Webcurios 09/10/26

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Reading Time: 38 minutes

 

WHY HELLO AGAIN HELLO!

I *missed* you! No, really, I did; I even woke up at 6am last Friday in a sweaty panic that I had a Curios to write and no links to fill it with – this is my internal life, you see, SO RICH!! – and, well, what more proof do you need that without you I am nothing?

As I might have alluded to last time, I went to a wedding a couple of weeks back; it was lovely, but you might enjoy this small anecdote from it because, well.

So I was asked to do a reading during the ceremony, which was obviously all lovely and flattering; upon acquiescing, I was sent a link to a Google doc which contained the verse in question. I look, I parse, I close the document, figuring it’s short and I can wing it.

Come the day, the ceremony’s in full swing and it comes to my reading; I stand, phone in hand, and (with only limited glances at the screen, credit to me, well done Matt!) deliver what I would modestly call a STELLAR performance. The crowd, obviously, is enraptured, although I do note what seems to be some small consternation from the MC and some of the wedding party, which I obviously put down to something entirely unrelated to me because I am ACE.

I sit, the ceremony continues without a hitch – although I notice that the final reading gets quietly dropped from the running order. Why? Fcuk knows, not my problem, I am great, let’s get drunk.

Reader…it turns out the Google Doc I was sent didn’t only contain *my* reading. It contained *all* the readings, and I read totally the wrong one, and fcuked up the running order of the whole thing and basically slightly threw the whole thing off. And THAT is how I learned that it’s REALLY hard to notice that there are tabs on a Google Doc when you view it on mobile.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can book me to read at YOUR wedding if you like (but you will have no choice as to what I read, apparently, so suck it up).

By Giulia Muraglia

WHY NOT SETTLE IN AND ENJOY MAX COOPER’S FABRIC LIVE SET WHILE YOU CLICK AND GAWP AND WONDER? 

THE SECTION WHICH IS WILLING TO BET THAT A SIGNIFICANT PROPORTION OF THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SPENT FORMATIVE AMOUNTS OF TIME ON ROTTEN DOT COM AND OGRISH AS ADOLESCENTS, PT.1: 

  • The Tiny Awards Have A Winner!: THE PEOPLE HAVE VOTED! THE WINNER HAS BEEN DECIDED! CLICK THE LINK TO FIND OUT WHO! Thanks so much to every single person who voted and shared the link and wrote about the Awards; this was our biggest year yet in terms of nominations and votes, and it’s honestly so pleasing to see them carving out a small place in the web’s calendar. We’ll be back next year, unless we all die or something (currently only approximately a 3% possibility, I think, but these odds are subject to change).
  • Scrubjay: Given we’re saying goodbye to the 2026 Tiny Awards, it seems fitting to kick off with a webthing (yes, the technical term) which is all about building stuff online; this is a new experimental toytypetoolthing (also a technical term) by Curios favourite Everest Pipkin which is effectively a lightweight, simple website-slash-game-slash-digitalexperience builder, all in your browser. “Scrubjay  allows you to drag any web element into a page and then manipulate those elements casually and immediately- playing, overlapping, making research patterns or decorating lines of thought. It looks at arrangement and decoration as a space for personal agency in computation, and believes in physical, joyful interactions while browsing.” Which, ok, sounds complex, but think of it this way – you can basically pick up elements and HTML from any webpage by copy and pasting, dump it onto a blank canvas and then republish it, creating new…things from bits and pieces of other things, like a universal digital webpage collage tool. Yes, ok, fine, I know that this is a TERRIBLE description (and dear Christ, if this is how we’re starting then I apologise in advance for how bad it’s going to get), but click the link and play and you will, I promise, understand. If nothing else this could be a really fun digital creative toy for Young People In Your Life, or anyone who quite fancies the idea of digital scrapbooking. TRY IT!
  • The Bayeux Tapestry Online Experience: I appreciate that those of you living outside the UK mightn’t give a sh1t about this, but the British Museum in London is currently hosting an exhibition showcasing the ANCIENT EMBROIDERED COMIC STRIP known as the Bayeux Tapestry, back in the country for the first time in, er, lots of years, and the queues are apparently making the viewing experience…somewhat-suboptimal, and so I am *thrilled* to be able to bring you this Official Digital Experience so that you can enjoy the work without the inconvenience of having to stand in line for three hours. This was sent to me by the digital person at the British Museum and, look, I can’t pretend I wasn’t a *tiny* bit thrilled at being PR’d – LOOK MUM I AM A REAL WEBSITE! – but, honestly, I would have featured this anyway as it’s a really nice bit of webwork, letting you explore a high-res scan of the artefact in a variety of ways (a tour of the best bits – IN YOUR FACE, HAROLD! – or a free roam) all with lots of annotations to help explain what all the variously dun-coloured stickmen in helmets are up to and What It All Means. This is great, and a pretty much perfect case study in how to ‘do’ digital accessibility for cultural institutions; no need to render it in Unity or have an AI chatbot, just let people look at the thing and tell them what they are looking at. See? EASY.
  • The Atlas of Bluesky: Ooh, one of those ‘social media networks, mapped by topic’ things, this time for Scold’s Paradise Bluesky! You know how these things work by now – it shows clusters of interests, and you can zoom around to see subtopics within the broader conversations, and, because it’s Bluesky, there are some CRACKERS in here. Come for the ‘Political and Global Affairs’ cluster, stay (and, er, possibly come) for the ‘Rag Slut Self Portraits’, ‘Genderqueer Furry Art’ or the Archipelago of AI Hate! This is actually rather nicely done, and there’s something genuinely interesting about going deep into the various discussion areas to see the subcategories of chat. Didn’t expect there to be such a big ‘Strange School Assemblies’ thread, ngl.
  • INCYNC: OH I LOVE THIS! Honestly, this is SO beautifully-made and weirdly gorgeous to listen to; the site lets you play, and layer, various live performances of the musical composition ‘In C’, ”a minimalist composition by Terry Riley for any number of musicians playing 53 melodic fragments in their own time, in the key of C“; there are a selection of different recordings from different times and orchestras loaded onto the site and you can set them off with whatever delays, etc, you like, creating your very own multilayered composite concert which, amazingly, seems to sound oddly-great whatever you do (there may be some Clever Maths happening here but it is too early for me to think about stuff like that). This is GREAT, I strongly recommend you play with it.
  • Sliding Shores: Would you like to see a simulation of exactly what will happen to the world’s shorelines should global sea levels rise by a set amount? What will 0.3 metres look like? What about 0.5? CAN YOU GUESS? Obviously it will NEVER get this bad (lol!), but let’s just say that were I living near Peterborough I would be…quite invested in the Net Zero conversation, looking at this.
  • Digital Train: Ok, this is BEAUTIFUL and pointless and meditative and I adore it. If you’re anything like me (and, honestly, I hope you’re not, it’s mostly quite annoying and I wouldn’t recommend it) then you will find few things more soothing than the act of sitting and watching the world zoom by from the window of a train – presuming that your life doesn’t afford you as many opportunities for long-distance rail journeys around the world as you might like, then why not check out this website, which uses videos of views from trains pulled from YouTube to simulate the experience of, er, being on a train. “Why haven’t you finished that spreadsheet, Susan?” “I was staring out of an imaginary train window and imagining I was on the Trans-Siberian Railway” – THIS IS PERFECTLY FINE AND HR WILL BACK YOU. You can select a range of countries from the drop-down menus (and weather, and SFX), so why not set it to Switzerland and imagine you’re on your way to Dignitas and the sweet release of death?
  • The Adobe Creative Suite, But Cloned By AI: OK, so I haven’t tried these because, well, I am lucky enough not to have to have anything to do with the Adobe creative suite (I like to imagine that every time I type that without a Copyright symbol a senior Adobe marketing exec gets the soles of his feet lashed), but they have done the rounds this week and I am assured by People Who Know that they do in fact work – someone basically used AI to vibecode the functionality of photoshop et al and make them all available for free, which is obviously…an interesting Rubicon in terms of copyright and the future survival prospects of All Software Businesses Ever but, well, also gives you free access to a whole bunch of stuff that you would otherwise have to pay a lot of money for, so who’s to say what’s right and wrong here?
  • Old Models: As long-term readers (or at least those of you who bother paying attention to what I write and who aren’t so addled by age or misery or substance abuse that you forget everything immediately) will of course know, I have been featuring AI-generated stuff in Curios for YEARS now, well before the current LLM era, and so I was rather tickled by this site which collects a selection of different models and technologies in AI image gen from the past few years and lets you play with them and reminisce about, say, the Deep Dream era in which The Machine saw psychedelic puppies in everything, or the early Dall-E era from whence the horrifying Will Smith eating spaghetti memes came from, and if you’d like to briefly return to the times when this stuff was curious and funny and a bit janky and almost fun rather than ubiquitous and simultaneously very terrifying and very dull.
  • The Clodyssey: A quick check in on ‘what you can do with The Machine this week’; there’s been yet another step-chance in model and agent capability in the past few weeks, and various people have been showing off the impressive results you can get from instructing agents to go off and make videos for you based solely on a few short prompts; this involves Claude (or whatever) pulling together work from a bunch of different image-gen models, using video gen to animate them based on storyboards it’s written…look, I KNOW YOU HATE THIS but look, it’s incredibly impressive (sorry, but it is) and if you can watch this video (which is a pastiche of the Odyssey in musical form, all about AI and superintelligence an admittedly terrible track which is obviously some tech chud’s idea of ‘funny’ which at the same time is MAD when you consider it was conceived of and thrown together by AI in 12h, semi-autonomously) and not think ‘crikey, this stuff is a bit good, isn’t it?’ then, well, what the fcuk is wrong with you?
  • TV Poems: OH THIS IS SO COOL! A clever little hacked-together webtoy which lets you spin up a four-line rhyming poem (ok, look, nothing here’s going to trouble the laureate, but it’s fine for machine doggerel) and which pulls accompanying TV clips to voice it, line by line. You can input themes for the machine to riff on (it’s an LLM under the hood, Jev, that works to pick the ‘best’ lines based on some coded restrictions which help maintain rhyme and meter) and then you’ll get it read out by a collaged cast of characters from the screen; it is SO nicely done, seriously, and there’s been a lot of real care put into calibrating the outputs so that the cadence and flow fit well, and it works so much better than it has to – I promise you, you will REALLY enjoy this. Also, occasionally it throws up things that feel…oddly profound, like this: “I want to go to blow alert. Unless you wanna come. We’re going. Let me get my keys. I wanna bury some. There’s ninety years of mother here including some of mine. I’m gonna take a look around. That one’s completely fine.” SEE? SO MEANINGFUL!
  • Longhoang Yeo: It truly has been a vintage year for people’s personal portfolio websites, but this one I think possibly takes the crown (so far) for ‘most needlessly-impressive and madly-interactive ‘LOOK GUYS I CAN CODE!’ showoff portal’ – hats off to Longhoang Yeo, who has built a full-on little 3d cybertank game which doubles up as a sort-of online CV; move the tank around the landscape with WASD, shoot things, solve puzzles, SHOOT MORE THINGS…honestly, this is better than some actual videogames, I cannot recommend it enough.
  • Fun Little Synth Toy Thing: Yeah, I know, but seriously, I have about 300 tabs to get through this morning and so you’re going to have to accept that the descriptive work this week is going to be even less helpful than usual. LIVE WITH IT. Ahem. Sorry. Anyway, this is a neat riff on a standard webtoy – a synth in your browser, rendered as a 3d object, which you can play by clicking or using the keypad, and which, if you play around with it a bit, reveals itself to be surprisingly full-featured; loop, layer, and do all sorts of weird stuff I don’t really understand with tone and pitch, and SEE WHAT HAPPENS.
  • The Digital Art Timeline: I am quite annoyed by this, I have to confess. This SHOULD be exactly the sort of thing I like – a history of generative art (in its broadest sense – effectively it seems to take that as meaning ‘any artworks which have enough of a sort of vaguely-mathsy element to them’ as well as ‘stuff that is actually generative’, but, well, I’m not really in any position to quibble the taxonomical choices of others, so), presented as an interactive timeline for you to explore and learn about; the graphical stuff is nice, there are a variety of different ways of exploring the archive…and yet it is rendered HIDEOUS AND UNFUN by the fact that the UX and UI is so horribly AI, and all the copy is horribly AI, and as such the whole thing is flabby and baggy and lacks precision or focus and GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH I am seeing so much of this of late, nice ideas that are rendered sh1tty by the fact that the people behind them have just let The Machine do all the design and it sucks, honestly. STOP THIS.
  • Nappy: Stock images, available under a creative commons license, of people of colour, for use on websites and in campaigns. All real people shot by real photographers – apparently the site is in danger of shutting down as a result of AI-generated imagery having flooded the market for stock, which is…well, entirely-predictable but also very sad, so should you be someone who uses these sorts of images then why not bookmark this and support real people and real models rather than the fake versions (while we can still just about tell the difference)?
  • Scanline Videos: Would you like access to an obscure repository of weird arty videos with minimal explanation as to what the fcuk they are or why they exist, and many of which feature the sort of ‘bongo but with a lava lamp filter’ vibe that will be VERY familiar to anyone who’s seen a particular type of 1970s pr0nography? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! “This is described as “ a community centered on DIY audiovisual/electronic art and experimentation”, and it’s…odd, frankly, but I think some of you will find it interesting and fun and quite possibly erotic in ways that you find troubling in the extreme (I do not judge, I merely proffer).
  • A Live Map of the World’s Private Jets: Would you like a live(ish) map of thousands of private jets and where they are in the world RIGHT NOW? Excellent! While this doesn’t, sadly, offer any information as to who is on the plane right now (or any identifying info like serial numbers) which makes it largely-useless for specifically-targeted acts of antiplute terrorism (which, to be clear, Web Curios IN NO WAY endorses), I like to think that there is at least one of you out there who can think of a Creative and Socially Useful way of using this information (beautifully, this link was sent to me by a PR for a company which I think hires out private jets – er, not sure you quite thought this one through, lads, but happy to feature you! God, you could lose HOURS to this – there’s someone taking off from London right now who landed last night from Dulles in DC and I am SO CURIOUS as to who’s doing overnights from Washington…NO MATT, KEEP TYPING, DO NOT GET DISTRACTED FFS!
  • The Visual Experiment Archive: Ooh, this is very cool; Its creator, Kagan, writes: “I recently put together an interactive archive of over 160 javascript visual experiments, exploring sound, motion, particles, generative patterns, and all sorts of strange visual behaviors. These aren’t pre-rendered videos or static showcases. every experiment runs directly in the browser, and i’ve open-sourced the entire collection under the MIT license so anyone can explore, take things apart, remix them, or build something completely different.” Basically just click the link and enjoy all the different examples of soundviz and waveforms and the like, beautifully and minimally presented – if you’re in any way design-minded then this will tickle you, I think.
  • The Eurobird Portal: ALL OF THE BIRDS IN EUROPE ON ONE WEBSITE! Ok, fine, *possibly* hyperbolic, but at the very least it’s a LOT of the fcukers: “There are more than 20 online platforms collecting bird observations in Europe. Some cover a limited geographical area (e.g. a region or country) while others function across several countries. All these portals, unlike more traditional monitoring initiatives, which focus on structured data collection, aim mainly to obtain year-round data from the relatively unstructured but intensive and widespread activities of birdwatchers…The EBP was established to unlock all this potential at the European scale by combining the data gathered by all the online portals operating across the continent.” Basically (very basically, fine, but I’m not a fcuking ornithologist) this offers an overview of migratory patterns and avian volumes across Europe RIGHT NOW (ish), so you can see where exactly all the Eckert’s Spurfowl (no, me neither) are hiding these days.
  • The Chicken Feet Restaurant: OH MY GOD I LOVE THIS. Its creator, Kang Jihoon, emailed me about it the other day; in their words, “I ran a chicken-feet restaurant in Seongnam, Korea, for 1,330 days and closed it last week. Instead of a goodbye post I built its archive: every customer review typeset like a Bible (years are books, the owner’s replies are in red), a guest book that carries on after the last verse, a split-flap clock, a timeline of 206 photos you can roll through, and a little runner game where you play a chicken foot.”  Honestly, this is *such* a gorgeous project, both the execution (which is a really nice bit of webdesign) and the content; the guestbook entries in particular (all in Korean, but Google can fix that) are SO heartwarming and there’s something wonderful about seeing the establishment’s history over the years memorialised in the interactions between guests and the establishment, photos of the food…I spent a good 15 minutes exploring this, and, while I generally hate the word, it is ‘cosy’ in the best way. THANKYOU KANG JIHOON!
  • The Photo: This is a nice project – again, sent to me by its creator, Frederic Eltschinger – where anyone can send in a photo for consideration; Frederic chooses which ones he likes and puts them on the homepage as they come in, a personally-curated, single-shot photographic showcase for photographers around the world. Simple, but I enjoy the fact that it’s dictatorial; what Frederic says goes, and, well, MORE POWER TO YOU, FCUK DEMOCRACY LOOK WHERE IT HAS GOTTEN US (ahem this is obviously a joke, for the avoidance of doubt). Submit your pics, go on.
  • Stillwet Art: A website which presents artworks being ‘drawn’ by Claude, brushstroke by brushstroke, and which shows the ‘thinking’ being done by the model as it works. This is REALLY interesting, conceptually and in terms of outputs: “You’re watching an AI model paint. It writes every brushstroke as code, and a simulation of bristles, wet paint and linen carries it out. The big picture is the painting as it last saw it whole; when it studies a detail up close, squints or checks the picture in grays, that view shows below it. Its thinking runs beside the picture. LIVE means it’s working right now. Press ▶ Replay to watch the painting grow, or tap the painter’s name at the top to choose another.” Smart, and worth spending some time with if you want to get a feel for how frontier models work (in a certain narrow sense) right now.

By Bernadette Timko

JOURNEY INTO AUTUMN NOW WITH THE LATEST MIX FROM THE RECORD COLLECTION OF TOM ‘DAPWEARER’ SPOONER! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS WILLING TO BET THAT A SIGNIFICANT PROPORTION OF THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SPENT FORMATIVE AMOUNTS OF TIME ON ROTTEN DOT COM AND OGRISH AS ADOLESCENTS, PT.2: 

  • The Chopin Planet: Sonification savant (that’s not going to catch on, is it?) Joshua Wolk, he who made Train Jazz from earlier this year, has created another gorgeous little toy using data to make BEAUTIFUL SOUNDS. Using the orbit of a minor planet and the orbit of Neptune (look, it makes sense, I promise), Wolk effectively gets the celestial bodies to play Chopin. GOD THIS IS SO PERFECTLY SATISFYING, honestly.
  • Musical Journey: In 2012 (and trust me, the fact I can remember this with this degree of accuracy is…upsetting to me), I featured a fun webtoy in a very early edition of Curios called ‘Boil The Frog’, which, if you inputted two songs, would chart a musically-coherent course from song A to song B and let you export it as a playlist; now, 14 long years hence, someone has done exactly the same thing, proving that some ideas are too good to die. This is objectively ACE, and there’s something really fun about getting the software to attempt to take you seamlessly from, say, ‘Suzanne’ by Leonard Cohen to something by Extreme Noise Terror.
  • Life After Death: Indefatigable purveyors of superb dataviz The Pudding return, this time with a really smart and genuinely novel means of exploring survey data around people’s beliefs about the afterlife; you interact with the data by moving through a virtual crowd of people, each figure representing a different surveyed individuals opinions…as you go, you realise that there is clustering at play and you are moving through age cohorts, and the whole site tells you a fascinating story about the ways in which our feelings about the possibility of life after death tend to change as we get close to the terminal exit (whodathunkit?!). This is a really clever way of dramatising data imho, worth exploring and thinking about.
  • The Peel Sessions: Not the first site seeking to make the John Peel Archive of live performances (apologies – for the non-Anglos or the young, John Peel was a BBC Radio DJ who championed new, obscure music (occasionally new, obscure, utterly-unlistenable music) on his show and who hosted HUNDREDS of groundbreaking artists doing live sessions) searchable, but this is a simple frontend with some pretty useful search features; sort by artist, range of years, genre, where the band or artist was from…all the sessions are YouTube links as far as I can tell, meaning you can create your own playlists from the best stuff you find which might be fun for some of you (or it might not; honestly, at this stage I don’t care).
  • Craig Mod’s Walks: Ok, this feels like a nice use of AI – Curios favourite Craig Mod, he of the walks around Japan and elsewhere, has for years been documenting his travels on his website; he’s now used Claude (I think) to spin up this wrapper for all of his various strolls and their writeups, letting you see the route he took, mapped, to browse his archive in more visual, user-friendly fashion. This is a prettymuch perfect use of AI coding imho, taking something you own and making it more useful, as well as something that simply wouldn’t exist without AI. See? SOME OF IT ISN’T TERRIBLE, YOU MISERABLE REFUSENIK FUCKS.
  • Destroy Any Website: You may have seen this already – it’s done the rounds in the past week or so – but, if not, this is a riff on the now-classic ‘take any webpage and blow up its components!’ toy but with bells on; this will turn any site you feed it into a minimal platform-type environment that you can blow to smithereens with your little guntoting stickman; pick different guns! Shoot the banners! SEE WHAT ELDRITCH HORRORS LIE BEHIND THE MENUS! If nothing else, feel free to load Curios into it and take revenge on me for all the terrible words and typos and broken formatting and and and.
  • The Voynich Viewer: The Voynich Manuscript feels a bit like the White Whale for a certain corner of the web; should you desire yet another way to explore the as-yet inscrutable pages and to wrestle with THE MEANING OF IT ALL, perhaps you will appreciate this rather-whizzy 3d viewer which offers a potentially-useful additional way of interrogating the manuscript for scholars and obsessives alike: “The Voynich Manuscript is a hand-written book from the early 1400s, full of drawings of plants, stars and women bathing in pools. It is kept at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, where its shelf mark is MS 408. Nobody has been able to read its writing. Yale has photographed every page. This viewer cuts those photographs up so that each piece of parchment becomes a sheet you can hold: you can turn pages, unfold the fold-out pages, and see the whole book in 3D. You can also put the sheets in the order Lisa Fagin Davis thinks they were in before the book was rebound, or in any order you like.”
  • Every Single PS1 Game Model Ever: Ok, fine, maybe not ALL of them, but it’s certainly a metric fucktonne – god knows who it is who’s taken the time to extract all of these, but should you have ever desired the ability to download the original 3d models for Cloud Strife, Sephiroth and Lara Croft with which to enact some hideously-pixellated erotic fantasy of your own devising (I AM NOT JUDGING) then you will be very, very happy with this (but please, do not share your creations, I do not need or want to know).
  • Leave A Song: I think this is a rather beautiful idea; a webpage where you’re invited to leave a song for someone else, just a title, artist and link. Anyone visiting can leave a song and click the button to get a song left by someone else – that’s it, just a 1:1 musical exchange, and there’s something hugely-pleasing about both the small scale of it and the random, grab-bag nature of what you might find (I got this just now fwiw).
  • Don’t Cook That: A collection of terrible, inedible recipes from old cookbooks, which would be SO much nicer if it wasn’t such horrible ClaudeSlop in terms of look and feel. Good content let down by a miserable lack of care and attention to the design.
  • Kinoria: THIS. THIS IS WHAT I MEAN WHEN I COMPLAIN ABOUT AI DESIGN. So this is the website for…I think it’s a camera, of some sort, with a gimmick, but it is impossible to tell because ALL of the prose is AI garbage and NONE of it means anything. Like, the site itself is reasonably-shiny, but WHAT IN THE NAME OF FCUK does this mean? “What you decide, the frame keeps.” WHAT WHAT WHAT THE FCUK??? “The camera turns to what the round finder leaves out, and stays there.” THIS IS NONSENSICAL, NONE OF THESE SENTENCES ARE SAYING ANYTHING. It is ALL like this, seriously; how exactly it is possible to make a very visual site about a camera entirely baffling to the reader is slightly beyond me, but, well, the people behind this have managed it! Look, please, ANY of you reading this, DO NOT LET THE MACHINE WRITE YOUR COPY FOR YOU IT IS STILL REALLY BAD AT IT. BONUS ANNOYING CLAUDE-Y INTERFACE! This is a theoretically-interesting music gen synth toy plus AI, which effectively lets you co-compose with The Machine, which will make up lyrics, etc, to the musical beds you put down. Or at least I *think* that is what it is, because fcuk me is the interface and the UX an unintelligible clusterfcuk – THIS IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO MAKE SENSE OF YOU FCUKING D!CKS, HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE THIS?!?!
  • Bastardica: Ooh, this is fun – make horrible, mixed-up fonts by creating (eg) a version of Times New Roman where every ninth character is rendered in Comic Sans instead, say, or one in which every other letter is stretched to the point of illegibility. A fun toy to create (admittedly largely-upsetting) new custom fonts should you desire such things.
  • Control Panel for YouTube: Ooh, this could be worth installing – this is a Chrome extension which lets you tweak YouTube in all sorts of potentially useful ways, allowing you to not only block ads but also to create a customised viewing experience based on your preferences. Remove Autoplay, hide Shorts from the experience, always play in ‘Theatre’ mode…there’s all sorts you can do with this should you be a particularly-exacting consumer of online video.
  • Blind Spot: TikTok continues to be an interesting place to explore new TV formats – after ‘Through the Queerhole’ (sorry! sorry!) the other week, now here comes this one in which the presenters talk about the experience of being visually impaired (or otherwise disabled) and living in New York City; worth a look, if only to see how people are approaching the medium creatively in terms of content types (sorry).
  • Magpie: Oh this is *such* a good idea; an app (iOS only) which effectively acts as a screenreader for articles, etc, on your mobile: “Magpie is a podcast and article player that can be controlled by voice. Podcasts, blogs, and newsletters are organised in a single library. Podcast episodes play as standard audio. Written articles are read aloud using the Apple system voice you choose, with standard playback controls including lock-screen and headphone support, adjustable speed, a sleep timer, and saved listening positions. You do not need screen-reader gestures or a separate reading mode to listen to an article. You can make requests by tapping the microphone or through Siri, such as: “play the latest In Our Time”, “subscribe to Astral Codex Ten”, or “play the one about Agincourt”. An AI model interprets your request so you can search by topic, title, show, guest, or position instead of remembering exact names.” Potentially a godsend for anyone with a visual impairment and very much worth checking out.
  • Minecraft Roulette: YouTube players which pull videos with 0 views are not a new thing – this one, though, restricts itself to videos featuring Minecraft, of which there are A LOT. If you can get past the fact that 99% of the vids here will have been uploaded by literal, actual children and that therefore a not-insignificant number will feature the incredibly-annoying voices of the same children yapping nonsensically about creepers or whatever (and the fact that, well, it’s Minecraft), this is quite an interesting snapshot rabbithole of A Time And Place In Global Youth Culture.
  • Line: A little webtoy that lets you gently simulate the craft of pottery, except without any of that messy, slightly-disgusting mess known as ‘slip’ (and entirely in two dimensions. Basically you can change the angles and curves on the sides of the pot and then see how that would render across a variety of different base designs (bowl, mug, vase, glass, etc) so you can see how a set might look given the same proportions. Does, er, does that make any sense? Fcuk, it doesn’t, does it? Christ. ONWARDS!
  • Clair De Lune: A truly BEAUTIFUL and hypnotic little Rube Goldberg animation which I really could stare at in wonder for its entire runtime (several minutes) but which I am tearing myself away from because I LOVE YOU AND I WANT YOU TO HAVE MY LINKS. See how kind I am? Honestly, though, on some level this is basically therapy (thanks to Lynn for the link).
  • Global Terror: Another one to file under ‘not quite sure what is happening here and not sure I like it’, this is an…upsettingly-designed webpage where every single element seems to be shouting at you (and it’s not shouting nice things), and which is basically, as far as I can tell, the wrapper for a YouTube channel and Patreon belonging to a strange man who makes videos about (eg) seeing exactly what it feels like to get so fcuked up on drugs that all your bones seem to basically disappear. Please note that I am including not because I think this is ‘good’ – I do not, it is miserable edgelord sh1t – but because, however bad and upsetting the design and aesthetic here is, it is STILL so much nicer and more interesting than a site styled by Claude. LEARN, YOU FCUKS.
  • Where (Roughly) Is?: Can YOU pinpoint where the blue whales hang out on a map of the world? What about the buzzards? PROVE IT! This is…surprisingly compelling, honestly.
  • Size It Up: This game presents you with two objects – your task is to resize one or the other until their relative sizes are real-world accurate. HOW MUCH BIGGER IS A RHINO THAN AN AK47? Again, weirdly compelling to an unexpected degree.
  • Browser Boxing: This was sent in to me by its creator, Garrett, who describes himself as a long-time web developer and who has made this rather fun (and charmingly slightly-janky) in-browser boxing game. Play against friends or the computer and, if you are anything like me, get your ar$e handed to you repeatedly.
  • Wordsquash: “What if Wordle but actually quite unpleasantly stressful?’, is a question noone has ever asked and yet HERE is the answer courtesy of David Nicholls, who sent it to me saying “it’s essentially my attempt to make the opposite of a soothing daily word game. You have to recognise familiar phrases and arrange their words on a 3×3 grid while an increasingly impatient squasher descends towards them.” This is SO ANNOYING, but in a really good way.
  • Sound of Sliver: How quickly can you guess the song from the (insanely short) clips you’re given as clues? Faster than me, no question, I am fcuking TERRIBLE at this.
  • AAA Minesweeper: Minesweeper – the one you know and love! – but presented with the narrative trappings of a AAA game; this riffs off the viral ‘what if Mario, but AAA?’ meme from earlier this year, but is nonetheless very funny indeed; the voice over really does skewer the genre, although it’s also true that the presentation does make the whole thing…a bit more exciting, so it turns out that all those AAA cliches do actually work after all.
  • Identifive: Ooh, this is a neat idea – guess three words each day, each one letter longer than the other, based on the combinations available to you on the Word Wheels – I KNOW, I KNOW, JUST CLICK THE LINK IT WILL MAKE SENSE FFS.
  • Melty: I am not quite sure what has happened in the past fortnight to cause the insane explosion in rips of quite chunky games, but FCUK ME has there been a step-change in the amount of ‘X, in the browser’ ports I have seen floating around, along with a frankly dizzying range of X game mashed with Y game and made playable’ – apparently you can make you very own ‘Call of Duty X Mario64’ (for example) using Melty, which, if you have the roms for the titles in question, will do the heavy lifting of putting the game models of one title into the engine of the other. Honestly, I have NO CLUE if this works or how it works or whether it will infect your computer with the digital clap, so VERY much Caveat Emptor with this one.
  • Explore a Beautiful-But-Sort-of-Soulless 3d World: The problem with vibecoded stuff, part x of y – this is, honestly, SO pretty and the fact that it was spun up by AI is genuinely amazing, but…ach, it’s EMPTY and it’s lifeless and there’s no soul to it, and you really can tell. The link takes you to a sort of massive 3d fantasy landscape that you can fly around; there are various landmarks to ‘find’ and explore, each coming with some flavour text, but it’s all just…generic-feeling and a bit bleached-out, and there’s no joy in the wandering once you’ve gotten over the initial tech vertigo. BUT, that said, I *could* imagine an actual team of designers being able to take this and breathe life into it with storytelling and craft, so maybe the short-term future for this stuff is seeds built by the machine and then tended by actual human creatives. Maybe.
  • No Name Soccer: Quick, simple in-browser football game, with no named teams and no stats and no tactics – JUST KICK THE FCUKER INTO THE NET. Quite fun for a five minute kickabout.
  • Parking Simulator: YOu might not think a top-down game in which you’re tasked to park a car and the trailer its attached to into a series of increasingly-tight spots would be fun, but DEAR CHRIST did this suck me in (and I can’t even drive ffs).
  • Tetris, But Four Ways: Honestly, this starts simple but after approximately three minutes my brain was leaking out through my ears and I was crying blood.
  • COD Zombies: Want to play COD Zombies (I think it’s the COD4 version) in your browser? OH OK HERE YOU GO. This is fcuking AMAZING (also, the only reason I am not linking to the in-browser GTAV is that all the working versions appear to have been killed, but if you know of one then, well, please).
  • Skate 3: Want to play Skate 3 in your browser? OH OK HERE YOU GO! HOW ARE THEY DOING THIS THIS IS WITCHCRAFT.
  • PES6: YES THIS IS IT THIS IS PERHAPS THE PINNACLE GET OUT YOUR GAMEPAD AND CLEAR YOUR DIARY YOU MAY BE LOST FOREVER! Relive the immortal joy of scoring 40 yard bangers with Adriano with this insane port of (possibly) the best football game ever made, playable RIGHT NOW. While you’re meant to be working. I KNOW!!!

By Bill Brown

OUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS SOME OLDSCHOOL HOUSE AND ACID AND FUNK AND STUFF SELECTED BY STATUES! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Orca Grotto: NOT IN FACT A TUMBLR! But it *is* a place where one person expresses their deep, abiding love for orcas (no, not like that!) and who doesn’t want to see that? NO FCUKER, etc!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  •  Infinite Ice Creams: These are not, in fact, ice creams, and you would be VERY UPSET were you to mistake one as such. Instead, they are rocks. Look, trust me, it will make (some sort of weird) sense as soon as you click, and you will agree with me that this is a VERY PLEASING project (no idea why, though).
  • DarqDagr: Don’t look at me like that, he’s the one spelling it this way. Have you ever wondered ‘what would it sound like if someone did that sort of death metal growl vocal over really mediocre dubstep drops, and what if the growl was saying really vanilla BDSM-adjacent phrases like ‘Run, little mouse’, straight out of the romantasy/werewolf bongo canon?’ You HAVE? You…you fcuking weirdo, honestly. Still, that is what’s happening here – it’s called ‘smutstep’, apparently – and judging by the comments on these vids there is a small-but-dedicated audience of women and gays who really want to be called a ‘naughty little girl’ by Grindcore Skrillex.
  • Long Lost Personals: Newspaper personal ads from The Past, when it was apparently entirely ok to put an ad in the paper saying “send nude photo please” alongside AN ACTUAL PHOTO OF YOUR OWN FACE. The past, truly a different country (and yet in some crucial respects, not anywhere near different enough).
  • Bitchfork: A new female-focused music magazine which I know nothing about other than its name really made me laugh because, it turns out, I am a tiresome, tryhard teenager at heart.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • The New UN Climate Report: Another good piece of analysis looking at the latest UN report into how we’re fcuking everything up, climate-wise, by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, who has taken the time to actually read the document and presents a selection of Things We Should Be Aware of which come from it. Look, it’s not…it’s not cheering news, fine, but she DOES sound a small note of relative optimism at the end: “It remains as true as ever that we have solutions. So many solutions! The UN is very clear in this report about what a trajectory to a safer, cooler world looks like. And no one better elucidates the 100s of solutions at our fingertips than Project Drawdown. While I’m fully on board with the UNEP in calling for transformation, I also know that with a crisis this all-encompassing, the increments do really matter. The difference between getting this 40% right and 80% right is hundreds of millions of lives. Food security (crop failures, fisheries collapses) and safety (storms, floods) for billions of people, for all of us, hang in the balance.” FWIW, I remain 100% convinced that the big elephant in the room that noone is talking about, and the reason why every single G7 government has such a hard-on for AI as a technology, is because THEY ALL KNOW WE HAVE FCUKED IT, and they all think that AI IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE SOLUTION LEFT TO US THAT MIGHT WORK, and that they are punting everything on The Machine because it’s literally a Hail Mary at 3rd and 10 with 15s left in the 4th Quarter (see? I CAN DO SPORTS ANALOGIES TOO), but noone wants to say this out loud because, well, it’s a bit too much like staring at the sun.
  • Brazil: The first round of the Brazilian Presidential elections earlier this week provided yet another neat proofpoint demonstrating that, collectively and taken at a Big Picture level, we really are fcuking morons who will consistently choose to act in ways that will fcuk us up. How else to explain the Brazilian electorate’s seeming willingness to elect Bolsonaro’s Failson? Actually there are a few reasons that explain the (seemingly) inexplicable, as this interesting article (an interview with political philosopher Rodrigo Nunes) makes clear – this is worth reading in full, not least because of the perspective it gives on geopolitics through a Brazilian lens. Aside from anything else, this is an excellent and pithy articulation of something that has been true for a while now but which is rarely laid out so cogently: “The appeal of the contemporary far right changes depending on where you stand. The ruling class sees it as offering the most predatory form of capitalism and neutralising all challenges from below. The popular base is drawn to the discourse of law and order and the prospect of a more deregulated economy that will ‘get the state off their backs’, allowing them to compete more efficiently in the market. For an irregular cohort drawn from both camps, it’s also a career opportunity: you can now make good money as a far-right agitator.”
  • Poisonous Fruit: The ‘Cornell 7’ story coming out of the US in the past couple of weeks is another miserable datapoint in the general ‘wow we really haven’t come anywhere near as far as we have enjoyed telling ourselves when it comes to attitudes towards sexual assault’ discourse; this piece isn’t specifically about the Cornell story so much as it is about the fact that we continue to allow men to behave like this with relative impunity, about the fraternity system in the US and how much of it seems designed to facilitate events and male behaviour such as this, about the way in which society continues to be weirdly weighted towards not wanting to ruin the lives of promising young men who have ‘just made a mistake’… This is very good, and very angry: “Men are not going to upend the system that serves them. I am sad about it, too, but I have been waiting my whole life and it’s not happening. I saw a woman talking about how moms need to talk to their sons right now and a bunch of women in the comments freaked out and said DON’T BLAME MOMS AGAIN and DON’T GIVE WOMEN MORE WORK TO DO and one woman said DADS NEED TO ENTER THE CHAT, BOYS ADORE THEIR FATHERS! And you know what? Fuck that. Fuck it. What are they waiting for? The dads that were going to “enter the chat” already did. If they haven’t by now, they aren’t going to and they never were. We had Gisèle Pelicot. We had the Motherless website. Do these dads need a written invite to the horrors? We have asked, we have pointed to it, we have begged, we have gone numb, we have gone crazy. I raised a kid who feels sick to his stomach thinking about what happened to Jane Doe, and I didn’t wait for a man to enter the chat after a man left the chat. The chat goes on and it waits for no man. There are good men and they are already in the conversation and I have even seen some outrage and I hope I see more, but men are not going to uproot the tree, friends. The tree is affording them shade and ease.”
  • My AI Agent is Making Me Lamer: As the agentic AI era kicks into gear – in the US, at least; thank GOD for Eurolegislation shielding us, for the moment, from the tentacles of its next evolution – so we’re going to start seeing the Weird Social Wrinkles emerge as people start to outsource significant aspects of their lives to digital assistants whose behaviour (let’s keep on saying this, it feels important to reiterate) NOONE REALLY UNDERSTANDS FULLY. One such wrinkle is going to be the flattening of everything towards the ‘optimal’ mean – after all, if everyone’s letting The Machine make their decisions for them and everyone’s version of The Machine (while obviously tweaked for personal preference) is running off the same architecture and the same training set, so will we tend to see similar suggestions and actions and outcomes begin to emerge, clustering behaviour in as-yet-unknowable ways) – and, as such, the removal of the wrinkles and frictions and human habits where the interesting can often lurk. Basically I read the following and immediately convinced myself that THIS was going to be what transforms Web Curios into the media juggernaut I have always known it should be – any Big Media Owners want to swoop in any pay me £50k a year for this OH SO VALUABLE bit of modern media, just shout! “I miss the serendipity of online rabbit holes. This is coming from someone who has been perennially online a lot of my life. I’m now asking myself: am I getting older or is AI technology making me lamer? Much of the trendspotting and things I learn are from my rabbit holes, Substack and lurking down some Twitter hole. The discovery piece, while I still do (though it feels like less), is taken up by stupid shit I should optimize. I kind of miss being on Twitter and like digging around and finding niche, interesting things. My Internet Explorer StumbleUpon vibe has shifted completely and it’s super depressing. Some of this isn’t the AI. My calendar is just fuller, so less time in Discords and the platforms were already getting worse. The X algorithm doesn’t push you to the edge, it pushes us to a common context and often that context is just a shared negative space. But the rabbit holes are kind of where I figure out what I like, and the agent skips that part.” BONUS AGENTIC BELLCURVE HORROR! This piece, in Noema, about how we’re going to see more and more ‘just good enough, ish’ mediocrity in the world as the agents work alone and unbidden. GREAT!
  • The UK and AI Safety: You may not THINK you care, but it’s worth reading this decent and comprehensive explainer on the UK’s current position when it comes to AI safety and the tech’s regulation, because it lays out quite neatly what a clusterfcuk it is; which, given the amount of fcuking time the Government has devoted to wanging on about the tech over the past two years, is somewhat surprising. Will we get primary legislation? Will the promised ‘AI Bill’ ever happen? Does anyone know what ‘sovereignty’ actually means? The answers, should you be curious, are “probably not”, “probably not”, and “LOL YOU ARE JOKING AREN’T YOU?”.
  • What Will Happen To Indian IT?: Another in my semi-regular attempts to remind myself that ‘the impact of AI’ is a conversation happening EVERYWHERE, not just in the West, and that the reality is necessarily different in different places (yes, I know, obvious but still). This is a really good piece of writing in Asterisk Magazine which looks at both the history of IT outsourcing to India – how did the boom happen and when and why? I had no idea that the Millennium Bug was such a driver of the industry, for example – and the actual and coming impact of AI technology on the sector. I did find it darkly amusing that the article talks blithely about the fact that the sector will probably do ok while…slightly glossing over the human impact of the near-inevitable headcount reductions, but, well, WELCOME TO THE FUTURE OF WORK, EVERYONE! Can I take a moment to say, once again, that as we approach the four year anniversary of ChatGPT’s first emergence that it fcuking STAGGERS me that we still don’t have anything resembling a coherent view of how we want to manage its impact on the labour market. LADS THIS ONCOMING TRAIN HAS BEEN VISIBLE FOR A WHILE NOW, MAYBE WE COULD THINK ABOUT GETTING OUT OF THE WAY BEFORE IT TURNS US INTO METAPHORICAL JAM?
  • GPT Travel Planning In China: Another of Geoffrey Ding’s fascinating in-translation articles from China, this time looking at the experiences of various Chinese citizens traveling on a national holiday and using AI to plan their trips; this is interesting not because the tech works or doesn’t work (it…sort-of works), but because (per the agents piece above) the wrinkles it reveals in how this stuff is going to impact the real world. I particularly enjoyed the detail that agents all glommed onto the fact that some attractions were less busy at certain times, told people to visit at said times…thereby causing new congestion and bottlenecks. MAKES YOU THINK, EH???
  • The People Holding Up The Internet: You are all, I am reasonably willing to bet, the sorts of people who are familiar with that XKCD cartoon about how the whole internet is basically dependent on a single github repo maintained by a guy called Dylan who lives in Nebraska, alone, and is now in his late-60s; this is an essay/explainer (scrollytellingish, if you will forgive me the now hopelessly-outdated term) which shines a light on who some of these people are, and what exactly would fcuk up if they were to drop dead tomorrow. There’s a really interesting detail in here about the value people ascribe – or, more accurately, don’t – to these things; the person behind core-js says he managed to raise the princely sum of $57 from crowdfunding when he asked for donations to help keep the project going, which is…god, everything is going to break SO BADLY in a few years time, won’t that be fun!
  • Inside The Russian Recruiting Machine: The Russian war machine continues to require meat for the frontline grinder, and, it turns out, that meat is being sourced by recruitment agencies being paid by the state to tempt young people (and, frankly, anyone else they can get) into being target practice for enterprising Ukrainian drone operators. This is SUCH an interesting look at how the recruitment pipeline works, written by someone who managed to get into the recruiters and see how the system worked first hand; “the head of AKS sent a Google Drive folder: training materials for aspiring recruiters. One sheet lists the regions through which a man can sign, and the region decides almost everything. Sign in wealthy St Petersburg and you get 4.5 million rubles at once, about €47,000. The fitness examination is strict, and nobody over 55 is taken. Sign in Voronezh, 500 kilometres south of Moscow, and you get half. There, the sheet says, the medical check is “very loyal”. It means lenient. Hepatitis and HIV are no obstacle. The rule holds down the list: the less a region pays, the less it asks. Some accept, by arrangement, men with diabetes, a slipped disc, blindness in one eye or a mild intellectual disability. In Bashkortostan, Vadim’s home region, a man can still sign at 64. A subfolder is called «Креативы с девушками», “Creatives with girls”. It holds ready-made ads: AI-generated young women in uniform next to the offer. “5,620,000 rubles for a year of service”, about €56,000. A one-time payment of up to 3.1 million. Salary from 210,000. Debts written off up to 10 million. “Ticket, accommodation and food at our expense.” “Any university in the country, no waiting list.”” MORE RUSSIA: this is an interesting piece about the Russian propagandist use of AI-generated songs as a morale-boosting exercise; slopaganda is real, etc etc.
  • Who Gets To Speak for Eritrea?: I’ve spent the past year or so doing a bit of volunteering work with refugees from Eritrea and Ethiopia and so I found this piece particularly interesting and poignant; if you’re not familiar with the current state of play in either country it’s worth reading this piece, not because either is (sadly) unique, but because there are many, many situations all over the world that are a bit like this, where many of the people seeking asylum in Europe come from, where people’s lives are being fcuked in half through no fault of their own, and where no sane person with the wherewithal to leave would choose to stay.
  • Squat Photography: This is from August so apologies for my tardiness; in my defence, though, I don’t tend to see that many links from World of Interiors. Anyway, this is a BRILLIANT photo-led essay about the squat scene in London in the 1990s, from free parties with Spiral Tribe to Hackney before it got hipster, and it feels a lot longer ago than just three decades in many respects: “What I realised is that neither he, nor the house, nor the photo is trying to signal anything at all. That’s precisely what draws me to Hunter’s work: the subjects are not thinking about how they will be perceived by others. No audience exists in their minds. How rare is it now to gaze at an image in which both the subject and their surroundings are completely unconcerned about how they might be perceived? What does it mean to live without those reflexes? How might we decorate our homes if we thought that no-one beyond our immediate friends and family might see it? If there wasn’t a financial or social imperative to impress the right people or project a certain image? If we weren’t always worried about the landlord in our heads?”
  • Black Bag: I haven’t read all of the Booker nominees this year – look, I’ve been busy, leave me alone – but, of the ones I *have* read, Black Bag by Luke Kennard was the one I enjoyed most; this is a good piece in the LRB presenting the book and telling you what it’s sort-of about without telling you exactly (if that makes sense). Give it a go: “Black Bag spans several genres while not belonging to any of them. It’s not quite a campus novel but has things to say about what it’s like to teach at a university (‘We’re supposedly the finest minds in our respective disciplines but we’re required to spend most of our time boring hungover teenagers to sleep’). It’s not quite a satire on the theatre world but says more about acting than Rachel Cusk does in her latest novel, Life of M. It’s not a surreal parable but the central bag image is as haunting as Kafka’s Metamorphosis. It’s not a state-of-the-nation novel either, but it wittily documents the paraphernalia of our times: chiller cabinets, EVs, VR goggles, datasets, iced coffee cans, bars of soap that look as if they have been ‘carved raw from the side of a cliff’, negronis ‘the colour of healing potions in a video game’, the disadvantages of living in a ground-floor flat, the ‘laryngopharyngeal noises’ of an espresso machine.”
  • The Failure of the Pandemic Novel: Martin Dolan writes in the Metropolitan Review about how the novels that came out in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic feel…odd, now, and somehow inauthentic, performing reaction rather than embodying it, which, on balance, I think is perhaps fair (although I might argue that that’s a necessary factor of good literature requiring time and distance from its subject). This covers authors from Shteyngart to Lockwood and will be more enjoyable the more of them you’ve read, but in general it’s an interesting essay about how we write about Big Crises and how we reflect and react, and how that changes with the passage of time (and why, perhaps, it simply wasn’t possible to Make Good Work In Covid).
  • Bitcoin FC: A fun piece in Dispatch Magazine profiling Bitcoin FC, a team in England’s lower leagues which is being bankrolled to (current, relative) success by its libertarian Bitcoin enthusiast owner, much to the seeming bemusement of most of the Bedford residents who turn out every week to see the team play. Why are ALL Bitcoin people so fundamentally ridiculous? This is a semi-sincere question, honestly – anyone? “It’s a couple of hours before kick-off, and around 20 people are sitting in the clubhouse for the latest Bitcoin meet-up. They are almost all middle-aged men. An American dressed in orange films himself talking about Bitcoin culture. A teacher who’s travelled from Norfolk listens politely. A man with plugs in his earlobes describes a Bitcoin-mining simulator he has designed, to mild interest. That’s Mark, by the way. Around us, footballers wander through on their way to get ready for the match, paying little attention to the gathering. At one point, the only woman in the room asks what could be done to persuade more women to come along. Peter McCormack, Real Bedford’s chairman, wonders aloud whether men simply think about money more than women.”
  • I Ate Nothing But Nutella For A Week: 11 years ago a young Australian aspirant journalist working for VICE pitched a piece to his editors about only eating Nutella for a whole week and writing it up in the house style; the editor said yes, the piece was written and it changed David Allegretti’s life forever (or at least for a good 6-8 year period). This is a really fun look back at his experience – the article, the Nutella, but also the particular world that he inhabited, the last hurrah of the clickbait empires before the algofeed fcuked them into oblivion, and the last generation for which ‘a career writing pieces about pop culture and self-destruction’ was a genuine possibility rather than a cruel joke.
  • Making Microdramas: I cannot stress enough what a brilliant, funny, mesmerisingly-odd piece this is, all about the very serious business of making the vertical-first microdramas that are currently the only game in town as far as Hollywood is concerned. Every part of this is hilarious, apart from all the bits where the author soberly considers whether this is all that people want now, and, if so, what that means (the section on ‘people on their phones want to watch phone stuff’ is, honestly, so smart and so neatly-articulated and I think every single person working in ‘content’ should a) feel ashamed; and b) internalise that IMMEDIATELY).
  • I Lost Myself When I Lost Hong Kong: Our final longread this week is a beautiful essay by Tiffany Huang, about leaving home and lost love; I enjoyed it so much that I was able to ignore the really horrible page layout on Electric Literature, and I can think of no higher praise, honestly.

By Carlijn Jacobs

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!