New year, new worries, same old Web Curios! Even in the maelstrom of moderately-unsettling uncertainty that is Q2 of the 21st Century, rest assured that I am once again here to greet you with open arms, a tear-streaked face and a hug that you will initially find welcoming but will, as it continues without showing signs of stopping, begin to make you feel uncomfortably like I am holding onto you for dear life lest I otherwise slip away into nothingness.
You’ve missed this, I know you have, don’t make that face.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and it’s ok if you make ‘unsubscribing from this sh1t’ one of your new year’s resolutions, I will never, ever know.
THE SECTION WHICH ODDLY ALREADY FEELS LIKE THIS YEAR HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR APPROXIMATELY THREE DECADES, PT.1:
- Simulation Clicker: Our first link of 2025 is one which, if you’re a certain type of online person, you will probably seen already – congratulations to Curios favourite Neal Agarwal who’s snagged the coveted (not in fact coveted, except maybe in some VERY niche circles) ‘first viral link of the year’ slot with this EXCELLENT clicker game. Ordinarily I chuck the games at the end of the main links, but I’m putting this one up front because a) it’s very good, and deserves to be looked at even at people who normally have better things to do than waste 30m on what, objectively, is an entirely-pointless exercise in ‘watching the number go up; and b) because it is SATIRE, and good satire at that, about THE FCUKING DIGITAL WORLD WE LIVE IN and what we are doing to ourselves with it and why. The premise is , as with all clicker games, simple – you need to accumulate clicks (do not ask why, for that way madness lies). The more clicks you accumulate, the more you can automate said click accumulation, until you have a veritable factory production line of systems all automatically clicking for you – but, in this instance, every new tier of automated clicking ALSO unlocks a new level of ‘digital stimulation’, drawn from an increasingly-ridiculous and pleasingly-imaginative selection of modern-day online junk trops, from slime ASMR videos to STONKS trading to lofibeats radio…how much stimulation can YOU take before it all becomes too much? Will you flake out, or will the promise of MOAR CLICKS keep you glued to the screen til your dopamine receptors fry out entirely? Honestly, there was a certain point beyond which playing this was almost physically painful for me – and I know that that doesn’t make it SOUND like something you should experience, but, I promise, it’s exactly why you should (WARNING: this will make your laptop sound VERY emphysemic, but it’s probably fine. Probably). BONUS FUN LINKS: if you’d like to experience this but don’t want to spend the time, you can find some code in this Reddit thread which will set up autoclicking in the browser window so you can speedrun the whole thing. Oh, and Andy found a standalone version of the STONKS game which is weirdly addictive just to play on its own, should you fancy wasting some more time.
- Subway Stories: A beautiful bit of urban storytelling, this site, found by Giuseppe Sollazzo – this is SO nicely-made, and a really clever way of using mass-scale passenger data to tell the story of the city in non-obtrusive and non-creepy-feeling fashion. Per the blurb, “Every year, New Yorkers take more than a billion trips on the subway. Using data from the MTA, we mapped out how riders flow between stations at every hour. Each story explores a slice of city life. Scroll down to keep reading, or click the horizontal lines on the left to jump between stories. The captions at the bottom explain what’s on the map for each page. Click the info (ℹ) icon at the top right for more details.” So as you scroll you’ll get a bunch of different little vignettes about different parts of the city, explaining why certain stations see specific traffic at certain times of day or the year, why it comes from specific places, where people are going and what they are doing…it paints pictures of the characters of neighbourhoods, from the differences between the Chinatowns to where the late-night party kids end up before getting the dawn subways back out to suburbia…all of city life is here and, as ever, I would LOVE to see a version of this doing a similar job for London. Does API data exist for station footfall over time per station? Because, if so, one of you could say thankyou to me for all these years of ceaseless, uncomplaining (well, ish) service in a very kind and specific way.
- Build Websites With AI: I appreciate some of you will be displeased at the fact that we’re into a whole new year and I appear to still be banging on about AI stuff – but, well, tough, Cnut. And anyway, this is GOOD AI (sort-of), not ‘stealing artists work’ but instead ‘letting anyone make a website really, really easily, even if they can’t code for sh1t’. Obviously these aren’t exactly fancy websites – you’re not going to be building a business off this stuff, at least not yet – but there are some interesting examples on the homepage of the sorts of things that people have been spinning up and it feels like we’re on the cusp of this stuff getting…quite good? Here for example’s a little game someone’s build which asks you to identify one of four notes from a lineup – ok, fine, it’s hardly Balatro but, well, IT IS MADE USING THE MACHINE! THAT IS QUITE AMAZING! Or this one, which generates a bunny avatar for you on demand (and which would 100% have been an NFT scam 4 years ago, oh how times change!)! Basically I think that things like this are probably just about worth playing around with now in a way that they probably weren’t a year or so ago, and we’re getting increasingly close to some interestingly-creative options in development opening up to people with no specific technical skills whatsoever.
- Search For Things To Read With AI: Hardly an elegant title, fine, but this website’s called ‘En’ so it’s not like their name’s better. Via TITAA, this is smart way of using an LLM which offers you a natural language interface to find your next book to read – just type in your question and see what it spits out, so things like “a literary novel whose themes explore the tension between eros and thanatos” or “werewolf bongo with knotting scenes”. I’ve given this a go with some reasonably-oblique questions and been quite impressed with the outputs – I don’t know whether this is just an off-the-shelf model with a nice skin or whether it’s been specifically trained on something a bit more literary, but the recommendations…seem ok? Although honestly I would be FAR more interested in seeing a live feed of the queries people plug into this because my WORD do I imagine there to be some very specifically-constructed enquiries about romantic/erotic fiction in there. BONUS AI INTERFACE THINGY!: This is the same kind of idea, except instead of asking it about things to read you’re instead asking it about places to go, so for example ‘football pitches in Morden’ or ‘parking in Croydon’, and is both, again, interesting and potentially-useful.
- A Personal Portfolio in Minecraft: Ok, it’s not *technically* actually in Minecraft, it’s just designed to look that way, but this website, but one Andrew Woan, is LOVELY – it’s his small personal portfolio site which I think is intended more as a proof-of-concept than anything more fully fledged, and while it’s not hugely-interactive I found the interface and the animation as you scroll and the general look, feel and *vibe* of the whole thing is just gorgeous and I would generally like more sites to do this sort of thing please thankyou.
- Meawio: This really is VERY silly, but, well, it’s January and it’s incredibly dark and cold, both literally and metaphorically, so I feel reasonably-OK about this edition of Curios being light on roughage. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to play Super Mario Brothers, or indeed a selection of other classic NES titles, in your browser, with all the sound effects replaced by the sound of cats? No, of course you wouldn’t, that sounds weird and pointless and a bit sh1t – AND YET IT EXISTS! You can also upload your own sound sample to trigger each time Mario kills a Koopa, say, which for those of you with a friend with an HILARIOUS CATCHPHRASE or similar could I am sure lead to some high comedy. But, er, keep it to yourselves, eh?
- The Bruv Party: Oh, was that TOO silly for you? TOO frivolous? FINE, then, watch now as I apply the patented huge Curios thematic handbrake as we pivot hard to THE NEW FASCISM! Fascism that writes in crayon, true, but, well, fascism nonetheless. Amongst all the sound and fury of the *checks calendar* dear God FIRST FCUKING WEEK of the political chat of 2025 you’d be forgiven for not noticing a pronouncement from Andrew ‘Top G, Tiny Penis’ Tate that he had HAD ENOUGH of Britain being ruined by communists (or something; it’s hard to tell) and that he was so disgusted by the exploitation of young women and girls by criminal gangs that he was taking time out from, er, being investigated on counts of human trafficking and ‘sexual misconduct’ to throw his hat into the political ring. And lo! So it came to pass that the BRUV Party was apparently born (this is not a political party, to be clear, it is a thinly-disguised top-of-funnel marketing effort for Tate’s fraudulent ‘hustler’s university’ grift). BRUV obviously stands for ‘Britain Restoring Underlying Values’ (I know, I know, and it gets less coherent from this point onwards!), and the homepage links you to Tate’s ‘values’ (a page on the aforementioned ‘hustler’s university’) and to the party ‘manifesto’. Look, I know you don’t want to give this man the oxygen of publicity and, mostly, neither do I, but it really is worth downloading the document and having a read because FCUKING HELL. It looks and reads like it was LLM’d into existence in about an hour (and it quite possibly was), from the AI-generated images (there’s something almost poignant about the slide extolling the importance of education accompanied by a machine-created picture of a teacher at a board reading “ENTREPRENULSOIP”) to the…unsophisticated prose, but, equally, if you bother to actually read what the slides are saying then it’s…fcuk, it really is Fisher Price Fash in every single way possible. It’s a joke, but it’s not really a very funny one – I don’t think that this is going to go anywhere beyond doing a bit of work to swell the Tate empire’s mailing list, but it’s also not impossible that Elon will decide that THIS is the UK political force worthy of his cash at which point I am fcuking it all off and moving to Italy because even Meloni would be better than that.
- The Plastic List: I can’t imagine that you need additional reasons to feel mildly uncertain and anxious about the future here in twentytwentyfive, but here’s one anyway! Both really interesting and deeply unsettling, this data is the culmination of a six month investigation in the US into the amount of chemicals found in everyday foods in the US. What was meant as a quick fortnight’s experiment expanded into a much wider project: “We formed a team of four people, learned how this kind of chemical testing is performed, called more than 100 labs to find one that had the experience, quality standards, and turnaround time that we needed, collected hundreds of samples, shipped them, had them tested, painstakingly validated the results, and prepared them to share with you. Over time our effort expanded to nearly 300 food products. It took half a year and cost about $500,000.” The result is this dataset, presented in admittedly-unattractive tabular website format but which lets you look at and sort the numbers in all sorts of ways. The upshot? “We detected plastic chemicals in 86% of the foods we tested.” HOW IS THERE SO MUCH PLASTIC IN US BABY FOOD???
- Websites From Hell: There’s no record of this in the archive, although it looks suspiciously-familiar – I think this might have been featured MANY years ago, like 10+, which feels uncertain and long-ago enough for me to give it a pass. You want a collection of really horribly-designed websites collected in one place? You do? HUZZAH! I almost just got stuck on this one reminding myself of the sorts of things it features and becoming momentarily-fascinated by who or what the REBEKAHS OF MAINE are (seemingly some sort of women’s Masonic-adjacent WASP-ish community group, I think? But…are they all called Rebekah? AND IF NOT WHY THE NAME???), and if you’re a particular type of person (or if you are practising some very intense work-avoidance this afternoon) then you could lose yourself for quite some time in here.
- Outdraw: Ok, fine, this is a link to a page about a game that isn’t technically out yet, BUT! I am linking to it because it’s SUCH a cool idea, and because I played a demo at London’s Now Play This festival last year and really enjoyed it, and would quite like the final version to find a wider audience. Outdraw is a clever, fun game making smart use of AI – it’s basically Pictionary, where the goal is to draw something that the human players can identify but which fools the machine – so your job is to draw something which communicates on a level which humans can comprehend but which doesn’t make ‘sense’ in a way LLMs can comprehend. Honestly, this is SUCH a smart idea, and exactly the sort of creative use of The Machine that I am disappointed we’ve not seen more of in the past year or so – this is your regular plea to remember that you can do SO MUCH MORE than ‘remix your brand assets with DALL-E’ ffs.
- My Stupid Friend: A Chrome extension which does one thing and one thing only – in this instance, replacing every instance it find of the words ‘ChatGPT’ with ‘my stupid friend’ – so ‘I asked ChatGPT’ becomes the far more accurate and pleasing ‘I asked my stupid friend’. LAUGH AS THE MACHINES TAKE YOUR JOBS, HUMANS, LAUGH ALL THE WAY TO THE BENEFITS OFF…oh, no, hang on, they shut all those didn’t they.
- The Virtual Tea Towel Museum: Yeah, I know, I know, TEA TOWELS ARE DULL. That said, everyone has them (weirdly, one of those things that in my experience even the most appallingly-studenty single men will own teatowels – why is that? Some sort of rock bottom below which even people who will occasionally sleep on an unmade bed won’t sink below?) and for some reason someone started this website celebrating the things during (I think) lockdown – it was abandoned in May 2021, suggesting it was the product of claustrophobia-induced insanity rather than because of its creator’s deep and abiding fascination with the subject matter. Still, I am glad it exists, and there are some genuinely LOVELY tea towels on there should you be in the market for such things (the best tea towel in the world, by the way, is this one).
- The Public Domain Image Archive: Another tool in the slow, unwinnable fight against every online image one day becoming the product of AI, this is a great resource – “The Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA) — brought to you by The Public Domain Review (PDR) — is a curated collection of more than 10,000 out-of-copyright historical images, free for all to explore and reuse. Our aim is to offer a platform that will serve both as a practical resource and a place to simply wander — an ever-growing portal to discover more than 2000 years of visual culture. A valuable image archive in its own right, offering hand-picked highlights from hundreds of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, the PDIA also functions as a database of images featured in the PDR, offering an image-first approach to exploring the project’s content.” Can one of you please find a way of using this in your corporate comms this year, please?
- A Culture Finder for Rome: Fcuk, I can’t tell you how much I wish this had existed when I lived in the city – still, for the few of you who I know live there and read this, or for those of you intending to visit, this is a GREAT resource; a live-ish map of ALL the cultural stuff happening in the city, from interesting bars with attached galleries or music scenes to contemporary art popups, this is all the stuff that you never really see or hear about what with all the (admittedly insane) INCREDIBLY OLD CULTURE sucking the oxygen from anything new. Seriously, worth saving this for next time you visit the city so you can do something that isn’t redolent of several thousand years of death for a change.
- Dailies by Matthew Carrozo: I have been Internet Friends with Matthew Carrozo for what feels like about 15 years, despite I don’t think ever having met the man – still, he seems nice! Anyway, last year he started forcing himself to make a short piece of video each day, and these have been slowly being uploaded to a YouTube channel; the link here takes you to a Page on his website which hosts some of the videos, and you can watch a year’s worth as a playlist and…look, I honestly have less than no time for video art as a rule, but there’s something REALLY lovely about these (I have now watched a couple of dozen on them) – they would benefit from being on a big screen, I think, just sort of looping, ambiently, but he’s got a real eye for a shot and there’s something pleasingly-retro about some of the angles and shots he employs across the various shorts. I really like these, you might too.
- Time Wizards: Sort-of funny, sort-of made me want to cry! This is silly, but, equally, it is 100% something that imho you could lift wholesale for the right brand – as ever with stuff like this, KitKat springs to mind but you may have your own ideas. “Give the gift of time to a friend, colleague, loved one, or even yourself (we won’t tell). For just $5, we’ll send 3 very professional looking meeting invitations to their calendar. Then, in the early morning on the day of each call, poof! We cancel the meeting. By holding time on their calendar and (and later relinquishing it), you’ll grant the person who has everything (but time) a microdose of the good life.” On the one hand, a cute, funny little gag! On the other, the harsh reality that ‘just being left alone for a second’ is a genuine gift feels…sharp and unpleasant! I don’t know how to feel anymore!
By Kaoru Ueda (this and the rest of the pics this week from TIH)
THE SECTION WHICH ODDLY ALREADY FEELS LIKE THIS YEAR HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR APPROXIMATELY THREE DECADES, PT.2:
- Joys of Facebook Marketplace: NGL, linking to Twitter increasingly feels like I’m furtively passing you a wrap of something illicit, muttering something about ‘into the gums, you ain’t seen me, right mate?’ Still, given that people appear to have once again decided that they can’t quite be fcuked to start over again on Bluesky and the MASS EXODUS has slowed somewhat, Twitter continues to be at least somewhat worth looking at, and occasionally it will throw up a gem – like this! Collecting some of the unique and fantastic goods available for purchase on Facebook Marketplace, you know EXACTLY what you are getting here – it’s not big, it’s not funny, but if you attempt to tell me that you don’t find the idea of someone attempting to sell ‘The OG Testicuzzi’ (yes, it is what you think it is) to people in their local area USING THEIR REAL NAME funny then, well, I do not believe you.
- Princess Etch: Are Etch-A-Sketches still a thing, or is it a relic of a bygone age which for anyone under a certain age will elicit shrugs, blank looks and a plea to STOP TALKING ABOUT THE PAST WE KNOW IT WAS BETTER WITHOUT THE INTERNET? Anway, presuming YOU know what an Etch-A-Sketch is, you may be impressed with the singular skill displayed with the instrument by one ‘Princess Etch’ (I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that that’s not her given name), whose website presents examples of her work and the opportunity to book original artworks made on a kid’s toy from the 80s and then fixed in place by MAGIC (actually chemistry) and mailed to you anywhere in the world. Do YOU want a monochromatic depiction of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers rendered in iron fillings and right-angles? GREAT! As ever with stuff like this, I am torn between thinking ‘I am genuinely thrilled that the web has enabled this person with a very singular and specific talent to make a living from it’ and ‘there is something about the woman’s eyes in all of the shots on that site that makes me think there’s an internal monologue screaming about being trapped in some sort of retro-art purgatory of her own making, as I often am with stuff like this.
- Particles: A little visual code demo which, for reasons I can’t quite explain, I find pleasing to the point of near-ASMR. I could watch this ALL DAY, honestly, and it’s frankly miraculous that I’ve torn myself away to continue typing this (just think, you almost got away!).
- DOOM Captcha: Because it’s the law that DOOM must be embedded into every single possible aspect of human life before the heat death of the universe (I just had a fleeting fever-dream of FPS-styled fertility treatments, which suggests last night’s lack of sleep is starting to catch up with me at 844am), here’s a version of the game’s first level which operates as a simple CAPTCHA system – prove you’re a human by shooting three enemies in a tiny on-page embedded version of DOOM. Made VERY difficult by the small window size, which would add a pleasing degree of friction and frustration to, say, logging onto the HMRC website (lol like it needs more). BONUS DOOM: this is a winning little bit of comedy-modding in which Filippo Meozzi has created a version of the game where, rather than shooting Cacodemons with a shotgun you’re instead sipping a glass of mediocre red wine as you stroll around a gallery opening, wandering the corridors and perusing the works (the works, by the way, drawn from th actual, digitised collection of the NY Met). I really enjoyed this, partly because it’s having a slightly-Proustian effect on me and I’m flashing back quite hard to all the bad wine I ‘enjoyed’ at Thursday night openings between 2005-10ish and partly because it’s just a nice use of the digitised collection.
- Colourspace: Er, look, I don’t really understand what’s going on here – as far as I can tell its simply a way of displaying the colour spectrum, but it’s entirely possible I’m missing something deeply significant about why it’s clever. BUT! Who cares? It looks nice! You can move around it! It’s a CYLINDER OF ALL THE COLOURS! I think you can use it for a bunch of palette picking stuff and things but, honestly, I’m just here for the CYLINDER OF ALL THE COLOURS (although you can in fact read more about the theory behind this visualisation here, which might be of interest to designers or…colour theorists? Is that a thing?). I would quite like to see this as a large-scale projection, fwiw. What’s that? It’s worth ‘nothing’? Oh.
- Surf: This is an interesting-sounding project which doesn’t *quite* exist yet but which points towards a future where the federated social web has taken off, and we’re all living in a future paradise with infinitely-customisable multi-platform feeds pulling content from a variety of independent-but-interconnected platforms existing as part of the fediverse – which, admittedly, is a bit of a stretch at the moment, but it’s not inconceivable and the ideas presented by Surf certainly seem like an attractive alternative to the feed-based status quo. It helps to click the link and read the blurb yourself, but BASICALLY the idea is that Surf will allow you to create custom feeds on whatever topic you choose, pulling from sources across the fediverse (so, for example, Bluesky and Mastodon and Threads and…YouTube? Sources are a bit unclear) and stipulating search terms and guardrails to keep it tightly-focused; these feeds can then be individually explored by content type (so, by video or images or audio or text) rather than by platform, immediately creating a more coherent sense of the informational ecosystem around a topic…I can 100% see the appeal here, and I think they’re being smart attempting to onboard social ‘curators’ to create initial feeds for them before a proper launch, but I still wonder whether there’s just too much of the stench of geek about the term ‘fediverse’ and we’re going to have to wait until it feels a bit less neckbeardy before any normal people give a fcuk.
- L’Atelier de Musique: Via former editor Paul comes this YouTube channel which is relatively new, relatively sparsely-populated, but which I think looks GREAT – per the blurb, “Weekly mixes on vinyl that will transport you to different genres, countries, eras, and inspire new discoveries! Welcome to our YouTube channel where we post mixes and tracks on vinyl records! We collect music from different genres and eras, presenting rare compositions by little-known artists to broaden your musical horizons. We explore rare grooves from around the world on vinyl. Each mix is a new journey into the world of music.” Which, fine, sounds pretty generic, but mix titles so far include “Soviet and Socialistic Grooves from the 60s & 70s” and “Mexican 70s Jazzy Vibes”, which puts this squarely in my area of interest. If you enjoy the Sadeagle mixes I post then you will enjoy this very much I think.
- HyperEssays: Anyone still feeling that this week’s Curios is a bit lightweight will hopefully EAT THEIR FCUKING WORDS at this link. Do you want a project for 2025? HERE’S YOUR FCUKING PROJECT THEN. “HyperEssays is a project to create a modern and accessible online edition of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne…The Essays is not a single, cohesive book but a collection of short and long pieces on various subjects such as religion, horses, friendship, sleep, law, or suicide, which Montaigne wrote over more than twenty years. His goals for the book and the circumstances under which he worked on it changed over time. The first edition, published in 1580, comprised two books. Eight years later, an updated edition included hundreds of revisions and a new, third book. By the time of his death, in 1592, Montaigne had planned many more changes, which were incorporated in the first posthumous edition of 1595. So, while you can read the Essays from beginning to end, starting with Montaigne’s address To the Reader, you can also follow John Cage’s advice and “begin anywhere.”” FULL CONFESSION – I have not read the Essays of Montaigne – or at least no more than a handful of them – but a) I think this is an interesting project, and I am slightly in awe at the fact that this is seemingly just one bloke who decided ‘yes, the world needs this and therefore I must create it’; and b) I figure there’s at least one of you who’s the sort of weirdo who likes to set themselves ‘improving challenges’ each year (how…how do you change? How do you get better? Asking for a friend) and, well, this feels like such a challenge.
- Delics: A selection of caveats before we start here: a) I THINK THIS IS POSSIBLY VERY ILLEGAL; b) if it is not illegal I really, really don’t understand how; c) Web Curios IN NO WAY ENDORSES the sale or purchase of prohibited substances and would like to strongly advise its readers that they ought NOT attempt to purchase anything from this link. Ahem. Now, click the link and try and work out how it is that this website appears to be quite openly offering pharmaceutical-grade cocaine for sale to residents of Canada (and MDMA! And Ket!), in convenient little nasal spray bottles. They only ship to Canada, but, well, CANUCKS FILL YOUR BOOTS (noses) (NB once again Web Curios does not in any way endorse this website or want one of you in Canada to check if it actually works, no siree).
- Explore a Mayan Temple: Basically this is Google Street View for the Mayan temple at Copan (because, honestly, looking at LA, it doesn’t really feel like we should really be doing frivolous transatlantic flights anymore, does it), which really is very, very cool indeed and quite incredible to wander round, even virtually.
- The Mills of Britain: So seeing as we’re all agreed that it’s domestic or train-based holidays from hereon in (LOL!), you’re probably thinking ‘but Matt, what sort of travel within the UK could possibly compare to exploring the mysteries of an ancient Mayan temple in the tropics?’ and, well, do I have the link for you! VISIT THE MILLS OF BRITAIN! The link here takes you to a map of all the mills in the country, meaning that you can plan a FASCINATING journey around the country visiting, er, old mills. JUST AS GOOD AS THE MAYAN TEMPLES IN YOUR FACE MEXICO!
- Tokyo’s Digital Twin: This is, I think, possibly quite interesting – but sadly I can’t speak Japanese at all and so I only really have a pretty rudimentary idea of what’s going on here, What I CAN tell is that this is a detailed 3d map of Tokyo, over which its possible to layer a LOT of different city data to be able to do all sorts of overview analyses of the city and how it works – what I sadly can’t tell you (re the aforementioned inability to read the Japanese alphabet) is what these datasets are, whether any of them are live vs static and all that sort of stuff. BUT I am interested in this sort of thing and the extent to which models like this, coupled with GenAI, might transform urban analysis and social planning and things. Does something similar exist for London?
- I Have That On Vinyl: A new digital magazine project thing by Michele Catalano, where she’s collecting writing about music and why people love it – the focus is on physical recordings but really this is a home for any writing about the effect that music has on people and the feelings and memories it creates. “A mission statement for I Have That On Vinyl would be simple: a place for people to share their passion for vinyl records, music, and have discussions about both. But I don’t want a mission statement. I don’t have a mission. I have a vision. And that vision is to take my love of music, my respect for physical media, and my desire to spread good music around, and present all of that in one place. Mostly, it is going to be a collective love letter to vinyl and music in general…I want to connect you with people just like you; who love listening to whole albums, who love going to yard sales looking for holy grail records, who know every record store in a 25 mile radius.” This feels like something that some of you will love immoderately.
- Mikroverlag: Ok, this is VERY niche, but I approve of the specificity and the passion behind it – and, also, it’s a new post-Imperica publishing project from Former Editor Paul! I will reproduce the ‘about’ here in full – if you’re interested in writing something or being involved, drop him a line: “Mikroverlag is an idea to publish new works that cover technology stories from the past few decades, particularly from Europe. Books on, from, and about Silicon Valley are plentiful. It’s easy to find a book covering business models, leaders, or company stories from that area. Silicon Valley’s place in the history of communications technology is assured. But, there are so many additional stories from Europe that are less well-known globally. The concept of Mikroverlag is to cover specific histories related to European technology: its innovations, its people, and also, its failures. Central and Eastern Europe is particularly ripe for untapping as there are many stories of government-led and people-led innovations that are in danger of being lost.That said, the point of Mikroverlag is to cover technology stories from the whole of Europe. We might cover, for example, the development of Minitel in France, or the story of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum clones in Communist-era Czechoslovakia. The first digital computer, the German Z3, might be a future topic, or perhaps a biography of Benoit Mandelbrot. I’m just making these up. This is where you come in.”
- Riddling: Five clues a day to guess the one-word answer. Partly fun, partly INCREDIBLY IRRITATING due to the specificity of the word selections, your mileage will vary.
- Catdle: Oh God, this REALLY makes my brain hurt – however, I am aware that there are some people (see my friend Mo, who ever since I first met her in her early-20s has carried around an actual physical book of logic puzzles, like a grandmother) who find stuff like this cracklike in its appeal. A daily puzzle which asks you to solve one of those ‘Alan has five nieces, Susan once went to Clacton, Angelina won’t get in the car with Tony unless Ann is in the back seat – WHO ATE THE LAST SLICE OF CAKE?’ conundra, except the characters involved are cats because it’s the internet. This is clever but sadly my brain doesn’t quite work in this way and so I slid off it pretty quickly – YOU, though, may be different (I hope you are, I wouldn’t wish being me on anyone, honestly).
- Monopoly, Online, With Strangers: I presume that those of you with families would rather eat your own faces than ever play Monopoly again – does ANYONE enjoy it? Anyone? – but, judging by the fact that this website is seemingly ALWAYS teeming with players, there is a surprisingly-large number of people who like the game enough to play a 2d, minimalist version online with complete strangers. Ok, so it’s unofficial and so the game’s called ‘RichUp’ and the boards all have the wrong names on them, but, clearly, it’s Monopoly. Want to spent an hour or so getting bored and frustrated but with none of the familiar, familial warmth you might benefit from playing with loved ones? GREAT!
- Dreiblade: This is…surprisingly full-featured for what feels like it started out as a punchline – this is basically ‘what if Beyblade battles but Dreidels?’, and tasks you with playing a selection of dreidel-vs-dreidel matchups against players of increasing skill, alongside a betting mechanic which, I confess, I have totally failed to understand across multiple attempts. Still, this is fun and feels weirdly like a lost NES-era title developed specially as a youth outreach tool by a very rich New York synagogue in the late-80s.
- Gar Type: Another really, really well-made game for what is, at heart, a single-note gag – what if R-Type but, well, themed around Garfield? This is silly but actually really fun – if not exactly challenging – and the soundtrack in particular fcuking slaps (no, really, it does, it’s SO much better than it needs to be).
- The Top 10 Webgames of 2024: Last up in this week’s miscellanea, this rundown of the ten best browser games of the past 12 months – a couple of these have been featured in here before, but these are all, generally, GREAT (and the final one, an escape the room number, is EXCELLENT) and, look, you’ve done a WHOLE WEEK of work this year already, sack off the rest of it and play some games, you’ve earned it you special little soldier.
By Zoë Waldman
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Glorious Trash: FINE IT’S NOT A TUMBLR. Fcuk, ok, I might have to kill this section at the end of the month, it does rather feel like the era of the single-serving Tumblog is sadly over (this is a genuine shame). As if to make my point for me, this week’s entry is, in fact, not a Tumblr at all – it’s an oldschool blog but, well, noone cares and frankly neither do I anymore. Glorious Trash collects reviews of old pulp novels – so if you want to learn more about classics such as ‘The Last Shaft’ (the final appearance of the titular detective in fiction) or, er, ‘Memoir of a Horny Hooker’, then, well, here you are.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- TrendyVideos AI: Do you ever experience someone else’s feed? It is an occasionally odd and unsettling experience to get a glimpse into the incredibly-intimate world of ‘what the algorithm thinks someone else wants’, as I discovered over Christmas when I was round at a mate’s and he pulled out his phone to show me something on Insta and I saw that his homepage feed was…just slop. Just AI slop video after AI slop video after AI slop video, fake sea creatures animated into being on beaches, fake animals in fake jungles, fake people eating fake cakes…what was even odder was that this didn’t seem to bother him at all (fwiw this friend is VERY offline and, I promise, less stupid than this exchange makes them sound). Anyway, that’s what this account is – all AI, all the time, and, seemingly, this is what a LOT of people are seeing all over their social feeds every day. We are, as the kids say, so so so cooked.
- Voidstomper: More AI video! But this stuff is horrible and unsettling and so therefore interesting to me – again, though, it’s worth looking at this stuff and realising that there are a LOT of people in the world who simply aren’t going to pay attention to the fact that some of this stuff is faked. If you think the UFO panic at the tail-end of 2024 was something, I feel reasonably-convinced that we’re going to see some fcuking MENTAL crpytid-related chat in the coming year or so as people start to fall for increasingly-realistic videos of ‘ACTUAL CAMERAPHONE FOOTAGE OF SKINWALKERS CAPTURED’ sliding across their FYP.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The State of the World 2025: For the…God knows how many consecutive years, we kick off the new year longreads with the traditional ‘where we are now’ discussion thread over at venerable online community The Well, conducted by Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky, which, once again, brings together and interesting collection of minds to opine on the whole ‘where we are now and where we are going’ thing. As per previous years, the composition of the debate skews tech/futurist which means there’s a reasonable focus on those specific facets of the now, but it’s as-ever a wide-ranging discussion that covers geopolitics, history, AI, yesterday and tomorrow and features some really interesting thinking. Personally-speaking Cory Doctorow’s post in the debate about ‘coalitions’ being a significant unit of agency/progress in the coming now felt like an interesting one, but you can and will all find your own bits and pieces to glom onto amongst the chat.
- We’re Getting The Social Media Crisis Wrong: I don’t know about you, but I have already read more information about social media platforms, their policies and their owners than I felt I needed or wanted to this year. Still, presuming you’re not burnt out by this particular discourse yet – and I’ll be honest with you, I have to confess to just feeling utterly exhausted by this latest bunch of bullsh1t, so tired of having the parameters of my existence determined by a bunch of spectacularly-rich men who have repeatedly-demonstrated that THEY ARE NO FCUKING GOOD AT THIS STUFF – then this is a really good essay by Henry Farrell about social media, misinformation and the effect both are having, which makes the point, correctly, that it’s not so much the promulgation of falsehoods that is the issue (although that’s bad too) so much as the following (forgive me for quoting in full, but it’s a strong argument he makes well and it’s worth reproducing): “Something like this explains the main consequences of social media for politics. The collective perspectives that emerge from social media – our understanding of what the public is and wants – are similarly shaped by algorithms that select on some aspects of the public, while sidelining others. And we tend to orient ourselves towards that understanding, through a mixture of reflective beliefs, conformity with shibboleths, and revised understandings of coalitional politics. This isn’t brainwashing – people don’t have to internalize this or that aspect of what social media presents to them, radically changing their beliefs and their sense of who they are. That sometimes happens, but likely far more rarely than we think. The more important change is to our beliefs about what other people think, which we perpetually update based on social observation. When what we observe is filtered through social media, our understandings of the coalitions we belong to, and the coalitions we oppose, what we have in common, and what we disagree on, shift too.”
- The Creator Economy Doesn’t Work: Or, per its title, “It’s Time To End Our Subscription Addiction”, an essay by Nick Hilton which did numbers in media circles last week and which, if you don’t mind me saying, makes a point which I have been making for FCUKING YEARS, to whit ‘the creator economy as a concept is a fcukiong bust because the numbers simply DO NOT ADD UP’. Here Hilton uses Substack as his example, talking about the potential monthly burden of multiple subscriptions and how that’s a) not tenable for 99.9% of people; and how b) because of that, it’s not tenable for 99.9% of creators either. I mean, look, I HAVE LITERALLY BEEN SAYING THIS FOREVER, and I distinctly remember writing multiple times last year that I fully expected someone in their 20s to suddenly discover the concept of bundling up multiple writers in a single publication to benefit from economies of scale…LIKE A MAGAZINE! Anyway, this is overlong and basically only makes one point, but it’s a point I agree with and so I will forgive it the prolixity (yes, I know).
- The Best Newsletters: So obviously the next link I include is a collection of excellent newsletters you might want to try subscribing to – LOL LIKE YOU HAVE THE TIME TO READ ANYTHING ELSE AFTER THIS (you…you do read it all, don’t you? Even these bits?) – compiled by Caitlin at Links; this is a GREAT selection, arrived at by asking a bunch of people whose newsletters she likes whose newsletters THEY like, and so on, and so on. The resulting selection is long and SO BROAD, and I think almost all of these are free or have a free tier, so you can add to your regular reading list with some new blood for 2025 should you so desire (full disclosure: I was one of the people asked to recommend some links).
- Frictionless Conformity: I really enjoyed this essay by Pascal Wicht exploring some of the potential reasons as to why everyone dresses the same these days. I really like the way Wich presents 15 or so different hypotheses to explain the phenomenon he describes as “Fast forward to now. Puff jackets, sneakers, oversized sweat pants. Style boiled down to algorithmic efficiency. The only message these outfits send is: “I fit in.” It’s not rebellion. It’s not self-expression. It’s passing the vibe check—the algorithmic kind, not the human one. Subculture has been stripped of its rough edges, sanded down into something smooth, market-ready and utterly frictionless.” Which you may not wholly agree with, fine – I think there are arguments one might make to suggest’s Wicht is slightly overstating this – but which then leads him to some really interesting (and, yes, slightly-w4nky) thinking about the why of it all, which I personally thought was worth a read from a cultural/social strategy point of view.
- Capital Will Matter More: I think, as alluded to above, one of the reasons the first week or so of the year has felt so…psychologically abrasive is the sense that we are not in control, that agency has been stripped from us, that, effectively, it’s other people’s world, we just happen to be standing on it temporarily. If you feel vaguely-similar then can I strongly advise that you DO NOT READ this article, as, honestly, it will only make you feel worse. The central tenet, basically, is ‘the better AI gets the more likely it is that ‘being very rich’ will become the most important determinant of the degree to which one can be said to have meaningful agency’ – which, yes, fine, is sort-of true now, but JUST YOU WAIT! “The key economic effect of AI is that it makes capital a more and more general substitute for labour. There’s less need to pay humans for their time to perform work, because you can replace that with capital (e.g. data centres running software replaces a human doing mental labour). I will walk through consequences of this, and end up concluding that labour-replacing AI means: 1) The ability to buy results in the real world will dramatically go up; 2) Human ability to wield power in the real world will dramatically go down (at least without money); including because: a) there will be no more incentive for states, companies, or other institutions to care about humans; and b) it will be harder for humans to achieve outlier outcomes relative to their starting resources. Radical equalising measures are unlikely” HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!
- No, Adrian Dittman Is Not Elon Musk: I don’t care about the story – for Professional Reasons I am sadly all-too-aware that there is a certain class of man (and it is always men, always) who are willing, ready and VERY KEEN to go into bat for Elon should you ever have the temerity to slag him off anywhere too public – but I found the account, of exactly how the researchers behind the investigation were able to prove that Adrian Dittman is not in fact a billionaire pretending to be someone else to defend himself but instead the far sadder spectacle of a seemingly-normal man going onto internet forums to defend Musk’s qualities as a parent, really interesting. Serious OSINT chops on display here.
- Barry Malzberg: I’ve always been fascinated by the pulp novelists of the mid-20th-Century, the men and women who under various pen names would absolutely hammer out potboilers by the dozen to meet the voracious demand of the North American market for vaguely-salacious tales or galactic scifi adventures – this is a profile of one Marry Malzberg, who legend has it was the fastest and most-prolific of all, and who, per this piece, once managed to spaff out a smutty tome called ‘Diary of a Parisian Chambermaid’ in just over a day at a rate of just under 2,000 words per hour which, most remarkably of all, was apparently actually readable. Although, thinking about it, I do roughly 10k in 5 hours every Friday morning so…look, does anyone want to save me from the living hell that my life has become by paying me 1950s-equivalent rates to type the fcuk out of some low-quality bongo? Because, honestly, if so, I am ALL EARS.
- The Idiots Year In Review: I know, I know, in week two of the new year one should really not be looking back – that said, this is one of those ‘a list of all the best dumb things people said on the internet last year’ things and FCUK ME is there some absolute gold in here. This is VERY LONG, but, and I say this even as someone who is far, far too online for their own good, there is some true gold in here. I promise you, there will be at least three things that will make you cry with laughter – also, the concept of a ‘coworker meme’ is incredibly powerful and will now stay with me until death.
- The Case Against Gameplay Loops: Ok, this is very specifically about game design and so your interest in it will largely depend on your interest in thinking about why some ludic experiences are ‘fun’ and how that ‘fun’ actually works, and what we’re actually getting out of games when we play them – but presuming you are in some way interested in those sorts of questions then you’ll really enjoy this super-smart essay by Joey Schutz.
- The Gentrification of Videogame History: SUCH an interesting article and a useful reminder of the fact that questions of perceived, relative cultural value are often firmly-linked to Western-centrism. When you think about the history of games, you think about Space Invaders and Pac-Man and Mario and Sonic and all that jazz – or at least you do in the West. You don’t, probably, think of all the games that you have never heard of but which are played by tens, hundreds of millions of people in South East Asia, or across South America, and which barely if ever show up in conversations about gaming culture and history because, well, we’re self-obsessed and have a tendency in the West to automatically dismiss stuff when it’s not from the Global North. This is so so so interesting, and also introduced me to the BRILLIANT Super Bomba Patch from Brazil, by all accounts the country’s best-selling and most-played football game, which is distributed exclusively through hooky copies and which itself is a heavily-patched and modded version of Winning 11 (the original Japanese version of Pro Evo – real heads know) from the early-00s (seriously, check out some footage here, the player models are genuinely amazing). This is fascinating, honestly.
- What We Did To Our Penises: Not you and I, to be clear – or certainly not ‘I’, I can’t speak for what you may or may not have been doing with yours – but the wider world – this is Defector’s annual list of the terrible things that have been reported to medical departments in the US as having been done to the penises of various Americans; all of these are true, all of these are verifiable, and FCUKING HELL. As ever with this stuff, my main question is ‘how…how bored do you have to be of vanilla sex to think “Yeah, actually, you know what, I WILL try fitting this compact disc over my member”?’ – these are VERY FUNNY, unless of course they happened to you. BONUS LIST: here are all the things people got stuck inside themselves in 2024, should you want a cautionary tale to guide you into the second quarter of the 21stC.
- Being A Viral Sensation: I know you’ve read a load of ‘I was a meme/I went viral for X’ pieces in which, say, success kid talks about what an amazing impact being, er, success kid has had on their life; this one, though, feels different. Christopher Spata at the Tampa Bay Times tracks down one ‘Lucky’ Luciano, who went viral back in the past as the slightly-Guido-ish kid in pink captioned “You know I had to do it to ‘em” (you will recognise it when you see it) – what I find fascinating here is the implication throughout that Luciano hasn’t had a very happy intervening few years, the failed attempts to cash in on his moment of fame, the vaguely-unmoored sense of a kid still vaguely hoping the fame lottery might find him again, this time better-prepared…I don’t know, this really touched me for some reason, can’t wholly explain why.
- The Romantasy Beef: This is VERY LONG, but, honestly, it satisfied my internal; ‘messy b1tch who loves drama’ almost completely. There is NOTHING I don’t find fascinating about the romance fiction industrial complex, and this story – about a plagiarism accusation and the two authors at its heart – is GREAT, not least because it lifts the lid on a lot of ‘how the sausage is made’ type stuff about the industry (you may have seen the quote from the publisher in this piece doing the rounds this week, incredulous that some authors come to her without even having considered the hashtag for their work).
- Satire Across Languages: In the week of the tenth anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris, a look at how different nations across Europe approach the challenge of making ‘their own version of the Onion’ (the author argues, not unfairly, that ‘their own version of Private Eye’ simply doesn’t have the brand recognition as a phrase). This is great – very dry, very funny, and full of plenty of ammunition for any and all Europeans who want proof that NOONE ELSE on the continent is funny other than them (it is, for example, one of my strongest-held and most-troublingly-self-defeating opinions that, at heart, Italians simply are not funny. They can BE funny. They are charming, warm, amusing, passionate and often comid. But they are not funny. LOTTATEMI, STRONZI).
- The Honourable Parts: One of my occasional links to Scope of Work, Spencer Wright’s wonderful newsletter about manufacturing which consistently amazes me by being so much more interesting than it ever has any right to be. This essay is gorgeous – Wright spends a day shadowing NYT photographer Christopher Payne, who specialises in shooting industrial processes or people at work, or factory settings, and explores what it is to record labour, what the photographs tell you, and what it is to celebrate the dignity and value of all sorts of work through art. Honestly, this made me feel…weirdly hopeful and sort-of happy, and that almost NEVER happens.
- A Sex Memoir: Edmund White writes openly, explicitly and unflinchingly about his sex life, from the rearview mirror of his 80s – White is gay, and so the sex presented in the piece (drawn from a longer memoir) is all man-on-man, and there’s something so pleasingly-unsentimental and occasionally-visceral about his descriptions, along with a certain sad coldness and detachment, that speak both to the writer and the eras of which he’s writing, many of which predate the legality of the sort of assignations being described. So so so good (although to be clear it’s also very explicit, should that give you pause).
- Doing The Work: Geoff Dyer is a cracking writer – Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi is still one of my favourite depictions of both Venice and the artworld found in a novel – and this piece in Granta, about his memories of doing no-future work in the 80s while getting his writing career off the ground, is not only typically-lovely writing but also feels like it hails from a distant world, one in which a young man could be paid the dole while scabbing a cash-in-hand gig and attempting to make a life in the arts. Fcuk me, there’s something terrifying about the immediate impulse I had then to couch Thatcherite Britain as ‘the good old days’ compared to the suppurating horror of The Now.
- Child Catchers: A look back at the child abduction panic of 1980s America, a panic which will be familiar to any kid who grew up in the UK in the 80s and 90s when you were apparently never more than 300m away from a becorduroyed pervert in a sh1t-brown Ford Cortina who wanted to ‘show you his stamp collection’. I really enjoyed this – captures the fag-scented tinge of the era perfectly, along with the strange sensation familiar to the time of a world that worried loudly about children’s safety while simultaneously not really seeming to care about kids at all.
- The New Age Bible: Sheila Heti is one of those writers where I would read pretty much anything she pens – this is a SUPERB essay in Harper’s in which she writes about discovering a tome called ‘A Course In Miracles’, apparently a hugely-popular ‘spiritual’ text which has been referred to as ‘the new age bible’ in some circles. Heti is initially intrigued, finding in its pages support and succour through a period of depression – and so digs into its history, which is where the story gets STRANGE. Featuring some top-notch 1950s batsh1ttery, the CIA, unrequited love, potential mind-control and the vague sensation of THINGS BEYOND OUR KEN, this is an absolutely superb piece which you will really enjoy, promise.
- Devour The Flesh: On feeling rage, and leaning into it. Female rage, specifically – I am not an angry person (I’m just…disappointed), but the writing here by Steffi Cau is very, very good indeed.
- Brigade De Cuisine: Our final longread of the week is from 1979 – I discovered this over the holidays and FCUK ME is it one of the most wonderful pieces of writing about food I have ever read. It is SO satisfying – rich and indulgent in subject and style – and just THE best portrait of a person, a time and a place that are long since gone. John McFee profiles a mysterious, anonymous chef, cooking Michelin-grade food for a small roomful of people out in the boonies of New York – honestly, this made me want to invent a time machine and go back 45 years so I could experience all this for myself. WONDERFUL, and a genuine pleasure to spend half an hour with (it goes long).
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:
- Our first video of the year is hopefully something of an antidote to the fact it is FCUKING COLD, being a summery, vaguely samba/bossa (sorry sorry I don’t really know what either of those terms actually mean)-tinged jam – this is by Σtella, it’s called ‘Adagio’, and fwiw it sort of reminds me of that Feist record from c.2002/3?