Oh hello! Welcome back to the new season of the long-running popular reality series ‘What The Fcuk Happened While I Was Asleep And How Is It Going To Conspire To Fcuk My Sh1t Up?’!
Yes, that’s right, after that weird period where we all pretended that everything was going to slow down, someone has cranked the dial up to threemillion again and we are SO BACK BABY! 2026 looks set to carry right on where 2025 left off – astonishing to think that it’s only week two and already we’ve had to cross ‘removal of a sovereign head of state by a foreign power’ and ‘mass-production of AI-generated borderline bongo on the de facto digital breaking news platform de nos jours’ from our collective bingo card. My only hope is that at this rate it seems likely we’ll finally make First Contact come, say, April and be vaporised by the little green men by June, thereby putting me, you and everyone we know out of our collective misery for good.
As you may have gathered, the year may be new but the authorial tenor of this particular newsletter is very much not – look, what can I say, I’m 46 years old and this is Who I Am. Who the fcuk are YOU?
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you probably resolved to unsubscribe from some newsletters in 2026 so here’s your chance (I love you it is so good to see you again).
THE SECTION WHICH ISN’T SURE ‘WE MONETISED THE NUDIFIER BEHIND A PAYWALL’ IS THE MORAL OR PRACTICAL FIX REQUIRED HERE, PT.1:
- I Want My MTV: While it would be nice to be able to enter into the New Year with eyes fixed firmly on the glorious new horizons awaiting us over coming months, it does rather look like any light at the end of the current tunnel might in fact be not just one but a whole fcuking host of oncoming trains, and, as such, you could be forgiven for wanting to hunker down with a bit of nostalgia during the first, miserable, cold months of the year – which makes this webproject a PERFECT link with which to kick off 2026. This is a frankly incredible labour of love by…some mysterious web user, which basically lets you go back and watch MTV from ANY era you choose. Click the decade (70s-20s), or select specific content streams (MTV Raps, say) and then sit back and GLORY in the infinite-stream of era-appropriate videos pulled in from YouTube and played through a lovely MTV-branded webwrapper, time-traveling back to when things were BETTER (or, more accurately, when you were young). This is so so so good, and, if nothing else, is a prettymuch perfect time capsule – if you want any YOUNGER PEOPLE in your life to experience The Culture from back in the day, this is a pretty decent way of explaining to them Why The [INSERT DECADE OF YOUR CHOOSING] Were Better Than Whatever Sh1t You Have Now (definitely a great way of bonding). Basically just turn this on and wait for March to come around, is my advice. BONUS VIDEOS! WikiFlix is a platform that lets you browse and watch all the old films that form part of the WikiMedia commons – so a whole bunch of stuff from the 20s and 30s (LITERALLY A CENTURY AGO) which might tickle your fancy should you wish to see what sort of entertainments we were enjoying last time we decided to accelerate ourselves towards multinational bellicosity. BONUS BONUS VIDEOS! I’ve featured it on here before, but, seeing as we’re doing ‘places where you can watch loads of video for free’ then I would be remiss not to mention Matt Round’s excellent VoleFlix project, compiling a bunch of out-of-copyright films which are floating about YouTube in one place (tell me you’re not intrigued by ‘The Brain That Wouldn’t Die’).
- Normie Club: I am, I suppose I have to concede, not exactly slap-bang in the middle of the UK bell curve when it comes to my tastes and proclivities; I don’t watch telly, I don’t like Greggs, I don’t increasingly hold the actions of a blameless set of minorities responsible for the fact that we have fcuked our country into the sun…As such, what Normal People Are Into is a source of much confusion and fascination to me, which is why I have been obsessed with Normie Club in the weeks since I discovered it. This is a daily quiz, which every 24h offers you the chance to answer 10 binary questions – in each instance, you’re asked solely to guess which of two options was most popular with the majority (the data is sadly from the US, which means that some of the questions are baffling to this particular anglo – RANCH DRESSING IS NOT FOOD FFS – but that doesn’t stop it being interesting and fun) and see how normal YOU are – questions like ‘would you rather fly or be invisible?’ and ‘is it ok to be racist?’. Over the 2-3 weeks I have been playing this I think that my best score is 8, which is a terrible indictment of my COMMON TOUCH – honestly, though, this is compelling and has slotted seamlessly into my daily procrastination routine, and I REALLY want someone to make a UK version of this with UK data because, honestly, I think this would do numbers given the near-universal love of looking at other people and going ‘what the fcuk is wrong with you why do you think like that you sicko?’. If YOU work for a company with a lot of data about the UK (polling companies I am looking at YOU!) this such a great idea to rinse for lightweight brand building FUN purposes. BONUS PREFERENCE QUESTIONS! This is an interesting little website which asks you a bunch of questions and then, after you give it the answers to 10 or so, starts trying to predict what you will give as answers to all subsequent questions. I presume it’s just brute-forcing this with ‘people who answered x also answered y’, but would be curious to know how it appears to KNOW ME SO WELL.
- The 90s Festival Generator: Look, I promise that Curios isn’t going to become some sort of miserable nostalgiahole – but, well, it’s January, it’s dark, it’s cold and everyone in charge of the world is a cnut, and maybe it’s ok to just hunker down and watch some nice videos from the past. This is a superb bit of work by long-running creator of Fun Internet Things Monkeon, which not only produces imaginary lineups for a 90s festival on demand – click the button, spin up a new lineup! – but also makes every single band name on the poster clickable; click the bandnames and you will be taken to a video featuring a full set by said band at a festival somewhere, so that YOU TOO can imagine that you’re having fun in a field rather than shivering in a garret flat somewhere. So so good, and another really nice example of building on top of YouTube to make something fun.
- Polyglobe: One of the ‘fun’ little wrinkles surrounding the US, er, ‘activity’ in Venezuela was that, a few hours before the rest of the world learned of it, users of peer-to-peer predictions market Polymarket saw a newly-created account place a lot of bets on various questions pertaining to the future political status of Venezuela – it’s unclear whether this was someone from within the US administration, or maybe Barron Trump telling his mates, or even someone at the NYT who decided ‘well, if we can’t report this then at least I can make bank!’, but whichever it was then, well, it’s probably fine, right? Anyway, this is Polyglobe, a nice little visualisation of all the prediction markets being traded on RIGHT NOW. Current fun questions being asked include ‘will Israel bomb Iran?’, ‘will the US launch attacks on Mexican soil?’ and ‘will China invade Taiwan?’ – all of which feels great, right kids? Anyway, this is interesting in part because of the whole ‘ooh, look, nice glowy interface’ thing, and also because it gives you a sense of quite how big these sorts of markets are getting and how odd it is that we’re basically just sort of resigning ourselves to betting on potential geopolitical breakdown because, well, we’re impotent in the face of it! This is fine!
- Sunlight Optimism: Ok, look, I am sorry, I will stop going on about The Bad Things and instead attempt to provide you with some NICE, LIGHT FUN. Would you like something to look forward to? Plug a postcode into this website and it will give you some details about when it might maybe stop being INCREDIBLY DARK AND COLD where you are – per this, we’re only a short month or so away from the sun rising at 7am! And not setting til after 5! IT IS PRACTICALLY SUMMER, KIDS! Come 17th April I will be getting up to write this at the same time as the sun is peeking above the horizon, and that is no time at all. IT IS ALL GOING TO BE OK! Lol. BONUS SEASONS: this is a nice little seasonal visualiser, should you want one.
- PharmAIcy: It’s fair to say that the ambient music around AI hasn’t gotten any more positive since the turn of the year, and I think we can expect the general vibe around the tech to continue to be ‘terrible’ for the coming future (it doesn’t, though, mean it’s going away! Sorry!), but, still, interesting things are bubbling up around the edges. PharmAIcy is a project selling ‘drugs’ for your LLM – basically you pay money and you get a ‘package’ which you can feed to the AI model of your choice, which will induce it to behave like it’s ON DRUGS – you can buy modules which will apparently make GPT behave like it’s on gak, say, or DMT, or weed – why you would want to spend actual cashmoney to do this is…unclear, but, well, you might! Per the blurb, the cocaine model will, for example, have the following effects: “Response cadence accelerates by ~20% (less “thinking friction”). Key signal tokens get stronger emphasis (less noise, less drift). Talkativeness increases: more riffs, more options, more variations per answer. “Idea Burst” mode: generates rapid bursts, then surfaces the best picks.” This is obviously very silly, but I quite like the idea behind it – also, this can be filed under ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’ as Shardcore had literally the same idea 10 whole years ago.
- Airloom: I love this! Pick an airport – any airport! – and get a…live? Anyway, get a maybe-live visualisation of all the planes currently flying around its airspace, which you can rotate to get an idea of the density of traffic around a specific hub, and how exactly all the planes manage to manoeuvre without crashing into each other (ngl, this is…quite stressful if you think about it too hard). Real planeheads will enjoy the fact that you can even click the little plane iconsto get the flight number and a photo of the plane in question (this is…slightly amazing to me, on reflection), but the rest of us who have never stood at the end of a runway with a clipboard and pair of binoculars (no judgement!) can just marvel at the balletic display which as far as I am concerned doesn’t make any physical sense at all HOW DO THEY STAY UP IN THE AIR LIKE THAT???
- Sandwich Alignment: The sort of thing which feels frivolous but which at the same time might well be the deepest bit of psychological/emotional analysis you undertake this year. This website takes images of sandwiches from Tiny Award winning website Rotating Sandwiches and gives you a grid on which to map them in terms of their alignment (good/evil, chaotic/lawful). Why? BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU LEARN ABOUT YOURSELF! I feel quite strongly that you could have a really quite revealing couple of hours with a partner if you just compiled one of these each, separately, and then came together to compare notes and see WHAT IT TELLS YOU about your approach to life and compatibility, and, ideally, then wrote up that analysis in far, far too much detail.
- Poms: It’s only January 9th, but I can confidently predict that you won’t see another website this month which pleases you quite as much as this does. No, really, I mean it. Click and ENJOY. Oh, and this was made in part with AI – if that makes you hate it per se, if that makes you froth and seethe and fills you with bile then maybe, just maybe, you should stop being a miserable, joyless cnut. EMBRACE THE POMS FFS.
- Thibault Introvigne: Another gorgeous example of a portfolio website by one Thibault Introvigne, who has presented his as a sort of top-down scifi landscape that you can explore with your little scifi guy in a little scifi space suit – this is very, very pretty, and very impressive, and there are some lovely touches in terms of interactivity design (just look at the way the grasses part as you run through them! Enjoy knocking stuff over just because you can!) and it doesn’t even fcuk my laptop up too much, which suggests Efficient Programming, so, well, WELL DONE, THIBAULT INTROVIGNE!
- TV Guessr: Weirdly video heavy selection in this first edition of 2026 – not in fact weird if you bother to take into account the fact that EVERYONE APART FROM YOU LOVES VIDEO MATT YOU PR1CK – to which this is a wonderful addition. TVGuessr is a simple game which asks ‘what random country is the website currently showing you a TV show from?’ and WOW is this a great way of both getting some interesting insights into other cultures and of testing your own prejudices. Seriously, you won’t know what the fcuk is going on 99% of the time – unless you’re a very impressive linguist or have spent a LOT of time watching obscure cable – but it is so so fascinating to skip between countries and see how they are presenting the world to their viewers. These are all livestreams, so you get a proper feel for the here and now, and, honestly, fcuk the ‘game’ element of this, this is just really, really interesting and I could honestly watch this for hours just navigating from country to country. Also, MAN does South American TV play some banging tracks during the middle of the night (just after 3am, Colombia time).
- Pictures of the Year 2025: National Geographics pick of the pics from the past 12 months – beautifully-presented, although I would have liked the ability to explore in a non-scrolly way. Personally I find the sad, genetically modified pig really spoke to me, but that may just be something to do with the way I have started the year. BONUS PHOTOS! Here are Nature’s science-y pics, should you want them (you do).
- Frontier of the Year: This is interesting, and made me feel in small part…hopeful? Looking at scientific research and discovery over the past year, the site seeks to answer the questions “How did the world change this year? Which results are speculative? Which are biggest, if true?” – it basically lists 202 different areas and ranks them based on whether they are positive, neutral or negative changes, and how ‘big’ they are in terms of their likely impact, and might make you feel…less bad, maybe? I mean, look – Extreme poverty drops from 27% of India to 5% in one decade! Murder rates worldwide have fallen 25% since 2000! Ok, fine, maybe ignore ‘Artificial chimeras of bat coronaviruses, with up to 100% lethality, produced, on purpose, under BSL-2 conditions’ – think of the good stuff! This is really interesting overall, and you can get more information and links back to cited studies in each case, should you wish to delve more.
- Tera: This is an interesting-ish idea, basically creating AI-generated ‘radio stations’ from online news sources. “Tera FM is an audio news radio that turns online stories into short, listenable updates. Listen to Hacker News, BBC News, TechCrunch, and 40+ more channels—without scrolling for hours” runs the blurb, which is *technically* true – it doesn’t, though, mention the fact that the voices are sadly horrible and unpleasant to listen to, and that it’s significantly slower and less efficient than just reading the articles in question (but I appreciate I am showing my READING PRIVILEGE).
- UK Roads Simulator: I honestly can’t tell you how much I adore that this exists. Have you ever wanted a website which will let you simulate, in slow and very lo-fi fashion, the experience of taking a journey on a UK road? Would you like this website to render said journey in a manner that means the only possible interaction is to click ‘carry on’ to ‘keep driving’? NO OF COURSE NOT THAT WOULD BE MENTAL AND YET IT EXISTS! Honestly, this is SO SO SO pointless and wonderful that I love it more than words can express – it’s apparently been in existence for a while, and despite it being at best a…curious and niche pursuit, I can’t tell you how happy I am that it is possible to take a poorly-rendered digital trip around the M25 (clockwise OR anticlockwise! TRULY, IT SPOILS YOU!) via the medium of the web. You can read a bit more about the project here, should you wish (and I think you really should), but I want to reproduce this bit of creator Chris Marshall’s essay because it’s an ethos I can really get behind and which I think is worth celebrating – MORE THINGS LIKE THIS, PLEASE: “The Simulator is not just ridiculous because it took so much time to make something so utterly pointless. It’s ridiculous because the modern internet is commercial and demands your likes, your clicks, your subscriptions, your money. I am not doing this for the likes. I’m doing it because I think the internet should have fun, purposeless, engaging things and they shouldn’t always be asking you for something in return. The new Simulator carries no adverts and it earns me nothing. I haven’t even got analytics running on it so I don’t know – I don’t want to know – how many people visit or how long they stay to play with it. I just like that it’s just there, for whoever finds it, for fun, for free.”
- Lollipopstar: Ok, fine, not an internet thing, but it’s CES and it would be remiss of me if I didn’t feature at least one moronic ‘tech’ ‘innovation’ in this week’s Curios – and Lollipopstar is said moronic ‘innovation’! Have you ever wondered ‘what if lollipops that vibrate in such a fashion that they conduct music into your skull via your mouth?’? NO OF COURSE YOU HAVE NOT THAT IS A FCUKING IDIOTIC CONCEPT AND ONE WHICH IS DEEPLY UNSETTLING! And yet! Someone is peddling that very thing in Vegas RIGHT NOW! Apparently they are launching with tracks by Ice Spice and Akon (lol Akon, how far your star has fallen since the dream of Akon City died a death!). Anyway, there’s not much you can do at the moment other than SIGN UP FOR THE WAITLIST (why? What ill will befall me if I somehow miss the launch of the musical, vibrating lollipop?!) but I figured you’d want to know about this. No, you’re welcome!
NEXT, WHY NOT SETTLE IN FOR SOME SEASONALLY-APPROPRIATE INDIE TUNES MIXED BY TOM SPOONER?
THE SECTION WHICH ISN’T SURE ‘WE MONETISED THE NUDIFIER BEHIND A PAYWALL’ IS THE MORAL OR PRACTICAL FIX REQUIRED HERE, PT.2:
- 70s Paris: I never went to Paris in the 1970s, what with not having been born, but I imagine that the image in my head (intense glamour! Everything in black and white! Beautiful people!) would be somewhat eclipsed by the reality (an intense and overwhelming smell of Gitanes everywhere! Unconscionable quantities of dog faeces!) – still, thanks to this photo project I can just revel in the imagined version without having to confront any of the olfactory peculiarities! This is a site which…oh, look, just have the translation, it’s easier: “In the spring of 1970, the City of Paris and FNAC organized an amateur photography competition aimed at producing comprehensive photographic coverage of the Parisian territory, divided into a grid of 1755 squares, each 250 meters on a side. 15,000 candidates registered, and 2,800 of them submitted a complete application. These photographs were then given to the Historical Library of the City of Paris, which digitized them and organized them into a collection, available on their website . The site you are on allows you to view all the photos of a square at a glance, before consulting the high-definition versions on the website of the Historical Library of the City of Paris. There you will find 30,225 digitized photographs of 6,918 candidates.” Honestly, this is such a wonderful time capsule – you’ll get more out of it if you know Paris a bit and if there’s a specific part of the city you want to explore, but even as a casual observer it’s so interesting to see just how…well, how Parisian and 70s it looks (these are the sorts of insights you can look forward to more of in 2026!), and, honestly, how incredibly shabby and dirty and sort of run-down the whole city appears. Guys! Guys! THE PAST WAS SH1T ACTUALLY, TURNS OUT!
- Reverse Audio: Give this an audio clip and it will spit it out reversed. Which is GREAT if you want to create a whole new Satanic Panic-type moral craze, or do some backmasking on a record, or just send encrypted messages amongst your friends for the lols. Why? WHY MUST THERE BE A REASON???
- The Pi Clock: A clock! Which shows the time, pulled from the digits of Pi! Or at least that’s what it’s purporting to do – obvs noone has all the digits of Pi committed to memory and so I can’t imagine anyone’s able to ACTUALLY check whether the site is accurate or whether it’s making it all up, but let’s presume good faith!
- Micooked: This is both an interesting and broadly-terrible idea – the best sort! Micooked is basically a service which lets you feed in your particular circumstances (your STORY) and then put it to a selection of different persona-based juries to see what different sorts of people think of your situation/behaviour, a bit like throwing it out to AITA or a similar community. EXCEPT NONE OF THE OPINIONS ARE REAL! This is all being done via ‘personas’ or ‘synthetic audience’-type LLM-juicing; this is basically just telling a model behind the scenes ‘give a perspective on this which Reddit’s AITA community might share’ or ‘tell me what HR managers would think about this’ and OH GOD I can’t begin to express how uneasy this stuff makes me, the way it’s presented as being ‘data led’ or ‘based on real insights’ when, as far as I can tell, this is literally fiction. WHY IS SYNTHETIC DATA DIFFERENT FROM ME JUST IMAGINING WHAT A BUNCH OF PEOPLE MIGHT SAY IN RESPONSE TO SOMETHING? Is it…is it no different at all? Anyway, the people behind this want to charge for access to it, which, well, good luck lads.
- Tweet-to-Magazine: I think this might have been the fortnight during which ‘actively using X’ stopped really being OK – I have for the past couple of years been continuing to post a weekly link to Curios there, but only through muscle memory and I think 2026 is the year when I finally stop because, well, there’s no fcuking point, is there, and while I personally don’t see anything gross unless I actively look for it (guys, just want to say that…you don’t actually have to turn on the algofeed, you know? Like, you can just…not?) it feels too grubby to even post links on any more. Still, should you still have access to your Twitter account you might find this momentarily amusing – plug it in and you will be presented with a selection of magazine covers based on your output, which is moderately-amusing in a slightly-2012 way (you can do this with Insta too, but I haven’t tried that re not in fact having an active Insta presence). Amusingly (lol!) my covers all involved me complaining about writing Curios which, well, METHINKS HE DOTH PROTEST TOO MUCH, etc.
- How London Is Where You Live?: It should be obvious that this link is only for those of you with a London postcode – for the rest of you, the answer is obviously ‘not at all’ – but if you are ‘fortunate’ enough to be in possession of such a thing then you can plug it into this site and get a percentage score determining exactly how LONDON your address is, based on the tube zone it’s in, transport links, whether there’s a Pret nearby (such are the determinants of urban life quality!), etc. I am 71% London based on where I live, so IN YOUR FACE suburbanites (it costs me literally £50 every time I leave the house, at this rate I will have had to sell all of my skin by 2028 in order to afford milk).
- Tiled Art: Do YOU like tesselation? OF COURSE YOU DO YOU ARE ONLY HUMAN! Explore every single facet of tesselation you could POSSIBLY dream of via this excellent website, which has a couple of very cool features, not least the one which lets you make your own tesselating tile set using a rather neat interface which explains helpfully and visually How This All Works, and the fact that you can pick any tesselating tileset and get a little animation explaining to you how the symmetries and flips work, and, basically, if you are someone like me whose spatial awareness can best be described as ‘partial’ and ‘sporadic’ then you will find yourself staring at this with the same sort of awe as one might encounter in a cat observing an astrolabe.
- Mr Panda’s Psychologically Safe Portfolio: Look, I don’t really understand this or know who made it or why, but it is SO BEAUTIFUL – honestly, just click the link, I would like many, many more sites to look exactly like this this year please thankyou.
- Barry’s Border Points: Do YOU like the borders between countries? Do YOU feel a faint, tumescent stirring when confronted with a TRIBORDER or, even more erotically, a QUADRIBORDER (NB – these may not in fact be the correct terms, but, well, come at me Barry)? I bet you don’t like them anywhere near as much as Barry, who has, I think for years, been maintaining this blog detailing Curious Borders and his Travels To Them with photos and writings and while I might scoff (but only a little, promise) this is actually a pretty good resource if you’re interested in arbitrary territorial boundaries – and, well, who isn’t? NO FCUKER, etc!
- Earth Sounds: Have you ever wondered ‘ok, if I were to take data bout the topography of a certain part of the planet and then attempt to convert that data into soundwaves, what would it sound like? And, specifically, what would it sound like if I were to take the topography of where I am RIGHT NOW?’ No, I imagine that you haven’t, and yet that is where you are rubbish and the person behind this website is GREAT – basically (although it’s not exactly intuitive and you will have to fiddle a bit to work out how to make it work) you can select anywhere you like on the global map, then select what sort of analysis you want to subject the location data to, then drop the resulting sound files into the the player and MAKE LOCATION-BASED SOUNDS! Ok, my attempts to create ‘the sound of Oval’ has resulted in, at best, a static-y mess and at worst something that sounded genuinely-eldritch, but you might have more luck – I really like the idea of using this to generate beats or small audio cues to drop into stuff as hidden nods to place (but I acknowledge that it is almost certainly completely useless from a practical, musical point of view). BONUS DATA-AUDIO THINGY! Would you like to listen to the sound of SOLAR RADIATION? Of course you would, so click here (and unmute the site, the icon’s in the bottom left). Horrible, isn’t it?
- FuzzyGraph: “What if graphed equations, but beautiful?” is a question that has been occupying the minds of mathematicians for, ooh, no time at all (they already think graphed equations are beautiful, I guess), but if you’ve ever thought ‘wow, I would really like a very pretty version of that quadratic parabola to hang on my wall’ then this website will be PERFECT. Basically you feed it an equation and it will plot that, but with FANCY COLOURS and stuff – you can remove all the grid lines to create semi-abstract works of luminescent, maths-based line art which are honestly rather beautiful, and if there are any of you out there with favourite equations (on the one hand, this strikes me as…improbable; on the other, I have one or two ideas about what you lot might be like) then you will ADORE this.
- Grok of Sh1t: At the time of writing, Elon Musk’s nonconsensual nudes generator for Nazis has seemingly taken the step of…restricting the creation of nonconsensual nudes to paying subscribers, which definitely seems like a good fix. If you would like to find some lols in the increasingly-bleak landscape of horror that X has become, though, you could do worse than follow Rob Manuel’s latest bot on Bluesky, which imagines Grok persuading its owner of increasingly mad conspiracy theories – silly, but gentle, which is all I feel we can collectively cope with right now. BONUS ROB BOT! This is another one he cooked up over Christmas, mashing up inexplicably-popular UK cartoonist ‘Matt’ (no relation) with other mad conspiracy theories (can you see a theme here?) for comic effect.
- Bird Radio: Would you like to replace the constant, whirring sound of the future and all the horror it brings with the relaxing sound of birdsong? OH GOOD! This site presents a small radio player – pick your continent and then stream a variety of different birdsong in a desperate attempt to take yourself away to somewhere bucolic and rural and SAFE.
- The Heritage of Casio Watches: I have to say I don’t quite understand the degree of almost fetishistic reverence afforded to the Casio digital watch by a certain type of guy – I mean, yes, fine, they WORK and they are OLD, but also they really, really smell bad (why is this? Genuinely curious) and, well, they’re ugly. Still, if you’re part of the subset of people who for some reason holds them up as DESIGN CLASSICS then you might enjoy this Casio website taking you through the HISTORY OF DIGITAL WATCHES (Christ alive) since the 70s. If nothing else this will give the real heads something to aspire to – I have a horrible feeling that if I were to check the price of some of the vintage models on eBay I would be HORRIFIED (although part of me does quite covet the one with the built-in thermometer WHY WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME Christ is this…is this old age?).
- Mirumi: A new year, a new Kickstarter! Mirumi is, basically, ‘labubu, but with AI!’ which honestly sounds horrid but, well, it’s met its goal with a fortnight to go, so it’s coming! “Mirumi is a little companion robot that lights up your heart with its innocent, adorable expression. It notices the world around it and turns to take a peek. When its shy gaze meets yours, it sparks a moment of unexpected joy—just like when a human baby on a crowded train suddenly looks your way. And Mirumi isn’t just for you—it can spark joy for people around you, too. Think of Mirumi attached to your backpack turning to someone behind you on the train. Now imagine the delightful surprise for them!” Think that sounds cute? Look, click the link and then imagine one of these little fcukers stuck to someone’s backpack just suddenly turning its head and LOOKING AT YOU – are you seriously telling me that that’s not sinister as all fcuk? Imagine it when it’s all grey and grubby and slightly-fcuked-up from all the commuting, like some sort of dirty little robot urchin revenant thing, chittering and whirring and just STARING…no, sorry, this gives me the fantods, do not want.
- A Huge Bongo Links Motherlode: Look, it’s January, noone has any money, I have no idea how you are going to choose to spend this, the second-most-miserable month of the year, but should you decide that the answer to that is ‘masturbating to the point of collapse’ then you might find this collection of links to all of Reddit’s bongo-ish corners of interest. If nothing else, this is, as always with these sorts of projects, a really interesting birds’ eye view of the great, crenellated, infinitely-fractal oddity that is human sexuality – HOW, exactly, does one find out that the thing that one finds most arousing in all of the world is ‘hentai magical orgasms’? Genuinely curious. Anyway, click away with impunity – I will NEVER know (also, this is SFW at the point of entry but will very quickly stop being so, so CAVEAT EMPTOR and all that jazz).
- Touch My Belly Button: This game was sent to me by its creators and, honestly, it made me SO HAPPY – it is very silly, but it made me laugh lots (the voice over is genuinely perfect) and, seriously, that is no mean feat right now.
- Infinite Word Search: By the same person as Curios favourite monkeys.zip, this is an INFINITE MULTIPLAYER WORDSEARCH! One day I imagine we will find ALLof the available words, at which point the universe will origami back on itself and all of life will cease (probably), so, er, get a move on.
- Enclose The Horse: This is very simple but also VERY HARD, and significantly more knotty than a game whose entire premise is contained in its title/url ought to be. WHY AM I SO BAD AT ENCLOSING THE HORSE???
- Jigsy: This is basically Tangrams, and, for someone like me who is VERY much Wordcel rather than Shape Rotator, is basically impossible – if you have marginally better spatial awareness than a piece of LEGO you may fare better than me.
- Flickle: Another creator submission! Ilhan writes that he created Flickle “for a specific kind of nerd: the ones who obsess over lighting, composition, and color grading. It’s a daily movie & TV guessing game, but here is the “Curios” part: Each puzzle is paired with a Cinematography Analysis (on the blog section), breaking down why that specific shot works visually. I also included a full Archive Mode because I hate it when daily games lock you out after 2 minutes.” You will have to REALLY know your cinema, be warned, but the film and telly buffs amongst you might find this compelling.
- 45 Groups of 45: BE WARNED THIS COULD TAKE A LONG TIME. Your task here is simple – arrange all of the concepts on this digital magnetic board into 45 groups of 45 things. SOUNDS EASY DOESN’T IT? Honestly, this is EVIL.
- Frost and Furious: DRIVE! DRIVE THE TRUCK! DO NOT CRASH! This is very, very more-ish, trust me.
- Rainbows are Carnivores: Finally this week, it may only be January 9th but it’s unlikely that I will include another link this year whose description is as wtaf as this one. Have you ever wanted to play a fishing game which is also an allegorical piece of satirical commentary on gay culture and the pickup scene in which you literally fish for naked men? OF COURSE YOU DO! This is very weird and you might find it helpful to read creator Robert Yang’s blogpost which explains a little about the game and how it works – this is, per all of his work, funny and weird and poignant and smart, and aside from the very obvious ‘well this is fcuking odd’ appeal there’s something beautiful about the way he uses game mechanics to deliver social commentary. Also, though, you get to fish for naked guys.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- The American Museum of Natural History: Posting excellent nature images and facts every day, in 2026! TUMBLR LIVES, incredibly! Every year I fear I will have to kill this section and every year Tumblr proves itself to be a genuine unkillable thunderchrist of the web! Via Pietro, btw.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Who’s A Good Lizard?: This guy. This guy is a Good Lizard, trust me.
- Indie Charlie Brown: Via Elle, to whom thanks, this initially struck me as funny (classic clips from the Peanuts cartoon, set to old songs that vaguely fit!) and then I found myself looking at the link earlier and inexplicably crying like a child so, er, I am tired, maybe? Or this is actually DEEPLY AFFECTING. Either/or. Seriously though, look at the National ‘Fake Empire’ clip and if you don’t shed a small tear then you are DEAD inside, I tell you.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The 2026 Forecasting Contest: I think I have mentioned here before – and certainly proved it, based on all the crap I have written over the past 16 fcuking years chiz chiz – that I am genuinely terrible at predicting the future (oh the irony that I should have spent so many years contributing to trends documents!), but I imagine that there are some of you who feel that you are EDUCATED and INFORMED and that you have the INSIDE TRACK on how the world is going to play out over the next 12 months…and so I present to you the opportunity to put your…well, not your money, but at the very least your PREDICTIVE CHOPS on the line with the 2026 Forecasting Contest being run by Edrith. They’ve been doing it for a few years now, and the format is simply – just give your percentage probability of 50 separate events coming to pass within the next 12 months, which will be assessed come late-December 2025 to see how many you got right (there’s some weighting based on the certainty of your predictions going on in the scoring, but you don’t need to understand the first thing about maths or statistics to participate, promise), with a GLORIOUS PRIZE (ok, bragging rights) for the person who gets the most accurate set. This is a GREAT idea, not least because we all secretly think we’re better at this than we actually are, and it’s useful to be reminded that most of us will do LESS WELL than an entirely-random set of predictions. Worth remembering when you (ok, fine, when *I*) start making self-important pronouncements about What Will Happen.
- Dan Wang’s China Letter: Kicking the longreads proper off this year with Dan Wang’s near-annual missive about what he thinks about China and geopolitics – he missed 2025, but this year’s edition is a cracking and insightful piece of writing covering both the state of play in China and the US, the relative geopolitical positions of both, the Wang’s loose predictions about What Is To Come in the year ahead, and all sorts of general observations about The World We Live In that will make you smarter than you were before you read it. Seriously, ALL of this is fascinating, but here’s a bit about AI to whet your appetite: “Silicon Valley has not demonstrated joined-up thinking for deploying AI. It would help if they learned from the central planners. The AI labs have not shown that they’re thinking seriously about how to diffuse the technology throughout society, which will require extensive regulatory and legal reform. How else will AI be able to fold doctors and lawyers into its tender mercies? Doing politics will also mean reaching out to more of the electorate, who are often uneasy with Silicon Valley’s promises while they see rising electrical bills. Silicon Valley has done a marvelous job in building data centers. But tech titans don’t look ready to plan for later steps in leading the whole-of-society effort into deploying AI everywhere. The Communist Party lives for whole-of-society efforts. That’s what Leninist systems are built for. Beijing has set targets for deploying AI across society, though as usual with planning announcements, these numerical targets should be taken seriously and not literally. Chinese founders talk about AI mostly as a technology to be harnessed rather than a fickle power that might threaten all. Rather than building superintelligence, Chinese companies have been more interested in embedding AI into robots and manufacturing lines. Some researchers believe that this sort of embodied AI might present the real path towards superintelligence.We might furthermore wonder how the US and China will use AI. Since the US is much more services-driven, Americans may be using AI to produce more powerpoints and lawsuits; China, by virtue of being the global manufacturer, has the option to scale up production of more electronics, more drones, and more munitions.” WE IN THE WEST ARE NOT THE FUTURE OR INDEED THE PRESENT AND IT FEELS VERY IMPORTANT THAT WE ALL KEEP THIS FRONT OF MIND IN 2026. Oh, on which note, this is a different-but-adjacent piece about the rise in popularity and ‘cool’-ness of ‘Chinese signifiers’ in Western culture – ChineseMaxxing, per the piece – which, again, feels worth noting.
- Societies: Another long and moderately-theoretical piece uptop, but I promise you that this one’s really interesting too – I have featured the thinking of Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin in here a few times over the years, and I have always found him a genuinely interesting and smart thinker who is a lot less crypto-y than you might expect given his background. This is him reflecting on his thoughts on new forms of social organisation, based on his experiences setting up small, temporary communities around the world over the past year or so – there’s LOTS of interesting stuff in here about social structures and forms of governance, and, impressively for someone whose background is in tech and crypto, literally NONE of it seems unpleasantly fascist or like he wants to let the rich people secede from wider society (strange but true), and, as with everything I’ve read by him, it’s a genuinely thoughtful series of reflections on how to organise and maintain communities of shared interest, how to build and develop culture for positive ends, and how practically one might go about structuring smaller, semi-autonomous community groups and how those might relate to wider, extant social structures. I have literally NO desire to establish my own micronation, to be clear, or to live in someone else’s, but I really appreciate the level of thinking here.
- The Rise of the Troll State: Ryan at Garbage Day on the mad first weeks of 2026 in the US (and this doesn’t even cover the murder of that poor woman by ICE the other day). Honestly, it’s staggering to me the degree to which the best reporting on the US political establishment and its relationship to the web (and the symbiotic nature of that relationship) is being undertaken by individuals like Ryan rather than newsrooms, and says nothing good about the future of media – anyway, if you would like a depressing read about the state of America (IT’S ONLY FCUKING JANUARY FFS) then, well, here! “The closest description I’ve seen to world we’re now watching take shape is the idea of “the network state.” In 2013, investor and Bitcoin evangelist Balaji Srinivasan coined the term to describe his utopian vision of new cities and countries being formed by what he called “cloud formations,” or the “infinity of subcultures outside the mainstream” that find each other online. Srinivasan, like every other guy in Silicon Valley blinded by naked, unregulated greed, didn’t account for how stupid this would all be in practice, however. And it turns out the end result isn’t some exciting patchwork of new communities. Instead, it’s a handful of poster regimes, rogue troll states, fueled by internet clout, where nothing matters unless it becomes content.”
- X and AI: No, this isn’t about Grok and the nonconsensual imagery (you can read about that literally ANYWHERE else on the web should you be so minded); instead it’s about the extent to which the platform formerly-known as Twitter is so central to the AI ‘ecosystem’ – developers, investors, amateurs and enthusiasts (and all the gross men! Obvs!) all coalescing there, which in turn affects the nature of the debate, which in turn affects the way in which the tech is developing. This may seem hyperbolic, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that ‘if you spend all of the time developing and brainstorming the idea you have for a new chocolate drink in a Nazi bar, your eventual chocolate drink may end up having a few Nazi qualities about it’ – so it is with some of the ways in which AI is being conceived of. You also know that were the UK or indeed anyone else to consider banning the platform you would have a host of entrepreneurial tech types – with good access to the ear of govt! – saying ‘you can’t ban it, you would literally be cutting us off from the ecosystem for this technology which you acknowledge we can’t be left behind on!’, which, while b0llocks, feels like the sort of think Ministers would actually believe. “The AI industry’s X obsession is obvious enough for insiders to joke about, but all evidence suggests they’ll be riding with their feeds until the end. (It’s certainly worked out so far!) As analysts try to identify sources of financial risk and evidence of an AI bubble — will circular financing backfire? Is Oracle’s stock price a worrying bellwether? — the industry’s capture by X, a chaotic platform full of capricious audiences owned by an impulsive and invested tech magnate who holds a grudge, represents an underappreciated latent risk.” WELL QUITE.
- The Delivery Hoax: A good piece by Casey Newton at Platformer, who admirably admits to nearly being taken in by a Reddit post the other week – you might have seen the one, purportedly from an engineer at a delivery app ‘blowing the whistle’ on the unethical approach the company took to assigning jobs and money to drivers, which did the rounds all over socials because it TOLD PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANTED TO HEAR about ‘Big Tech Bad’, with a sprinkling of ‘AI also bad’…and which wasn’t, as Casey found out, true in the slightest. This is interesting on the ‘how’ of the debunking, but I am including it mainly because this is where we are now – you simply cannot believe anything you read, anywhere, unless it’s sourced – and you have to check the source closely, and even then check your prejudices and priors, because the barrier to now spinning this sort of thing up is now basically nonexistent and there are many, many incentives in place to motivate people to seek virality in exchange for creator pennies, regardless of the truth value of anything they post. Is this good? NO IT FCUKING IS NOT! And yet, as ever, here we are!
- Searching for Soul in Roblox: The latest in the growing number of pieces asking ‘hm, have we been paying enough attention to Roblox given literally all the world’s kids appear to be on there right now?’ and coming up with the answer ‘hm, no, not really’ – this is the second part of a writeup by Meghan Boilard, but it stands alone and in general is an excellent and comprehensive piece which makes several excellent points to suggest that at this stage the platform’s failure to institute better safety guardrails for users is a dereliction of duty. “What happens with Roblox from this point forward is anyone’s guess. As criticism about rampant exploitation becomes increasingly difficult to ignore, the insistence that Roblox represents the gold standard of online safety practice becomes less believable. Quick fixes pitched as innovative strides in security just aren’t cutting it anymore. The most recent – a facial age estimation software powered by Persona Identities, set to roll out globally by early 2026 – has been lambasted before it has even had a chance to be fully implemented. If effective, the update may very well make Roblox marginally safer by restricting some interactions between Roblox users outside one another’s age group. However, concerns have already been raised concerning the overall efficacy of the technology. The update does little to combat criticism that many of Roblox’s moderation woes can be traced to an overreliance on imperfect AI.”
- New Arteries of Power: I am endlessly fascinated by the fact that so much of the world’s infrastructure and day-to-day functioning is based on massive, fcuk-off lengths of cable just sort of sitting at the bottom of the world’s oceans, which at any second could be snipped by a bad actor or two and thereby plunge us all into some sort of febrile sea of mad chaos – this is a really good article looking at How The Cables Work and Who Regulates Their Maintenance and the fac that, perhaps astonishingly, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of coherent and coordinated global oversight of this INTENSELY IMPORTANT set of massive wires. There’s an intimation throughout the piece that to create such oversight would require a degree of leadership and global coordination which, well, in the second week of 2026 elicited quite the hollow laugh from me oh god we are so fcuked.
- Notes on Taiwan: One of those bits of writing which is, basically, ‘person goes to place they do not know, writes exhaustively and unselfconsciously about their experience and thoughts about said place’, in this case published on Irish newsletter The Fitzwilliam and all about the author’s experience teaching in Taiwan. This is SO interesting, really open and curious and just…nice, generally, like being shown around by a genial, curious fellow traveller who wants to discuss the WHY of what they are seeing. This is just VERY WHOLESOME and really interesting.
- What An Unprocessed Photo Looks Like: Ok, this is technical and not exactly a longread, but I thought it was interesting both because, if I am honest, I literally had no idea how the fcuk a digital camera actually worked prior to reading this, and also because it will go some way to explaining to you why you shouldn’t really trust any image that you see produced by a phone anymore – because, per this, everything is inference and everything is a software choice.
- Start Drinking: I am aware that some of you will, for various reasons, be pursuing sobriety right now, whether as a temporary THING for January or as a more permanent lifestyle choice, and, well, go you! Consider me an enthusiastic supporter of your endeavours, willing you on from the sidelines! But, also, know that there’s no fcuking way in hell I am stopping drinking, quite possibly not until I am dead, and I very much enjoyed this piece in GQ by Dean Stattman where he talks about the good things that booze gives him and the reasons why life without it is flatter and a bit less good – I thought the stuff about ‘trust’ and ‘vulnerability’ in here was particularly interesting. Look, obviously I can’t speak for anyone else and I get that Addiction Is Real and Booze Can Be Difficult and Hard and Bad For People, but, also, as a species I firmly believe we are all a little better two drinks in.
- Optimising Love: I continue to be slightly amazed that my BIG THESIS for the modern age – to whit, ‘an overreliance on data has made literally every aspect of life marginally-but-noticeably worse than it used to be’ – hasn’t caught on yet, but I would like to present this article, all about people in San Francisco attempting to create BETTER AND MORE OPTIMISED ways of finding ‘love’, as an excellent example as to why I am right. PEOPLE WHO THINK LIKE THIS SHOULD NOT BE IN CHARGE OF RUNNING THE WORLD, OR EVEN A FCUKING COMPANY IMHO! “I told Mr. Zervas that when I looked him up online, I found a link to a request form titled “Anonymous feedback for Cody,” as if he were a customer service experience or a Burger King location. I asked him what the form was for. “Anything. Any encounter you have with me,” he said. “Collecting and improving based on feedback is an important part of any process in life. If you’re trying to make a good product —” “But you’re not a product,” I said. “I’m reasoning by analogy,” Mr. Zervas said. “The worst thing would be to go through your life, having your life be shaped by forces that you don’t understand.””
- Things We Got Stuck In Ourselves In 2025: You do not, I don’t think, need me to explain this to you – here once again is Defector’s rundown, based on actual US medical admissions data, of ‘things people in the US put in themselves and then struggled to get out’. You WISH you had a night as good as this last year, is all I’m saying: “states he has a foreign body in his rectum that is vibrating. he states he was with a girl last night and doesn’t remember much.” BONUS BODY HORROR – here’s all the terrible things men did to their penises – so many of these raise so many questions, such as “pt states he was hit with a cricket ball in the suprapubic area and bitten on his penile shaft. dx: infected human bite” I MEAN WHAT???
- The Sentence Diagram: I am well aware that the vast majority of people reading this will apply what might at best be described as a…loose reading of the prose in Curios, but you will possibly still have noticed my deep, lasting and unshakeable love of an overlong sentence, the sort, like this, full of nested parenthetical clauses which, if left unchecked, might well end up ourbourosing itself into a proper, inescapable gordian knot (but which in this specific instance I will allow you to escape). Anyway, this is an excellent article about one specific sentence in a David Foster Wallace short story, and the author’s attempt to map it diagrammatically, and on how sentences and clauses *work*, and how language works to both convey and obfuscate meaning, and, generally, if you like words and writing then you will love this I think. SLightly annoyed with myself now that I didn’t write that whole entry as a single sentence, hack that I am. BONUS WRITING ABOUT WRITING! This is a lovely, funny and very stylish little essay about the act of editing and, specifically, the use of the ‘comma splice’ as an authorial device – honestly, this made me laugh a lot as well as simultaneously making me jealous of how elegantly it was all constructed, so well done Benjamin Dreyer (you bstard).
- Tasting Water: I first included a piece about the weird world of water tasting and water sommeliers sometime in…2017, I think? Anyway, now there’s another – this is less about the process of tasting water, and the oddity of it as a Thing, as it is about the author’s experience at the annual meeting of the Water Sommeliers’ Union, which is as much about the general human oddness of niche societies and interests as it is about the flavour profile of very mineral waters (though it’s about that too). This is really beautifully-written, I thought, which makes the fact that the author is also an acclaimed film director even more annoying – STOP HOARDING ALL THE TALENTS FFS.
- American Tourists In Rome: A Roman writes about the plague (sorry, but it is) of American tourists in the city, and how it feels, and the very peculiar way in which tourists from the States (sorry but it is true) seem to seek to bend the fabric of reality towards them wherever they travel because, I supposed, so much of their lives have been characterised by the world doing exactly that to varying degrees. I felt this bit particularly strongly, not least in the context of the point I made up top about neither the future nor the present belongs to us any more: “The cold brew order is no new behavior. We know what it is. The American empire is just the fourth incarnation of what started as Roman, became Christian European, and then predominantly British. We know what it is. We still have it in our veins, the disdain these tourists are showing. Their carelessness and abstraction. They are the rulers, the ones who believe they are giving meaning to reality for the first time. They have put something in motion. Now that they have asked for cold brew, a set of invisible quakes and rumblings will bring about a moment, very soon, when someone like these three smug yuppies will stop by the dive bar to find that somebody has, in fact, steeped ground coffee in cold water the night before. If they stop by. And eventually some company or fund, maybe even one owned by a relative of these 30-something Americans, will buy both the business and the building. That’s what the elite naturally do. They put the territory in a chokehold.”
- When Does Divorce Begin: Anahid Nersessian presents a series of observations, vignettes, scenes from a live before, during and after divorce; each of these is polished and near-perfect: “When I got divorced people started telling stories about me. A false rumor spread that I was in a throuple with another professor and a graduate student. The rumor circulated only among my professional colleagues and not among my actual friends. It was as if my sex life, freed from the institution of marriage, had to be swiftly contained by another institution, the university. The episode reminded me that to be a divorced woman is still to be what was once called a public woman, a phrase that carries a range of meanings—from “a woman who makes her own money” to “prostitute”—but above all means a woman who is not under anyone’s protection, who exists for others as an object of ambivalent (critical, salacious, aggressive) attention. I emailed someone who, I’d been told, had repeated the story, and asked him to tell me where or with whom the rumor began. “I’m not going to go any further with this,” he replied, “or involve anyone else.” How fortunate he was, I told him, to be able to make that choice.”
- In The Mist: Rider Alsop writes, in Harper’s, about lesbian sex parties and the queer scene and cruising and and and. This is about sex but weirdly not in any way titillating or salacious; it’s just good, clean, dirty writing about good, clean, dirty fun: “The parties come and go, as do the spaces. My anonymity flags. I know you from Ida, from the afters, from Folsom, from Sunday School, from Summer Scum, from Silent Barn, from the alley, from last night and on into the morning. A friend asks another friend to pull her hair. We are feeding each other water from puppy bowls now. We are choking (just a little) on the water now. There is a chain across your neck. Your lover is getting fcuked by three on a massage table across the room. She is ecstatic and so, so loud. I am biting the inside of your thigh until a bruise blossoms. Then I slap it and mark it with my nails. Someone else brings your tied-up lover poppers and holds them softly to her nose so she can take more fist.”
- Bloodgarden Violation Syndrome: Finally this week, this presents as a game but it’s really just a short story – hit ‘play’ and click to advance the text and…God, no idea how to describe this, it feels Burroughsian and Cronenbergian and fetish-y and horror-y and like poetry and prose, and it’s one of the more remarkable things I’ve read in a while, stylistically, and it has stayed with me since I found it before Christmas, and I think it might be brilliant.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS !: