Cast your minds back, if you will, to January and the first Curios of the year, which I opened with the line: “Oh hello! Welcome back to the new season of the long-running popular reality series ‘What The Fcuk Happened While I Was Asleep And How Is It Going To Conspire To Fcuk My Sh1t Up?’!”
LOL AND HERE WE ALL ARE ONCE AGAIN AT THE MERCY OF THE LUNATIC CNUT ACROSS THE SEA!
How have you been? I had a genuinely weird experience this week as a result of having been on a Popular UK Podcast which, thanks to the viddyfication of EVERYTHING, now films itself in full, multicamera style and puts the episodes on YouTube, meaning that I am in the (for me) very, very unusual (and, let’s be clear, horrific) position of being a YouTube thumbnail. THEY MR BEASTIFIED ME, MUM (she’s dead, she will never know who Mr Beast is, and for that I am grateful).
Anyway, I made the momentary mistake of reading the comments briefly when it went live and JESUS FCUKING CHRIST PEOPLE ARE INSANE. I mean, legitimately insane. Ok, fine, I wave my arms when I talk in a manner which might reasonably be described as ‘a bit camp’ – I question, though, whether this warranted a full para gayquisition by one commenter who was keen to assure me that I am ‘definitely’ queer (for the record – tried it, not into c0ck). No thanks at all, also, to whichever cnut thinks I look like Laurence Fox.
This has persuaded me of a few things – firstly, that being on television must be a genuinely traumatic experience, let alone being on the big screen; secondly, that one must never, ever read the comments; and thirdly, that being a woman on the internet must be horrific in a manner I am personally glad I will never have to experience. Honestly, though, what the actual fcuk.
Anyway, enough preamble, this is a particularly…replete version of Curios – replete with what will only become apparent once you break its gently-quivering skin and let its contents cover you, for good or ill. Go on, *poke it*.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can laugh all you want at my face, I can’t hear you.
THE SECTION WHICH REALLY WANTS HIM TO DIE, PT.1:
- The Covid Sound Map: Yes, yes, I know, they were BAD TIMES and they are IN THE PAST and you just want to forget all about the couple of years in which everyone was dying and it slightly felt like the world might be about to end (or at least the bits of it that concerned us) – what a radical departure from the world right now, eh kids? LOL! Anyway, I wouldn’t normally drag you back to the pandemic, but I somehow missed this at the time and discovered it this week and, with the distance of a few years, I think it is sort-of wonderful; the project, which compiled crowdsourced soundfiles from around the world during Covid and mapped them onto the globe using Google Earth, is by one Peter Stollery, and it is GORGEOUS – zoom around the globe and click into the individual soundfiles to hear people clapping for carers in Lowestoft, birdsong in Venice, public service announcements in Australia, a genuinely-odd sensation each time, taking you back to the past in eerie fashion in the way that only audio can. I was honestly transfixed by this, and the snapshot vignettes it provides of a(nother) time everything felt mad and jagged and weird.
- Surf Social: The whole ‘social media is dying’ argument received another fillip in the UK recently with data from our media regulator (lol, some fcuking regulator – LITTLE BIT OF POLITICS THERE) Ofcom releasing its annual insight into How People In The UK Consume Media which showed that the proportion of people posting on social media has fallen year on year – except, if you actually look at the numbers, it’s not that people are using the platforms less, it’s more that the platforms themselves have shifted to become lean-back places of passive video consumption. Anyway, should you be one of the many people who would like a better way to passively consume content from across the internet (SIT BACK, OPEN WIDE, ENJOY THE GUNK) you may well be interested in Surf Social, a new platform which effectively does the whole ‘pull in feeds from all sorts of places into one viewing window to consolidate your content consumption experience’ thing. It’s a *little* clunky, to my mind, but that might just be that I am old and have literally no desire to ever learn another platform-based UI ever again in my life; the deal is that you can create a variety of different custom feeds within the app, pulling from different sources and platforms – so for example you could set up sports feeds that pull from all the various accounts that journalists and publications have on Reddit, Bluesky and the like (yes, it’s all fediverse stuff, which is inherently a touch limiting but hey ho) – or you can follow existing bundled feeds…you get the idea, this isn’t technically anything that you haven’t seen before but, if you can be bothered doing the setup (which is always the hassle with these things tbh) then it’s potentially a useful way of keeping across a whole bunch of sources in one place – but it does require said sources to be active across the non-mainstream platform ecosystem, which does rather limit its utility imho.
- 365 Days: I’ve always been something of a sucker for year-long artistic projects, not least because of the punishing degree of commitment it requires to ACTUALLY make a new thing every day for a whole year – this is one such project, in which Japanese artist Masayuki Kamimae made, er, a different abstract work each day, and then built this BEAUTIFUL website to house them; there’s something genuinely lovely about the way in which the ‘gallery’ space is presented as a circular area in digital space, which curves around your field of vision as you explore it and gives a very real sense of the scale of work involved in producing this volume of canvases; I also personally very much like the pieces, though your mileage will vary depending on the extent to which you are moved by Japanese calligraphy as a style, but even if the works don’t excite you there’s something quietly gorgeous about the presentation and the idea here.
- The Images From Space: The miserable contrast between the messages of wonder being beamed back from the Artemis II mission (“The Earth is so fragile, so beautiful, we must protect it!”) and the mad vacillations of the syphilitic lunatic upon whose whims the future of the species seemingly rests has been…quite stark over the past few weeks, but however you feel about the decision to spaff billions on a bit of soft-power vanitywork by the US it’s undeniable that the photos have been VERY pretty. The main link here takes you to the official NASA feed of images, but if you want the REALLY BIG version then click here and go to Flickr and download some soothing wallpapers that you can stare at while everything here on Earth goes to absolute tits.
- UK Coke Prices: NOT THAT SORT OF COKE YOU BAG FIEND, YOU HORRIBLE LITTLE SESH GOBLIN. No, this is the horrible brown sugarwater, and, specifically, a running tracker of which particular UK supermarkets currently have the best bulk-buy deals for the stuff. Which, OK, fine, may not be a thrilling pull for you to click on the link (unless you have a particularly-troubling rate of soft-drink consumption), but given the likely hike in the price of everything coming down the line in the next year or so it offers a teasing glimpse of exactly the sort of fun microanalysis we’re all going to be indulging in in a few short months. Also, I am pretty sure (although details are sparse and I might of course be wrong) that this has been coded with AI and as such it struck me as an interesting example of something genuinely useful which can be spun up using public datasets and The Machine – should anyone want to do this for stuff that *I* like (cornershop rates on rolling tobacco and terrible white wine, thanks for asking) then I will be very grateful, ta.
- Mumumelon: SATIRE KLAXON!!!! I am usually a bit down on projects which create ‘satirical’ spoof brands and websites to critique existing corporates, mainly because I always wonder how much reach they actually get beyond the tedious advermarketingpr dullards on LinkedIn engaging in tedious THOUGHT LEADERSHIP DEBATE about the quality or otherwise of the STRATEGY – this one, though, I thought slightly better than the norm. “mumumelon is a dupe activewear brand. A deliberate shameless copy of lululemon. We made it to make a point” – the point, in this case, being that Lululemon’s clothing is an environmental disaster but doesn’t have to be, and that the company can and should be shamed into improving its green bona fides. “lululemon made over $11 billion in revenue last year. In that same year, their greenhouse gas emissions increased by 14%. Actually, they’ve risen every year since records began. That’s because most of lululemon’s manufacturing is powered by fossil fuels, like coal, even when cleaner energy sources exist. lululemon’s original manifesto said: “what we do to the earth, we do to ourselves.” If they truly believe that, they probably need a lesson in self-care.” The site is nicely-made, they rip off the branding neatly, and there was even a pop-up in London the other week to give a REAL LIFE MEATSPACE EXPERIENTIAL (sigh) angle to the whole thing – if I have a criticism (of course I do) it’s that the ‘dupes’ they offer on the site aren’t actually available to buy, which imho does rather undermine the point they are making about the fact that the company COULD DO BETTER – if it’s that easy, then, er, why not make it explicit by offering environmentally-friendly gear in limited edition ranges, with profits/proceeds going to suitable causes? Also, another question which isn’t immediately clear from the site – where the fcuk is the money coming from to pay for this? There’s some talk about one of the campaign groups behind it being funded by ‘philanthropic organisations’, but I think some transparency here would be helpful fwiw. I’ve just been quite negative about this, haven’t I? Sorry.
- Sleepy Hollow: THE EPISTOLARY NARRATIVE BOOM CONTINUES! Is it a boom? Well I reckon this is now the third ‘pay actual cashmoney to receive a story in the post via the medium of letters and stuff’ project I have featured in here in the past year, which by the p1ss-poor standards of modern trend consultancy (or indeed all trend consultancy) probably warrants its inclusion in a ‘deck’ (you cnuts) – this one is, per the description, “a cozy, nostalgic reimagining of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, delivered to your mailbox as letters, sketches, and artifacts from the era of cassette tapes, flip phones, and zines”, and leaving aside the almost-visceral degree to which I have come to hate the term ‘cozy’ when applied to media (can we fcuking stop with the twee, please? Or if we must do twee can it at least be of the ‘twee as fcuk’ variety?) and the extent to which this is zeroing in on a very specifically-zeitgeisty obsession with the late-90s/early-00s media landscape, I can imagine this doing well – the people behind it have some real writing chops, it seems, and a background in the ARG space, and it you can sign up to find out when the Kickstarter launches should you want to get in early. Expect to find ‘personalised postal marketing campaigns’ cropping up in presentations soon, if they’re not already there.
- The HTTPoetics Anthology 2026: Consider this the training wheels version of the HTML review – this is the annual collection of works by students at the School for Poetic Computation (“an experimental school in New York City and online supporting interdisciplinary study in art, code, hardware and critical theory”) and comprises a couple of dozen individual webartpoetrythings which range from digital breathing exercises to a museum of children’s jokes to a small fanpage about how Wuthering Heights is a horror story ACTUALLY (please no more Wuthering Heights I beg) – these are in many cases…quite janky, but I can’t help but love the homespun and handmade and very very very personal nature of all of these, and there’s something really pleasing in spending a few minutes exploring what people have chosen to make and the way they have used code as a means of expression.
- Ban Ray: It does rather feel that, given the…not-exactly-universally-positive impact so much technology has had on people and society over the past couple of decades we might perhaps want to think a little quicker about developing a regulatory framework to manage the use of smart glasses and the ways in which they are used – it doesn’t entirely feel like anyone’s paying quite enough attention to what it’s going to be like should a significant proportion of people start wondering around the world with AI-enabled cameras strapped to their faces. Anyway, this is a campaign site set up by one Mateusz Pożar which looks to build a groundswell of support for the broad idea of regulating the tech – there are a series of good arguments for maybe *not* letting them become entirely widespread, and you can download stickers that indicate that smart glasses are banned in specific areas, though imho it ought also to have a basic ‘email your local representative about this’ function (but that’s me quibbling). Fcuk Meta glasses, basically (and maybe tell your MP).
- Strado: This is an interesting way of looking at urban spaces – this is a mapping project which, per the blurb, “Every street in Europe scored across 22 categories — from grocery stores to nightlife, transit to healthcare. Free and open data.” This is actually limited to major cities, I think, but as a way of exploring the ‘livability’ or urban areas, based on access to various different types of amenity (transport, nightlife, groceries, emergency services, etc) it strikes me as potentially useful.
- GB AI: FINALLY THE UK HAS SOVEREIGN AI! PRAISE THE LORD! Or at least that’s what this purports to be – I am…slightly iffy about some of the details here, but apparently this is a model adapted from best-in-class open source tech and which is trained on UK data, complies with copyright (everything beyond the base models it’s been trained on is apparently either non-copyrighted or synthetic – the latter part of which doesn’t hugely encourage me in terms of its performance and utility, I have to say) and which runs on ‘100% renewable energy’ (again, not 100% certain about the validity of this claim, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt). This is…look, I don’t feel hugely-positive saying this because it’s new and it’s trying, but this is going to die on its ar$e, isn’t it? Noone has covered it at launch, the model simply isn’t anywhere near as good as any of the big boys, and no fcuker is going to use it. STILL, SOVEREIGN AI!!!!111eleventy
- Sloptracker: This is a nice, eyecatching bit of propaganda which I don’t think *quite* stands up to scrutiny; Sloptracker purports to track the amount of money being ‘stolen’ from ‘real artists’ as a result of AI-generated music on Spotify – the idea being that there’s a finite pool of money that gets paid out by the platform, and that that only goes to a fixed number of artists above a certain threshold of popularity, and that the introduction of AI-generated music and its increased acceptance is going to see the portion of the pie doled out to Actual Humans fall. Which in theory makes sense, but which fails to take into account a few reasonably-significant things about how Spotify’s payments model actually works in 2026 (and I say this as someone that fcuking hates Spotify) – there’s also something…a bit iffy about the fact that the whole site is obviously vibecoded (it’s amusing how obvious the ‘built with Claude’ tells are in terms of site aesthetics right now, although expect that to get addressed as time goes by). Basically this is an eyecatching stunt but not quite the MORAL KO whoever is behind it wants you to think it is (also, lol, Spotify basically IS music now, good luck with your attempts to fcuk it up).
- Krita: I am very much not an artist; I can’t draw, I have no creative impetus and the sole imprint I am going to leave on this world when my carcinoma-riddled corpse finally gets burnt to ashes is the millions of words on Curios – OH WHAT LEGACY! – and as such I have literally no idea whatsoever whether this painting tool is any good. BUT! It is FREE! It is OPEN SOURCE! It works on Windows, Mac and even LINUX (which is how you know it’s proper geekware)! It probably isn’t malware! If you want to draw on your computer but would prefer not to give money to one of the worst companies in the world for the privilege (hi Adobe! WE WILL NEVER ADD THE ™ TO ‘PHOTOSHOP’! IN YOUR FACE) then this might well be of interest.
- The Smithsonian Mag Photo Finalists 2026: The winner has actually been announced now, but the selection of nominees this year was wide-ranging and beautiful and it’s worth looking through the whole range rather than just focusing on the eventual victor – I have a personal soft spot for the VERY MEATY lake (you will know it when you see it), but, as ever, pick your own (please, I am tired).
- Geograph: I LOVE THIS! But also, how the fcuk have I not seen it before? I feel like a failure (not, it must be said, a novel experience, but one I would prefer to experience with slightly less regularity than seems to be the case). This is like Google maps, but crowdsourced (ish) – “The Geograph® Britain and Ireland project aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of Great Britain and Ireland, and you can be part of it. Since 2005, 14,132 contributors have submitted 8,254,695 images covering 283,417 grid squares, or 85.3% of the total squares.” Honestly, what an incredible collaborative work, and how wonderful that people have just…joined in, and to this extent! It’s also a really interesting picture of changing urban geographies – depending on where you explore, there are photos from across the past 20 years which offers a fascinating temporal patchwork of Britain and which I think you could do something really interesting with given the time and a bit of modern code (this site has many qualities but it is…avowedly oldschool in terms of design and functionality). This is really is weirdly heartwarming, well DONE people of Britain and Ireland!
- The Cybernetics Image Library: “A living visual archive on cybernetics in the expanded field. Browse and contribute images of all kinds: diagrams, schematics, photos, graphic elements, and other visual fragments. Each image is linked to a record in the Cybernetics Library catalog or integrated from the project’s original are.na channel.” NGL, the visuals here mean…very little to me, but I find the aesthetic on display almost infinitely compelling.
- Study At Newspeak House: My friend Ed has been running Newspeak House – the College of Political Technologists – in East London for…Jesus, years now. It acts as an incubator for people who want to develop their skills around using tech for civic good, a meeting hub for people interested in how tech and government intersect, and it’s been a place where lots of now-successful people doing interesting things have started their careers. Newspeak House is currently accepting applications for students for the next academic year, and I figured it’s not impossible that some of the weirdos reading this might also be the sort of weirdos who are interested in taking a non-traditional academic path towards ‘fcuking around with computers and data to help things work and run better’. ARE YOU THAT WEIRDO??? Click the link, find out more, email Ed, get qualified.
- The World Atlas of Sausages: I am *sightly* suspicious of this in that it looks and feels *quite* AI, and I was worried it was going to be wafer thin, but a bit of digging suggests that in fact there is a LOT of sausage-related content in here and if you want to learn more about the unique, savoury qualities of a specific variety of Uzbek horsemeat salami (just had a genuinely traumatic flashback to college and a poor Uzbek kid I lived with called Dilshott who brought back one of said sausages after Christmas one year and had to put up with some, er, ‘culturally insensitive’ ribbing – in the unlikely event that you ever see this, Dilshott, I am VERY SORRY about the polaroids) then this is possibly the only website you will ever need.
- A Lovely Coded Ballpit: It’s a ballpit! In code! Move your mouse, watch the balls move, ADMIRE THE PHYSICS YOU FCUKS.
- Waddleloo: OK, I fcuking ADORE this. Apparently the University of Waterloo has a problem with aggressive geese, so a student has taken it upon themselves to spin up a map to help students and staff navigate campus without being attacked by some incredibly-aggressive and VERY TERRITORIAL (and, honestly, fcuking massive) birds – this has a map which shows GOOSE DENSITY (not joking) and offers notes such as “On the roof. Nest located in the bushes just behind. Head-on attack reported, with the goose flying straight at someone’s face. There is nowhere to run on the roof, so do not attempt. Extremely aggressive. Avoid this area entirely, even for the sunset” (ngl, “there is nowhere to run on the roof” slightly sent me just now, but that is often the way as we approach the ⅓ point of the Curios writing experience). There are currently 12 HIGH RISK sites on the Waterloo campus, so, well, TAKE CARE KIDS. Honestly, I love this immoderately.
- The Premier League Archive: Ok, this might be old and so apologies if you all knew about this already (and if you did why the fcuk didn’t you tell me?), but I discovered this week that the Premier League has made highlights of EVERY SINGLE TOP-FLIGHT GAME SINCE 1992 available to watch on its website – THIS IS AMAZING (or at least it is if you are interested in English football from The Past; I appreciate that for the rest of you this is probably incredibly fcuking tedious but, well, allow me a brief moment of blokey indulgence). Fine, so you have to register an account with the Premier League which is predictably annoying as far as onboarding experiences go, but the ability to go back in time and watch Chelsea beat Spurs 4-3 in 1994 has made me VERY HAPPY.
By Juan Romero
THE SECTION WHICH REALLY WANTS HIM TO DIE, PT.2:
- Goodbye Warden: “597 Death Row inmates have been executed in Texas since 1982. These are their last words.” This is a very simple site – no bells, whistles or flourishes – and it originally existed in another form and has now been brought back having been offline; there’s no way of pretending that these are anything other than heartbreaking, regardless of the crimes that the subjects may have committed, and I just had to go and step away from the computer for a second to Take A Moment after reading a few, but it’s also weirdly beautiful and perfectly, horribly, tragically human and poignant and awful and therefore perfect.
- The Civic Atlas: A simple project designed to showcase the different forms of government in place across the world, mapped to a globe – it doesn’t show you much (it’s basically just a colourcoded atlas showing which countries are parliamentary republics, say, or constitutional monarchies), but it’s fascinating to see the extent to which forms of government cluster regionally and in some respects it’s probably not a terrible finger-in-the-air indicator as to some of the…fun geopolitical tensions we can expect to see developing as the battle for resources becomes even more fraught and febrile. FUN TIMES!
- ModemBin: Ooh, this is fun – almost entirely pointless, fine, but fun nonetheless. Upload any audio file you like and this site will convert it into the sound of a modem from THE PAST; you can then send it to anyone you like, who can then convert it BACK in to actual, listenable audio by plugging the audio back in here. So should you ever wish to play a VERY ELABORATE game of spies or something then this is exactly the tool for you – fcuked if I can think of an actual, practical use for it, but maybe you clever people will amaze me (please amaze me, I long to be shocked from my torpor).
- Cosmos: This is an interesting idea for those of you who work in, or who just fiddle around with, design, or who like to make visual moodboards or who just Think In Pictures – Cosmos is basically a riff on the visual search engine, where you type in whatever you’re interested in and it pulls images from a range of sources; there are a bunch of clever additional features, though, which elevate it beyond ‘just Google Images’, including the ability to add images to collections which are then visible to others, meaning you can actually do quite a fun navigation through visual latent space as experienced by others, by searching, clicking on individual pics and then exploring other people’s collections in which said pics feature…this is very much one of those sites that it really is easier to experience than describe (he said, like the lazy hack he is), so, well, click and LEARN.
- Dualshot: Ok, this is genuinely smart and if you are a CONTENT CREATOR then it could be hugely useful – this is an iOS app which does one thing and one thing only, letting you capture images and video in simultaneous portrait AND landscape view, meaning that you don’t then have to spend an age repurposing one format into another for the purpose of All Of Teh Socials. Clever, useful, simple, and while it costs a tenner that doesn’t feel unreasonable if you currently spend a lot of time fiddling with the horror of aspect ratios.
- Midway: A READER WRITES! Matthieu Guyonnet-Duluc, who I have never met but who I have ‘known’ online for ages (HELLO MATTHIEU!) emailed me to tell me about this website he’s made, which…oh, fcuk it, here are his words, they are better than mine: “Over the past few months, I’ve been building Midway, a free tool that helps people find destinations reachable by direct flight from different cities. The idea came from a personal experience: finding a destination where my best friend and I could meet — one with direct flights from both our cities since he has a busy schedule — was time-consuming, especially since airline schedules vary by month etc. I think it can help a group of friends planning a getaway weekend, a family organizing a reunion across different cities or co-workers looking for a retreat in a third-place.” I think this is both potentially-useful and the sort of thing that a travel company might reasonably think about incorporating into their own planning tools (after paying Matthieu for his idea, in an ideal world).
- Infinite Digest: ANOTHER READER WRITES! I have mentioned on here more times than I care to remember my love for the novel Infinite Jest (despite, I feel it important to point out, not being one of THOSE men – does he…does he protest too much??), so imagine my delight when I got an email from one Christian Swinehart reading: “I’m a Brooklyn-based data visualization artist and design professor and wanted to share a new project of mine that might interest you and your readers. For the 30th anniversary of its publication, I have been analyzing David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and creating a graphical companion to untangle some of its knots. Infinite Digest is a series of interactive visualizations of the novel’s plotlines, characters, and self-referential structure. The first two installments, exploring the novel’s timeline and its many footnotes are currently live, with more to come over the next few months.” OH GOD THIS IS FCUKING CATNIP TO ME. Honestly, if you are familiar with the book then you will adore this – it is SO comprehensive, and the work done to wrangle the novel’s famously-labyrinthine plotting and…odd approach to narrative chronology into a coherent timeline is both impressive and nicely-done from a visual point of view. I would very much like Christian to make posters of some of this work (I have emailed him this request too, but figure that by putting it in writing and further bullying him that might make it slightly more likely).
- Playlist Circle: Basically a place to share YouTube playlists that you’ve made, designed to make them discoverable and shareable in a way in which the platform itself doesn’t necessarily lend itself to. This is SUCH a good idea, even if the interface is possibly a *touch* clunky, and it’s an excellent place to find new collections of music and other audio, themed by genre – bookmark this, imho.
- Roman Letters: “7,049 letters from the late Roman world” – per the blurb, this is “The largest collection of late Roman letters ever assembled in English.” WELL. I presume that some of you are men and that therefore some of you spend ALL YOUR TIME thinking about the Roman Empire (yes, that’s right, I am resurrecting memetic rubbish from a few years ago, that’s how fast the nostalgia cycle spins in 2026), and that therefore you will all have stopped reading this sentence about 30 words ago and are now instead revelling in the WISE WORDS of Marcus Aurelius or something (other Romans are available, you know). There are over 8000 letters here, making this a genuinely incredible resource for scholars, enthusiasts and MEN alike.
- Delzer Editor: This is a TikTok channel belonging to…some kid, somewhere, where he shows off his video editing chops – the work here isn’t the shiniest or the best you will ever see, but there’s something fun and charming about the enthusiasm, and it’s interesting watching his skills develop as he becomes more confident with the tools at his disposal, and, generally, it’s just MAD what you can achieve with just your phone these days (he said, geriatrically) – there’s some incredibly-pure teenage boy energy (not THAT sort of energy, thank God) running through these which I very much appreciate.
- The FIMI Explorer: “This FIMI Explorer is the first public interactive multilayered dashboard on foreign information manipulation activities. It allows users to easily navigate key networks used in FIMI attacks, demonstrating connections between threat actors involved in information manipulation activities and their role.” This is a slightly-dizzying attempt to map various infomanipulation campaigns over recent years, the actors and the targets, which is probably only really of practical use if you work in the field but, for the rest of us, offers an interesting-if-bleak portrait about the extent to which the fact that noone can be certain about anything anymore (and the fact that that is only going to become more pronounced!) is being exploited by the now-legendary Bad Actors all over the fcuking place.
- Perfect Loop: It’s curious the extent to which despite ostensibly being used by literally hundreds of millions of people, many of whom must live in the UK, Threads (you know, the Meta-owned Twitter knockoff) has made literally NO cultural impact whatsoever – nothing appears to ever have emerged from it in terms of memes or breaking news, none of you know anyone who uses it, it seems to persist as an odd shadow network reflecting the rest of the web to an audience of…Jesus, who knows? Actually, you know what, I would LOVE to read a decent piece of analysis about who the fcuk IS actually using this – who are they? Where do they live? DO THEY HAVE A SENSE OF INTERIORITY???? Anyway, that has only a limited amount to do with the actual link, which, yes, is to Threads, and which is to an account which posts INCREDIBLY satisfying looping gifs with a sort of Tumblr-perfect glitched-out aesthetic, and while you will probably never look at it again on Threads it is also available on Insta so maybe go follow it there instead.
- Rejected Petitions: A Bluesky bot posting the subjects of petitions which have been rejected for whatever reason by the UK Parliament (there’s a convention in the UK whereby anyone can set up a petition through the Parliament website which, if it reaches over 100k signatories, gets a (very small, mostly entirely-cosmetic) debating slot in the House of Commons. Recent pleasingly-mad examples include the amusingly-specific “Letting Children use the toilet in schools when they need too without a pass”, and the quite wonderful “Any party who fail to implement their manifesto within 1 year. General election” (I absolutely ADORE the implication here that enacting legislative change across a sweeping range of policy areas and departments is as simple as just ‘doing it’!), and frankly the whole feed is a delight and you should follow it immediately.
- Particle Life Sim: Ok, look, I don’t REALLY understand this but it is VERY FUN TO WATCH – via Lynn, this is, per the site: “This is a particle system where particles asymmetrically attract and repel each other via the interaction matrix visible on the left panel. Originally inspired by Jeffrey Ventrella’s Clusters, ciphrd’s Atomic Clusters, and Tom Mohr’s Particle Life.” Look, I don’t really know what any of that means and if you’re being honest most of you don’t either, but click the link and enjoy watching the weird particulate life move and jive and generally just sort of…pulsate under your gaze.
- ReKindle: Ooh, this is interesting – the browser on the Kindle is, as you will know if you;ve ever tried to use it, largely pointless, but this service is designed to make it USEFUL – basically you can use this url to access all sorts of different tools via your e-reader, from basic calendars and RSS readers to more advanced stuff like your *spits* Substacks and your email (these latter require a paid subscription, but there’s a whole bunch of stuff you can do for free using this). As a way of getting off your phone, this feels like a good one – ok, fine, you’d just be swapping one screen for another, but the e-reader is VIRTUOUS AND MONOCHROME, by contrast to the RIOTOUS, SEDUCTIVE COLOUR of your whoreish mobile, and as such perhaps easier to tear yourself away from.
- UK Train Departures: Ok, this is VERY BORING and VERY PRACTICAL, but fcuk me if it isn’t useful, particularly given the…suboptimal performance of much of the UK’s rail network. “View live train departure boards for stations across Great Britain. Each station has a dedicated, search-friendly page showing real-time departures in a layout that replicates official station boards like Liverpool Street Station.” Honestly, if you want a decent, up-to-date way of checking exactly how late your train is running so you know whether it’s worth leaving the house (it almost certainly isn’t) then this is SO helpful.
- Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026: Per the Smithsonian post up there, this is a link to ALL OF THE NOMINEES rather than just the winners – as such there are a FCUKTONNE of images here, all amazing, some, as per, featuring SAD ANIMAL DEATH (so, you know, BE WARNED), and one or two which are so perfectly-composed that they…oh God, it’s happening, isn’t it, because what I really want to write here is ‘that they look like they have been AI-generated’ (and yes, I know, and I am sorry, but click the link and find the photo of what I think is a King Cobra hiding behind a door and you try telling me that this doesn’t look like the product of The Machine). Anyway, as ever these are glorious but, also as ever, I really wish we could stop HDR-ing the fcuk out of photos because the effect really is irreal and deadening at scale, and makes everything look processed to the point of being ‘shopped (and yes, I know they all get post-produced, but still).
- Movie Release Radar: A website which shows the the upcoming film release schedule wherever you live. I obviously don’t give a flying one about this, but according to people online who Like Films (weirdos) this is apparently both useful AND comprehensive!
- Magnified Sand: Who wouldn’t want to explore a whole website dedicated to showing you what sand looks like when magnified about 10million times, to, per the blurb, “explore the world of sand”? NO FCUKER!
- Woodid: OK, this is 100% Not My Thing, but given the number of you who will probably be tedious middle-aged men who are obsessed with running as you attempt to replace the bad addictions you once had with GOOD ADDICTIONS more behooving of your advancing years and maturity I figure that at least some of you might be in the market for a trophy commemorating your best run EVER on Strava. Basically these people will, for about 60 Euros, make a custom wooden trophy that shows your route, your time and which will let you feel like a WINNER, even as your record is smashed into smithereens by some other lycra-clad atheletodad with marginally more expensive trainers than you.
- Mr Breakfast: Breakfast, you may have heard, is the most important meal of the day – and noone is more convinced of this fact than the owner of this site, one Mr Breakfast. The site’s strapline is ‘All Breakfast, All The Time’ and MY GOD is it not joking about that – if you want breakfast-related information then you will find it here, all presented in the charmingly-retro fashion you might expect from a site whose heyday was very much 20 years ago. The site doesn’t appear to have been updated for 6 years – I really hope Mr Breakfast is ok – but there is SO much to love in here and I can’t help but adore the…unique enthusiasm that the owner has for the meal. The media endorsements are FABULOUS by the way – not least because they hark back to a time when the media reported on things like this rather than, I don’t know, how we’re all being driven mad by the web and the apps and the scroll. “September 30, 2003 – Bay News 9 TV of Tampa Bay, Florida chooses MrBreakfast.com as “the best the web has to offer”; airs an informative segment about the website.” CAN WE GO BACK, PLEASE? BREAKFAST RETVRN!!!!
- As Slow As Possible: Curios favourite Pippin Barr has made this excellent little art project which encourages you to play classic games (Pong, Breakout, you get the idea) but VERY, VERY SLOWLY, turning them into experiences which are genuinely (and I know this is a horribly-overused term, but it fits here) meditative. Try it, I promise it is genuinely-soothing.
- Orange Ocean: A short (five mins or so) little game riffing on Snake, but with a surreal narrative layer which I rather enjoyed. EAT THE FRUITS, follow the story.
- DOOM, in CSS: Someone has coded DOOM in CSS. Is this is an impressive technical feat? Yes, indubitably. Is this in any meaningful way ‘playable’? No, not in the slightest. Still, it’s nice to see that the slow progress of making every single thing in the known universe DOOM-compatible continues apace, well done everyone.
- Nounsense: Ooh, this is fun and all you wordcels will very much enjoy I think – the game in this daily puzzle game is to ‘guess the most common noun that follows the adjective’, which is simple and quick and a nice potential addition to the morning gamecycle. Mind you, I am embarrassingly sh1t at it and so am never going to play it again – see how you get on.
- Horse Magnifier: Look, this is INCREDIBLY silly, but given this appears to be a boom year for ‘games featuring horses’ then I feel honour bound to include it. Can YOU apply the magnifying lenses to the horse in exactly the right way? Yes, I promise that will make sense when you click, even though you will still be very confused as to what the fcuk you are doing and why.
- Conservation of Bass: This little physics-y platformer does a very bad job of explaining itself, but is fortunately quite intuitive and is VERY smart once it gets going – you need to guide your little fish friend to the glass of water in each level, but the challenge comes from how you manipulate the environment around you to do so. If you don’t immediately ‘get’ how this works, please stick with it as once it clicks it is very satisfying indeed.
- Make Me Some Cookies: ANOTHER READER WRITES! They want to remain anonymous, though, which is both INTRIGUING (are…are you some sort of international fugitive, mysterious correspondent? WHAT NEFARIOUS CRIMES HAVE YOU COMMITTED) and entirely fair. Anyway…*they* write, “I thought this might be a good fit for Curios. It’s an idle/incremental story game, it’s about 6 hours long. Best played on a desktop. It’s fully playable on phone or tablet but the UI wasn’t built with that in mind. There’s no monetization, no requests for donations or anything like that.” This is a clicker-ish title which has some rather nice touches, not least the narrative development that proceeds in parallel with you ramping up your cookie production empire to increasingly-ridiculous levels, and it’s a fun thing to keep open in the background while you perform the pointless charade that is your job.
- Strange and Luig: The final game this week is this BEAUTIFUL and very, very fun (if involved) little puzzler – I don’t want to explain too much as part of the joy is the surreal strangeness of the whole thing, but basically it harks back to a specific genre of title from the mid-00s in which you basically had to work out the order in which to interact with different elements across a large, multiscreen map, taking objects back and forth to unlock different areas and ‘story’ beats (I use the word ‘story’ advisedly here because, honestly, this is VERY WEIRD), and it is SO CUTE and nicely-animated and drawn, and generally it feels beautifully handmade and it’s a real pleasure to spend time with. So, er, I suggest that’s what you do RIGHT NOW.
OUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS VAGUELY-DREAMLIKE 80s-INFLECTED SELECTION BY LEE ROSEVERE!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Pictures of Old French Storefronts: Lots and lots of them! Not in any way a Tumblr, but it really should be!
- Title Scream: Type and graphic inspiration from 8-bit games! SO AESTHETIC! In a blocky way, but stilL!
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Administration Fiscale: A feed featuring the art of Thomas Strasser, which is…I mean, look, this is quite horrible, but exists in a strange sort of uncanny valley which straddles AI aesthetics and pop culture and celebrity and bodyhorror, and while the works themselves are not something I would ever rush to see irl there’s something oddly fitting about seeing them in-feed. Gross, but in a weirdly-curious sort of way.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The War Against Misinformation Is Over: I don’t have anything directly about The War in the longreads this week, not least because it seems increasingly clear that literally no fcuker anywhere in the world has the first fcuking clue what is going on right now (not least the people ostensibly in charge of the whole fcuking farrago lolololol – the world will end not with a bang but a series of hollow chuckles, it seems), so instead let’s focus on another ongoing conflict which may be approaching its end, specifically the ‘war’ on misinformation which looks set to join the one on drugs in the pantheon of great military failures of our time. The thesis of the piece is that we have fundamentally given up on caring whether what we share or the things we say are ‘true’ in the old sense of the word, that the quality of truthiness is enough to satisfy us, and that we have fundamentally given up trying to push back against the tide of bullsh1t flooding the socials and the news and the airwaves because our fingers are small, the hole in the dyke is massive, and the incredibly-dirty-looking water is so backed up it’s now slopping over the top of the dam (to, er, coin an incredibly clunky metaphor – I get paid to write, you know!). I have noticed myself in recent weeks, even in communities of the middle-aged and ostensibly ‘should know better’ crowd people have taken to posting things and when confronted with the fact that they might not in fact be true responding with a shrug and a ‘does it even matter?’. Which, er, fcuk. This is, I think, one of the great, significant tragedies of the modern age, and I don’t think it gets anywhere near as much attention as it ought to.
- The Anti-Muslim Agenda: Hussein Kesvani, who I have met a couple of times and who has always struck me, both online and off, as not only a nice man but a very, very smart one, writes here about the seemingly-accepted climate of Islamophobia which now maintains in the West (specifically the UK and US, but frankly you could extrapolate this to much of Europe as well imho) – there’s a lot in here, but Kesvani’s a very readable writer and the thesis is compelling, and you’d have to be something of a moron not to notice the way in which the appeal to ‘Christian values’ has become a popular dogwhistle amongst the racist right-wing over the course of the past couple of years. “Speaking to Muslim family and friends who have seen a marked rise in anti-Muslim hostility and attacks, both in the news and in their personal lives, all while existing on an internet where anti-Muslim content, misinformation and Islamophobic AI slop have become so common as to be unremarkable, a common sentiment emerges: Yes, we’ve been dealing with Islamophobia for a long time, and for many of us who grew up in the shadow of 9/11, it has lurked in the background of our formative years. But this time something feels different. We’re now dealing with an Islamophobia that’s far more abstract, fixated on Western civilizational collapse as an opportunity to instill racial purity, and far more sinister in its intentions. Its key influencers and figureheads, backed by millions of dollars in dark money and cryptocurrency, have taken to calling for the return of concentration camps and mass human trafficking under the guise of deportations, all accompanied by hacky AI hallucinations depicting crusades and civil wars. Indeed you’d be hard pressed to watch or listen to any right wing podcast or media outlet of late and not find that pretty much every conversation they have – be it on the economy, on healthcare, or even on pop culture, comes back to their singular fixation on the existence of Muslims. (That is when they take a break from fearmongering about trans people.) Islamophobia isn’t just a feature of Britain’s Conservatives or the Republican party, part of a package to sell endless austerity and open markets to predatory capital, it now occupies the entirety of right-wing political thought.”
- What Happens To Saudi Now?: Oh, ok, so this is tangentially about the war – this WalL Street Journal piece looks at the recent scaling back of many of MBS most grandiose (read: fcuking mad) projects, The Line and NEOM being the two most high-profile – and how the Kingdom’s ambitions and ‘pivot to tech’ is going to pan out now that the stability of the region looks to be fcuked three ways from Sunday. The wider consideration, of course, is how this affects the broader tech sector, given the degree of Saudi investment on which the continued expansion of the AI sector (insert the word ‘bubble’ here depending on how Zitronpilled you happen to be) and the extent to which a LOT of businesses seemed to be banking on being bankrolled by the petrodollar and the munificence of cuddly butcher of journalists Bin Salman. This is fine, right?
- Reform Vs Green: Non-anglos, and those of you who are English but who are somehow not GRIPPED by local election fever, can probably skip this, but for the rest of you I thought this piece in Prospect by Carys Afoko was a very good look at the respective status of the two ‘challenger’ parties in UK politics right now (although given they’re both polling consistently above the traditional two main parties I suppose we ought to call them the NEW FRONTRUNNERS) and how their approaches to campaigning differ – I’m personally not convinced by a lot of the current discourse from the trad liberal left about the supposed equivalence between the two in terms of the oddity of their membership base and the paucity of policy, but there’s something interesting about the contrast presented here.
- Bring Back Shame: Ok, I am paraphrasing SLIGHTLY when it comes to the title here, but this post by fellow Tiny Awards convener Matt Klein (and journalist Sophia Epstein) is both interesting and something which I believe very firmly indeed (and which also, I think, links back to the first piece in several important thematic ways) – to whit, that we have slightly given up on holding people accountable for sh1t that they assert with confidence and which then turns out to be totally wrong, and that we have perhaps lost something when noone feels the need to be in any way responsible for what they said in the past, and there’s no need to present a coherent body of thinking so much as to just Always Be Posting Opinions. Obviously this made me think a LOT about the Bullsh1t Strategist Industrial Complex and the ceaseless cavalcade of Thought Leadership on LinkedIn about AI and THE CRAFT OF STRATEGY by people who five years ago were charging consultancy fees to tell you why having a web3 strategy was vital for your business and why having an office in Decentraland was good actually, but it equally applies to almost every single politician (certainly in the UK) over the past few years, and, frankly, lots of people in their day-to-day life. BRING BACK SHAME AND BRING BACK BULLYING, are basically my two most-cancellable opinions right now (lol, jk, I have SO MANY MORE!).
- The Moral Dyad: A short-but-smart (and useful) piece by Arnold Kling on the concept of the moral dyad, or, in layman’s terms, “The moral dyad is a phenomenon where we attribute agency only to one side and feeling only to another side. This is the villain-victim mindset.” As Kling points out, this was most recently visible in the reaction to the lawsuits against Meta (and Google) in the US last month, in which the claimant in the LA case in particular was depicted as entirely without agency and defenceless in the face of the AWESOME POWER OF BIG TECH which, I don’t know man, feels…reductive and wrong? Anyway, this is NOT LONG (praise be!) but does do a good job of introducing you to a helpful way of analysing any binary debate you happen to come across.
- The AI Writing Witchhunt is Pointless: There has been a LOT of DISCOURSE about AI and writing over the past few weeks, spurred by that schmuck who got caught using The Machine to write part of his review for the NYT, but I thought this take on it by Joan Westenberg was a good one, touching on how we’re now at a point where the pursuit of purity in the written word is now – sadly! – a bit pointless, that the models can all do a reasonable job of punting out clunky-but-not-obviously-useless prose, and how many of the old ‘tells’ won’t work in a few short months…and that there is plenty of human-created terrible writing out there which one might easily credit to The Machine but which in fact is all the work of some meaty fleshsack. “You can’t read a paragraph and reliably, with a human life on the line (because that’s the stakes, when you destroy a writer’s career and a writer’s reputation) tell beyond any reasonable doubt, whether a human or a machine produced it. Humans writing in familiar genres, leaning on conventions and common phrasings, leaning on their own context windows, containing everything from Ian Kershaw to Ursula LeGuin to a smattering of Harry Potter fanfiction from 2005 to a series of brain-rotted TikTok reels are doing the best they can to find the right words and shove them into something resembling the right order. A romance novel that uses “his eyes darkened with desire” isn’t necessarily AI-generated, even if it reads like a steaming pile to those of us enlightened enough to call ourselves the Literati. Following genre conventions doth not a fraud make. A horror novel with clunky exposition isn’t ChatGPT. It might just be a first-time author who hasn’t found their voice yet, and they’ll never find their voice if we wave pitchforks and torches at every line we personally dislike.”
- Industrial Policy for the Machine Age: Yes, yes, this is a document by OpenAI – I KNOW AND I AM SORRY. That said, I do think that this – published this week, and featuring a selection of ideas from literally nobody’s favourite company as to how governments might want to respond to the growing threat of AI to, well, all sorts of stuff – is worth reading, not least because its existence does rather highlight the fact that, whatever you might think of some of the ideas in here, SEEMINGLY NO FCUKING GOVERNMENT IS APPLYING ANYWHERE NEAR THIS DEGREE OF (TO BE CLEAR, MINIMAL) INTELLECTUAL RIGOUR TO THE QUESTION. You might think, for example, that there might have been some consultations around this, some Departmental position papers, but…nope! Anyway, some of this struck me as not-actually-dumb (for example, the concept of applying differential tax burdens to businesses dependent on the extent to which they deploy AI to replace human workers, say, and using the proceeds for broadly-redistributive ends), some of it is risible (are you saying, OpenAI, that governments should…invest in AI companies and then share the profits of those investments with the populace? Are you…suggesting that governments prop you up? HMMMMMMMMMMMMM), but, honestly, it was genuinely refreshing to see SOMEONE asking questions or positing ideas because fcuk me is there a paucity of serious thinking about the actual, practical steps we are going to need to start taking soonish should this stuff continue on its current trajectory.
- The Big Altman Hitpiece: This is Ronan Farrow’s BIG TAKEDOWN of Sam Altman, which is also an exhaustive account of the attempt to oust him from OpenAI a few years ago and how he basically corporate-jujitsu’d his way out of it and, honestly, I didn’t personally find it that interesting – not because it’s not good reporting (it very much is) but because I didn’t feel it told me that much I didn’t already know based on previous profiles and readings. It is, though, comprehensive as all fcuk, and if you want to read a bunch of people repeatedly saying variants on ‘this guy is fundamentally untrustworthy as fcuk and also lies like a snake’ then you will very much enjoy it. What struck me most, personally, was the extent to which I just sort of shrugged in resignation while reading because SO much of the behaviour and attitudes described here are just ‘the qualities that VCs look for in founders’ and can we PLEASE PLEASE maybe change that?
- Prediction Markets and Fake Influencers: Not to say ‘I told you so’ but when the Polymarket x Substack linkup was announced however many weeks ago, I seem to recall saying something along the lines of ‘wow, what a wonderful ecosystem this is going to provide for grifters who want to pretend to have insider knowledge to BEAT THE (poly)market and who will happily charge for said ‘info’!’ AND LO! Ok, fine, this isn’t about Substack per se, but the ‘insider grift’ is well and truly here.
- Brainless Human Clones: This is by a very long chalk THE most fcuked-up thing I have read in ages, and I had to keep checking the date on the piece to make sure I wasn’t missing an April Fool – apparently, though, this is real. Honestly, you will not believe how incredibly, astonishingly, scifihorror this is – you know the classic, awful ‘we kept the less-fortunate brother in the basement to use as an organ farm for the more favoured sibling’ trope? Well this is basically that, but real – if you don’t like the idea of people LITERALLY trying to engineer brainless fleshsacks with human organs but no brains for the express purposes of organ harvesting then, er, maybe skip this one.
- The Serbian Student Movement: All of the excitement about the student-led revolution in Nepal has pulled the focus away from the also-student-led revolution still going on in Serbia – this is a really interesting and illuminating essay in the LRB, in which Vincent Bevins summarises What Has Happened to date, and tracks the difficulties inherent in the shift from ‘student protest movement’ to ‘coherent group with agreed policies that might be ready to contest elections’. “When a student uprising unexpectedly toppled the government in Kathmandu last autumn, a meme circulated on social media urging Serbia to ‘do a Nepal.’ If there was a moment last spring when that might have been possible, it seems to have passed. Some of the students I interviewed knew that I’d written a book about mass protests which ended in disappointment. ‘If you are here, that is already a bad sign,’ one of them joked. But I wasn’t there because I thought they’d fail, and it’s not as though they’re confident they’re going to succeed. Some of the students asked whether I thought their movement could serve as a model for others. But it’s hard to think of other countries where ‘the students’ could stand in for the entire political opposition. In the US, university students are now seen as an elite class committed to a specific form of radical politics. If Serbia is an exception, it’s one explained in part by the history of Yugoslavia. The Socialist Federal Republic had its own student revolt in 1968, when protesters called on the government to tackle inequality and provide more jobs for graduates. Tito eventually said that ‘the students are right’ and gave in to some of their demands, promising a renewed commitment to socialist ‘self-management’ and improved living conditions for students, though in the end little changed. Most Serbian universities are public and almost half of students attend for free. Educational institutions are seen as belonging to the country as a whole, and many Serbians regard students as the children of the nation.”
- Fake Fans: An interesting piece about modern-day astroturfing in the music industry, and some of the surprising names who might have benefited from grass-roots excitement that may not have been quite as organic as might have been thought (although personally I have been slightly baffled by the popularity of Geese, so imho this tracks). None of this felt new to me personally as someone who remembers the insanely-crooked ‘virality’ industry c.2010 (Rubber Republic, what lies you helped me tell!), but younger readers or those less tainted by advermarketingpr might find this strips some veils from their vision.
- Building A Family Memory Encyclopedia: I thought this was a lovely idea and a really nice instructional post – Jeremy (no surname, apparently, like Madonna) writes about using Claude to help them build a Wiki of their family memories, including photos and text, built from fragments, interviews with family members and the remaining recollections of those who can still cast their minds back far enough to recall shared moments from decades past. I thought this was a wonderful usecase for AI, and the sort of thing which I can imagine people whose families are less catastrophically-decimated than mine might reasonably enjoy playing with.
- How We Got Instant Coffee: Yes, ok, fine, this is quite technical and, yes, it is specifically about how we arrived at the modern process for making instant coffee granules, but I promise you that it is GENUINELY INTERESTING and taught me quite a lot of stuff that I would never have known otherwise, about both coffee and physics, and what more can you ask for than that? I mean, look, obviously you can ask for whatever you like but, Jesus, STOP BEING SO GREEDY.
- How The Spreadsheet Changed Everything: The actual title of this is ‘how it changed America’, but, well, fcuk the US-centrism of that perspective, THE WORLD IS BIGGER THAN YOU YOU SELF-ABSORBED FCUKS. Anyway, this is another ‘far more interesting than you might think’ piece, and a good series of arguments as to why the quantification of everything is not, necessarily, a net good in every single instance.
- Going On The Modest Mouse Cruise: I have featured pieces in here about band cruises before, but this has a slightly different tone – less ‘look at the weirdos’ and more an interesting exploration about what the relationship between artists and fans looks like as both, er, ‘mature’. I really enjoyed this – it’s a very straight piece no snark, but it gives a pleasing amount of space to both artists and punters to explain both the appeal of the cruise and also the shifting relationship they have to each other, and there’s a…sincerity to this that I rather enjoyed (and I NEVER feel like that as a rule).
- Secrets of the Granny Shelf: I LOVE THIS SO MUCH. Tim Hayward in the FT takes a tour along the ‘granny shelf’, the bits of the supermarket that house all the foods that you know in your heart of hearts are only eaten by people who have been alive for 65+ years and which you would NEVER consume – sandwich spread, tinned chicken breast, Fray Bentos pies, the whole smorgasbord – and unexpectedly finds himself repeatedly singing the praises of tinned produce. This is funny, and fun, and a really nice idea for a piece, and will generally please anyone with even a passing knowledge of the horror that was the UK food landscape prior to about 1990 (a cultural hill I will die on – Italia90’s greatest contribution to British culture was nothing to do with men crying or football becoming less terrifyingly violent and racist but instead more to do with the range of foods stocked in supermarkets as part of the tournament tie-ins and how those changed mainstream British palates forever).
- The Aetherius Society: This piece is very personally resonant to me; the bit of London where my dad has lived for 35-odd years is very close to the HQ of the Aetherius Society, an organisation which very much believes in communion with benevolent alien space gods, and as such I have, since a young age, walked past a shop window advertising books on how to commune with the immortal cosmic masters without knowing the first thing about what the fcuk it is all about – thanks to this profile by Lotte Brundle, now I do. This is a lovely piece of writing, not least because it escapes the easy trap of pointing and laughing at the mad freaks.
- Desi Italian: When I read this Vittles piece about ‘Italian’ food in India I confess to having about seventeen different conniptions at the dishes being described and I can’t pretend that I was anything other than appalled at the concept of pasta in ‘pink’ sauce – but, equally, I appreciate that Italians are incredibly fcuking annoying about food, that there really are no rules when it comes to what tastes good (or what you *think* tastes good), and that one of the lovely things about living in a global village (this analogy really doesn’t work anymore, does it? Fcuk it, I can’t be bothered to think of a new one) is the cultural osmosis that you get through the meeting of peoples and cuisines…anyway, this is really interesting but I would suggest that my Italian readers take several deep breaths before clicking because, onestamente, checazzo fanno questi pazzi?
- Negative Tennis: I don’t really care about tennis, but I do love me some good sportswriting and this piece, by Owen Lewis in n+1, about the soulless dominance of Jannik Sinner (a man who I know is Italian by passport but who I can only ever think of as Austrian), is some good sportswriting.
- Funeral for an AI: I know, I know, ‘people ‘falling in love’ with AI stories are OLD HAT and PLAYED OUT’ – this is slightly different, though, as Chandler Fritz attends a funeral for a woman’s AI…companion being held in New York. This is less about someone going loopy thanks to The Machine (although it is) and more about the experience of the funeral itself, the oddity of memorialising something that never existed…this is strange and weird and sad and poignant and, again, doesn’t punch down in a way that would have been easy; there’s no sense that the author pities the subject, just a sense of curiosity about the how, why and what that sits behind a Buddhist service for the memory of some code.
- Is My Writing Too Wet: The last longread of the week is ANOTHER piece by Sam Kriss, who I am going to stop linking to for a while because, well, enough, but whose writing here I enjoyed SO much that I can’t but include it. If you find his style a touch maximalist (and, objectively, a bit smugly clever-clever) then you won’t find anything here to change your mind, but I’ve got a soft spot both for slightly-overheated prose styles (whodathunkit, etc etc) and for people showing off, and on that basis this is excellent. This is about slime – except it’s not, of course, it’s about ideas and writing and self and memetics and and and and. Enjoy, it is good and VERY CHEWY.
By Nat Meade
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: