To the best of my knowledge, nothing massively-humiliating has happened to me this week (NB – should anyone reading this have a radically-different opinion, feel free to let me know, but, well, *gently*) meaning that I don’t have a COMEDY ANECDOTE for you this week. Frankly even if I did I am down about 9 hours sleep this week and am an exhausted, sweaty mess, so, well, it’s unlikely I’d have been able to spin it into gold.
So this week we’re (practically) straight into the links and words, but not before saying a brief but very genuine thankyou to the very kind person who sent me a massive box full of crisps as a THANKYOU for writing Curios – in the 15 years I have been doing this this is the SECOND freebie I have gotten (after some gig tickets in 2012 from someone who radically overestimated the likelihood of my being able to write concert reviews on the website of a major international PR agency), but, should any of you reading this feel oddly-inclined to SEND ME FREE SH1T then please do let me know; also it’s entirely probable that I’ll give you my postal address without any thought whatsoever, so if you really hate this and want it to stop forever then you could just pretend and send me a letterbomb (just make it a small one so the nice people in the flats below me don’t get hurt, eh?).
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you’re not *really* going to attempt to murder me, are you?
SOUNDTRACK YOUR SWEAT WITH THE SOULFUL SOUND OF SADEAGLE’S RECORDS!
THE SECTION WHICH IS UNSURPRISED AT THE FACT THAT THE HATEFUL MAN FROM THE HATEFUL COUNTRY MADE A HATEFUL AI, PT.1:
- Reachy: Despite the various promises made by the racist apartheid toad, we still seem to be a way away from the age in which BIPEDAL HUMANOID ROBOTS WALK AMONG US (to which the collective response might well be ‘thank fcuk’, based on said apartheid toad’s seeming desire to create the world’s most-racist version of AI with which to power said robots) – we’re also, perhaps more sadly, yet to see any really interesting integrations of LLMs into more modest robotic carapaces. That’s unlikely to change with Reachy, which is a *very* homebrew project by Huggingface, but I thought there was something interesting/potentially-moderately-sinister about the idea – per the blurb, Reachy is “an expressive, open-source robot designed for human-robot interaction, creative coding, and AI experimentation”. Which in practice means that for $299 (for the basic version; a beefier one is planned for later release) you get a Johnny-5-looking plastic pal which will sit on your desk and which can be loaded up with any number of Open Source AI models of your choosing and which is equipped with cameras, mics and the rest for FULL MULTIMODAL FUN. You may be reassured to know that Reachy doesn’t appear to be blessed with either arms or any way of moving, thereby minimising the likelihood of you downloading a rogue model and it attempting to murder you in your sleep, but while it’s obviously practically-useless it’s also easy to see how a particular sort of hobbyist engineer could have some fun with this – but, equally, the comments on the page talking about how great it is that stuff like this will be able to keep your kids company made me…slightly-sad, in a ‘Momo’ by Michael Ende-type way (why is it that so many people who have children seem so keen to, well, outsource the spending of time with said children to technology? Eh? Oh, yes, of course), and while the design of the robot is clunky and benign I couldn’t help flashing forward to some sort of future AI murderbot scenario in which Reachy somehow gets granted opposable thumbs, some wheels and access to the knife drawer. Anyway, this will inevitably be Quite Sh1t and end up gathering dust pretty quickly, but I wouldn’t be surprised if things a bit like this didn’t become more popular over the coming few years as both the kit and the models you can install on it become more powerful.
- Symphony of Vines: It’s been a little while since I’ve featured a really pointless website about wine, so please take a second to enjoy this new example because, honestly, it’s VERY silly and the copy is a beautiful example of entirely-nonsensical w4nk. The Symphony of Vines (what do you mean ‘that doesn’t make any fcuking sense’? WHERE IS THE POETRY IN YOUR SOUL???) is a site celebrating a vineyard apparently called Chateau Oublie’, specifically the INCREDIBLE MAGIC OF ITS TERROIR, and which takes you on a soft-focus, glide-y journey through various elements of the land to bring to life the AMAZING CONNECTION between the earth and the grape. Or something – to be honest I was just sort of hypnotised by the swirling music and the portentous voice-over telling me things like “glaciers carved deep impressions into the earth’s canvas”, or describing the “tapestry of earth and water” unfolding, explaining how the sea “shaped the soul of the soil” and determined “the mysterious singularity of our fruit”…honestly, this is some top-grade b0llocks and I love it so, almost as much as I love the fact that the website trumpets itself as being IMMERSIVE AND INTERACTIVE, which immersive interaction seems to amount to letting you wave your cursor around and provoke some (admittedly-pretty) particle effects…you know, in an age in which it feels like everything is ever-more hyperoptimised and data-led and that there’s less room for silly frivolity than ever, there’s something almost comforting about a bit of advermarketingpr that’s so spectacularly, stupidly pointless, and part of me is cheered that there are still studios out there able to persuade idiot clients to shell out for this crap. WELL DONE EVERYONE INVOLVED YOU HAVE CHEERED ME RIGHT UP.
- Ask Amina: Amusingly, in the 24 hours since I found this it appears to have been flipped from ‘everyone can try it’ to ‘apply for access’ – hmm, I WONDER WHY. Ask Amina is an (doubtless well-intentioned) project by, I think, the UN, which offers (or at least it did) the opportunity for visitors to deepen their understanding of the conflict in Sudan and its impact on people in the region by, er, chatting for 3 minutes at a time with a pair of AI avatars representing a refugee and a military commander respectively. You’re given the choice of talking to either Amina, “a woman living in the overcrowded Metche refugee camp in Chad, where she represents one of over a million Sudanese refugees fleeing the conflict in Darfur”, or Abdalla, “a commander of a Rapid Support Forces (RSF) unit operating near El Geneina, Sudan.” I get the idea, I really do, but it’s hard to get past the fundamentally-dehumanising effect of representing the very real struggles being endured by millions of very real people through a three-minute ‘conversation’ with a slightly-stilted chatbot; what, er, what is wrong with the idea of using, I don’t know, real interviews with real people, and letting people explore information that way? Why couldn’t you have created an LLM-interrogable corpus of conversations with actual people affected by this rather than making weird, digital puppets? Why limit the conversations to three minutes (I know why – context windows and the possibility of the things going weird)? WHO IS THIS FOR AND WHY DOES IT EXIST? This does not feel like A Good Use Of The Tech.
- Mirage: Ok, as with all the ‘LOOK IT IS AN ENTIRE 3D WORLD BEING GENERATED ON THE FLY BY THE MACHINE ISN’T IT AMAZING????’ stuff out there at the moment this doesn’t *really* work, so temper those expectations accordingly, but these tech demos are probably the most impressive examples of What Might One Day Be Possible I’ve yet seen, and a seriously-impressive leap from the ‘AI-generated Minecraft’ that we say ~6 months ago. Mirage bills itself as “the world’s first real-time generative engine enabling live UGC gameplay through state-of-the-art AI World Models”, but all you really need to know is that by clicking on the link you will get access to two playable ‘games’ which are generated live by AI – one a Forza-style racing title, the other a GTA-looking affair which lets you walk a miscreant around a 3d city. These are, to be clear, janky as fcuk – the lag on the controls is horrible and they are not ‘fun’ or even ‘playable’ in any meaningful sense – but, that said, it’s also quite insane that this is all just being made up as you go, and that we can now spin up a seemingly-infinite virtual space out of nothing. It’s not, obviously, any sort of imminent substitute for level design or actual modeling, but it’s also quite clearly heading very much in that direction.
- The Spreadsheet of Freelance Writing Rates: I appreciate that many of you probably couldn’t give two hoots about what the current going rate of exchange from words to money is, but as someone who is, for the first time this year, likely to earn the bulk of his income from writing (trust me, I find this as unlikely as you do but these are strange and straitened times), I was bleakly-fascinated by this spreadsheet offering a wide-ranging overview of the rates being offered by a bunch of publications – this has a US skew but there are some UK outlets on there too (FT, Guardian, etc), and while obviously Your Mileage Will Vary, this was a really interesting overview of Where Journalism Is At. My main takeaway was that I am a fcuking moron for not becoming a travel, interiors or fashion expert because MAN do they still pay well at Cosmo, Elle, Conde Naste Traveller and the Hearst stable. If anyone reading this happens to work at any of these publications and wants to discuss bringing Curios into your stable of titles then, well, I CANNOT BE BOUGHT FCUK OFF (but seriously, I’ll take £0.75 a word, it’s a fcuking BARGAIN).
- Mockly: This is a deeply-evil and potentially-seismic little webtool which will let you mockup messaging conversations from a variety of different platforms, cranking out screenshots of chats mimicking the UI of different interfaces such as iMessage, Whatsapp, Discord and the like – you can input your own usernames and avatars, meaning you can create genuinely-convincing spoof conversations between whoever you want, saying whatever you like, which you can then share wherever takes your fancy…look, on the one hand I know that my constant railing against the IMMINENT EPISTEMOLOGICAL COLLAPSE being ushered in by tech and The Machine means I probably oughtn’t be linking to something that lets you make up really convincing lies, but, well, THINK OF THE ABSOLUTE, LIFE-ENDING CHAOS YOU COULD SOW WITH THIS SH1T. Honestly, if you’re not RIGHT NOW thinking of all the relationships you could end or fights you could start with this then, well, you are obviously a better person than I am but, I would suggest, you also lack some imagination. Go on, just have a play – start with something benign! AND THEN EXPLORE THE DARKNESS.
- The Palantir Merch Store: I’m not entirely sure which element of this is the most fundamentally-distressing; the fact that Peter Thiel’s cuddly future death corporation Palantir has just launched a merch store, allowing people worldwide to pay actual cashmoney for clothing emblazoned with the logo of a cartoonishly-evil company that is literally helping build the techno-surveillance-murder-panopticon, or the fact that stock sold out in what was seemingly a matter of minutes. IS THIS IRONIC??? Hang on, I have just checked the prices, and the caps and tees were…£55?! ARE YOU NOT RICH ENOUGH PETER, YOU SOULLESS VAMPIRE CNUT??? Anyway, the one benefit of this, I suppose, is that it helps you easily identify people who, were you be involved in some sort of natural or urban disaster, you should under no circumstance rush to the aid of.
- Chinatown: This is a lovely little project – “REFLECTIVE URBANISMS: Mapping New York Chinatown is an interactive web project that maps Manhattan Chinatown through its architectural changes. Here, transformations that have occurred in its buildings, since Chinatown was established in the 1860s, are visualized and investigated alongside community stories about these spaces…Discover more about these buildings in New York Manhattan’s Chinatown: navigate the interactive 3D map feature, or select a block from the ‘Elevations’ page to view the building facades changing from the 1940s to today. Learn more about each building through visual projections of the architectural transformations, read transcriptions of building memories from community members and look at photographs of building details from today and the past.” The 3d map in particular is lovely to navigate, and I appreciate the way that you can double-click on any building in the map view to be taken to a page of photos of the actual, real-life structure; I would love to see something like this for Soho in London, say, or Trastevere in Rome, should anyone have a lot of spare time, money and energy to dedicate to making my dreams come true.
- The Museum of Battery-Operated Toys: NOT LIKE THAT GET YOUR MIND OUT OF THE GUTTER. What? It was only *my* mind that went there? Ahem. The Museum of Battery Operated Toys is a site which celebrates, er, old toys which ran on batteries; this is a VERY enthusiastic website which features all sorts of old tin, metal and, latterly, plastic motorised contraptions, from drumming dolls to celebrity cash-ins from a bygone era (the motorised Monkees car! Creakily-swinging baseball players!), and which also includes some frankly-fantastic little bits of flourish in the code (more websites should do the whole ‘the photo spins wildly when you hover over it’ UI thing, to my mind). This is very much one for the collectors or enthusiasts, I think, although it’s worth a look even for the casual observer just to get a reminder of how utterly-horrific so many kids’ toys from the past were – perhaps we should go easier on the boomers, look at the sort of psyche-flaying sh1t they were exposed to in their formative years ffs (if you’re thinking of filming some sort of kitsch-y ‘Five Nights At Freddie’s’-style horror romp there is AMPLE inspiration for jumpscares in here).
- The Tamagotchi Torture Chamber: Ok, this is a writeup of a student engineering project and as such is possibly a BIT dry, but I absolutely adored the EVIL BEAUTY of the premise here: “The Tamagotchi Torture Chamber combines the iconic 90s toy with a soft-body physics simulation and an accelerometer, allowing users to roll a squishy pet around a digital enclosure. The Tamagotchi Torture Chamber is a fully hand-held device that persists the state of your pet across boots, so they can never forget what you’ve done to them.” ISN’T THAT DELICIOUSLY EVIL??? Like some sort of ‘I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream’ toy, which isn’t a sentence I was ever expecting to write to be honest but then it has been that sort of year. There’s a small part of me that’s darkly-curious to see what would happen if you did this but with added LLM, but, equally (and as someone who very much thinks that Roko’s Basilisk is a stupid theory for stupid people), I am not sure I want to take my chances JUST IN CASE I leave myself vulnerable to some sort of latter-day digital revenge plot. Give it a few months and someone will be spinning a version of this stuff up to ‘draw attention to the plight of people kept in solitary’ or something (I am joking, but also worry that I am not).
- No To Algorithms: A sentiment we can all get behind! Apart from, er, the good algorithms that we actually like and find helpful; those ones can stay. This website, though, is specifically railing against the algos on Spotify, YouTube and the rest, those which are designed to predict our tastes and keep feeding us an ever-optimised stream of aural treats to ensure we stay LOCKED IN, while simultaneously reducing the likelihood of real serendipitous discovery and surprising, new things that are nothing like what we think we’d like; No To Algorithms is basically a music recommendation site powered solely by the recs posted by ACTUAL PEOPLE – anyone can submit the names of two artists, in a ‘if you like X you may like Y’ format, which then results in the bands being listed on the site, clicking on any bandname will bring up a list of other bands that other users think you might find pleasing if you like the first. Simple, but a really nice idea, and it’s received nearly 1000 submissions in the few days since I found it suggesting it might perhaps get just enough input to become useful; fcuk knows why the Black Midi fans have brigaged it quite so hard, though.
- Bears Will Be Boys: The Pudding is back, this time examining the vexatious question of which animals are most-commonly ascribed which gender in kids’ books – I KNOW I WAS WONDERING TOO! This is really interesting, as their work always is – apparently two thirds of anthropomorphised animals in children’s books (at least of those they looked at) are depicted as male, while there’s a clear bias towards depicting birds and cats as female vs bears or frogs as male. Why? I HAVE NO IDEA! Stop the girl frog erasure! WE NEED STRONG MALE FELINE ROLE MODELS! I feel there’s a CAMPAIGN in here somewhere, though fcuk knows what for.
- True-ly: Ok, this is waiting list-only and there’s not currently anything to see here – BUT, it’s interesting and might be worth signing up for if you’re either interested in AI and related issues or whether you’re just intensely-paranoid about the creeping tide of everpresent bots powered by The Machine inserting themselves into every facet of our lives. Envisaged as a sort-of antidote to obnoxiously-marketed AI ‘cheating startup’ Cluely, Truely promises to offer you the ability to detect whether or not anyone you’re talking to on a call is a real human being or an AI voice agent – a frankly horrible sentence to type, and even moreso when you take a moment to stop and think and realise that, actually, that’s probably going to be quite useful in the coming months and years. You can see a short video about how it works here should you so desire – OH THE WONDERFUL ARMS RACE BETWEEN SCAMMERS AND ANTISCAMMERS THAT AWAITS!
- 70s Hitchhikers in California: You may have read one or more novels romanticising the 1970s in America and the idea that it was an era in which one could travel from coast to coast simply by standing by the side of the highway, sticking out a hopeful thumb and waiting for one of the inevitable procession of wide-bodied sedans to pick you up and deposit you wherever you wanted to go, possibly with some RISQUE CONVERSATION or shared drug abuse on the way – with those heady images of freedom and the open road in mind, click the link and take a look at these pictures and ask yourself ‘would I, were I driving the car in this situation, pick up ANY of these people?’; reader, I would suggest the answer is ‘not unless I had a peculiar desire to become an unpleasant statistic. Actually I am being *slightly* unfair – there are some obviously Nice Young Kids in here (and at least one man who if he wasn’t trade probably ought to have considered a different outfit), but there are at least three men on here who would be wearing your skin as an overcoat faster than you could say “Dahmer? That’s an unusual surname.”
THE SECTION WHICH IS UNSURPRISED AT THE FACT THAT THE HATEFUL MAN FROM THE HATEFUL COUNTRY MADE A HATEFUL AI, PT.2:
- Foods of the Minnesota State Fair 2025: On the one hand, food discourse is some of the worst discourse; on the other, it’s impossible not to gawp every year at the astonishing things that North Americans seem able and willing to do with saturated fats and a deepfryer, and to speculate and the deep and significant character flaws that this sort of approach to ‘sustenance’ connotes. THERE IS NO WORLD IN WHICH “a 4 oz. hamburger patty with cheese, pickles and special sauce, sandwiched between two deep-fried peanut butter & grape jelly Uncrustables” IS A DESCRIPTION OF A REASONABLE FOODSTUFF! (also, can we just take a moment to consider what has happened to a society in which pre-made crustless sandwiches are a thing? O THE DECLINE OF EMPIRE!). I know that I feature stuff like this in here around this time every year, and I am sorry for the slight repetition (lol like Curios isn’t some sort of deeply-recursive waking nightmare timeloop – or, er, that’s the way it increasingly feels from the inside), but I will never not be astonished and terrified by the things people put inside themselves. Would you want to drink this ‘mocktail’? A “Dirty NoTini (lemon, dill pickling spices & olive brine)”? I posit that you would in fact not. ONE OF THESE ‘DISHES’ IS LITERALLY ‘PASTRY SCRAPS WITH SUGAR AND CINNAMON SERVED WITH A SUGAR-BASED DIPPING SAUCE’ FFS! There’s not enough Ozempic in the world, honestly.
- The Feminist Food Journal: Back to more recognisably-edible examples of ‘food’, now – the Feminist Food Journal is a newsletter (and podcast, but, well, I don’t care about those) presenting writing and thinking about food ‘through a feminist lens’, which in practice means lots of really interesting-looking essays published every few weeks, each bundled into thematic collections (much like Colours Magazine used to be back in the day, if that reference means anything to you). “FFJ publishes four thematic issues a year on a rolling basis, with new essays coming every two weeks. Each issue explores food and culture from intersectional and global feminist perspectives, analyzing dynamics of power and resistance and spotlighting lesser-heard voices.” Previous thematic collections include ‘milk’, ‘sex’, ‘meat’ and ‘body’, and if you’re the sort of person who enjoys the food writing in Vittles then I think you will find a lot to enjoy in this. It came to me via Corina Zappia’s ‘Don’t Pretend We’re Dead’ newsletter/podcast, which is also very much worth a look/listen.
- Free House Plans: I have no idea where you live, but I am going to guess that it’s probable, wherever you are, that houses are TOO EXPENSIVE and that there aren’t enough of them, and that, for many, the dream of home ownership is a distant and largely-impossible dream. So, er, WHY NOT BUILD YOUR OWN???? Obviously it’s not quite that simple – and Web Curios does not in any way condone you just rocking up somewhere, planting a flag and erecting a dwelling as I am not entirely sure that’s how planning legislation works – but in case you’ve ever toyed with the idea of doing Grand Designs but, well, small and modest, then you might appreciate this extraordinary act of generosity from Australian architect Jiri Lev, whose made two actual, real-life blueprints for houses available for free download on his website. “The plans are provided to you free of charge and any copyright. You may use them as you please, however note that they will need to be adjusted for your specific site, solar orientation, aspect, privacy, shading (verandahs), access … At minimum, a site plan and structural drawings will need to be done by an appropriately qualified person. You do not need to use our services – any draftsman, structural engineer or architect should be able to assist.” WELL ISN’T THIS LOVELY?? Such a generous thing to do – can we possibly go back to that early, utopian vision of the web during which time we believed that information (the good sort!) wanted to be FREE and everything would be abundant and shared and the commons would flourish? What’s that? We…we utterly fcuked that dream in half? Oh.
- Gobsmacked: On the one hand I am conflicted linking to this because it feels a bit like a disintermediation exercise that’s withholding traffic, and therefore potential ad revenue, from the food blogs it’s reformatting; on the other, traffic is fcuking dead, so wevs (and also it’s interesting from the point of view of dataviz and information formatting and the rest, so). Gobsmacked lets you plug in the url of any recipe you like, and then TRANSFORMS it into a sort-of diagrammatic representation of said recipe, laying out ingredients and cooking times and steps and all the various recipe gubbins in what is intended to be a simpler and easier-to-parse format than the often text-heavy blog style. There are some recipes on the site already, but I imagine the main draw here is the ‘formatter’ which applies the effect to whichever url you feed it – there’s some LLM-ery under the hood here, I think, but it works…quite well, and it feels like this is the sort of thing that might usefully applied elsewhere and to other types of information/source.
- Wayback Memories: Astonishingly, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the tool that lets you go digging around in THE PAST OF THE WEB, is soon going to have indexed its TRILLIONTH page – a staggering number that I can’t, now I bother to try, even begin to conceive of; in commemoration of that, they’re inviting anyone who has a POSITIVE MEMORY of how they’ve used the service to share it with them for some sort of eventual digital celebration of the endeavour. I think, honestly, this is one of the most wonderful examples of caretaking and curation of recent times and doesn’t get anywhere near the credit it gets both for the work and for its importance, and it’s something that deserves to be lauded – should you have any HEARTWARMING STORIES of exhuming the past via the medium of urls, share them here.
- Keepfully: Are you the sort of person who lends things to people but who, on so doing, is very clear about the fact that YOU NEED IT BACK? Do you find yourself muttering darkly about debtors and their iniquities? Do you just wish you could GET YOUR STUFF BACK??? In which case you might appreciate Keepfully, an app which, effectively, promises to help you keep track of the people who OWE YOU STUFF. “Don’t rely on memory or scattered notes, Keepfully gives you a clear overview of your personal loans, helping you stay organized. The app supports multiple currencies and lets you optionally add a location to each loan – perfect for remembering the context later.” Beautifully one of the later sales-y bullets includes the copy “See exactly who owes what with the Persons tab, which lists all your saved people along with their loans,” which perhaps suggests a target audience with a more…professional approach to usury than I might initially have thought.
- The Activist Handbook: Styling itself as ‘Wikipedia for campaigners’, the Activist Handbook ‘consists of 450+ guides and 4.7K external resources to help you make more impact with your next campaign.’ This covers everything from the first principles of grassroots organising to effective campaign planning and all sorts inbetween, and should you be interest in STARTING A MOVEMENT or, more practically, maybe just doing some local community organising around an issue or topic, there might be some useful stuff in here for you to draw on.
- Some Lovely Little Wooden Animals: Ok, this is a link to an online shop, fine, but it’s the shop of a sculptor in France who makes occasional small wooden animals and OH GOD THEY ARE PERFECT. Not cheap, by any stretch of the imagination, but they’re (I think) one-off originals and the style is SO GORGEOUS – slightly-70s-Scandi, at least that’s the vibe I get – and in particular I cover the MERL hog to an immoderate degree should anyone fancy spontaneously rewarding me for all these millions of words via the medium of a carved wooden pig of unusual girth.
- PrimeSweeper: Prolific creator of Fun Things On The Web and Friend of Curios Matt Round returns with a quick and dirty little webgame he knocked up in a morning last week, just because – it’s called PrimeSweeper, and if you can’t tell from the name that it’s ‘Minesweeper, but Prime Numbers’ then, well, I don’t know what to tell you. You don’t, it turns out, really need to know loads of primes to play this (thank God).
- The Ultimate Proclaimers Experience: While we wait for the inevitable comedy Salt Path game adaptation (“Can you help Moth outrun both his illness and the accusations that they made it all up?”), someone has seen fit to make this – a ‘game’ in which you’re tasked with proving the Proclaimers’ devotion to their beloved by ACTUALLY walking the 500 miles described in their most famous (only?) song; “Witness the ultimate ‘The Proclaimers’ fan experience with this interactive work of perseverance that asks the question: are you man enough to walk 500 miles? If so, how about 500 more? Featuring roughly 300 hours of gameplay, prove that you are indeed the true superfan of 80s Scottish rock duos…Alternate pressing the Q (left foot) and E (right foot) keys (quickly!) to keep your pace up and advance toward your destination…The game will save your progression, so you are free to come back anytime when you have a spare moment or two and work on your progress.” This is not, in any conventional sense of the word, ‘fun’ but also feels like it could reasonably be used for some Desert Bus-style charity fundraising endeavour for anyone feeling masochistic enough to do it on a livestream.
- Lemon Shark: Do not be fooled by the name – this is PacMan, but with a small twist in that the ghosts only move when you do, adding a pleasing element of ‘strategy’ (lol I have no idea what I am doing) to the game and making it feel fresh (for about 5 minutes, anyway).
- Snakes Tiling The Euclidian Plane: Snake! But, er, with added geometry! You know how to play snake when you’re only able to travel in four directions – but what about when you can move in six? Or three? WHAT IF SNAKE BUT TRIANGLE???? Which, I appreciate, is a sentence (ok, barely) which doesn’t really mean anything to you now, but click the link and it will all begin to make a terrible sort of sense, I promise.
OUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS SELECTION OF WHAT I MIGHT CALL FUNKY HOUSE BY VILLETTE!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- The Art of Roland Garros: I know it’s all about grass at the moment, at least until Sunday, but if you’re currently all caught up in TENNIS FEVER (I feel like I ought to be, but, equally, I can’t get excited about Yannick Sinner as an Italian player because, well, he’s German, isn’t he?) then you might appreciate this site which, fine, IS NOT A TUMBLR (I don’t think) but does feature loads of excellent poster art from the history of the French Open over the years.
- Classified Mirrors: ALSO not a TUmblr! Still, photos of mirrors taken from Facebook Marketplace are always charming, so, well, fcukit.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Milla Sofia: Another in the growing number of Instagram accounts ‘owned’ by AI-generated young women with not-insignificant lumbar problems ahead of them, Milla Sofia is an AI ‘influencer’, doing ‘music and art’ – which, practically, seems to mean that someone’s making short videos of a creepy-looking Machine-generated girl with the standard impossible proportions and weirdly-shiny skin of the AI-imagined, lipsyncing to actual vocal performances from The Past to farm engagement from all the desperate guys in the mentions writing some sort of variation on “so beautiful wowwwwwwwwwwwww’ in the comments. It’s enough to make you despair, honestly. As an aside, why is it that every time a blonde one of these crops up I am reminded of notorious kiddie Nazi band Prussian Blue?
- Asahi Park Ornament: Japanese kids’ playground furnishings and ornamentation. Why? WHY NOT?? Via the always-interesting Present & Correct.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The Rise of Whatever: Ok, this is long and a bit flabby and slightly all over the place but, well, YOU OUGHT TO BE FAMILIAR WITH THAT BY NOW. It’s also, to my mind, a rather good overview of ‘where we are now’ in terms of AI and culture and creativity and work and the grift economy and the desperate need to secure the bag while there’s still a bag left to secure, and while it’s possibly a *touch* on the loose side, argumentatively-speaking, I found myself nodding along at various points to a degree that made me think it worth sharing. In particular, there’s a section towards the end that addresses the whole ‘The Machine is just a tool!’ argument in a direct way that I haven’t seen much before, and which I agree with wholeheartedly: “I keep seeing this — people compare LLMs to calculators, or screwdrivers, or digital cameras, or whatever. I’m left wondering if the people saying this stuff have ever used any of those things. A calculator does arithmetic for you — thus automating the tedious, repetitive part — but you still have to know which buttons to press to get the answer you want. You can’t just type the entire problem in and get Whatever — something that sounds plausible, with a microscopic disclaimer that checking it for accuracy is your problem.” Anyway, this is interesting throughout and even if you don’t wholly get on with the style it’s worth a read for the themes and questions it raises imho.
- The State of Everything: Ok, so technically this piece is headed “How the Attention Economy Is Devouring Gen Z — and the Rest of Us” but in actuality this transcript of a recent podcast conversation between Ezra Klein and Kyla Scanlon is far more wide-ranging than that; while it didn’t say anything that I found hugely surprising or revelatory, I thought it was another decent ‘state of the now’ overview as regards some of the big-ticket issues around labour, culture and the digital. In particular I thought the section on AI and jobs was interesting, namely because it’s the first time I’ve seen or heard the media addressing the fact that…NOONE SEEMS TO HAVE A PLAN??? In general, though, this is a good overview on The State of Things, although I would also like to point out to anyone reading this that I have been saying/writing everything in this piece for several years now and noone seems inclined to give ME props in the NYT ffs chiz chiz chiz.
- I Appreciate Depreciation: Katrina Forrester in the LRB writes about public finances and how the 20th Century saw a switch from the spending of public money on public goods and infrastructure to the facilitation of private capital interests which would, it was hoped, pick up the slack, and how, counter to the prevailing neoliberal narrative and that peddled by conservative voices, the latter is just as much an example of ‘public spending’ as the former is. The piece is a review of a book by Melinda Cooper, and segues into an interesting discussion of the extent to which the promotion of the family by neoliberal interests is itself an extension of economic policy and worldview – “When neoliberal policymakers attack abortion and promote conservative visions of sexuality and the family, it is not only to maintain women’s subordinate status, but because the family is central to the reorganisation of economic life they have overseen in the last half-century, which has engendered a new form of ‘dynastic’ capitalism”; this is a really interesting piece which is a lot less hard-going than I might have just made it sound, honest.
- Radicalisation and the Spectator: This isn’t , in fact, particularly long, but in a week in which the UK’s seen yet more fundamentally-grubby AND ACTUALLY VERY FCUKING RACIST discussion about ‘immigration’ and culture and the like, and we’re seeing the slow, creeping mainstreaming of the idea that people from other countries and cultures are somehow un-British and a threat to our way of life, it’s worth reminding yourself of the role played by the Spectator, oft-described as the in-house magazine of the Conservative Party, whose former editor, Fraser Nelson, now happily ensconced at The Times, has given a megaphone to such charming racists and criminals as Taki, Rod Liddell and others, and who really ought to bear a far greater degree of responsibility for people like Matthew fcuking Goodwin and his ilk than he seems to be taking, the smarmy cnut.
- What Would You Do?: Meanwhile the introduction of Actual Camps to the US seems to suggest that everything over there is going just swimmingly – here, Rusty at Today in Tabs writes about Where Things Are At, through the lens of a few weeks spent at home without his family and with the memory of the Stephen King short story Apt Pupil rattling around the inside of his head: “So that’s how I spent the early weeks of June, while ICE used Los Angeles to test its plan of putting American cities under military occupation and abducting their most vulnerable residents to be shipped off to concentration camps run by acquiescent authoritarians abroad. Occasionally my family would ask how thing were back home, and all I could say was “Bad.” They didn’t particularly need to worry about it while they visited Hobbiton and saw the blue penguins, there was nothing they could do. I was right here and there was nothing I could do either. But it was hard to express the feeling of acceleration, of events starting to slide from bad to extremely bad, with the specter of atrocity lurking just at the horizon, almost in view. Almost here. That feeling was what reminded me of Apt Pupil, which is drenched in the same nauseating miasma of acceleration toward atrocity, of purposeless cruelty not just employed but enjoyed, savored with sick delight and no prospect of consequences.”
- Inside The Media’s Traffic Apocalypse: Not suggesting that things don’t feel rosy in the world of the media at the moment, but I saw a Well-Known UK Journalist, one with bylines in Actual Papers and regular radio 4 appearances, touting for a regular, non-media job this week as a purported sideline; that doesn’t *feel* like a healthy canary. This piece in the NYT covers the crushing impact on direct traffic to news outlets that’s starting to be felt as a result of the boom in AI-assisted search via LLMs, and Google’s AI summaries – and with the news this week that OpenAI’s going to be launching its own browser in a matter of ‘weeks’, which, per reports, “is designed to keep some user interactions within a ChatGPT-like native chat interface instead of clicking through to websites”, and that Perplexity’s doing the same, it doesn’t feel like *great* news for anyone attempting to make a living from website traffic. There’s some potential words of hope in there for specialist publications and ‘COMMUNITY’, but it’s hard not to read this without a general creeping sense of ‘oh god, all so fcuked’.
- Hallucinatory Feature Creep: This struck me as really interesting, in a sort of future edgecase frontier-y sort of way. Soundslice is a service that lets users scan sheet music to then listen to it – recently, its developers started to see a surprising uptick in the number of images of ASCII tabulation being fed to their systems, despite the fact that this feature isn’t supported and isn’t mentioned anywhere in their site’s documentation. The reason? ChatGPT had decided that the platform worked like that, and was confidently telling people that they could use it as such. So, because the machine imagined it, it became fact – the dev team implemented the functionality to respond to user demand. Which is *fascinating* to me, from an impact and effect point of view, and made me wonder how and in what unexpected direction other systems and services might develop in based on this sort of machine imagining.
- India and AI: I was really interested to read this piece in MIT Tech Review about the reasons India is lagging terms of model development and deployment – there are a number of reasons, but the most fascinating to me was the country’s vast array of languages acting as a barrier to the creation of a singular ‘Indian’ AI: “One of the most fundamental challenges in building foundational AI models for India is the country’s sheer linguistic diversity. With 22 official languages, hundreds of dialects, and millions of people who are multilingual, India poses a problem that few existing LLMs are equipped to handle. Whereas a massive amount of high-quality web data is available in English, Indian languages collectively make up less than 1% of online content. The lack of digitized, labeled, and cleaned data in languages like Bhojpuri and Kannada makes it difficult to train LLMs that understand how Indians actually speak or search.”
- Blake Lively and the Misogyny Slop Ecosystem: Compared to the worldwide mainstream attention lavished on the miserable Depp/Heard farrago, Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni’s recent contretemps has attracted relatively little attention outside of The Very Online – this is a good writeup of the whole saga and how it’s ended up now that Baldoni’s defamation lawsuit has been thrown out, and how the whole future was supported and sustained by a wing of the culture/media which makes bank from explicitly amplifying and exploiting misogyny; when you step back and take a moment to look, it’s not hard to see that it’s part of a wider trend of certain corners of the internet simply using women as punchlines or attack targets, from the whole ‘we interview people on the street LOOK HOW DUMB THEY ARE!!!’ genre which seems to overindex on picking on women, to shock creators like Bonnie Blue and how they’re used as discourse fodder by the ‘manosphere’ (sorry), to the whole faux-podcast content ecosystem which exists solely to populate Reels with ragebait content, it doesn’t feel like this is a particularly golden era when it comes to ‘how society presents/perceives women’, driven largely by people who make a lot of money out of this state of affairs.
- They’re Angry at Superman: The new Superman film might be terrible, I have no idea – and I never will! I do not care about superheroes! – but the reaction to it from swathes of the right-wing content meatgrinder has been grimly predictable. “WOKE!”, they cry, upset that a fictional superhero created for children nearly a century ago is apparently demonstrating exactly the sort of values of kindness and compassion that have always apparently been its trademarks. It’s worth reading the piece, even if you’ve as little interest in Superman as I do, just to get a sense of the sheer in(s)anity of the complaints and the whinging – lads, if you’re upset that the Nazi-fighting superhero is TOO NICE, what…what do you think that says about you, exactly?
- Chemical Castration: Hm, even by my standards going straight from ‘Superman’ to ‘chemical castration’ seems like a, er, tricky segue, but, well, here we are. This is actually a very interesting an sensitive piece of reporting in The Dispatch, where Steve Boggan speaks to several convicted sex offenders who have (voluntarily) been subjected to chemical treatment to reduce their libido and, by extension, reduce the likelihood of them feeling the feelings that caused them to offend in the first place; in all the cases cited, the overwhelming feeling described by the people in question is of relief, like being unshackled from the madman that had ruined their life for years; equally, though, while these testimonials suggest that this is A Good Thing, it also feels…quite important that each of the people here described undertook the treatment voluntarily rather than having it applied to them regardless of their volition.
- The Raw Milk Delivery Guy: Honestly, this is a GREAT read – New York Magazine on the guys who deliver contraband raw milk – and other stuff, fine, but it’s mainly about the raw milk – to crunchy pilates fans and the comfortably-rich all across Manhattan. The people! The cult! The just oh-so-New-York-ness of the whole thing! “When he picked me up, the Milk Guy had 38 stops left, all in North Brooklyn. A tanned 20-something in a matching workout set bought four gallons. A modelish woman in her 60s in chunky clogs met us outside her brownstone for two gallons and a jar of honey. A woman with eyelash extensions and a yappy little dog forked over $99 for a few gallons of raw dairy, seafood, and some alkaline water. “Most of my customers are not vaccinated,” said the Milk Guy between stops, “and they’re like homeschooling. You know.”” Do you remember that web series from a decade or so back, about the guy who delivered weed to people on his bike all around the city? They could and should totally do a variant based on this, I think it would be ACE.
- The Quietus Albums of the Year 2025: In my youth, I had something of a reputation as a wilful musical obscurantist – there’s a poster in my flat that reads ‘I Listen To Bands That Don’t Even Exist Yet’, in hopefully-self-aware mockery of this fact. Honestly, though, you want wilful obscurantism? This list of the best albums of the year so far by The Quietus is FULL of stuff I have never, ever heard of (some of which, it’s fair to say, sounds like nothing I ever really want to hear ever again) and is a genuinely great way of discovering a bunch of new stuff you might not have heard of and which you are unlikely to get served to you in your Spotify Weekly. What do you mean you’re not familiar with Coltsblood’s INSTANT CLASSIC album “Obscured Into Nebulous Dusk”? RECTIFY THAT NOW.
- Frame of Preference: Are YOU a Mac person? Oh good, I am really happy for you but please don’t feel the need to talk to me about it, thanks. Still, should you be the sort of person who has warm feelings of nostalgia for the old operating systems of yore then you will love this, by Martin Wichary, which digs out and presents old control panels from MacOS past – beautifully, the software embeddings in the article actually work, which is VERY elegant and means you can click around in your memories should you so desire. From the opening blurb: “As a designer, I’m meant to dislike settings. As a user, I love them. Every year I celebrate Settings Day: a day when I take a look at the options and toggles in all the apps I use. I do this out of curiosity – what was added since the last time I looked? – but also because I love this way of getting to know software: peeking under the hood, walking the back alleys, learning what has been tricky or important enough to be equipped with a checkbox. During the last Settings Day, I had a realization that the totemic 1984 Mac control panel, designed by Susan Kare, is still to this day perhaps the only settings screen ever brought up in casual conversation. I kept wondering about that screen, and about what happened since then. Turns out, the Mac settings have lived a far more fascinating life than I imagined, have been redesigned many times, and can tell us a lot about the early history and the troubled upbringing of this interesting machine. Join me on a journey through the first twenty years of Mac’s control panels.” GO ON, JOIN HIM.
- Did Shakespeare Write Hamlet Stoned?: To be clear, per Betteridge’s Law, the answer to this is very clearly ‘no, of course he fcuking didn’t, IF HE EVEN WROTE HAMLET IN THE FIRST PLACE (lol)’, but I am including this because the thinness of the argument here presented made me laugh quite a lot – the entire piece hangs on two lines drawn from Sonnet 76, subjected to the following RIGOROUS ANALYSIS: “Many scholars believe the “noted weed” in which the author finds “invention” is a reference to cannabis and its ability to stimulate creativity. Some also think the phrase “every word doth almost tell my name” is a sly reference to the fact that “shake” (as in Shakespeare) is another word for cannabis—specifically, the scraps left over after cannabis buds have been plucked and packaged.” I don’t think Shakespeare was baked, no, but I have my doubts about the author of this piece, bless them.
- The British Influencer Invasion: Vittles goes in hard, high and two-footed on the UK food ‘influencers’ and their recent trips to America – as a non-Insta/TikTok user my exposure to this stuff has been mercifully-limited, but they’re attained a degree of cultural heft that they escape containment often enough for me to be aware of their schtick and how ‘looks like he really enjoys TopJaw’ is actually a top-tier insult – and how, generally, awful they are. There were several lines in this that made me laugh out loud even as I was wincing – here’s a representative example: “Topjaw are a classic dom–sub duo in which one slightly better-looking friend (Jesse Burgess) commands the screen, while the other (Will Warr) is relegated to camera duties, rarely appearing in videos unless it’s to squint from a small gimp box tucked into a corner and say something like, ‘Er, what’s that mate?’“ Because it’s Vittles there’s also a disquisition into whether they went to public school or not (spoiler: they did!) which doesn’t strike me as strictly relevant to anything but, well, we all have our hobbyhorses and at least theirs isn’t Peter Thiel I suppose.
- New TV Novels: I very much enjoyed this essay, looking at a selection of recent-ish pieces of fiction and the manner in which they relate to, depict and aspire to the status of, TV as a medium – I have only read one of the books in question (the Taffy Brodesser-Akner, fwiw), but that didn’t prevent me from both enjoying the line of argument and the writing here, and the callbacks to the famous DFW essay which covered similar territory 30 years ago serve to contextualise the whole thing rather nicely. “Existing for now as merely a nationally bestselling work of fiction, Long Island Compromise illuminates a newish kind of literary territory: the novel that sounds like TV, that was clearly written in order to become TV, that constantly reminds us how great TV is. The TV novel, in this iteration, willfully inherits all the crappy formal impulses that used to get novelists so worked up about cable television — “the hackneyed plots, the unlikely dialogue, the Cheez-Whiz resolutions,” as DFW taxonomized — but packages it all with the contemporary sheen of “prestige.” If this emergent strain of fiction doesn’t quite endorse a wholesale inversion of the old assumptions (what if television is better than novels?), it at least scrambles them, pointing toward the possibility that TV has become more like fiction and fiction has become more like TV — and neither is very good.”
- The Emoji Language: I have to make a confession – I don’t actually hate emoji anymore. I spent a good few years in the early-00s railing against them, cnut-like, but I have come to both accept their inevitable assimilation into human communication and occasionally appreciate their creativity and flexibility (I am a fcuking terrible emoji-er, though, as befits someone of My Generation). If you’re in any way interested in language or linguistics you will absolutely adore this essay which explores whether emoji can and should be considered a ‘language’ – running the gamut the emoji translation of Moby Dick from a decade or so ago to the social media posts of Cher, this is really interesting and a really clear, smart piece of writing about What Language Is (and what it isn’t).
- Finding Baldwin: Ifeanyichukwu Eze writes about buying a second hand copy of a James Baldin book from a vendor in (I think) Lagos; there’s something about the tone and feeling of the prose here that I very much enjoy: “My first encounter with Baldwin was in 2015 when I was a laborer in a block factory in the United Arab Emirates. At break time, the first post I read on my phone feed was a Paris Review interview with Baldwin. I went back to work with a feeling for which I did not have a name. Weeks later, I was given a sick leave because I had fractured my middle finger. The feeling manifested again as an existential turmoil. First, I was a philosophy graduate in blue coveralls pushing a wheelbarrow in another man’s country, a ridicule to all the Marxism I had studied in university. My writing was a series of blank pages; I realized I could have died in the accident without writing a thing. My fear of death was rooted in my experience of the Sharia crisis, which ended my childhood in ways my adult self still grapples with. Over the years, the distraught child and the unprepared adult in me have struggled for reconciliation. In the midst of all this, Baldwin awakened in me an urgency I had lacked—write.”
- Killing a Coyote: A farmer waits to shoot a coyote that has been killing his sheep; no spoilers, but no coyote death is depicted in this piece, in case you’re worried for the POOR CRITTERS. I thought this was beautifully-written: “I have come to lie in this field at night not only to see a coyote but to kill one. The ribcage, spine, and head covered in a blood-soaked rag of white fleece—feet dangling like a marionette’s—that now lies near the spring is what remains of a valuable yearling ram I had promised to a buyer. It is the latest sheep we have lost this summer, and now our bait. My eyes accustomed to the dark, I stamp down a small area so our blanket will lie flat over the rough ground and tall weeds, space enough to lie and wait. I leave a fringe of goldenrod between us and the spring, parting the plants just enough to see through. I lick my finger and hold it up but detect no wind. We’ll be lying about forty paces from the carcass, close enough for a coyote to smell us, wind or no wind. Their noses are as keen as a whale’s sonar. But maybe the stink of rotting carcass will overpower our human stink. Or maybe the coyote will be hungry enough to risk it.”
- The Politics of Contagion: Finally this week, a piece which I feel the need to tell you upfront is…a bit gross, in a dirt and pus and grime and sickness sort-of way, but which I enjoyed significantly more than I expected; I want to use the word ‘visceral’ to describe it, but, well, that sounds unforgivably cnuty so I shan’t. Sickness and community and UGLY, SELFISH HUMANITY and virality as both metaphor and real-life experience, all bound up in some perfectly-vile writing; I liked this a lot, and you will too (but you will likely want a good wash after reading it). “I think people don’t understand how much our politics and culture are defined by the very 21st century dynamic of virality. In the sense of popularity, sure, but also actual viruses like Covid or emotional contagions. I wasn’t always an internet person. I used to live in a different hyperconnected bubble, a much smaller one. I spent three years at an off-grid commune deep in the woods. I was there because I wanted to experiment with radical social structures. I definitely got to do that. I weathered several years there, and learned a lot of things in that microcosm that have helped me navigate the internet age. Let me tell you the story in three plagues.”
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: