Webcurios 10/07/26

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Can we not, please, have a month or so off? I know that the political and media classes in the UK are addicted to CAMPAIGNING – governing, not so much! – but, Jesus, can it not just STOP for a bit?

Anyway, you can get all your news about the HILARIOUS contest between a no-longer-funny joke candidate who’s very much outstayed his welcome and Nigel Fara…God, no, sorry, I simply can’t bring myself to do it. Finish the gag yourselves, you’d do a better job, honestly.

I am once again going to spend this weekend hanging out with people two decades younger than me and being ‘the weird old man at the rave’ – between that and the fact that there’s a non-zero possibility that I am going to have to watch a significant England match in public, with England fans, for the first time in over a decade, I might actually not make it out alive. So, er, it’s been a pleasure – I appreciate it might not feel the same way for you, but trust me when I say that you will miss me when I’m gone (YOU FCUKING WILL YOU CNUTS).

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and in the event of my death I bequeath this newsletter to each and every one of you (this is legally binding).

By Minseo Kang

ACCOMPANY THE FIRST SECTION OF THIS WEEK’S CURIOS, OR INDEED ANYTHING ELSE YOU FANCY, WITH ANOTHER WANDER THROUGH THE SOUL AND AFRICAN SECTIONS OF THE RECORD COLLECTION OF TOM SPOONER!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGISE TO ERLING HAALAND FOR ALL THE TIMES IT HAS REFERRED TO HIM AS A GIGANTIC NORWEGIAN ROBOT GOAL B4STARD IN THE PAST FEW YEARS AND WHICH WISHES HIM THE VERY, VERY BEST FOR SATURDAY NIGHT PLEASE GOD, PT.1: 

  • Liminal Bingo: I know that this is, in the main, meant to be a newsletter about ‘stuff on the internet’, but this week we kick off with something which is very much designed to get you off the FCUKING SCREENS and whose relationship with Online is very much tangential – but, also, it is a great idea and I like it a lot and, as ever, it’s my newsletter so THERE. Liminal Bingo is, basically, a photoprompt site which encourages people to go out into the REAL WORLD and take some pictures – it gives you a series of 25 very loose prompts which you can take as literally or figuratively as you wish as inspiration for a series of shots, with the idea being that you upload your snaps to Insta to participate in the collective project. The prompts are rather beautiful, naive little artworks in and of themselves, and I like how…oblique some of them are: “epitaph written on a dumpster”, say, or “A Roadsite Portal”, and the cherry on the cake is that the ‘best’ images submitted to the challenge through to the end of August have the chance to be included in an actual, real-life, honest-to-god PHYSICAL SHOW at an NYW gallery later in the year. Basically this is a superb idea and something which could very easily be used for, er, ‘CREATIVE INSPIRATION’ should you be in the market for such a thing.
  • Kamtape: I am slightly confused by this website, but to a certain degree that feels very much As It Should Be with the links in here; Kamtape is a (to my mind, at least) almost-entirely-inexplicable attempt to answer the question ‘what if YouTube like it was when it first launched, but NOW?’. So this is, literally, a video sharing site which is designed to ape the look and feel of early YT – I think it launched in 2023, and since then it’s accumulated its own weird collection of…Christ, I don’t really know how to explain this other than to say ‘it really does feel like early YouTube’ – this is full of clips that feel like they have been uploaded by people who don’t ever really think they are going to be seen, like it was back in the good old days (lol, THERE IS NO SUCH THING, NOSTALGIA IS EVIL AND THE PAST WAS SH1T TOO)…think grainy nighttime footage of a slightly-sinister 3am trudge to the gas station with your friends when you’re all a bit baked, or a screenrecording of someone playing computer solitaire, or some techy how-to stuff, or weird little CG animations…nothing on here has more than 300-ish views, nothing here really has any sort of explanation, there’s no algorithm and no real discovery mechanism other than just sort of clicking around, and it really does feel like you’ve stumbled across a portal back to c.2009 or something. I am FASCINATED by this, honestly – who is using it? Why? – but very pleased that it exists.
  • Meta Pocket: Much like ‘fetch’, Meta keeps trying to make AI happen – its continued attempt to inject ‘fun’ toys into its app ecosystem has so far been met with little more than studied indifference (at best) by consumers in the West, but let’s see whether this latest gimmick will shift the needle and convince us all that actually it’s really cool after all (it won’t). Pocket is a new app which is, at the time of writing, available to users in the US and basically lets you create small ‘games’, one-shotted into existence via a prompt; said ‘games’ (they’re not really games, as far as I can tell, morelike small, simple interactive toy-type experiences; ‘paint a landscape with flowers’, say, or ‘sculpt an object in 3d and create a digital artwork’, you get the idea) then become available for anyone else with the app to experience and play with…”Scroll a feed of gizmos [NOTE: GIZMOS IS NOT GOING TO CATCH ON, META MARKETING PEOPLE] from people around the world. Gizmos respond to your touch and the tilt of your phone. They play sound effects and your favorite songs. They can use your camera or pull in photos from your camera roll. Some can even reason about the world around them. Make a gizmo just by describing it. Open the editor to tweak and refine it until it’s exactly what you want. Add photos from your camera roll to make it personal. When it’s ready, share it on your profile. Likes and comments go a long way — but you can do more. Save the gizmos you love into playlists: the best puzzles, your favorite selfie cameras, the music soundboards. Explore the community through playlists made by people like you.” Actually there’s a universe in which I can imagine this being quite cool (ok, fine, ‘cool’) but it would require the functionality of what you can create to be significantly more interesting than I have a strong suspicion it will in fact be in actuality; I remain…uncertain that this will still be supported in 18 months time, but obviously feel free to come back here and mock me if we’re all playing with each others’ Gizmos come Q327.
  • The Annals of Morermarch: Seeing as we’re doing AI stuff, this is a neat little demonstration of how fcuking impressive the stuff you can make with the current crop of frontier models is. Ethan Mollick writes: “I had Fable build another thing I always wanted, a full procedural fantasy kingdom generator with economics, trade routes, population growth, wars, lineages, and occasional dragons. First, I worked with it on a plan, then it made it. Also signs and portents, royal processions, mule trains, bandit camps, tiny sheep, rivers, plagues, assassinations, marriages, fields, natural resources, and other stuff.” Mollick has generously shared the full prompt he used to generate this, and it’s worth a read (not least because it demonstrates that you still need to put quite a bit of work into the thinking/prep) as you play around with the viewer, but, honestly, this is very, very impressive indeed. The graphics are…ok, the way the world works is coherent, the possibilities from the point of view of emergent are huge, and I can see something like this being a really fun addition to the storytelling and worldbuilding of a D&D campaign or similar should you be the sort of person for whom that is a meaningful sentence (THIS IS FOR YOU).
  • Football Data Portraits: I don’t want to dwell on the football because, mainly, I have The Fear about The Bad Thing happening, but seeing as it is very much still happening I may as well chuck in a couple of links. This one is to a cool project which presents the data of each game of the tournament as a sort of animated fluid map; every pass, tackle, shot, etc, is rendered as a sort of creeping, moving heatmap, showing the relative degree of control and pressure each side was exerting over the game as the 90 (or 120) minutes passed; so last night’s France-Morocco game, for example, is basically a pulsing blue wave just sort of lapping against a slightly-feeble-looking red shoreline (look, sorry Morocco fans, that’s just what the visualisation’s saying, don’t look at me like that). This is actually a surprisingly-useful way of getting a quick feel for the ebb and flow of the gamestate, imho, as well as looking pretty cool, and I think there’s something genuinely novel about this as a dataviz mechanic (or at least it was novel to me, and that, fundamentally, is all that matters). BONUS WORLD CUP LINK: Ok, fine, this is basically just a throwaway vibecoded thing (SORRY TO WHOEVER ASKED CLAUDE TO MAKE IT) but if you’re interested in a map of where every single goal of the tournament has been scored from then perhaps you will find this of some small use. There’s actually quite a lot of data buried in here, should you feel that there’s some sort of DEEP INSIGHT you can scry from, I don’t know, analysing the number of left-footed shots that have been scored in the final 7 minutes of all the matches so far (there isn’t, stop looking for one).
  • AI For Newsrooms: Hm, I can’t pretend that the name of this site/project doesn’t make me feel…slightly-icky, but equally it would be foolish and blinkered not to acknowledge that there *are* plenty of things for which AI is, can be and will be useful from a journalistic point of view; research, first-line editing, NOT WRITING…basically this is designed to be a repository for news and updates for What Is Going On At The Intersection of AI and News, so things like links to tips, techniques, case studies, articles about the craft, that sort of thing. The site’s (inevitably) a Claude co-production, but I am heartened by the fact that there is a named, real person behind it, one Sergei Yakupov based in Lisbon, and if you’re someone who’s interested in how AI might usefully be used in newsrooms and where then this is worth a look.
  • International Cocktail Whispers: I rather enjoyed this little experimenttoything spin up by Lynn with AI – it’s basically a lossy information transfer simulator, but, er, that’s a really fcuking horrible way of describing anything so I will instead defer to Lynn’s own explanation as it’s significantly less sh1t than mine: “At this international cocktail party, the English guest has things to say — code phrases? or just rambling? — and they are taken rather seriously: heard through translation software, their messages pass from guest to guest as gossip, mutating a little with every retelling.” Basically this simulates an imaginary cocktail party where you can see information being passed from guest to guest via their natural interactions, and see how the quality of that information degrades as it’s passed from one node to the next, losing detail or nuance or being mistranslated at each step; I think there’s actually the kernel of a rather clever game in this, but even as a sort of demo-toy-thing this is surprisingly interesting and weirdly cute.
  • The Milky Way Photographer of the Year: STARS! BEAUTIFUL, MILKY STARS, SPAFFED ACROSS THE INFINITE BLACKNESS OF THE NIGHT SKY! MARVEL AT THEIR SPLENDOUR! FEEL INCREDIBLY SMALL AND INSIGNIFICANT! As I am now compelled to say, these have been fcuked with slightly too much in post for me to truly love them, but, equally, there’s nothing like a bunch of photos of the roiling celestial majesty of the heavens to remind you of where you stand in the universe (NOWHERE, YOU STAND *NOWHERE*).
  • Who’s On Bluesky Right Now?: Based on observable trends, the answer to that is likely to be ‘fewer people than there were yesterday’ – but still! This is a neat little tool which will, if you give it your username, tell you which of your mutuals are online RIGHT NOW, which I presume is a useful way of seeing whether or not it’s worth posting based on who’s likely to see it and whether they will give a fcuk (although obvs a TRUE POASTER will post regardless because they have The Disease). I just looked and, at the time of writing, I have two mutuals who are currently checking Blusesky and, look, I am not going to shame you but I am going to say that you probably don’t need to be monitoring this situation at 7:55am on a Friday morning guys ffs (and yes, I am aware of the fact that I woke up nearly two hours ago to write 10,000 words of largely-unreadable crap about ‘stuff on the internet’ which will be seen by approximately six people but I HAVE A PROBLEM OK?? Jesus).
  • Song Shapes: It’s been a bumper year so far  in terms of lovely people getting in touch with me and sending their projects, and I would just like to say thanks again to everyone who gets in touch to send me things they have made (although no thanks at all to the cnuts who get their Agent to pen their emails; PUT AT LEAST SOME EFFORT IN AND MAKE ME FEEL SPECIAL YOU B4STARDS) – this is from Javier, a Chilean living in France, who wrote to tell me about his project, described as “what a weirdo that likes (indie) rock and diagrams might end up doing”. Basically this is a neat little series of diagrammatic representations of songs and their titles/lyrics, rendered as flowcharts or venn diagrams or other, er, visual things (you may be able to guess that this is not an area I really know much about), and which are, honestly, CHARMING – I think these could make rather nice posters, on reflection, with perhaps a tiny bit of a design glow-up. Anyway, take a look and THANKYOU JAVIER.
  • Knockoff Shopping: This is a neat little idea; I *think* it’s been pretty much entirely vibecoded, which imho is a nice example of something genuinely-useful you can spin up in next to no time which can actually gain reasonable traction (this has been all over the web over the past few days). Knockoff Shopping is a Chrome extension which, when installed, lets you browse Amazon with all (oh, ok, probably not ‘all’, but still) the weird, fake nonbrands removed; you know, the Amazon listings for products with names like halluicinated IKEA shelving units or strange Gods from the Old Times, names like “HJALKRINSKK” or “BLOBBCHUXX”, companies that exist as shell brands with dropshipping setups and a suspicious quantity of positive reviews in strangely-uniform English…anyway, this works by (I think) simply running the listings against an approved list of brands that Really Exist and eliminating any that aren’t a match; simple, smart and potentially useful if you have some sort of weird objection to buying a tshirt from a company called “SZHLUX”.
  • A PS1-Style Audio Visualiser: Would you like a website that will produce rather competent PS1-era visuals to accompany whatever music you run through it? YES YOU WOULD!
  • Visualising Seinfeld: Ooh, this is GREAT – a really lovely dive into Seinfeld, its characters, themes, plot lines, the works, all presented lovingly with audio and video snippets..seriously, if you have any affection at all for the series then you will absolutely fcuking adore this, it’s BEAUTIFULLY done and if I had ever watched more than approximately 17 minutes of the show in my life I would probably feel incredibly warmly towards this as opposed to just thinking ‘oh, this is obviously very nicely-made but I honestly have no fcuking idea what any of this means’. Er, Soup Nazi? Is that a thing? Via Giuseppe’s ever-excellent newsletter about data and visualisation and stuff.
  • Jay Rosen’s Internet Archive: Ooh, this is another rather cool use of AI which I think you might find interesting; “Jay Rosen’s Internet Archive is a curated public collection of the works, critiques, and teachings of Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University. It preserves four decades of writing about journalism, democracy, and public life. Since 2003, Rosen has written the blog PressThink, where he has developed a body of criticism that includes key concepts like “the view from nowhere,” “the people formerly known as the audience,” “the church of the savvy,” and “not the odds, but the stakes.” These ideas have shaped how journalists, scholars, and the public think about the role of the press in democracy. His work spans articles, books, blog posts, lectures, interviews, and social media commentary across platforms including Twitter/X and Bluesky.” So basically what Rosen has done is taken the archive of his work over the past few decades – his scholarship, his essays, his thinking, his notes, etc – and, as far as I can tell, run it through an LLM to fillet and tag and compile, and made it accessible via this interface, affording anyone who is curious the opportunity to take a structured dive through his output and to examine and explore it in various ways. The archive’s searchable, obviously, but there’s also an interesting layer of ‘linked concepts’ which I think is a really useful way of approaching an archive like this: per the blurb, “the entity browser shows how records connect through shared people, organizations, and concepts, and lets you search by specific names and institutions.” This feels clever, and something which might prove interesting inspiration for any of you with access to a similar informational corpus.
  • The Pixel Chapel: I have no idea why you might need a virtual representation of a chapel in 8-bit graphical style – perhaps you’re housebound! Perhaps you live somewhere with no churches! Perhaps, like me, you sold your soul to Satan aged 17 and are now too scared to cross the threshold onto sanctified ground lest you immediately burst into a nimbus of holy, white-hot flame and be reduced to a pile of gently-smouldering ash! Who knows! – but, just in case you did, here’s one! You can light candles, which I have to say made me…ngl, quite emo when I found this at 6:37am this morning, but I am STRONG and I stopped snivelling a good fifteen minutes ago so stop looking at me like that.
  • The New Foods of the Minnesota State Fair: It is a now-annual tradition that the Minnesota State Fair’s reveal of the NEW FOODS which will be gracing its stands this summer is an online OCCASION, as Americans salivate and the rest of the world queues up to shout “Jesus fcuking Christ what is wrong with you this is not food this is chemicals, deep-fried chemicals, no wonder you all look like that and vote like that, what are you DOING to yourselves you fcuking freaks?” (sorry Americans, but, also, I am right here). This year’s, er, smorgasbord of delights is no exception – as ever, what’s weirdest to me is the contrast between stuff that, yes, fine, is recognisable as something that normal people might on occasion consume (ham and manchego croquetas – fine! Tacos – fine!), and things which feel like some sort of incitement to international conflict; I can’t tell you what my Italian ancestors are screaming in my ears as I read this as it’s simply too obscene to commit to digital print, but, well, LOOK AT THIS FFS: “Chopped Italian grinder sandwich-style blend of sliced salami, pepperoncinis, green olives, artichokes, roasted red peppers and fresh mozzarella pearls, tossed in Italian dressing. Layered over a bag of Dutch Crunch® Parmesan & Garlic Kettle Chips and drizzled with Calabrian chili aioli.” OBSCENE! And don’t get me started on “Fluffy shave ice infused with blue moon flavor, dusted with Fruity Pebbles™ cereal and drizzled with sweetened condensed milk.”  BLUE MOON IS NOT A FLAVOUR FFS THIS IS WHY YOU ARE ALL ON REDDIT ALL THE TIME COMPLAINING ABOUT YOUR CHRONIC GASTRIC ISSUES.

By Mikey Yates

NEXT, HAVE AN 8-HOUR, ENTIRELY-GENRE-SCHIZOPHRENIC PLAYLIST OF SONGS BY AMERICAN ARTISTS!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGISE TO ERLING HAALAND FOR ALL THE TIMES IT HAS REFERRED TO HIM AS A GIGANTIC NORWEGIAN ROBOT GOAL B4STARD IN THE PAST FEW YEARS AND WHICH WISHES HIM THE VERY, VERY BEST FOR SATURDAY NIGHT PLEASE GOD, PT.2: 

  • The Miu Miu Tie-Break: Imagine, for a second, you are luxury Prada offshoot brand Miu Miu (making their second appearance in Curios in as many weeks – their marketing people must be so proud! What do you mean “lol, hubris, you think they monitor for this sh1t?”) – you aren’t a headline sponsor of the All-England Championships and so aren’t allowed to use the ‘W’ word in any of your marketing materials, but you DO have Coco Gauff as a brand ambassador…quick, what do you do as your BIG SUMMER TENNIS ACTIVATION? YES THAT IS RIGHT YOU BUILD A REALLY SH1T VERSION OF PONG!!! That is indeed what they have done – “but Matt, I hear you cry, how does this make use of the famous face of Ms Gauff?” Well I’m glad you asked – between points of PONG you will get served…some photos of her! This is SO SO SO SH1T, and I love it – they’ve even got the calibration of the game slightly wrong; the controls are fiddly and not hugely-responsive and the game is *just* too hard to be fun (or, more accurately, the computer’s not been nerfed enough so you just end up in interminable PONG rallies which aren’t actually any fun at all because it’s not 1983 any more), and it is SO POINTLESS, and I love it so. WELL DONE, LUXURY WEBDESIGN MONGS, YOU HAVE DONE IT AGAIN!
  • The Curriculum: This is an interesting-if-slight little visualisation project – this is basically the educational curriculum of the US and the UK, presented as a sort of…funnel, where you can see all the different things that kids are expected to learn at which stage of their educational development, so you can get an idea for when certain concepts are introduced and the chronology that takes you from ‘the idea of numbers’, say, to ‘calculus’; you can isolate different areas of study, and it’s interesting to note the number of components across various themes. It does rather feel that, based on a lot of the anecdotal (and increasingly actual, medical, emotional and economic) evidence we have at our disposal that perhaps we ought to be doing rather more in the field of ‘life skills’ than we currently seem to be.
  • Bird DJ: Online drum machines and synthpads are by no means a new thing, but have you ever seen one where each of the FX are BIRDS??? No you fcuking haven’t, don’t lie. This is one of the rare Curios links that seems to work better on mobile than desktop, and, honestly, I haven’t been able to make anything other than a horrible, atonal mess, but I am willing to concede that this *might* be a skill issue on my part. I reckon you could build an absolute banger off the coo of the Bar Shouldered Dove, fwiw.
  • Motion Deep: A pointlessly-shiny and needlessly-interactive and possibly slightly overengineered agency website! I love it! You may not think that the absolute best way to learn about a digital agency’s work and portfolio and capabilities and the like is to, er, navigate a small robot figure around a vaguely-dreamlike 3d CG landscape, collecting tokens, but you would be WRO…no, actually, you’re totally right, this is an all-time bad way of presenting information about your business, what are these people thinking?! BUT! On the plus side, the movement and heft of this is very pleasing, and the more you wander round and the more tokens you collect, the more fun little interactive easter eggs you unlock and small moments of delight appear, and after a couple of minutes I was absolutely charmed. I couldn’t tell you the first fcuking thing about the agency, mind, but I LOVE THEM NONETHELESS. Bonus silly agency site!: this is a Japanese agency called Homonculus and the landing page here features a slightly-sinister CG head which TALKS TO YOU – again, incredibly inefficient but God love the commitment to the bit (but, er, why does the head look SO SAD??).
  • Voicebox: I’m including this less because I think any of you will necessarily use it and more of a general illustration of how there are NO FCUKING MOATS in AI – this is a bit of code on Github which basically does the voice cloning thing which ElevenLabs has built their entire business on, apparently about 90-95% as well per user reports I have seen, for free. Your regular reminder that stuff like this means that even if some of the big companies tank the tech isn’t going anywhere, however hard you might fervently hope (look, I am sorry about this but I don’t make the rules – more’s the pity, my rules would be fcuking GREAT).
  • The Kanye Tweets Archive: The actual name here is YZY TWTS but even typing that makes me feel slightly physically sick. Would you like a full archive of all of the tweets ever posted by the world’s most famous bipolar person? Erm, ok, fine, here you go! “YZY TWTS is a public archive of every tweet Ye (Kanye West) has posted on Twitter since 2007. Ye is notorious for tweeting and deleting, so the archive exists to preserve as much of his Twitter history as possible. The YZY TWTS project began in early 2025, when Ye inquired about creating an archive of his February tweets. The first version of the site was shipped in under two days, covering approximately 400 tweets. You can visit V1 here. The full archive officially launched in July 2026. It includes every tweet Ye has ever posted (over 6,000) from 2007 to 2026. Each year has its own page styled after Twitter as it looked at the time: the fonts, the icons, the colors, and the layout.” I am not a particular Kanye fan, and there’s obviously going to be some…quite horrible stuff in here, but there’s also something undeniably poignant about going back to 2007 and seeing the person he was versus the person that insane fame and significant mental health challenges have turned him in to.
  • Pool Shot: This is a potentially smart and useful idea, should you be an apple user who likes to categorise information visually. Per the app blurb, “Pool is a new way to save and organize the things you capture. We take screenshots to remember — a recipe, a podcast, a product, a place. But they usually disappear in your camera roll. Pool turns your screenshots into structured content you can organize, revisit, and act on. With Pool you can organize screenshots into pools, automatically categorize content and find the original links, share pools with friends and keep everything searchable and easy to revisit.” Might be worth a look if you’re someone who, er, takes a lot of screenshots of things (ok, fine, now I think about it I literally can’t think of a single usecase, but that possibly says more about me and my total inability to understand visual-type thinking than it does about the app).
  • A Map of the Warhammer 40k Universe: This is, possibly, unfair, and maybe I should let the longstanding prejudices of decades long gone go, but I can’t shake the feeling, which I grew up with, that there is something genuinely, hideously uncool about the act of playing with miniatures and painting them, and that even the mere act of setting foot in a Games Workshop is the sort of thing which will rightly get you marked as a social pariah who will never know the warm touch of a lover. BUT! I know that this is a silly attitude! I know that we have moved on, and that this sort of silly perception is now BENEATH US! BEAUTIFUL HUNK HENRY CAVILL LOVES THIS SH1T FFS! But, also, I don’t think it SHOULD be entirely socially acceptable to spend a significant portion of one’s adult life fantasizing about being a giant armoured protofascist killing machine. What can I say, it’s complicated. ANYWAY, that’s by way of preamble to this link, which is a map of the Warhammer40k universe which you can zoom around and click on and, look, I have no idea if this is accurate or if it’s gibberish, but I am sure that at least one of you will be able to tell me if it’s all hallucinated rubbish (also, though, please don’t tell me, it’s ok, I can live in ignorance).
  • The Reuters Climate Monitor: You may possibly have noticed that it’s a touch warm again in the UK and Europe, and that the warm just seems to keep on happening – here’s a repository of up-to-the-minute data on global climate and temperatures maintained by Reuters which shows you how the temperature globally and where you are (and indeed anywhere in the world) is tracking against previous average and…well, let’s just say the graphs are looking A BIT WORRYING, although as it happens it looks like New Delhi is currently cooler than normal so maybe everything is going to be ok after all. I would strongly advise you not to click on this one if you’re feeling a little bit…er…concerned about any of this, honestly, as there’s fcuk all you can do about it anyway and you may as well just nip to the shops and buy a Mivvi while you’re still capable.
  • Pedalscape: My friend Dave – who is exactly the sort of middle-aged father I think of when I make fun of Rapha Dads, but who doesn’t read this sh1t (in common with my actual, real-life friends who all find the fact that I write this newsletter faintly embarrassing on my behalf, which, I suppose, is love of a sort) and so will never know that he is a figure of fun in my head – has one of those stands in his house that lets him cycle while standing still, so he can train to his heart’s content even when it’s miserable outside. Should you too be one of these Rapha Dads then you might like Pedalscape, which basically lets you stream a variety of different beautiful, scenic, presumably-challenging cycle rides from locations around the globe to accompany you while you pedal hard to nowhere – basically like a sort of budget Peloton, as far as I can tell (very budget, in fact – I think this is free). Would you like to put your bike on its fixed stand and then pretend you’re pedaling through Vermont as the leaves turn? GREAT! You weirdo.
  • Safebets: Would YOU like to participate in the excitement of prediction markets, and have the opportunity to WIN BIG, but with none of the risk of losing actual money? Of course you would, but that’s not how betting works you fcuking idiot. AND YET! That is the promise of Safebet, which promises you the seemingly-impossible – make predictions about future events, win money if you’re right and lose nOTHING if you’re wrong! Sounds perfect, right?? Except the winnings are in TOKENS (do you hear that? That’s the sound of the MASSIVE GRIFT ALARMBELLS ringing incessantly in your ears!)! Basically the way this works is that the predictions made by participants are used as investment signals by the people behind this, who use them to make trades; if the trades win, the winnings are shared in token form between the platform and the users. It’s not gambling because you’re not betting your own money; instead, it’s a crowd-sourced hedge fund. Sound dodgy? Well, the two people behind it are currently being investigated by the SEC, so, er, maybe a bit! I have to say I am slightly-impressed by the extent to which this feels openly like a complete scam and yet STILL IT PERSISTS – to be clear and for the avoidance of any doubt, Web Curios very much DOES NOT ENDORSE OR RECOMMEND this, and is of the opinion that any ‘coins’ one might earn through it will be magic beans at best. Still, er, if you get rich then you know who you owe for the tip, is all I’m saying (this is, I believe, called ‘hedging’).
  • Hello Outside: Have you ever spent any time, likely when fcuked on drugs, thinking “oh man, maybe this world is a simulation and I am being watched RIGHT NOW by some sort of pandimensional being who’s manipulating mine and your and everyone’s existence like they’re playing some sort of massive, cosmic game of The Sims; I wish I could ask them questions or communicate with them in some way!’? If so you will fcuking LOVE this website, which is seemingly dedicated to letting people leave messages to, er, ‘the outside’. “Some hypotheses suggest that what we call reality is not the base layer of existence. That our world may be a system, observed, computed, or simply contained within something larger. Philosophers have argued this for centuries. Physicists and theorists have formalized it. No one has answered it. If something exists beyond this frame, a consciousness, a structure, an outside, it has never been addressed directly. Not as a system. Not as a record. OUTSIDE is that record. It is a public archive of messages addressed beyond the known world. Each entry is anonymous, permanent, and sequential. Nothing is edited. Nothing is removed. No reply is expected or possible. You are not required to believe in anything to leave an entry. You are only required to address something.” Yes, fine, the copy is slop but the messages…the messages are real (mostly gags, but…sometimes not). This is STRANGE.
  • Origin Map: A Claude site, yes, but quite a nice one and the interaction here is fun; basically this is a collection of the origin myths of different civilisations and cultures around the world, which you can explore and compare and generally learn about; move the slider at the bottom to cycle through the timeline and see different myths emerging in different regions as the centuries pass. I think this is an example of a really nice use of AI to build something simple, interesting, curious and sort-of fun – although obviously everything in here could be entirely-made-up AI gibberish, and I am going on trust here that the person behind it has checked stuff, which, on reflection, they obviously haven’t. FFS AI!
  • The Simonetti Tuba Collection: Do you like tubas, the most preposterous of ALL the brass instruments (we are not counting the euphonium as I refuse to believe they are actually real)? OH BOY DO I HAVE THE WEBSITE FOR YOU! This is the digital home of the V&E Simonetti Tuba Collection and MAN do these people know tuba. The physical museum is in North America (Durham, NC, to be precise), but enthusiasts from across the globe can explore the collection virtually at this link: “Welcome to the Vincent and Ethel Simonetti Historic Tuba Collection web site. The 300+ instruments in the Collection, currently housed in Durham, North Carolina, represent a cross section of the history and development of the various members of the tuba family, from its inception circa 1830 to the present. The Collection began with a beautiful Cerveny helicon dating from circa 1910, which I found in Boston in 1965 while I was playing tuba in the orchestra for the North American tour of the Russian folk ballet troop, the Moyseev Ballet Company. The majority of the Collection was acquired during my twenty-seven year ownership of The Tuba Exchange, which I founded in 1984. Ethel and I sold The Tuba Exchange to its current owners in 2011, but we have retained ownership of the Collection with the idea of developing it further and to make it more accessible to the public. We invite all of you to learn more about the various members of the tuba family, by visiting our unique Historic Tuba Collection in Durham, and by looking through this web site – both of which we hope will be helpful to you as you further expand your knowledge about the instruments that we love.” THIS IS SO PURE!
  • Ctrl+Watch: A reader writes! Abdullah emailed me to tell me about his project, which he describes as follows: “a digital magazine that reviews and ranks YouTube channels in the register of a 1990s games mag. CRT scanlines, channels scored out of 100, verdicts from ESSENTIAL to GAMEOVER, head-to-head “Boss Fights,” a Top 50, and a few critical frameworks I coined because nobody had named them yet…this was a personal project honestly, and most if not all is done by Claude + Gemini, i mostly directed what to show and help set the tone and chose the themes/historical capsules etc… The whole thing started from nostalgia. I grew up in Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) reading zzap64 and C+VG and wanted to recreate that feeling of a new issue landing in the shop where it was glossy, opinionated, and just a lot of fun to read and share with friends. It’s been a nice way to “scratch the itch” so to speak  in whatever spare time I have.” Leaving aside the AI-ness of the prose – actually, while we’re here, a small plea; DO NOT LET THE MACHINE WRITE THE WORDS FOR YOU THE STENCH OF IT IS UNBEARABLE, PLEASE! – this is a really lovely project and will scratch a vague itch for anyone who recalls the golden era of gaming mags in the 90s (ZERO, you were honestly amazing).
  • American Modernism: Ooh, this is cool, and a really beautiful piece of webwork and design; honestly, the animations and transitions and the folder-style design are really nicely done, even if the ‘About’ copy is FCUKING AI AGAIN: “We built this website to replicate the feeling of opening an old folder—a carefully assembled archive belonging to someone obsessed not just with history, but with the people who made it. It’s not a dry catalog. Not a textbook. Think of it as a researcher’s desk: folders, blueprints, clippings, margin notes, all pulled together in one place. Some of the names here, like I.M. Pei or Frank Gehry, won’t appear on a standard list of early American modernists. We included them not as members of a single period, but as carriers of a wider tradition. Architects who took modernism’s core ideas and ran with them deep into the second half of the twentieth century, building the bridge to the architecture of today.” Are you interested in American Modernism? Would you like to explore the lives, history, works and theories of Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Gehry and others? This will be right up your street.
  • Gentle Fur: Absolutely no clue how this crossed my field of vision this week – I certainly wasn’t looking for it, not least because it’s TOO HOT to dress up as an admittedly sexy fox – but this is a clothing retailer for furries. Ever wondered where you might go to get your full-body, customisable fursona suit? YOU GO HERE! As someone who has been Far Too Online for Far Too Long, it’s been interesting watching public perception of Furries shift over the years – from derision, to suspicion, to their current elevation to the status of ‘one of the few generally good communities on the web’, their weird status as constant precursors (in much the same way as so much tech was driven by the bongo industry, so it seems that so much online stuff is born of Furry, weirdly) and their strange collective power despite there probably not actually being THAT many people who want to hang out while dressed up in a full wolf suit. All that said, the constant refrain from Furries that “it’s not a sex thing, ACTUALLY” does feel a BIT less convincing when you navigate around this site and notice quite how, er, calipygian many of the suits on sale are – REALLY IT’S NOT ABOUT SEX IS IT WHY ARE ALL THE WOLVES SO THICC THEN EH??? Still, if you were ever curious about how much you pay for a full costume then a) prices are on request for the full getup, I think; b) click away, I will NEVER KNOW!
  • Chesses 4: Curios favourite Pippin Barr returns with the fourth iteration of his long-running ‘chess, but I have fcuked with the rules and mechanics something chronic’ project; there are 8 variants here, none of which make chess *better*, per se, but all of which are beautifully-inventive and occasionally very funny indeed.
  • Binface vs Farage: Quickfire creator of SMALL TOPICAL GAG GAMES Chris Barker knocked this up this week in the wake of the HILARIOUS Clacton byelection contest (so tired already, so tired); you play ‘comedy’ character Count Binface, and your task is to collect more ballots than Nigel Farage. It is possible to leap on Farage’s head to stun him, which is something I strongly urge anyone visiting Clacton between now and August to try in real life, just in case (NB THIS IS NOT AN INCITEMENT TO VIOLENCE, TO BE CLEAR).
  • Four Corners: A daily puzzle that asks you to arrange the terms into groups, with an additional gimmick based on them needing to be placed into a square with certain terms shared across two categories…look, this is one of those ‘horrible to describe, very easy and fun to play, I promise’ links, so just click it and play and know that I would NEVER LIE TO YOU.
  • Preben: OH I LOVE THIS! The fabulously-named Theis Søndergaard emailed me with this link – I am going to reproduce his story in full, because, well, it’s really cute: “Back in 1995, while in high school, I was trying to teach myself QuickBasic for DOS. I had a 500 page brick of a manual in English, droning on and on about Booleans and other stuff I had no idea what meant. But somehow, over the course of months, I managed to make a small game. It was a collaboration with my friend Jesper – he made the graphics (pixel by pixel), I made the code (bug by bug). We named the protagonist Preben – a Danish name which, at the time, was the silliest one we could come up with. In order to prove himself worthy of the awesome name, he had to pass four tests. We only ever got around to building one: Preben is trapped in a cave, fighting off killer bees and green mutant elephants with wings, with only his trusted rifle to help him. Survive three minutes in the inferno and you get… well, then you’re done. The game turned out crude, but surprisingly addictive and challenging. Over the next couple of years, my friends and I would battle it out and compete for the highscore. In 1997, we gave the game its own website (obviously!), which got waaaay out of hand as a hobby for me, publishing made-up news from the imaginary world of the competitive sport of Preben. Then life moved on, and Preben was moved to the \archive folder of my PC (then a backup CD, then USB-drive, then Dropbox, then Google Drive), and stayed there for 30 years. This past weekend, while having access to Claude Fable and looking for the stupidest way to spend those credits, I decided to see if perhaps Preben could be resurrected. So I dug out the old sourcecode and with the help of the AI, over a Sunday afternoon, I (well, it!) managed to…basically recreate the whole game for modern browsers, extremely faithfully, with some additional bells, whistles and easter eggs (try exiting to DOS….). It even has the old archived website embedded. Thirty years ago, this game took me many months to build, now it was re-created in an afternoon.”  The game is – and I hope Theis doesn’t mind me saying this – quite basic, but it’s a fun way of spending a couple of minutes and I can’t tell you how pleasing it is to me that something he built as a kid can now live on, recreated by The Machine. This is GOOD AI.
  • Walk: This is, I think, the demo of a full, proper game coming out soon. It is VERY strange, but I think it’s quite clever and I adore the way it develops mechanics and a slight story through small, seemingly-unconnected play areas and interactions…look, I can’t really describe what this is (and the game seems disinclined to try either tbh), but just click around and you will start to understand what’s happening, promise; basically, clicking on things affects other things, and eventually that will unlock OTHER things and, ffs, just GO AND PLAY WITH IT.
  • Choo Choo Words: A name so horrid I can’t type it without doing a small internal pretzel of cringe, this is nonetheless a really fun twist on Scrabble – basically your job is to build tracks with WORDS, along which you direct the titular choo choo to its destination. There’s a growing time pressure, and this is both challenging and a fun gimmick, and I enjoyed it a LOT – but seriously, change the fcuking name, please (or, er, don’t! It’s your game, after all, mysterious creative force behind it).

By David Monllor

THE FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS THIS SUPERB SELECTION OF SLOW-ISH CUTS FOR A TOO-HOT WEEKEND MIXED BY HARRIS FISH!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Pixel Skylines: Urban backgrounds from old videogames! Nostalgia! Pixelart! Cityscapes! I fcuking LOVE these.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Neeltje DeVries: Some excellent black and white photography, mostly of women, featuring a reasonable amount of what I would probably term ‘artistic nudity’, but in what feels like a style more architectural than erotic – you’ll see what I mean, I hope.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • Farage vs The Bin: James Butler in the LRB with a decent precis of how and why we have arrived at the position of having ANOTHER FCUKING BYELECTION (and will almost inevitably have yet another a few months after this one), and how this is the culmination of a several-month-long period during which for the first time in the course of his longstanding, bilious domination of the UK political landscape he has seemed…wounded, somehow, like things have finally gotten to him a bit. I heard a rumour a year ago that the reason Farage has been out of the country so much of late is that he has a Serious and Lifestyle-Predictable Health Condition for which he is receiving expensive, privately-funded treatment in the US, and while this might not in fact be true I wouldn’t bet against it, if you see what I mean; regardless, it does feel like this week might have marked his first major tactical error and seen him create a set of circumstances which could see his party’s support cap out at a national level. Also, by the way, obviously fcuk that frog-faced cnut into the sun and may he suffer all the humiliations, etc, but can we all agree that the ‘man with a bin on his head pretending to be an alien’ thing is not, per se, funny in the slightest, and that we maybe need a refresh of our comedy satirical candidate pool please? Eh? You all still find it hilarious? Ffs. Anway, James Butler: “That British politics can be so altered by capricious by-elections decided by a few thousand unrepresentative voters – in Makerfield or Clacton – may seem a ludicrous way to run a country facing so many problems. Andy Burnham described Farage’s latest wheeze as a ‘gimmick’. It is, but it’s also desperate. It may be that Farage can convince voters in Clacton that they like his political offer more than they care about an under-the-table £5 million. But Clacton is not the country. The more he brazens it out – especially in a second by-election – the likelier he is to repel soft or Reform-curious voters elsewhere, permanently lowering their electoral ceiling. Reform currently polls at 25 per cent nationally, still the largest party and enough for a commanding presence in parliament. By trying to save his own skin, Farage may ensure his party never does better than that. There are few silver linings in British politics, and you have to take them where you can.”
  • The Post-Literate Society: Rose Horowitch writes in the Atlantic about the decline in reading and apparently-related decline in the general ability of people to undertake basic exercises in comprehension and textual analysis; the headline of the piece is “THE END OF READING” which on the one hand feels…a touch apocalyptic (and also untrue – as the piece itself notes, in simple terms of wordcount we all read significantly more on average than we used to, it’s simply the type and location of the words that has changed) but on the other will resonate quite hard with anyone who’s either spent any time at all online and seen how many people seem incapable of parsing 280-character posts or understanding ‘nuance’ or ‘subtext’, or anyone who’s worked in an office for longer than about a decade and seen the general decline in people’s ability to Read Actual Documents (a personal hill that I will die on is that the insistence in corporate life of allowing PowerPoint to become the dominant information delivery mechanism is a FCUKING CANCER and has made everyone about 17% more stupid). Anyway, this is…quite a bleak piece tbh, and won’t make you feel great about the speed at which Idiocracy is becoming a documentary, but, also, it’s a well-written and interesting overview of our slow slide towards the slack-jawed Wall-E future that awaits us all. “Text is thriving among a dwindling proportion of the population. Just 20 percent of adults accounted for more than 80 percent of all books read last year. “It’s becoming a kind of niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids,” Leah Price, a historian of reading at Rutgers University, told me. Readers spend more time reading each day than they did two decades ago. They appear to be even more passionate about print than their predecessors. But the people devoted to text, who derive cultural understanding and intellectual connection from the written word, are now part of a subculture. The fact that you are reading this article almost certainly makes you a member of it.”
  • Thinking In J-Space: I’ve generally stopped featuring – or even really paying attention to – thinkpieces by AI companies because, in the main, they’re not very interesting and they are just various forms of PR…and, admittedly, this is PR too, but it *is* interesting and I think there’s some fascinating stuff in here about how mental models work; to be clear, though, I don’t think for a second that this is demonstrating ACTUAL THINKING BY THE MACHINE, or that it brings anything any closer to the big illusion that is AGI, it’s just…curious. Basically this is a post by Anthropic explaining how it seems that LLMs have basically developed a sort of concept of ‘memory’, or a placeholder for concepts that they can refer back to, which the piece calls ‘J-Space’; this explains how and in what way its analogous to certain human thought mechanisms, which is fascinating in terms of How Our Minds Might Work. this is, I promise, really very readable indeed, and I say that as someone with next to no knowledge about neuroscience or anything. “As you read this sentence, circuits in your brain are adjusting your posture, controlling your breathing, and transforming lines and curves on the screen into recognizable words. Most of this processing is invisible to you. But some of what takes place in your brain you do have access to—an image that pops into your head, or a deliberate plan you make about where to go shopping. Neuroscientists and philosophers sometimes refer to the latter type of brain activity as “consciously accessible,” to distinguish it from all the other processing that goes on unconsciously. This activity has special properties: we can describe it, control it, and use it for deliberate reasoning, in contrast to all the automatic processing that goes on without our awareness. In a new paper, we present evidence that a similar distinction has emerged in modern language models like Claude. We find that Claude has developed a small collection of internal neural patterns that, compared to all its other internal processing, play a special role.”
  • The End of the Working Writer: As someone who mainly earns money for words right now, I can’t pretend that this headline felt good to read; equally, though, it’s pretty hard to argue with much of the content of the piece. Teddy Brown makes the argument that writers tend to massively overestimate the extent to which most people care about the quality of the prose that they consume, and that while there will always be a market for ‘good’ writing for the people that do give a fcuk, the market for writing which caters to the people that don’t – the vast majority of people, lest we forget! – is maybe not going to exist at all in not very long at all. “Sometimes, I think we as writers overestimate how much people care about the quality of writing outside of specific venues like fiction, criticism, and narrative journalism. But the balance of written words produced in the world are not valued for their quality, but rather for their existence. White papers, product copy, SEO blog posts—these are all hypercommercialized pieces of writing meant to one serve specific end purpose: buy this and not that. This is writing as a product and a large portion of that taxomony is, also, already being created by writers using LLMs. The same…will start happening to the little quotidian notes we have to send back and forth as part of daily life, the confirmation emails, the thank you notes, the scheduling and rescheduling. I cannot imagine using AI to do any of that, but I also think that a whole mass of people would rather click a button to tell their colleague they’re running 5 minutes late or cancel a reservation at a restaurant. Writing is extremely important to me; that does not mean it is important to everyone.”
  • How Podcasts Ruined America: Very obviously, NOT JUST AMERICA. Do we think that a world in which significantly more people choose to get their information and worldview from Stephen Fcuking Bartlett is a better one? I mean, you might, but in that case you’re a fcuking moron, what is WRONG with you? This is obviously, per the headline, a very US-centric piece, focusing on the primacy of the man-focused podcast circuit in the Trump election campaign in 2024 and majoring on Joe Rogan as the central vector of much of What Is Bad With This Setup, but you could make many of the same arguments about pretty much anywhere in the world right now I think, and certainly the UK. I am not, in general, a big one for the regulation of speech, but I do find it increasingly mental that there is no regulatory oversight whatsoever of a sector which is listened to by millions and millions of people and which is increasingly a core part of their informational ecosystem and which lets (for example) Tommy ‘Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’ Robinson run a (monetised!) pod on Spotify in which he openly talks about the fact that sinister elites are conspiring to eliminate white people from the world by the mass-importing of ‘foreign cultures’.
  • The Great British Clubhouse: A sort-of corollary/companion piece to the above from a UK perspective, this is a VERY datawonky article by the excellent Lauren Leek (see previous Curios for more of her work) who digs into where the UK’s social clubs are, and how that maps against various social indicators and what that can tell us about community and access to it across the country. As Leek puts it, she wanted to “see if there is any way I can contribute with data and see where the bottlenecks of people joining in are. I expected to write some kind of Bowling Alone narrative which is Robert Putnam’s account of Americans who kept bowling but stopped bowling in leagues, the visible edge of a long collapse in clubs and the trust and social capital they generate. But the data told a different story. Putnam’s image was of people who still bowled but no longer bowled in leagues. In Britain, the organisations are often still there and some new ones are still being founded. What has changed is the social form of community itself. In one Britain, civil society still looks like membership: the choir, the rowing club, the amateur dramatics society, the sports club, the place you join. In another more deprived Britain, civil society increasingly looks like provision: the food bank, the advice centre, the mental-health charity, the youth intervention project, the place you turn up to because something has gone wrong.” The conclusion is grimly predictable – the data clearly shows that “belonging is becoming a postcode lottery, thickest exactly where life is already easiest.” Let’s see whether Glorious Andy’s Localist Agenda looks at things like this as well as simply sending the Deputy Prime Minister to Manchester.
  • Netflix and Shovelware: Ryan at Garbage Day on typically-excellent form, analysing the recent Netflix numbers and talking about why it is that engagement is down, and concluding that I AM RIGHT AND THAT IT IS BECAUSE OPTIMISING CULTURE BASED ON DATA ON WHAT IS POPULAR IS A FCUKING TERRIBLE IDEA.
  • The GPT Flyer Epidemic: It is undeniably true that the world of low-level graphic design has been absolutely taken over by AI-generated work – posters, flyers, and, in the case of the dessert cafe round the corner from my flat, an entire wrap for the front of the cafe in which an obviously-AI CG cartoon child in the style of ‘Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs’ is…er…chased by a terrifying avalanche of what I assume is meant to be ‘fruit’; what I am less convinced about, again, is whether any normal people give a sh1t. 404 Media highlights how there is a ‘growing backlash’ against this sort of thing and, yes, that is definitely true amongst the sort of people who read 404 Media and who work in and around industries in which design is a key part of the whole thing…but, again, MOST PEOPLE DO NOT WORK IN MEDIA OR MEDIA-ADJACENT INDUSTRIES! MOST PEOPLE DO NOT KNOW OR CARE ABOUT WHERE THE ILLUSTRATION COMES FROM! I mean ffs people spent years making posters with fcuking clipart and comic sans ffs, you think they give a sh1t if now they get to make stuff that looks a million times better but it looks like ‘slop’ to the cognoscenti? I would strongly argue that they really do not give anything resembling a fcuk at all.
  • Partiful, and the Neverending Joy of Data Harvesting: This piece is about party-planning app of choice for the kids, Partiful, and how it is – and you might want to sit down for this bit – harvesting all sorts of data from users that it’s almost certainly going to sell to a bunch of awful people. The tone of the piece is a bit “shock, horror!”, and the connections to former Palantir staffers doesn’t sound great, but, also, WE HAVE BEEN DOING THIS SH1T FOR OVER A DECADE NOW THE ANSWER IS ALWAYS, ALWAYS “THESE COMPANIES SELL YOUR DATA” BECAUSE HOW THE FCUK ELSE ARE THEY MEANT TO SUCCEED AS A BUSINESS THIS IS THE ENTIRE FCUKING MODEL HOW HAVE WE NOT LEARNED THIS YET. You want to know a benefit of AI? If you want to make your very own lightweight personalised event planning app/website JUST FOR YOU AND YOUR MATES then, well, you can! You can do it right now! You need never use this stuff ever again! See, it’s not ALL bad!
  • Only An A$$hole Would Marry At Madison Square Garden: I have no personal beef with the newly-minted Mr and Mrs Squirle, but it was quite hard to read this and not think “yes”, repeatedly, all the way through: “Why the fcuk would two people as talented as Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce decide to get married at MSG, of all places? I’ll tell you why: because they’re selfish pr1cks with sh1t taste. Swift herself is no stranger to greed, and Kelce is a human Labrador who loves to get belly rubs from passing strangers. There’s no romance in getting married at such a large, exceedingly public venue. There is only the flex of doing so. There is only, OMG you guys I got married at Madison Square Garden! Isn’t that wild?!”
  • The Tour de France’s Infernal Present: Or “there is no way in fcuking hell that the Tour de France is still going to be a thing in a decade, at this rate, unless you also want it to see several people die each year trying to go up a 40-degree mountain gradient in temperatures approaching 50 C” – this is another piece from Defector which does a good job of pointing out quite how insane the conditions are right now, and offers and good overview of why it seems…improbable that it’s tenable for this to go on much longer. See also – the next World Cup is scheduled to be in Morocco, Spain and Portugal in the Summer of 2030, how well do we think that’s going to work?
  • What Can Schools Still Teach in the Age of AI?: My friend Iain is a teacher and he’s also a very good writer, and he started a newsletter a while back (I KNOW, I KNOW, CAN EVERYONE FCUKING STOP IT) and this is a really lovely piece of writing, about what the value of teaching is if kids are able to ask The Machine everything – Iain excels at a certain type of gentle, English comic writing (this sounds like faint praise, but it’s really not meant to be), and this is just a really nice essay about a topic he obviously cares about quite deeply (and also he doesn’t read this newsletter and so will never know that I have said nice things about him, with any luck, the cnut, etc etc).
  • How To Make Bin Soup: SUCH an interesting piece in Vittles which traces what happens to the food waste you dutifully place in small, biodegradable bags each week for the binmen to collect – where does it go? What happens to it? What’s it used for? ALL THE ANSWERS ARE CONTAINED HEREIN! Also, by the way, what sort of animal doesn’t use the little binliners?! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU???
  • The Perpetual Present Tense: I have, I confess, become A Bit Sick of the Heteropessimism Discourse – astonishing that this all seems to have stemmed from Chante Joseph’s seminal (take that work whichever way you choose) Vogue piece not even 12 months ago – but I thought this was a superb essay which wraps up a lot of the thinking expressed by the various authors who’ve weighed in, and characterises it (correctly and effectively imho) as downstream of the general sense we all tend to have now that WE ARE THE FIRST PEOPLE TO EVER EXPERIENCE ANYTHING, a sort of Eternal September of the emotions, if you will, all underpinned by a certain online register which presents everything as an IMMEDIATE and URGENT reaction to a WORLD THAT HAS NEVER CHANGED SO FAST: “This points to an important dynamic: many people on both the right and the left are very concerned about social media, very concerned about heterosexual tensions, very concerned about social isolation and declining community and “therapy culture.” What can separate a right-wing critique of any of these quantities from a left-wing critique (and a good one from a bad one) is the relatively tricky question of how and where one finds the roots of these problems, and then what solutions are prescribed. If social atomization was essentially created by iPhones, we have no reason to look critically at capitalism or the nuclear family. If the process of commodification sprung out of nowhere somewhere around 2014, no need to crack open a Marxist-feminist text. If straight relationships have recently become fraught as a result of women’s TikTok posts, we need not pay attention to the centuries-long project of patriarchy, the horrific violence of rape, or the historic positioning of the heterosexual dyad as a replacement for a robust social safety net. Even at its most innocent, the widespread usage of the urgent-tense muddies these waters, proliferating a norm of cultural criticism that lives only in the present — fundamentally disconnected, as a result of its very style, from historical context or systemic analysis, and thus disconnected from a coherent politic (and coherent solutions).”
  • Music Hall’s Final Act: The basically-obligatory weekly link to a piece in the Dispatch, now – this is a beautiful look at Brick Lane Music Hall, “the UK’s last remaining permanent venue dedicated to the art of music hall,” a last staging post for the old vaudevillians whose schtick, carried through from the late-19th and early-20thC, informed so much of pre-mass-media popular culture (and even some post-) in the UK. This is very much one for the anglos I’m afraid – I’m not sure that you’ll get much out of it if you don’t know who Su Pollard is – but for those of you for whom the cultural references mean something this really is gorgeous.
  • Swimming Scene: Our final longread this week is an early draft of a section of Rob Palk’s forthcoming second novel; you’re dropped into a scene and given no introduction to anyone, or anything that’s going on, but it doesn’t matter; this is funny and the sense of place is very nicely-done, and there’s a quality to the comic voice here that I didn’t quite realised I missed in contemporary writing until I read this and thought ‘Christ, I’ve not read something that feels like this in an age and I miss it’. I really really like this, and I think you will too.

By MXM

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!