. Anyway, should you want to keep track of whether or not The Big One has happened, one Kyle McDonald has built this website which uses publicly available data from private jets to estimate the likelihood of Something Bad Going Down – the inference is that as soon as the plutes get wind of things going south they will be straight to the airfields, into the Cessnas and off to the New Zealand bunkers before you can say “see you in hell, povvos!”, and so this site, by tracking them, will give you a vague idea of the fact that the end is nigh. At the time of writing, by the way, EVERYTHING IS FINE. I wonder if there’s some sort of rudimentary stock buying/selling thing you can rig up to this, out of interest?
- Radio Venus: Do you want to ‘discover music through your venus sign’? Do you know what the fcuk that even means? Anyway, give this site your birthdate, select a genre and it will pull together a playlist for you based on some criteria that, honestly, I do not for the life of me understand. The ones it’s made for me are pretty good, though, meaning that obviously HOROSCOPES ARE REAL.
- Nomare: When I found this link two hours ago it was called ‘DateSky’, but now it is called ‘Nomare’ – HOW FCUKING BLUESKY. Ahem. Anyway, this is apparently a dating app built on the AT Protocol, on which Bluesky is built, and which lets you connect your Bluesky profile to connect you to a dating pool of other people with unshakeable conviction in their own moral superiority and an inability to spot a joke at 10 paces (I USE BLUESKY TOO I CAN SAY THIS STUFF). I obviously haven’t tried it out, but, well, it’s here in case you want it. £10 says it’s called ‘TismDate’ by next Tuesday.
- Moth In Relay: I *think* I found this via Kris – regardless, it is SO LOVELY. Just click the link and experience it – it’s a small piece of webart based on the idea that…oh, look, here: “In 1947, scientists working on the Harvard Mark II computer found a moth trapped in the relay circuits of the machine, impeding its function. They taped the dead moth into the computer’s logbook and wrote: “(moth) in relay … First actual case of bug being found.” Grace Hopper, a key programmer on the computer, later popularized the incident and the term “debugging” through her lectures. This work conjures a world where the moth remains trapped in the computer and searches for a way out of the machine. It autonomously flies across global internet infrastructure, and each time it locates a node—a data centre or cable landing station—it searches the web for information about that facility, hoping to find an escape from the relay.” Honestly, this really is very cute indeed (and also made me feel…a bit sad, although tbh that might be the troublingly-cumulative hangover I am currently wrestling with).
- The AI Bible: Do you sometimes feel you have strayed from God’s light and could do with reconnecting with the scriptures? Do you wish that they were more ACCESSIBLE – less DENSE, less IMPENETRABLE, and, fundamentally, more full of visual renderings of Biblical scenes in the style of poorly-rendered videogame cutscenes? DO YOU WANT THE SLOPBIBLE (and yes, I know, I ordinarily hate the word ‘slop’, but here it really does fit)? OH GOOD HERE IT IS! Honestly, this whole thing is…astonishing, really, and if I can give you one tip (and this is a general one with the New Testament overall tbh) it is to go STRAIGHT to the book of Revelation because that is where the good (read: totally fcuking mental) stuff is and where the…erm…*particular* visual style of the machine really comes into its own. Apparently God looks vaguely like a bearded version of Akuma from Street Fighter, who knew?
- Looki: It feels like we’re soon coming up to Wave II of the (still imho doomed) AI-enabled personal device movement, what with the theoretical reveal of whatever it is that OpenAI and Jonny Ive are working on coming later this year – in the meantime, here’s the Temu version! Looki is basically a variant on the whole ‘a pendant that records everything that happens to you and uses the machine to analyse it and give you advice, etc, based on what it sees/hears’ thing (and I have to say, the little popup on landing on the Page which reads “it’s all about YOU” did make me rather want to scream “AND THAT’S HOW WE GOT INTO THIS MESS FFS!” at my laptop just now) – all for the low, low price of $249. There is NO WAY IN HELL that this thing actually works, to be clear, or not in any meaningful way, but let’s see if this sort of stuff gains any traction this time (it won’t).
- TubeSounds: After TrainJazz from NYC the other week, a reader writes! Jane Ling wrote to me to say “I loved the NYC Train Jazz website you posted a week or two ago. I just stumbled across Tube Sounds by Izzy Hemmings completely by accident and I thought you’d enjoy it.” I DO LOVE IT, thankyou Jane and thankyou Izzy Hemmings for making it. I will say, though, that while it definitely…makes sounds, it’s possibly a touch more on the atonal side than the NYC offering and if anyone still wants to make London Tube Jazz then PLEASE DO. In fact, fcuk it, it really ought to be London Tube Grime. Let’s do that instead.
- Single Ride: ANOTHER URBAN TRANSIT-BASED TOY! Annoyingly, this is ONCE AGAIN an NYC thing, but it’s ONCE AGAIN something that I implore one of you to make for London because it is FUN – the simple challenge is, to quote the site, “Travel the longest route you can on the NYC Subway without visiting the same station twice. Transfer in time before the end of the line! New start station each day.” The animation and interface here is really rather nice and gives it a pleasing air of polish – obviously this is impossible to me because of my almost-complete lack of familiarity with the New York subway system, but let it just be said that I would fcuking KILL this if it was trained on LDN.
- Lexiexplorer: Now that we have collectively seemingly realised that Duolingo serves two purposes only (making you good at Duolingo and insinuating that fcuking owl into everyone’s nightmares) and that it is no use at all for actually learning a language, perhaps you might like to try an alternative method – here’s one! Lexiexplorer is a cute idea – rather than getting given a list of words or a ‘complete the sentence’ thing, it helps you learn vocab by plopping you down in a 3d environment which you can walk around and, by clicking on things, learn what stuff is called. So, for example, select the ‘urban outdoor’ environment and learn the words for ‘car’ or ‘lampost’ or ‘vagrant’ or ‘troubling methhead’, etc etc etc. This probably won’t make you fluent, fine, but I enjoyed the creativity of the approach.
- Omeggle: You remember Omegle, which was effectively chatroulette? You know what would make that EVEN BETTER (worse)? YES THAT IS RIGHT INBUILT SOFTWARE DESIGNED TO RATE YOUR FACIAL ATTTRACTIVENESS BASED ON THE INCELISH BULLSH1T LIKE SYMMETRY AND HOW FAR APART YOUR FCUKING EYES ARE! This is EVIL and I tried it once to check it was real, and it is, and it made me so upset and dispirited (although tbh that might have been the laughter of the (I think) Scandinavian teens with their young skin and bright eyes, confronted with my sallow, sagging furrowed countenance, FCUK YOU SCANDI TEENS) that I had to log off, and I am sharing this with you because, well, why should I have to suffer alone. There are LEADERBOARDS ffs.
THE SECTION WHICH IS THRILLED THAT WE APPEAR TO BE GEARING UP FOR ANOTHER GENERATIONAL ACT OF NATIONAL SELF-HARM COME THE NEXT GENERAL ELECTION AND DOES START TO WONDER AT WHICH POINT WE HAVE TO ACCEPT WE JUST SORT OF DESERVE WHAT’S COMING TO US, PT2:
- Tiny Hamlet: Via Lynn, this is a fun little AI-built townbuilder which lets you spin up small, cute-looking villages with a surprising degree of creative freedom. It’s VERY pretty, impressive in terms of something that’s just been vibecoded together, and keeping the tab open is fcuking my laptop in half, so maybe close your other tabs before you try this one.
- Claw3d: If you’re one of the subset of lunatics using OpenClaw then a) I hope you don’t mind what it’s almost certainly doing to some very sensitive files on your computer; b) you might enjoy this toy, which offers you the opportunity to watch all your little agents in a virtual office, so you can see vaguely-anthropomorphised representations of instances of Claude as they rip the workings of your life to shreds via the medium of ill-advised API access.
- Shapes: You know messaging platforms, like Whatsapp or Signal or Telegram? You know what would make them better? YES THAT IS RIGHT THE INTRODUCTION OF AI BOTS INTO YOUR CONVERSATIONS! That’s right, in a feature that literally no fcuker in the world could ever possibly want, you can now sign up to an entirely new chat app whose sole gimmick is apparently that you can have your conversations with friends derailed and interrupted by The Machine. WHY DOES THIS EXIST?
- Familiar Machines: I have, I think, waxed lyrical over the years about how much I wanted one of Sony’s original robot dogs, the Aibo, when I was younger. Well, what if Aibo, but AI and significantly more sinister-looking? THEN THIS! Familiars are…what are they? Well they’re vaguely-mustelid-coded in terms of design, to my mind at least, and, per the blurb, they are “a supportive presence that learns your household rhythms and goals, responds with care, and makes life a little more magical. From the team behind Roomba.” So, basically, this is a companion machine thing, designed as a pet analogue or loneliness reliever (every time I type things like that I genuinely want to cry), they “express themselves through animal-inspired body language, facial expressions, and sound” and they “build memory and a distinct personality across every interaction, so the relationship keeps getting richer and more personal the longer it’s there.” Look, on the one hand I can’t pretend I am not curious about the development of this sort of thing, but on the other all I can think of is people living alone and having no friends and spending all their time interacting with a small, cute-shaped machine (“if friend-shaped, must be friend!”) and the thought of it is too upsetting, seriously, I have to stop typing about this.
- The TechnoOptimism Archive: A reader writes! Krystian Łukasik got in touch to tell me about his new project, which he describes thusly: “I recently launched Techno-Optimism Archive – a public digital archive of old technology hype from historical newspapers: failed predictions, strange promises, and forgotten beliefs about inventions that were supposed to save the world. It includes examples such as the telegraph being imagined as a way to end war, motion pictures replacing books, and automobiles making people “too prosperous to fight.”” This is perhaps a bit slight at present – sorry, that sounded churlish, I should really say “I would like more of this!” – but there’s some interesting stuff there, not least WIRED in 1997 talking about the coming attention economy, which, well, well done that writer.
- Epstein Photos: I confess to really not wanting to look at anything Epstein-y anymore (which, yes, I appreciate might sort-of be part of the problem with this sort of stuff), but for those of you who wish to continue staring into the abyss a bit longer might like this clever bit of digital sleuthing which gives you a guide to who appears with who in the various photos from the archive. “This is a visualization of the people whose faces are in the Epstein Library dataset. The circles (nodes) are people, and the lines (edges) between them are when two people are in the same photograph together. A node’s size is related to the number of photos they appear in, and nodes are colored based on the person’s category.” This is obviously miserable, but it’s also REALLY nicely made, so, well kudos for doing the horrible work required.
- Isopods of the World: As a slight corrective to the horror of the last link, HAVE SOME LOVELY ISOPODS. The website’s strapline reads “EXPLORE THEIR BEAUTY UP CLOSE”, and frankly I think more Pages should take that stern, almost bullying tone with me (yes, isotope daddy!) (sorry, not quite sure what happened there).
- The Toothcomb AI Fact Checker: ANOTHER READER WRITES! Rob Dawson, whose projects I have occasionally featured before, has built this AI-powered factchecking tool for audio – this is clever, so I will paste the explanation as to the ‘how’ here: “Give Toothcomb a speech transcript and it will fact-check and analyse it. If you have an MP3 file of someone speaking, it can generate the transcript for you. You can also stream audio in real time from your device’s microphone. Analysis is performed in three stages: 1) The text is broken up into small parts referred to as ‘utterances’. Each utterance is usually a few sentences in length. The utterances are sent, one at a time, to a powerful AI language model with detailed instructions about what to look for. The AI will respond with a list of what it found – this may include claims, promises or predictions made by the speaker, logical fallacies, and deceptive or manipulative language.2) The AI may decide that some of the speaker’s statements require fact-checking. It may be able to perform these checks using what it already knows, or it may need to search the web to get up-to-date information. 3) Once each part of the speech has been checked separately, a final review of the entire speech is performed. The final review can pick up things that aren’t apparent from looking at small parts in isolation. For example, it will check if the speaker contradicts themselves, or promises to address some issue and then fails to do so.” This feels like something which could usefully be wrapped into all sorts of other tools/products with a bit of thought.
- Chess Art: Oh this is REALLY nice – if you play chess with any degree of seriousness you will adore this tool, which basically takes the data from any game of chess you feed to it and turns it into rather beautiful ART. As far as I can tell the data it requires is fairly standard and easy to export, so if you play on chess.com or similar and want to immortalise your GREATEST ZUGZWANG or something then CLICK THE LINK.
- The Year in Songs: Vibecoded, fine, but I like the idea of this – a calendar that tells you all the songs that reference each day of the year, a bit like the ones that tell you when ‘International Sausage Day’ is, but which instead reminds you that next Saturday is Lagwagon’s May 16th day (for example).
- The Quest Archive: OK, this is quite the archive. I didn’t know that ‘Quests’ were a thing in the world of fanfic, but a reader (who wishes to remain anonymous, and I will respect that because, well, who the fcuk wants to be seen in 2026? NO FCUKER, etc) sent it in with the following explanation: “Okay, so… were you aware that aging internet cesspool 4chan has a 17-year-old creative writing subculture? I don’t mean greentexts or puerile racism or anything. (That’s elsewhere on the site.) I mean full-on works of original fiction, written over many years, spanning into the hundreds of thousands or occasionally millions of words. This wouldn’t be different from ordinary webnovels, except that the medium here is interactive fiction: in a “quest,” the author (QM) writes a chunk of text (update), then provides a slate of options for what the POV character (MC) should do next; this slate is voted on, and dice are sometimes rolled; the QM writes the results of the choice and/or dice roll, then provides more options; repeat until the QM vanishes or the story concludes. As a result, the stories of quests are frequently meandering, strange, and surprising (even to the author! maybe especially to the author!), not to mention revealing of the psychology of the voters. Quests can be found on other sites than 4chan, but are frequently either wildly NSFW or “smashing action figures together”-esque crossover fanfiction. 4chan, for all its (many many many) faults, seems to harbor a lot more in the way of genuinely interesting work. If your interest is actually piqued I can link specific quests all day, but I seem to recall you having a disinterest in genre fiction (which is the majority of the output), so I won’t put effort into recommendations right now. But maybe your readers might be intrigued?” ARE YOU INTRIGUED, READERS? I have had a flick through, and while it’s not really my vibe I think there’s something so, so interesting about the scale of this, so much created and put into the world through collaborative endeavour and worldbuilding, and it’s very heartening to see. BONUS QUEST: the mysterious person in question also linked me to their own fiction, which it would be remiss of me not to link to – it is a BIG WORK, and if you’re interested in scifi/fantasy then there is probably a LOT to love in here.
- Unruly Play: This is a lovely collection of examples of work that explore creativity and play in various forms – artworks and exhibitions and digital projects, tagged and searchable by theme, 177 in all, from across the world. Popup museums and AR projects and interactive sculptures and and and – this is SUCH a great resource for inspiration for anyone thinking about public art projects and in-situ play/interactive works.
- Jon Mud: I’m not entirely sure how one might explain Jon Mud – erm, if I say ‘short, surreal and lightly-upsetting (although the reasons why are…unclear to me) videos of objects and animals with human faces’ would that entice you to click? IT SHOULD, CLICK THE LINK.
- Clock NYC: Oh ffs another one. STOP MAKING COOL STUFF FOR NEW YORK FIRST MAKE IT FOR LONDON INSTEAD. Ahem. This is a clever little project – a clock displaying the time in New York RIGHT NOW, where every minute is represented by numbers found via Google Street View. I presume that there’s been a bruteforce scraping of the Streetview API to pull all of these into a database – you can at any point click a link to go to the exact place in New York which connotes, say, 4:18am, which is a nice touch. NOW DO IT FOR HERE PLEASE THANKYOU.
- Knock Knock: Well this is grimly impressive. Have you ever wondered how many attacks a single server receives from malicious actors, and how often they come? “Fcukloads” and “all the fcuking time” are the depressing answers, according to this website which is basically sitting on an unprotected server designed explicitly to track attacks and their provenance – there’s a nice view you can access where you see the globe and watch the pings come in in realtime and MAN do a lot of them come from…er…America, as it happens. WHODATHUNKIT???
- US Prisons: Have you ever visited a prison? I have, a few times, and fcuk me they are horrible places (obvs, they’re not meant to be nice, but I will never forget getting a tour of a young offenders institute c.2002 (I was working as a lobbyist, don’t ask) and being cheerfully told that none of the cells – designed explicitly to house children between the ages of 11-16 – had ligature points was a chilling moment and one when I realised that I did not want to do that job one iota longer) – this is a collection of aerial shots of the US prison industrial complex pulled from Google Maps to show the geography of the carceral system across the Atlantic, and FCUK ME the size of these horrors. Also, this project is, I think, from 2012, so Christ knows what it looks like now.
- The GDT Nature Photographer of the Year: The German Society for Nature Photography picks its pick of the pics for 2026! Pick your favourite – mine are the algae bubbles and you are WRONG.
- The Singapore Institute of Technology Virtual Campus Experience: How did you decide where to go to university (presuming that you did – if you didn’t, ngl, it’s increasingly looking like you might have made the correct choice)? Me, I went to Manchester based entirely on the fact that they offered me the equivalent of 2 Ds and an E at A-Level and therefore it meant that I could continue fcuking my neurons into the sun with booze and weed rather than bothering with petty things like ‘revision’ (also because I was rejected from Cambridge for being, and I quote, “too linguistically-imprecise, arrogant and nihilistic”, which thank GOD I have obviously moved on from), and arrived on day one at university never having even visited the city. Had there been something like this – a 3d virtual tour of campus in the now-classic ‘metaversal’ style, produced by the Singapore Institute of Technology – perhaps I might have taken one look at Whitworth Park and thought ‘actually, hang on, maybe that English course at Kent with the year in Amsterdam would be a better bet’. AND ON SUCH SMALL DECISIONS DO LIVES CHANGE. Anyway, this is quite a cute way of exploring a campus and not a terrible idea imho, though there could be more fun added in were I to nitpick (although perhaps ‘fun’ isn’t really the Singaporean vibe, on reflection).
- WikiPop: Would you like to know what the most visited Wikipedia page was yesterday (at least on English Wikipedia)? OH GOOD! This is a *tiny* bit fudged (“To keep things interesting, an article won’t be featured if it was already the top article in the last 30 days”), but in general it’s really interesting (if often unsurprising – yesterday was Ted Turner, for example), and if you’re keen there’s a daily email you can sign up to to keep abreast of who the world has recently given a fcuk about.
- Whale Follow Mouse: If you are not vaguely soothed or charmed by this in some small way – IT IS AN ORCA FOLLOWING YOUR MOUSE FFS – then you are probably dead.
- Wax Letter: Continuing my big 2025-26 trend of ‘man there’s actually a surprising amount of money in physically-mailed letters these days if you find the right niche’, this project basically lets you order a fancy-looking physical letter with an ACTUAL WAX SEAL to be sent to anyone you like. The nice bit is that you can upload a graphic file and that will be used to make your own custom seal for your letter(s), presumably using a small 3d printing setup the guys have knocked up. This feels like quite a cool ‘surprise and delight’ element for the right sort of product/brand, and an absolute license to print money for the people behind it if they get it into the hands of the right set of geeks (sorry, but).
- The Graham and Bouncer Adventures: To be clear, this is NOT GOOD – it is utter tripe – but I am fascinated that it exists. “The Graham and Bouncer Adventures follow a Land Rover (Graham) and a four-wheeler (Bouncer) from their life as working vehicles on a farm in the Lake District (UK) to becoming enhanced with nanotech in a heist gone wrong, travelling the world, the solar system and eventually the multiverse. In their many adventures they will meet maniacal corporate leaders and their evil henchmen, evil scientists’ intent on global domination, even evil doppelgangers, as well as making friends with helpful Professors, secret service agents, and fifth dimension alien spacetime guardians.” This is AI-generated – the script, the visuals, the voices – and none of the videos on this YT channel have more than a handful of views, and yet there are…what, HUNDREDS of episodes. WHY? WHO IS MAKING THEM? WHY ARE THEY BEING MADE? WHAT IS THIS FOR? WHY IS IT SO BAD? WHY ARE THE CENTRAL CHARACTERS SENTIENT, ANTHROPOMORPHISED MOTOR VEHICLES? So many questions – if whoever is behind this happens to see this, feel free to email me to a) call me a cnut; and b) tell me what the fcuk you are doing here.
- Hidden Cassettes: Oh wow, I love this project. “This is going to sound insane, but when I was a kid I found out my dad secretly recorded our phone calls. He was an engineer with a penchant for hacking stuff together, and one day I overheard my older sister talking in his office when she wasn’t home from school yet. Confused and intrigued, I waited until he took his afternoon nap (he was old) to investigate this impossibility and I found a hacked together device that recorded our phone calls to cassette tape whenever the dial tone was engaged from the land line. As a result, I grew up thinking surveillance was love, control was care, and hacking stuff was a way to play God. All the shenanigans he mysteriously knew about that I’d only talk about with friends on the phone finally made sense. I never told anyone that I found this… mainly because I learned how to pause the recording before I took calls so I could get away with breaking the house-rule that phone calls could only last 3 minutes. We had to use the microwave timer to time each call and promptly hang up when it beeped and it was annoying as hell. I continued to use my newfound knowledge to knowingly censor my own calls, while my sister continued to get in trouble for everything she unknowingly divulged. Savage younger sister behavior. 30 years later – I found a couple of the tapes. Here are a few excerpts.” This is wonderful – intimate and surreal and cute and like a timecapsule into someone else’s past, and I honestly adore it.
- Audio Spaces: I LOVE THIS TOO! Audio Spaces is a map of the world onto which anyone can dump a location-tagged audio file – and there are THOUSANDS, so you can literally zoom around the globe listening to whatever people have chosen to tag to wherever you’re looking. Near me, someone has recorded a short snippet of audio which simply goes “just two bros, in a van, going to move some furniture…” before dissolving into hysterical laughter; just round the corner someone’s uploaded cricket sounds and someone playing guitar…in Rome, there are sounds of Italians being Italian, and mopeds…honestly, this is really rather special and you could lose a LONG time to it if you’re sonically curious (and if you’re not, as ever, WHAT THE FCUK IS WRONG WITH YOU?).
- iTom: A rather beautifully-made personal portfolio website with a gorgeous scroll mechanic and some really cute illustrations which make the whole thing feel papercrafty whilst at the same time being very nicely coded indeed.
- RNGDLE: A daily game which basically asks the question ‘how much agency can you remove from the player whilst maintaining an experience which still feels on some level entirely gamelike?’, to which the answer is apparently ‘all of it’! Roll a different random number every day, win BADGES! This is, depressingly, really quite addictive.
- Takeaway: Oh this one is a B4STARD (I say this mainly because I like to think of myself as gud wiv wurds and yet I am TERRIBLE at this game) – you start with an eight letter word, and you need to get down to three by removing one at a time so that the remaining letters can still spell something. WHY IS IT SO HARD TO ME? Maybe it’s booze-induced braindamage (it does rather feel like that this morning, ngl).
- WenWare: This uses GenAI, so if you’re a refusenik then you’ll have to hold your nose, but for the rest of you this is a FUN little game – you’re presented with an AI-imagined VISION OF THE PAST (based on an actual, historic artwork), and you’re tasked with guessing where in the world and when in history the moment depicted is. So, for example, you might get a scene which features what looks like Chinese soldiers – but where in China, and what era? This is hard, but not so hard as to be offputting (and I say that as a man whose grasp of history is basically 0).
- Catfishing: Guess the Wikipedia article from its category tags! This sounds like it should be impossible, but it’s actually weirdly approachable – I wonder whether it’s capped at the 10,000 most popular Wikipedia pages or something, because there’s no way in hell anyone’s getting ‘brachial plexus’, say.
- Play Your Tubes Right: Another link that has been doing the rounds for a fortnight but, well, I’m a completist, and it’s a lot of fun, so STOP WHINGING. The game here is simple – you’re presented with a selection of tube journeys (say, Mansion House to Cockfosters vs Oval to Putney), and you have to work out which of them is the fastest. You keep playing til you get one wrong. This is HARD, but very satisfying when you get into the flow and feel like a proper Londoner (look, I was born in this fcuking city so it doesn’t matter to me if I get them all wrong, I still count (he says, protesting too much)).
- Daisy Life: A short game about being a daisy and, eventually, killing god. Entirely normal.
- Dashy Games: The last of the miscellanea this week is this really fun collection of tiny minigames where the twist is that everyone can see the best score that has ever been posted in each, giving you a WORLD LEADERBOARD to play against – this is both a really nice touch and a reminder that MAN there are some people who either have insane reflexes or a LOT of time on their hands out there.
JAZZ, SOUL, FUNK AND OTHER STUFF IN THE FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK BY TOM SPOONER!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- The London Dead: NOT A TUMBLR! BUT IT OUGHT TO BE! Stories and curiosities from the cemeteries of London – we have some GREAT ones, modestly-speaking, and the fact that the entry currently at the top is a list of the greatest weird deaths recorded at Kendal Cemetery, including someone being killed by an elephant in 1890, should give you an idea of the vibe here.
- Double Dactyls: ALSO NOT A TUMBLR BUT AT THIS POINT WHO GIVES A FCUK EH? Up until 2021, whoever was behind this site was using it to write, er, poetry inspired by children’s toys from the 80s, most recently He-Man. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT MUST YOU QUESTION EVERYTHING? Genuinely curious as to what caused them to stop, I hope they found love or something rather than, er, dying.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Meece: I’ve got to be honest, I generally have next to no interest in accounts posting images of stuffed toys in odd locations – sorry! I am dead inside! – but for some reason this one, broadcasting images of a pair of small, vaguely-anthropomorphic fluff mice, often accompanied by human-size cocktails to an audience of (at the time of writing) 70 loyal fans, genuinely intrigues me. WHY??? Anyway, I am glad it exists.
- Don’t Please Tell Anybody: Years ago I used to collect ‘Found’ Magazine, which collected images of found texts, notes, etc, discovered abandoned in the world; this is basically that, but specifically for Birmingham (UK, for the avoidance of doubt) – honestly, this could not be more my thing if it tried, and the torn fragment that reads ‘please be my wife’ is a fcuking novel in itself. PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL (it is crowdfunding for a book, in case you feel motivated to chuck them a fiver).
- Shaad Magazine: The media is dead, it just hasn’t quite realised that yet. But! Out of its ashes something will be born…maybe, probably. Whether that thing will be sustainable is another matter entirely, but, while we wait to find out, there are YOUNG PIONEERS exploring NEW FORMATS, and one such thing is Shaad Magazine. This is basically journalist Shaad D’Souza’s personal Instagram which he has decided to turn into…what is it? ‘Magazine’ feels wrong, ‘zine’ feels…wrong too. Maybe we need new words. Anyway, Shaad Magazine is basically just a series of carousel posts which are all notes written on Shaad’s phone, including contributions from other writers, blind items, reviews, articles, reminiscences, short essays…it’s a really interesting way of doing publishing, and given the fact he’s being paid for sponcon (the b4stard, WHY WILL NO CNUT PAY ME TO WRITE ABOUT THEM? Is it…is it the ‘cnut’ thing?) it’s obviously working.
- Flex For You: Is this real? IS IT REAL? If so, fcuk me it’s depressing. Chuck Flex For You a few quid and they will tag you in an exclusive, ACTUALLY REAL bit of video, or an image, to let you flex that you have an interesting life when what you are in fact doing is sitting in your room, crying and PayPaling $10 to Flex For You. Want an attractive women to tag you in a short film of her roadtrip to give the illusion that you’re with her? OH GOOD! This is fcuking BLEAK, but quite astonishingly Of The Now.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Hyperpolitics: We begin the longreads this week with an excellent piece from the LRB, ostensibly reviewing Anton Jager’s recent “Hyperpolitics” book, but which is more of an overview of the changing nature of political engagement and activity over the course of the past few generations, and the extent to which the rise of populism coupled with a fall in the number and viability of convening institutions has created a modern politics – in the UK, but this maps elsewhere – which is volatile but which volatility doesn’t necessarily result in a greater degree of practical civic engagement. Which is why you get lots of ‘this film’s crap, let’s slash the seats’ voting, but significantly less ‘ok, now that we’ve got that out of our system, shall we all get together and decide a new upholstery and start stitching?’ in the aftermath. This is long, but really interesting and it’s very hard to do anything other than nod at many of the assertions here: “What Jäger seeks to understand in Hyperpolitics is the way politics appears to have returned with a vengeance, yet at the same time turned on itself as a form of anti-political rage and hopelessness. He explains this in terms of two key dimensions of democratic health and power: ‘politicisation’ and ‘institutionalisation’…Institutionalisation gives form to politics, while politicisation provides the content. Institutionalisation is a matter of the way we pursue shared interests: voting, attending meetings, paying subs, delivering leaflets. Politicisation is what leads us to care about shared issues in the first place: feelings of camaraderie and loyalty, identification with a cause, a sense that the status quo is unjust, a fear of unrest or a desire for more of it.”
- The Return of Britain’s Groypers: One of the interesting (to me at least) subplots of this round of local elections in the UK is Great Yarmouth, where Rupert Lowe’s ‘Restore Britain’ Party (which is, and I feel quite comfortable saying this, campaigning on actively racist policies and attracting actively racist voters, many of whom are ACTUAL NAZIS, and perhaps coincidentally the one that Elon Musk has been backing) has been campaigning; it’s the only seat they are contesting, I think, and the extent to which they perform well will give an interesting look at exactly how many people are comfortable being quite open about the fact that they thing people with different colour skin to them, or of a specific religion, are inferior. This piece looks at the…troubling rise in the UK’s very own ‘groyper’ movement – but, look, can we just call these cnuts fascists, please? Can we not use the stupid madeup American words? Anyway, it’s a really good look at the extent to which lots of longstanding names of the UK’s neo-Nazi movement (including Mark Collett, who I remember featuring in a documentary about ‘Britain’s Nazis’ in the 90s and who, miraculously, is still openly going around being a Nazi some 30 years later) are reemerging to reconnect with the resurgent far right. Feels…feels bad, man.
- AI’s Biggest Critic Has Lost The Plot: I have on occasion here mentioned my problem with Ed Zitron – to whit, that his occasionally-entirely-reasonable questions about the validity of the business model of Big AI crumbles under the weight of his need to keep satisfying his paying audience who also want to hear him say “IT IS ALL A LIE AND EVERYONE WHO THINKS THAT THE MACHINE IS QUITE CAPABLE NOW THESE DAYS IS LYING TO YOU AND IS ALSO A FOOL!” – and this is the first piece to articulate in cogent fashion some of the problem with his two-year-long campaign to convince everyone that the wheels are JUST ABOUT to fall off the AI wagon. The point made by the author here is not that Zitron is wrong about everything, but more that he’s more interested in playing to the (repeat, paying) peanut gallery (and being famous as ‘the anti-AI guy’). I quite enjoyed this bit, but the whole thing is worth a read: “AI — not future, speculative AI, but AI as it exists today — has nonspeculative economic value. I pay $100 per month for Claude because Claude provides me with comfortably more than $100 per month of economic value. In 2024, “it’s mostly useful as a curiosity or for cheating on college assignments” was at least a plausible gloss; in 2026, AI is useful for a huge range of tasks, and the overwhelming majority of people who are paying for it are doing so because they are getting a service of economic value in exchange. Zitron seems to believe that this is not true. It’s hard to tell for sure, because he never directly says that it’s false. “Nobody wants to talk about the fact that AI isn’t actually doing very much,” he complained, before going on to complain about people saying that agents are able to do tasks independently with oversight. “What tasks, exactly? Who knows!” he wrote. Ed, thousands of people know and it is your journalistic responsibility to be one of them!”
- 13 Ways of Looking at Tung Tung Tung Sahur: Ok, this is…quite wanky, but I loved it immoderately – Aidan Walker writes (in the second half of a two-part essay) about some of the semiotics of Tung Tung Tung Sahur (you know, the stick with a stick brainrot guy! Christ, what a fcuking sentence) and his status as a semi-unique cultural artefact; a piece of collective, folkloric mythology and the first one ever to have been genuinely co-created between man and machine. Honestly, I can’t stress how interesting I think this stuff is, and how the bleeding of Italian Brainrot into real life – the trading cards! The tshirts! The action figures! – is very, very weird indeed from a ‘how human culture is going to work in the future’ point of view. The myth-to-meme-to-object pipeline is now real, let’s see what comes out of it next. “Staley’s “entity” finds its perfect vessel in 67 — a meme that, like Tung Tung Tung Sahur, once came from a specific cultural context but is now purely, defiantly, a sensonarrative experience in the way Monteanni describes — just a thing you say and a motion you do that carries meaning because, across a billion screens and a billion moments, it keeps getting done (it recurs). On top of that core sensonarrative experience, anyone can add their bit — but your bit remains just something extra, never final, and he’s never yours. Tung Tung can expand into an endless lore — he can die, be born, hate Tralalero then love Tralalero, sing a tune or swing a fist. He can have an online meta-narrative as a “niche meme” then a “popular brainrot,” then an “old meme.” But there is just a core collectively-shared sensonarrative experience at the bottom of it all. You hold him in your hand, and he is just a piece of plastic with those same great empty eyes, and you giggle in the way you did when you held him in your hand and he was just a plain of bright pixels. I don’t have to be me to feel the way I feel about him, I can be anyone — and in the moment I regard him, I am anyone, the same anyone you are, and the 16-year-old Lima teenager is, when we look at Tung Tung Tung Sahur.”
- Clipping: The Verge does it’s explainer bit on the clipping industry, which is basically the answer to ‘why do I know who the fcuk Clavicular is, who do I blame?’. The interesting thing here is, I think, the extent to which this is all a psyop – noone is actually watching Clav on stream, apart from a few thousand children, and all of the attention is driven by the secondary content pipeline across shortform video socials, picked up by the mainstream and made mediatically ‘real’ in culture, at least for a time. The question, of course, is who is paying – is it Clav? Well, per Ryan, who as usual has some GOOD THEORIES…there may be some funny money behind all of this. Honestly, if this all ends up tracing back to Peter Thiel again then Christ alive please god no.
- Does Good GenAI Content Exist?: I really enjoyed this piece by EX Research (whose newsletter, by the way, is excellent if you’re into VERY fringe gaming/memetic culture stuff), looking at the state of GenAI content now and looking at some people who are making genuinely interesting art with it (and, as ever, a hearty ‘fcuk you, you don’t know what you are talking about and you clearly haven’t considered this for longer than seven seconds you docile cnut’ to anyone whose kneejerk response to this is ‘but it can’t be art because it involves AI’ – fcuk off, go on) – this is excellent on the WHY behind what elevates some of the work above the status of ‘slop’ (the answer is always, always, a very intentional creator with a clear vision and a strong directorial hand, as is the case with literally all art worth speaking of). Inexplicably doesn’t feature Trisha, but I will let them off for that.
- Adventures in OpenClaw: John Hermman writes in New York Magazine about his experiences setting up OpenClaw and trying out the amazing agentic revolution for himself – the upshot here is, obviously, IT DOESN’T FCUKING WORK PROPERLY (YET), or at least not consistently, and anyone believing the snakeoil peddlers on X about ‘people spinning up entire business empires running autonomously and making $10k a day while they spend their time in the gooncave’ is, perhaps, a moron. Basically DO NOT LET AGENTS LOOSE ON YOUR STUFF IT IS A DANGEROUS AND BAD IDEA is the message here. The closing para is a nice summary of his experience, and the extent to which, right now, this stuff feels like yet another piece of fcuking pointless busywork: “You ask OpenClaw how to uninstall itself. Earlier in the day, it had sent you a list of “Deadlines/Action items” that was long enough to make your eyes glaze over and made you feel underwater, as if your inbox had been given a voice and that voice was getting annoyed with you. As you’re shutting it down, you wonder what it is about this technology and your own orientation to the world that led you to create, in the process of building your own little guy in the computer, not an assistant, but another boss.”
- Bollywood and AI: The latest in the semi-occasional series “the way people in the UK, and specifically left-leaning people with a bias towards the arts and the creative industries, feel about AI is not representative of how the rest of the world feels about AI, and the quicker you realise that the more you’re going to be insulated against a future where this stuff doesn’t just disappear overnight, however much you might really really want it to”, this piece is all about how Bollywood is embracing AI. The contrast with Hollywood is interesting; I wouldn’t presume to speculate as to why (although part of me does rather wonder whether the output of Bollywood, specfically the volume, means that anything that helps churn the wheel faster is going to be embraced) but I thought the point about lack of unionisation was probably depressingly accurate as a partial factor.
- State of the Art Scamming: Or “why you probably can’t trust videocalls anymore either now”. This is…quite a depressing and not a little unsettling piece in 404 about the top-end of the live videospoofing market, and how it’s being used by scammers to let them pretend to look and sound like whoever they want when trying to rip your gran off. Time was you could fcuk with on-the-fly faceswapping by asking the person being masked to hold a hand over their face, or three fingers up – now, though, the models are good enough and the old tells don’t work anymore and for any crim who can afford the (not insignificant) licensing fees these guys are charging this is a gamechanging way of fooling the vulnerable (or, frankly, just anyone who’s not quite paying enough attention) into parting with their monies or passwords or digital identity or whatever. It does very much feel like we’re at the point where you might want to start having a word with elderly relatives about how to guard against this stuff, because FCUK ME is it going to be rife in a few months’ time (it already is, but, well, WORSE AND MORE).
- What We Can Gain By Losing Infinity: Look, this is quite hard maths and I don’t pretend to have understood it entirely (ahem), but I was very tickled by the basic principle behind it, which is effectively some mathematician going “actually no, b0llocks to infinity, I reckon numbers DO stop eventually, actually”, and the fact that, despite the fact that there are lots of people queueing up to tell the guy he’s wrong, there doesn’t actually appear to be any reason why infinity HAS to exist as a concept. To be clear, though, this is approximately threemillion light years outside of my field of comprehension (wordcel, innit).
- How Does Shazam Work?: A genuinely-interesting explainer as to how the music recognition app functions (basically it’s about peaks and troughs as identifiable anchor points, but also it’s more complicated than that, obvs), with some lovely little interactive elements, which help explain the science behind the sonics, to boot.
- Subliminals: Since the early days of the web there has been a long and storied tradition of bullsh1t audio-based ‘hallucinatory’ wank – do any of you remember the period in the…what, late-00s, when a whole load of people started pretending that you could mimic the effect of actual, proper drugs simply by listening to certain audio files, like you could, er, hypnotise yourself into the state of being, I don’t know, coked-up, or stoned or whatever? Well, here we have a NEW EVOLUTION of this particular grift with a perfectly-2026 twist! Would YOU like to become fabulously wealthy or beautiful without lifting a finger (honestly, the great, unifying question de nos jours – OF COURSE I FCUKING WOULD WHERE DO I SIGN UP???)? Well it’s your LUCKY DAY! Per this piece in WIRED, there now exists a market for ‘subliminals’, audio recordings that their creators swear BLIND will make you more beautiful if you listen to them, because, er, SCIENCE! Honestly, this would be funny were it not, at heart, slightly fcuking depressing. Coincidentally my friend Alexander found this this week, which is basically the same but for manifesting wealth – click the link, marvel at the idiocy (and the fact that Actual Media have apparently covered this sh1t – do you have NO FCUKING SHAME? Oh, it’s the Telegraph, of course not), and then enjoy the Mrs Hinch quote-endorsement, which I am choosing to take as some very subtle shade (‘incredible’ is not necessarily a positive, after all).
- Disney Debt: On the one hand, dunking on Disney Adults is a bit like shooting (dead) fish in a barrel; on the other, these people are fcuking morons, so. Amelia Tate writes in the New Yorker about the people getting into debt to finance their love for the Mouse, and, honestly, some of the quotes in here are astonishing and make me think, on reflection, that some of these people perhaps have learning difficulties that mean that maybe they shouldn’t be in charge of their own affairs. It’s like the Dril/candles tweet irl, honestly: “Davidson said that she spends more spontaneously in Disney parks than in the “real world.” At home, “I worry about the price of groceries, I worry about the price of gas; I will not spend twenty dollars on a coffee,” she told me. Conversely, “when you’re not in reality, a twenty-dollar coffee isn’t a real coffee. It’s a Disney coffee.” Another teacher I spoke with, who lives in Florida, expressed a similar sentiment: “There’s real-life money and then there’s Disney money. And when you’re in the Disney bubble, it’s like your regular money doesn’t exist.” The Florida teacher, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of judgment from her relatives, said that she is still paying off Disney World annual passes that she had purchased on a credit card two years ago. “I kind of hate that we did it that way,” she said. “But the memories are kind of worth it.””
- The Men Who Want To Reverse Their Circumcisions: Fun fact! Did you know that if you convert do Judaism as an already-circumcised man, you nonetheless need to undergo a ceremonial bris in which the head of your penis is pricked with a needle to draw a drop of blood? NOW YOU DO! Anyway, this is about the growing movement in the US around men who feel somehow shortchanged by having lost their foreskins and are exploring surgical routes to restoring it; honestly, if there was any way of somehow channeling the degree of care and obsession we feel towards our penises towards something worthwhile we could really get some things done on this planet. Also, Jesus, this sounds HORRID: “The downside to restoring a foreskin manually is that the process is long and hard. It can take less than five minutes to slice off a foreskin and, according to Bob, around three to five years, at minimum, to get one back. (He estimates it’s possible to gain around one coverage index a year.) All of the traditional techniques rely on the same basic premise of applying gentle tension to the shaft skin of the penis until it stretches. The manual method (a.k.a. tugging) requires you to just reach down and pull the head and base away from each other, albeit with discipline. There’s also T-taping, which involves folding a strip of medical adhesive with origami-like precision, then sticking it on the penis and tugging the tape forward using an elastic bedsheet strap — a contraption that, if properly assembled, can be worn for three days at a time. Some opt to hook up what’s left of their foreskin to devices whose names suggest inventions best kept far, far, away from one’s genitals: MySkinClamp, VacuTract, Foreclip, Foreskinned Air, and Foreballs, tiny metal dumbbells that can be stuffed into the shaft skin. More enterprising restorers have jerry-rigged their own skin-stretching creations out of pill bottles, ball bearings, aquarium pumps, film canisters, trombone mouthpieces, toilet-seat-hinge bolts, baby bottles, binder clips, a pig-castration device, and baby socks.”
- Boars: James Vincent writes in Granta about wild boars, a topic you might not think would make for an interesting longread but which in Vincent’s hands very much is. This is a great piece of writing, and honestly far more interesting than any piece about what are, at heart, just very hairy pigs, should probably be, covering nature and urban life and the interrelationship between the two and all sorts more besides: “We’ve been walking for an hour or so and it’s dusk when Ed abruptly stops the group on a long, straight path between a field of bracken on our right and woodland on our left. There’s movement in the bracken somewhere, and a good chance it’s boars. Down the other end of the path, some fifty feet away, a lone walker has also stopped, either having spotted the same thing, or reacting to our uncanny stillness. The boars will want to cross into the woods and their quickest route is across our path, whispers Ed. ‘Stay quiet and we might see them.’ The six of us stand in silence, each looking around and over one another, into the bracken, trying to spot movement. Your eye quickly numbs to such dense foliage; patterns change and reform as you begin to identify hitherto unknown shades of brown. We stand for a minute, then a minute more, and a minute again. The only sound is the rustle of waterproofs, and then, suddenly, in the middle of the path exactly halfway between us and the lone walker – twhip, thwip, thwip, thwip; a huge sow bursts out the bracken, darts across the clear air, and then returns into the forest, followed by three juveniles. They’re all in single file, nose to tail, as close to one another as carriages of a train, and in and out of cover in seconds. It’s a brief but glorious sight: real boars, right in front of me! The group turns to one another with astonished and gratified looks, our patience rewarded by these hairy comets. ‘Well at least you got your sighting,’ says Ed, beaming. Yes, I think, but it’s not enough. I’m determined to meet a boar properly before my train home the next day.”
- Whale Euthanasia: No, wait, come back, this is beautiful! Yes, ok, fine, it *is* about killing beached whales, but it’s a lovely and humane piece of writing and I think there’s something rather gorgeous about looking death in the face like this, so to speak.
- Blister Pack: Emma Garland returns briefly from hiatus with a typically-excellent piece, this is a series of fragmentary thoughts gathered over the course of a day and night in London; I like this particularly because of the way the prose style mirrors the arc of the day as time passes and sobriety evidently ebbs; this is Good Urban Writing imho.
- Wish You Were Her: Finally this week, I am breaking a promise I had made to myself not to feature any more writing about cruise ships because, honestly, this is SUCH A FCUKING TREAT (and also the ship isn’t really the point). Mina Tavakoli writes for the new n+1 (which is a superb issue, by the way, I could have linked three essays from it this week at least) about going on a cruise with a bunch of lookalikes – Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, Rodney Dangerfield, Austin Powers – and this is honestly superb; funny and poignant and weird and tragic…but most of all very, very funny indeed. Honestly, it is impossible to read this without a smile on your face: “In the blue suit and prosthetic teeth, Greg was hard not to adore. Buoyed by the unwavering support of his wife, the near-disturbing talent of his daughter, and the memory of his brother — an aerobics champion, Disney World dancer, and cruise-ship entertainer who had died nearly thirty-two years earlier of complications from AIDS — Greg treated the art of tribute showbiz less like a baroque vocation and more like an instinct as complex as the project of fatherhood. To him, the Sunburst impersonators were a life force — a feedback loop of energy that was endlessly nurturable, and that nurtured in return. These truths were probably why, after a dramatic banging of his margarita glass at happy hour, he’d announced an official decision: He was not canceling the Sunburst Convention. The show would go on, next year, in a ballroom at the Embassy Suites in Orlando. “Look, we’ve had a Britney Spears call me and my wife Mom and Dad,” said Greg, now installed in our booth. “We had a Dolly Parton and Jack Nicholson meet each other at Sunburst and get married. We can’t split this up. It’s a tribe.” Suddenly he stopped speaking, jerked his face away. “Sometimes,” he said, fake glasses fogging, “I just think I’m walking in my brother’s shoes.””
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!