You know how if you read a certain type of right-wing commentator, particularly in the UK, they will often talk about ‘The Blob’ – the insidious groupthink machinery of the DEEP STATE, infiltrated by THE LEFT and which prevents meaningful action on everything and which has somehow INFECTED all modern institutions of government and education and basically the entire infrastructure and apparatus of the country and which is insistent on infecting us with the WOKE MIND VIRUS? You do, right?
Do you ever think that, perhaps, the real ‘blob’ is instead the money and media complex which means that the assassination of a right-wing monger of hate and division half a world away results in endless handwringing across the English-speaking world on the death of civil discourse and the need to listen to the legitimate concerns of a group of people whose entire politicoeconomic viewpoint can be summed up pithily as ‘white people better’, and that the fact that said death is being weaponised and leveraged by all the classic racist voices in the UK right now perhaps suggests that there is a not-insignificant set of vested interests coordinating the trickling down of these pleasant viewpoints from the US right all the way through to the flag-frotting, red-faced patriots at the end of your road and the ones gearing up to MARCH ON LONDON tomorrow?
Eh? Oh, ok, fine, have it your way.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios and you can probably tell that I have had quite enough news for one week.
***BONUS TINY AWARDS SECTION***
WE HAVE A WINNER! – click here to find out who! Thanks to the (literally) thousands of people who voted, everyone who submitted sites or shared the link, everyone who wrote it up (including the nice people at It’s Nice That who did a lovely piece about the whole thing), and all of the judges and, of course, everyone who was nominated – the response really was overwhelming, and we look forward to doing it all again next year. THE INTERNET IS NOT DEAD! WE CAN KEEP IT ALIVE BY MAKING AND CELEBRATING STUFF LIKE THIS!
THE SECTION WHICH JUST FEELS SORRY FOR POOR REINALDO TBQHWY, PT.1:
- Website Launches: An admittedly VERY TEDIOUS-sounding url to kick off with this morning, but, as is often the case in life, beautiful hidden depths lurk behind an unprepossessing exterior (is this true, by the way? Or is this simply something that we ugly people tell ourselves to make us feel better? I’m starting to have my doubts, you know)! Website Launches is a very un-shiny website which does something quite exciting (‘exciting’ in an admittedly very narrow, very internetty sort of way) – apparently, via the medium of what I can only assume is DARK MAGIC, it tracks new urls being birthed onto the web, and here collects them for your perusal, categorised and filterable and VAST. Think of this as, I don’t know, the internet’s delivery room – look at all of the new websites, swaddled and mewling and puking and barely able to see out of their weird little ineffectual eyes! Erm, shall I stop with this metaphor? It’s making me quite uncomfortable, turns out. Still, though, the basic facts remain – this is, somehow (actually can someone explain to me how it’s tracking these and where it’s pulling them from? Genuinely curious) a list of BRAND NEW WEBSITES about anything you can imagine – so what can we learn from a cursory perusal? Well to start with it’s sort-of cheering to see how many new domains are cropping up each and every day, even if the vast majority of them appear to be business-related; MAN do a lot of people want to set up simple online shopfronts, turns out. It’s also clear that there is an awful lot of stuff being made with AI right now; so many of these are just sort of hollow, machine-generated placeholders, which, yes, is perhaps a BIT miserable. That said, if you look at the ‘personal’ section and check out the hobby projects or the ones that have an ‘unclear purpose’ you can find some genuinely nice things (a few of which are sprinkled throughout this week’s Curios), and, regardless, there’s something quite fascinating about seeing the web just sort of come into being like this, like (admittedly slightly crappy) galaxies flaming into existence before your very eyes. Oh, and yes, there is a LOT of very clearly shady stuff on here, SO much gambling and bongo being conjured into digital being every day – you are, of course, welcome to explore those corners as well, but I would do so whilst wearing some sort of heavy-duty antimalware shield and possibly only after securing access to a priest and a confessional for afterwards, because, well, I have no idea what you might find on there and, as ever, caveat emptor. Still, I love this, if only for the vaguely-anthropological ‘THIS IS THE WEB, THIS IS ALL OF US’ vibe of the whole thing.
- Kong Studios: While I can admire the longevity of the Gorillaz musical project and the commitment to the worldbuilding bit, I never really got into them as a ‘concept’ – partly because I was never that much of a fan of the music overall, and partly because I was always slightly salty that Gorillaz got all the acclaim that I always felt the Deltron3030 project deserved a few years earlier (and which was 100% the genesis for the whole thing, down to the fact that it featured both Del and Albarn and was a scifi hiphop concept album) – but, weirdly, I *do* remember getting quite excited about the band’s then-cutting-edge website, featuring GAMES an ARTWORK and SECRET TRACKS and all sorts of fun stuff, which used to regularly crash every single work computer I would try and load it up on in the early-2000s and which, thanks to the magic of, er, marketing, has now returned, all spruced-up and de-Flashed and modern-device-compatible for the band’s 25th anniversary! This is really fun – partly as a relic of What The Web Used To Be Like, partly as a bit of digital archaeology, but mainly because Gorillaz always had an incredibly strong sense of LORE (sorry) behind them which the site expresses to the full; it leans into the whole ‘fantastical cartoon band full of freaks’ thing, and the Hewlett art style, and it’s FULL of fun bits and pieces for fans to enjoy, and it feels like it was made with love and care rather than by an agency sh1tting it out for the cash and, basically, even 19 years after it was originally shuttered it’s SO much better than most digital ‘portals’ for brands or artists that I’ve seen in all the years hence. Have a play, it’s fun (and the looping instrumental of Clint Eastwood that plays over the opening FPS section is annoyingly-earwormy).
- Cyber City Orion: There will come a point when I stop being impressed by people coding cool in-browser 3d experiences, but I am not yet so jaded that I won’t let out a small ‘ooh, isn’t that *pretty*?’ when confronted with a shiny, navigable space to explore in Chrome. So it is with Cyber City Orion, which is, I *think*, just a little bit of show-off coding from whoever’s behind it and which lets you explore a small slice of a cyberpunk-ish city, both in your flying car and on-foot; collect some coins, spend them to unlock all four of the playable arcade games, play the games, smile, be on your merry way. The actual ‘interaction’ here is relatively limited (fly, walk, occasionally press ‘E’), but the style of this is lovely and it runs REALLY nicely even on my ageing laptop which barely wheezed at all as I gazed around the neon skyscrapers in slightly-baffled wonderment, and the little arcade games are…not totally sh1t! Christ, I’m not selling this, am I? Click the link and ignore me.
- AI Bible Sagas: What, do you think, might God ask of us were He to suddenly appear to us in a collective vision? Would it be to stop the killing and the hateful rhetoric? Might it be to stop invoking His name in the promotion of hate and division? NO IT WOULD NOT BE ANY OF THOSE THINGS! Instead, he would INEVITABLY ask that we spend our time making video interpretations of the scriptures with the assistance of cutting-edge AI tools, and that we then place those videos on YouTube and aggressively monetise them to an audience of the devout! And lo, it came to pass! This is AI Bible Sagas, which is a channel seemingly on a mission to create AI-generated ‘films’ of all of the Bible’s books, produced (I think) by and for a Black evangelical audience – we’re currently still only on the Old Testament, but if you are keen you can see ‘The Book of Judges: The Movie!’ and ‘The Book of Joshua: The Movie’ for FREE right here (there are, beautifully, trailers for forthcoming Books, like this is the MCU or something). ”What are these films like?” I hear you cry – well, obviously I have only taken a slightly-cursory look, but from what I can tell if you’re in the market for a knockoff Morgan Freeman voicemodel reading the verses while some 6s Veo3 clips play shinily underneath the audio then, well, you are in for a TREAT. Would God want His words to be so aggressively-monetised as is happening here, with the ads on the channel and the frequent exhortations to donate to the owners CashApp? I mean, who are we to say, he is ineffable, etc etc.
- The Know Rogan Experience: Long-term readers will know that I don’t ‘do’ podcasts (except I spend all day listening to Radio4, so, well, that’s basically the same thing, isn’t it? FFS Matt!), but I was almost tempted by this one – Know Rogan is a series which basically attempts to UNDERSTAND THE PHENOMENON via listening to the fcuking shows. Per the blurb, “The Know Rogan Experience is a show where two podcasters with no previous Rogan experience get to know Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan is one of the most listened to people on the planet, whose interviews and opinions influence millions. He is regularly criticized for his views, often by people who have never actually listened to Rogan. So we listen to Joe Rogan, and, where needed, try to correct the record. It’s the show for those who are curious about Joe Rogan, his guests, and their claims, as well as for anyone who just wants to understand Joe’s ever growing media influence.” This might be funny, and it might be interesting, but, equally, I think one can learn anything anyone need ever know about Joe Rogan from this short clip.
- Find The Archived Version Of Any Webpage In One Click: A Chrome experience that does literally that one thing – visit a url, and if it is dead (or, erm, if it’s paywalled) press a single button on your toolbar to open a version of the page on the Internet Archive (presuming such a thing exists). This is VERY USEFUL.
- Digital Audrey: Do YOU like Audrey Hepburn? When her dead likeness was used in that intensely-creepy ad for, inexplicably, Galaxy chocolate bars, did you rejoice rather than recoil? OH WELL DO I HAVE A TREAT FOR YOU! Digital Audrey is…what is Digital Audrey? In the project’s own words: “Welcome to the official store of Digital Audrey, a collective art initiative dedicated to preserving and expanding Audrey Hepburn’s timeless charm and legacy in the realm of Artificial Intelligence. Our talented artists, passionate about Hepburn’s enduring spirit, create captivating digital art pieces using cutting-edge AI and digital techniques. The Digital Audrey collective seeks to share Hepburn’s elegance with fans, present and future, through our exquisite original artwork. We ensure that our creations are transformative and distinct, steering clear of any copyright infringement on her previous work. Our goal is to establish a minimum quality standard for all generative AI media that encapsulates Audrey’s essence.” What this seems to mean in practice is, er, a slightly-shonky-feeling website that seems to be attempting to flog AI-generated prints featuring Hepburn’s likeness – except if you click through then there aren’t actually prints, and what you’re in fact doing is paying $12.99 for a PNG. But WHAT PNGs! Please do take a moment to click this link and see the quality of the artworks you too could purchase – I mean, who wouldn’t want to own an image depicting what I can only describe as ‘Audrey Hepburn if genespliced with a young Melanie Sykes’? NO FCUKER, etc etc! Thanks to Eleanor for sending this to me – you will want to thank her too, trust me.
- 100th Projects: I appreciate that this is a…somewhat-grammatically-idiosyncratic title for this link, but, well, I am preserving the original and to be honest I find it rather charming. Anyway, this is a personal site made by and hosting the small digital projects of (I think) one Tomoya Okada, who’s (again, I think) a Japanese digital designer who has over the past few years made 100 separate little digital…toys? Code experiments? Whatever, these are all linked to from this website, which has an oddly-peaceful feel to it and which subdivides all of the small works into different categories, from ‘growth’ to ‘playfulness’ and various categories inbetween, and, well, I just think it’s quite a nice way to celebrate a small body of personal work.
- Ask Ralph: What’s the best and most useful and, frankly, most compelling use of AI technology that you can think of? Is it to have a companion on your phone that can give you sartorial advice from the very, very narrow perspective of a North American brand famed for pastel polo shirts and a generally preppy vibe? YES, YES IT IS! Thank God, then, for Ask Ralph, Ralph Lauren’s (sadly US-only, but even us non-’Muricans can at least get to enjoy the website) new, AI-powered digital pal in your pocket. “What might you want to ask Ralph about?”, I hear you cry – well, LET ME TELL YOU! Your little digital Ralphie will offer you “personalized styling and shopping guidance” – I KNOW, RIGHT? Also, “Ask Ralph will curate men’s and women’s Polo Ralph Lauren styles to fit your needs, offering complete outfit suggestions and a variety of pieces to choose from” – AMAZING! Oh, and when that palls, relax safe in the knowledge that you can use the app to “Discover the timeless World of Ralph Lauren with Ask Ralph’s expansive knowledge base, from our deep-rooted heritage to curated seasonal articles and more”! Truly, these are all things that DEFINITELY required a specially-designed chatbot built on top of a midrange LLM! I do wonder what exactly is in it for you if, say, your wardrobe doesn’t consist solely of RL-branded apparel – will Ask Ralph know how I should best pair my scuffed etnies and questionable slogan tees with a classic yachting jacket? I DO HOPE SO! I feel very strongly that a lot of the agency teams at Media Monks et al who spent the entire 2020-22 period flogging dead-in-the-water metaversal experiences to in-house idiots with budget have now pivoted to selling those same idiots pointless AI cruft and, well, I can’t say I blame you tbh, times are tough out there and you probably have children to feed. Although I suppose there’s a small outside chance that this is in fact the distilled essence of Ralph Lauren’s ACTUAL SOUL in app form, which would be sort-of cool I guess.
- Pollar: This is interesting as a bit of a code/news experiment; Pollar is, as far as I can tell, a one-man news aggregation project designed to make news a bit more digestible and easy to consume online; it’s a Polish project focused on Polish news at present, but I think the creator has plans to expand it to other regions; the site’s in English, though, and you can get a sense for how it works and what it’s trying to do. As far as I can tell it’s basically taking a bunch of sources, using those to create summaries of main headlines with additional bulleted info sourced from the initial range of news sites; it also offers you outlinks to all the sources, categorised by whether they’re domestic or external and an ostensible reading of their political leanings. I think this is really nicely-done from a design and IA point of view, and I’ll be interested to see if the model is scaleable because as a clean interface and daily news overview I can imagine it being useful.
- Britain Owes Palestine: My initial reaction to this was ‘I mean, probably, yes, but good luck getting anything done about it’, but then I figured that maybe I should be less cynical and just promote the initiative regardless of my personal belief in its likely success or otherwise. “The ongoing suffering in Palestine can be directly traced to Britain’s violations of international law between 1917 and 1948. We need your support in urging the British Government to formally acknowledge Britain’s role, issue a sincere apology, and provide meaningful reparations to the Palestinian people…We’ve submitted a legal petition challenging the government to account for Britain’s systemic breaches of international law during its unlawful occupation of Palestine.“ You can read the press release about the campaign here should you be interested – I don’t personally think there’s any chance of this being acknowledged in any meaningful way, certainly not by this administration and certainly not right now, but you might want to get involved and show your support, and, even if not, I learned quite a lot of history as a result of just reading around the site and the FAQ (although it’s possible that you’re less innately ignorant than I am and know a lot of this stuff already).
- Explore Space: The solar system! Represented in your browser! All done in code! This is actually pretty impressive for a hobby project, and I like the fact that there’s a button that let’s you basically get into a virtual spaceship and then fly around the cosmos using WORMHOLES to travel vast distances like you’re in some sort of scifi epic (but, er, with quite simple aesthetics), a bit like Elite (but, to be clear, with no game attached) (I’m not selling this, am I?).
- Savor: Despite being someone who is basically all skin, bone and bile, I rather like fats – or at least the good ones – and I am inherently wary of any and all substances that try and replace butter with ‘a delicious combination of long-chain polymers designed to produce a butter-like coating mouthfeel!’. Still, I must confess to having my scepticism momentarily put on pause when I found this GORGEOUS website for a company called ‘Savor’ which, as far as I can tell, makes VERY high-end, overengineered vegan butter analogues in a lab somewhere. What does this stuff taste like? Fcuk knows, but I challenge you not to look at the site and not want a croissant or similar viennioserie IMMEDIATELY – honestly, this really is a gorgeous piece of design and UX and the whole thing just screams ‘EAT ME’, kudos to whoever did the work here (did I mention I really want a pastry? WHY will noone deliver croissants to me on Friday mornings when I type this? I really should have sorted this out by now).
- Tas360: I found this on Reddit – as far as I can tell it’s just a one-person project, which is LOVELY; basically the site collects a bunch of 360-degree photos of Tasmania for you to explore, all mapped over the island, letting you do a bit of virtual tourism somewhere VERY far away and VERY remote (not, I appreciate, for any of you reading this in the antipodes but, well, I imagine there are approximately three of you and so you will be forgiven if I don’t optimise the Curios reading experience for this particular sliver of my audience as opposed to the other seven people reading in London). Per the post on Reddit, where I found this, “For the past 5 years I’ve been lugging a tripod all over Tasmania – lookouts, wild beaches, walks, waterfalls, mountain tops – shooting 360° panoramas wherever I could. Just me, a camera, the Tassie sun (or rain), and my wife making sure I didn’t give up long ago, haha. What started as a hobby is now hitting a milestone: planned to post at 50 locations, but by the time of writing it’s already 52 (around 130 panoramas) – growing into what’s basically the first immersive digital atlas of Tasmania. There are still about 300 panoramas waiting to be processed – and if I don’t have to leave Tassie, there’ll be plenty more. On top of shooting, I also built the website myself – coding, design, stitching tours together. Took me months and months (probably more time than I care to admit), but now it’s all in one place, free to explore.” ISN’T THIS LOVELY? A genuinely laudable project, well DONE anonymous antipodean!
- Alignment Alignment: Satire! About AI! SatAIre, if you will! Except, obviously, you won’t. Sorry. Anyway, this is a website mocking all of the various bodies and institutions all sucking at the sweet, sweet teat of AI hype and fear, specifically the ones focusing on AI safety assessments. “We’re constantly thinking about AI so that politicians and journalists don’t have to.Fiercely independent, we are backed by philanthropic funding from some of the world’s biggest AI companies who also form a majority on our board. This allows us to deliver policy solutions and legislation that can be implemented rapidly by lawmakers without the delay of democratic scrutiny, unless Trump has told them to stop regulating AI in which case our work is totally pointless…Early research on AI identified a major challenge: how to prevent an AI from pursuing unintended objectives. Even simple systems can quickly lead to unforeseen consequences, such as the thought experiment of an AI instructed to make paperclips that ends up destroying the Earth in service of its goal. That is the alignment problem. Solving the alignment problem is agreed by leading AI researchers to be the first step towards safe superintelligence. As a result, some of the smartest — or at least richest — minds across the world have started paying other people to think about this problem for them, leading to the rapid emergence of the AI alignment research field. According to the many different research centers writing reports about the alignment problem, their work is of crucial importance to humanity’s future. But the unchecked proliferation of researchers working on alignment has now led to a far deeper problem. Who aligns the aligners?” WELL QUITE. How funny you find this will be exponentially linked to how closely involved you are with this stuff – I like to think there is ONE of you for whom this will be the best thing you’ve seen all week (and, if that is YOU, I am sorry).
- Eight Dating: What are YOU doing between the ages of 20:00-21:00 every evening? Eating dinner? Watching telly? Doing a hobby? Getting trussed up like a sexy latex chicken? It is, of course, NONE of my business, but if you’re at a loose end and if you’re single then maybe you would like instead to dedicate ONE hour of your life each night to, er, having videocalls with strangers in the hope of ending the loneliness for at least a few minutes. The way this works is that you record a short video intro to sell yourself; people can see this for ONE HOUR between 8pm and 9pm each evening; during that MAGIC HOUR, if you’re online then people can see your profile and, if they like it, match with you; if you match them back you are IMMEDIATELY thrown into an eight-minute videochat during which you will either find your are each other’s soulmate or (and there’s obviously NO WAY in which this would be the case, but, well, I’m just throwing it out there as a possibility) just make awkward small talk at a stranger while you worry about the angle you’re being shot at. This sounds, honestly, HORRIBLE, but I am also the sort of person who gets genuinely upset each time their phone camera accidentally frames their hideous countenance and so your mileage may very (and dear God I hope it does). Should any of you use this and somehow find the love of your live through it, please remember where you found it and invite me to the wedding (I have ONE nice suit and it would be a shame not to use it before I become too fat to button up the trousers in a few short years’ time).
NEXT, HAVE TWO HOURS OF CRACKING JAZZ FROM THE, ER, JAZZ SHOW ON WINDRUSH RADIO!
THE SECTION WHICH JUST FEELS SORRY FOR POOR REINALDO TBQHWY, PT.2:
- The Elon Code: The web is not, it’s fair to say, short on people trying to make a quick buck – grifters and criminals and scammers and opportunists all vying to part fools from their money via the medium of ‘too good to be true’ promises and the general belief that averages mean that there are millions and millions of, objectively, very stupid people out there just waiting to have their wallets inspected. I’ve seen quite a few unbelievably-obvious scams over the years, but perhaps none that have amused me quite as much as The Elon Code. “But Matt,” I can almost hear you shout, “what is the Elon Code?” – WELL LET ME TELL YOU! Did you know that we all have it within us to be billionaires? And that all we have to do is unlock this latent potential by activating a part of the brain known, probably scientifically, as ‘the billionaire’s bridge’? WELL NOW YOU DO! Except, obviously, the knowledge of said trick isn’t enough – you need to know HOW to unlock it, and for that, obviously, you will need to hand over some actual cashmoney to these guys because, well, you can’t expect them just to give this life-changing knowledge away for free, right? Still, for a meagre $39 (for reasons they never mention, this is ‘discounted’ from $156 – SO GENEROUS GUYS!!!) you can access this TRANSFORMATIVE method for unlocking your potential. How? “Just 5 minutes a day of listening to this groundbreaking audio track helps your mind naturally attract money, success, and unstoppable abundance. No need for vision boards, hustle, or endless affirmations. The Elon Code does the heavy lifting for you through cutting-edge neural soundwave technology.” So, what, you just listen to some audio and then your life will just…get better? BASICALLY YES!!! Honestly, this really is amazing – if you have a spare 5 minutes I strongly recommend you click the big BUY NOW button on the homepage and enjoy the frankly AMAZING origin story about how the secret to the Elon Code was revealed to the ordinary Joe behind the website in his DARKEST HOUR by a MYSTERIOUS STRANGER in, er, an airport bar, who warned of DARK FORCES attempting to suppress this knowledge that could benefit ALL OF HUMANITY…Honestly, I know noone deserves to get scammed, but then I look at stuff like this and think, well, maybe some people do actually. This really is astonishing.
- FillHarmonics: A drum machine that is also a crossword grid! This is the latest submission to the wonderful (and Tiny Award nominated!) 10,000 Drum Machines project, and it’s both silly and really cleverly-made – you can read a bit more about how it came to be, and all the rhythmic/musical stuff that underpins it, here, but if you’re like me and don’t really understand the first thing about either rhythm or music and you just want to play about and Make Some Noises then that’s probably fine too.
- Islamic World 84: OK, I am not a Muslim but I am *reasonably* certain that this TikTok account doesn’t in fact have anything to do with Islam, and that, specifically, Orcas are not a central tenet of the faith or a recurring theme in the Qur’an. Nonetheless, that is what it’s called – the videos are a genuinely-baffling collection of clips purporting to show the final moments of a killer whale trainer at Seaworld or somesuch, doing acrobatics with the animal before, it is strongly-implied, meeting her grisly demise. The clips are all shonky as hell and they don’t really make sense, but the thing that absolutely compelled me about them is that they are ALL captioned with phrases along the line of “Jasseca last moment” or “Jasseca miss you” with lots of crying face emoji and, look, what can I say, ‘Jasseca’ fcuking ENDED me when I read it earlier this week and it is having much the same effect now. A few of the early vids actually show, er, Jasseca in the beast’s maw, but they seemed to pivot away from that aesthetic relatively quickly for what I presume were algorithmically-determined reasons. Anyway, er, PRAY FOR JASSECA!
- Big Studio: Another in-browser navigable promo world! This one’s for a little agency called Big Studio and in it you can move a cute little rabbit avatar around a(nother) vaguely-neon environment, and, look, it’s just A N Other little pseudo-metaversal showcase but I like the aesthetic and I like the grain over the ‘camera’ that they have deployed, and I *really* like the fact that, if you so choose, you can make your little rabbit avatar get into a little car and drive around the scene because, well, it’s a small, pixellated rabbit driving what looks like a toy car in a manner vaguely-reminiscent of Richard Scarry by way of TRON.
- Objects From Films: Via Andy, this is the website of one Marcus Merritt who has taken it upon himself to do pencil drawings of objects from films – not recognisable or iconic objects, but instead very, very mundane ones. You want a drawing of the TV from ET? No, you don’t, but one is here available for purchase nonetheless. Ever fancied seeing the photographic camera from, er, ‘Mr Vampire II’ rendered in loving detail in black and white illustration? OH GOOD! These are, honestly, a lot better than you probably think they are going to be, and there are a few I have momentarily considered buying before reminding myself of what I am likely to end up earning by the end of the year and what a fundamentally stupid thing that would be for me to do, financially-speaking.
- Oboe: Learning! With AI! I am not quite sure what’s going on under the hood here, or why this ought to be a better experience than just asking the LLM of your choice to spin up a course for you on whatever topic you choose (to be clear, I am not suggesting for a second that this would be a good way in which to embark upon a course of learning, but, equally, I AM NOT THE BOSS OF YOU, more’s the fcuking pity) – anyway, you ask Oboe to spring you up a course on a topic of your choosing and it does so magically within seconds, whether that be on, I don’t know, the evolution of utilitarian thinking or croissant-making. Ask it a question – or pick from one of the prompts, just to get a feel for it – and you’ll get a bunch of ‘resources’ to learn from, including introductory outlines of the topic, a podcast, some bulleted notes, a 20 minute ‘lecture’… the outputs here, the podcast in particular, suggest it’s built on Google’s stack, but that’s just a guess and I can’t quite be bothered to dig into it; as for the quality of the ‘courses’ – well, it’s top-level cheap LLM output so it’s knowledge-shaped but largely hollow, and you would be better served by reading the Wikipedia entry in almost every single case I could think of. Still, it’s an interesting proof-of-concept if nothing else, and might actually be slightly more useful if it was working with a better model under the hood (but, still, I do not think learning via LLM is currently anything other than A Bad Idea, personally-speaking).
- Bluesky As The Matrix: A weird throwback to that brief period last year when Bluesky was BUZZY and MAINSTREAM-ADJACENT and people were building stuff on top of it like nobody’s business; now it’s OLD HAT and, apparently, A CESSPIT OF ANTI-KIRK HATE (although, on that point, noone has attempted to show me the video of the guy’s neck exploding on Bluesky, whereas OH BOY TWITTER), but, in a throwback to simpler, more hopeful times, someone’s built this visualiser which pulls the Bluesky feed in realtime and presents it as a constantly-updating Matrix-style greenscreen visualiser. This is pleasingly-decontextualised and surreal, you can even click through to individual posts if you’re so minded – LOTS of Bolsonaro chat at the time of my typing this, fwiw.
- Today’s Front Pages: I have no idea where these are being sourced from, but this is…ok, probably not EVERY front page in the world, but it certainly feels like a fcukload of them; scroll and get a sense of the world’s priorities today, or at least the media’s reflection of the world’s priorities. I love this so much; the shifting eye you get on what people think matters across the globe as you scroll, the weird juxtaposition of the global and the very local, the bird’s eye view you get of how a story is being packaged and reported (witness the…not-particularly-wide-ranging headlines about Kirk, for example, which is of itself an interesting bit of metamedia)…you can click on each of the frontpages to get a hi-res readable version of the document, but there aren’t any links through to the news sites themselves which is, if I can be churlish for a moment, a slight shame, but this is a really interesting site to bookmark and start your day with if you’re newspilled beyond redemption.
- iPod Clickwheel Games Preservation Project: Realistically-speaking I can’t really imagine that any of you are a) going to own an iPod anymore; and b) going to have the time or inclination, if you do, to hack this code onto it so that you can once again play the complete collection of scrollwheel games developed for the original iPods back in the day. BUT! Should you be someone who has one of the devices, knows their way around Github and has ALWAYS wanted to be able to go back and play that weird version of Sonic they made for the iPod ONE LAST TIME then, well, MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU.
- Warner Bros. Classics: THEY HAVE PUT ALL OF THE LOONEY TUNES CARTOONS ON YOUTUBE! Ok, what they have also done is compiled them into hour-long clipshows which remove all the credits and the rest, which feels a *bit* like cultural vandalism, but if you’re either a nostalgic who simply wants to hang out with Bugs, Daffy, Porky and the gang again (weirdo) or someone who would like to get their kids off the horrific, violent, nonsensical rubbish on the rest of YouTube and instead feed them some DEFINITELY NOT AT ALL VIOLENT cartoons featuring anthropomporphised animals beating seven shades of each other and blowing each other up then consider this your lucky day. There’s other, non-cartoon stuff on here, but realistically I can’t imagine any of you give two fcuks about 10 minute clips from films from the 50s so let’s just focus on Tom, Jerry and the rest.
- Thicc Hornet: You may, if you’re a videogame person, be playing Silksong RIGHT NOW – if you’re not a videogame person and that word means nothing to you, though, you need know only that it’s a new game that was released this week after much anticipation, it’s meant to be very good, lots of people are playing it right now, and it features a central character called ‘Hornet’ who, in the original game, is a nicely-drawn but avowedly-sexless little sprite. Obviously, though, this is 2025 on the web and it is a truth universally acknowledged that there is no videogame character yet to be invented that said game’s fanbase won’t, to some degree, fantasise about boning. And so it is with Hornet, who, as you will learn if you will click the link, has been seized upon by the fanart community on Bluesky and depicted in a manner that I can only term as…lasciviously, obsessively callippygian. Look, if you click the link you are going to see a LOT of drawings of a vaguely-insectile humanoid with a VERY big bum, is all I’m saying. What you do with that information is none of my business.
- Yellow Pee Monster: Ok, look, I just want to point out here that this is NOT MY THING and I am just putting here because, well, it’s weird internet stuff and that’s what Curios is for. Anyway. Back in the OLD DAYS of the internet, there was a briefly-active YouTube account which posted videos of someone – a man, OBVIOUSLY – urinating ALL OVER the public bathrooms of various places; bookshops, gas stations, coffee shops, restaurants, you name it, this man p1ssed ALL OVER ITS BATHROOM. Perhaps unsurprisingly, YouTube did not let these vids stay up for long; perhaps equally-unsurprisingly, someone somewhere decided that these videos needed to be archived for posterity, and so here they are, all collected on one site dedicated to the strange, uric reign of terror briefly conducted by one guy on bathroom attendants across North America. This is VERY odd, very gross (you don’t see anything other than first person, genital-free video of someone urinating, but WOW are they a, er, prolific and high-volume p1sser!) and, whether you like it or not, OUR CULTURE. Suck it up. But, er, only metaphorically, please.
- Wet Gamin: Oh wow, this is VERY odd and very silly and also quite possibly ART. I found this via excellent gaming website Rock, Paper Shotgun, and am going to lift their description entirely because I am feeling lazy: “For most of his game-making career, Australian developer dweedes has projected an image of cheeky, punkish rebellion. His website WET GAMIN has accumulated a trove of experimental games over the last decade: short works by various freeware developers that exemplify a scribbly, DIY spirit…. ”I’ll put out games for free because it kind of lightens the load off my head,” he tells me as we chat over Discord. “I don’t have to market it, I don’t have to invest time in it. I just want to get the idea out, and then people can play it. There’s no quality target, so it’s fun for trying new ideas and throwing whatever you want out and not thinking too hard about it.”” There are a LOT of games on here – none of them are what you might call ‘good’, but I would suggest you click the link and give a few of them a go and see what sticks – they all have a very defined sensibility and vibe, and there’s a surprising amount of care and work that has obviously gone into them; I would strongly recommend trying out his unofficial sequels to indiegame juggernaut ‘Braid’ to see what this is all about (and also because Braid III made me laugh childishly on several occasions, which feels like high praise in this case).
- Can Of Words: Daily wordmaking games! Done on Pico8! With a pleasingly-pixellated art style! This is an online demo for a full game, but it’s a pleasing taster and the full thing is less than the price of a coffee should you be motivated to get the whole experience.
- Cineline: Are you able to guess the films from the clues AND put said films in chronological order? If you’re me, the answer is ‘no, of course not, I haven’t even heard of 90% of these let alone know when the fcuk they were made’, but I appreciate you may be more of a cinephile than I am and as such might enjoy it more.
- The Discworld MUD: On the one hand, I feel I should explain that ‘MUD’ here refers to ‘Multi User Dungeon’ which itself is an oldschool (seriously, like 1990s) designator for ‘multi-user text-based virtual environment traditionally used for roleplaying and effectively a direct-line precursor to things like WOW and, eventually, Roblox’, but, equally, I have a sneaking suspicion that if anyone will know what a MUD is it’s you fcukers. ANYWAY, this was sent to me by a reader (HELLO OLIVER!) who said that he remembered it from his teens and was happy to see that it was still in existence. Have you ever wanted to engage in INCREDIBLY DEEP text-based roleplay in the world’s imagined by Terry Pratchett? Ever wanted to join the Watch, or meet Death, or chat with Vetinari? This, then, might be RIGHT up your street. The fact that this still has thousands of players is WONDERFUL to me – not my sort of thing, but I am thrilled that it exists. If you’ve never tried this sort of thing before but you like Discworld and, er, reading and typing, then you might fall in love here.
- Polybounce: Can you guess how many bounces it will take for the ball to escape the shape (don’t worry, it will make sense when you click)? Not after the fifth level you fcuking can’t, this is IMPOSSIBLE. Still, weirdly compelling despite that.
- DoomScroll: Scroll. Shoot. Kill monsters. Get power-ups. Survive. This is really clever, like a videogame boiled down to almost its most simple form; scroll forward, or scroll back, dodge the enemies, see how long you can stay alive – PURE LUDIC JOY! Also, thanks to the way it’s designed and the nice Doom-ish packaging, this is a lot more fun than the central premise might initially suggest – give it a go, I promise you will find it stickier than you imagine.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Remembered With Love: I do love me a Tumblr with a strong visual aesthetic, and this is very much such a Tumblr. What is that aesthetic? Oh Christ I am fcuked if I know, I might call it ‘girly gothic death angel’, but feel free to come up with your own.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Trucks and Tuks: Accompanying the book project of the same name, this is a collection of photos of decorated transport across South Asia – trucks and TukTuks, shot by Chris Herwig, all beautiful and colourful and occasionally brilliantly oldnew, if you know what I mean; there’s one shot of a truck crossing something desertlike which has the TikTok logo painted on its rear end for reasons I couldn’t possibly fathom.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The Epstein Birthday Book: I know, I know, but if you haven’t looked at the actual document itself then, honestly, I really do recommend that you check it out (the main link here takes you to a folder of documents; you want the one labeled ‘Request No.1’). You may have seen the main horrorbits – the Mandelson ‘Yum Yum’, the Trump drawing and message, the INCREDIBLY-creepy cartoon of Epstein getting, erm, ‘attended to’ by a gaggle of poorly-drawn young women who, it is strongly implied, he recruited when they were schoolgirls…even if you’ve seen those, you don’t really get a feel for how intensely-fcuking SINISTER this all is until you see the whole thing, all 250 pages plus, in its original context. The very clear vibes here are, in order: 1) sycophancy – everyone here is bending over backwards to ingratiate themselves with the birthday boy, which is in itself uncomfortable; you don’t normally get to see people fawn like this, and it’s very…ugly when you do, turns out; 2) witlessness – I know this might feel like a superficial thing to say (and, well, I am nothing if not a millimetre-deep human!), but I was struck by how moronic so many of the authors sound…the idiot fratboy humour, the linguistic infelicities, the plodding lack of any sort of grace or style…look, I know that judging paedos on the quality of their prose is probably not really the done thing, but it’s always amazing to me when the rich and powerful are, again, inevitably, revealed to be schlubs; 3) complicity – there is NOTHING here that doesn’t make you think ‘wow, all these people really did know that Epstein was a wrong’un, eh’?, nothing that makes you doubt that, yes, this man really did have a very open penchant for sexual predation that was being openly endorsed and in some cases facilitated and shared by the people in these pages. It’s SO GRUBBY, honestly, and you don’t really get a sense of that without scrolling the pages in full (but also be prepared to take a shower afterwards, it leaves a lasting ick). Oh, and if you’re curious, Bloomberg’s analysis of the Epstein/Maxwell emails is also worth a look, as is the Epstein/Mandelson tranche. I know I say this more than is probably interesting, but fcuk me is the world of the very rich a murky parallel existence that you maybe don’t in fact want to examine too closely.
- Kirk: You will, inevitably, have read and seen far, far more about the assassination of Charlie Kirk than you wanted to, and so I will link to only two bits about it here – the main link is to Mia Sato’s astute piece in The Verge which does a decent job of snapshotting What It All Means from the point of view of the new media ecosystem, and particularly in terms of the incentives and structures that now exist to ensure that everything that happens, however significant or serious or meaningful, will now be flattened into ‘content’ within seconds because, well, BECAUSE CAPITALISM! This is the natural endpoint of hollowing out the economy to the point where for many people ‘joining the daily algolottery in the hope of getting a full house of cherries and earning a payout from Daddy Elon’ is as much of a viable survival strategy as anything else on the table, and this is the information ecosystem that results. Good, isn’t it? More seriously, Ryan over at Garbage Day continues his evolution from ‘man who is very good at writing about internet culture’ to ‘vital chronicler of the collapse of the US’ with this excellent post about Kirk and the right-wing media industrial complex which I encourage you all to read because it is better than 95% of what you will read on 95% of news sites.
- Reform’s Lunatic Fringe: UK politics now, and you may, if you’re over here, have noticed it was the Reform UK Party Conference last week – I was briefly tempted to go, for Journalistic Reasons, until I remembered what going to party conferences is like and how much they used to feed my Urge To Kill – and that the media spent a lot of time talking up the PARTY VIBE of the whole thing and the air of optimism around Nige and his ‘oddly appealing to massive racists’ bunch of mates. This is an account – which, it’s fair to say, is nakedly-partisan in its leanings, being as it’s by left-wing campaign organisation Hope Not Hate, but, well, I share their leanings so I am fine with the partisanship in this instance – of some of the more…fringe opinions on display at the Conference, from the 15 minute cities loons to the gold standard loons to the more unsettling racist loons…basically, there are no policies, all these people are cranks (apart from Farage, in fairness, who’s sadly very much not a crank) and if they get anywhere near power in 4 years time then WOW are we in for some Interesting Times (I am, though, going to stick my neck out and say that they won’t. Feel free to come back and remind me of this when they romp home in the GE29 and I am desperately revising my whole ‘I will never live in Italy ever again’ schtick).
- The Idea of the West: One of the big trends over the past 5 years or so in rightwing online circles – and you can see this in pretty much every big grifter of the past few years, along with all the ‘classical statue in my pfp’ social media accounts trojan horsing racism into your TL with every doric column – has been the reification of the concept of ‘The West’ as innately superior to, well, not-’The West’ in terms of its ability to CREATE and FOSTER HUMAN EXCELLENCE, etc etc, most often used as a stick with which to beat the idea of ‘NON-WESTERN (ERGO NON-WHITE) THINGS BAD’ into your stupid, liberal head (also, by the way, worth noting the pace at which this has gone from ‘known fascist trope used by pointy-headed wingnuts on unpleasant forums’ to ‘something said by actual politicians and quoted in the pages of actual newspapers like it’s not a fcuking dogwhistle’ – GOOD TIMES!!!1111ohgod). This is a really good article that neatly explains that the concept of ‘The West’ is a very recent construct, specifically one you can trace back to just 150 years ago, that it doesn’t make any sort of coherent sense, and that in its initial conception it was conceived of something that “transcended the parochialism of family and nation”, and “was not to be a society (or society of societies) committed to democracy, individualism, or liberalism. It was instead a rejection of the hyper-individualism of the modern period, and it was an attempt to recover an older other-centered ethic that had been lost to a prior age.” Useful bit of corrective history, this.
- Nepal: I feel that the Epstein/Kirk stories, and their centrality to Trump, and his inevitable gravitational pull on the news agenda, mean that we have missed out on better reporting of what’s been going on in Nepal this week, a genuinely interesting story from both the point of view of the country’s domestic politics as well as a sort of ‘well, we’ve come a long way from Tahrir Square’ sort of reevaluation of social media’s place in society…anyway, this is a decent NYT overview of the whole thing, what happened and (broadly) why, but what I *really* want to read are pieces that explain stuff like this to me – oh, hang on, I have just looked at the screenshot has been taken down, possibly because it inadvertently doxxed people, but this was originally a post showing a screencap of a Discord in which 10k+ Nepalese kids were discussing who they thought should be put in charge of the country. Which is, objectively, mad (you should still scroll through the comments, though, as there’s some interesting commentary from ostensibly-Nepalese kids explaining what’s been going on).
- What The Money Thinks Is Going To Happen: Ok, I feel I need to caveat this quite strongly – this is by quite some way one of the most chilling and bleak readings of the imminent future I’ve read in a long time, and certainly that I have shared here. Still , it MIGHT NOT HAPPEN! This came to me via friend and reader Julian (W_W), and is an interview with a hedge fund-type called Viktor Shvets about where he’s placing his bets right now and…well, let’s just say that Viktor’s not exactly betting on a better future for us all to enjoy. Some sample quotes for you: “Today is truly different, and our times are truly different. We will never again go back to what we would’ve called classified as a conventional traditional thinking, traditional investment styles. None of this ever is going to come back…If you think of wealth inequality, it’s so high and it’s progressing so quickly that I completely agree with the phrase that is being used quite frequently ‘you are either [in the] 0.1% or you are a peasant’…We’re starting to overproduce plumbers and electricians. By the time they’re fully trained, there will probably be too many…As the information age cascades through our society, gradually there will be no jobs, there will be no occupations, there will be no progression, both blue collar and white collar…” Look, it doesn’t get any more cheery than that, but I really would encourage you to click the link and read til you get to the bit where he outlines his broad ‘sectors to invest in’ thesis, which is, honestly, one of the most openly-morally-bankrupt things I have read in an age and sort-of almost admirable for its clarity. Anyway, look, it’s entirely possible Viktor is COMPLETELY MISTAKEN about all of this, and let’s all cross our fingers that he is because otherwise MAN are the next hundred-ish years going to be a fcuking chore.
- The Death of the Corporate Job: This is a couple of weeks old and may have done the rounds a lot already, but I am including it because a) I enjoyed it (the writing is shit, but the premise is strong) and I think it’s true; and b) it’s exactly what I have been telling anyone who would listen (and lots of people who, if I’m honest, really didn’t want to be told) was the case for about 10 years now (there’s a reason I now mainly work alone). Do you do white collar work? Are you not quite sure what the point of it is? Maybe, er, maybe don’t read this one, on reflection.
- I Hate My AI Friend: A year or so ago I featured a piece about initial impressions of the always-on AI companion pendant called ‘Friend’ which is designed to track your life and act as an all-knowing companion based on what it learns about you from listening to your conversations – here, in fact – and now the makers are confident enough to ship it out to actual media for review and…turns out media hate it! Partly this is because the device sounds, still, like something that the tech simply can’t yet deliver, but there’s something interesting about the fact that it’s the device’s ‘personality’ that still feels off (something which Katherine Dee focused on in her original assessment 12 months ago as well). I also thought the anecdote in the piece about the universally negative reaction to the device’s presence in social situations, even from people I would expect to be relatively tech-positive; it makes me wonder whether people who are into this stuff are simply going to swerve the ethical questions around it and just mask the fact they’re wearing AI surveillance kit in the first place.
- The Slopcast Economy Is Coming: Or at least, some people want to convince you its coming. Despite the protestations of the people here interviewed by the Hollywood Reporter, though, I can’t personally see the market for AI-produced podcasts being anything other than near-zero, at least for the foreseeable future. Still, that’s not preventing the VERY optimistic people behind ‘Inception Point AI’ from blithely predicting that this is the future – your clue that this is all bullsh1t is the ASTONISHINGLY dumb quotes that pepper the piece, my favourite of which is the honestly-nonsensical “We believe that in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI, and we are the company that’s bringing those people to life,” a statement so utterly-moronic that were it attached to my name in digital perpetuity I might have to actually end my own life from shame.
- More Fake AI Journalism: You might have seen the story about the presumably-AI-generated ‘reporter’ Margaux Blanchard who managed to secure bylines across a number of titles such as Business Insider before being exposed as…probably not actually a real person, and having those bylines scrubbed – this is a followup to that, which finds a host more similarly-iffy looking ‘journalists’ and suggests that they might link back to one specific guy who has some previous in this sort of attempted grift…This is a GREAT piece of reporting, and I like the fact that it highlights two important points here – the first, that this sort of thing can only happen if journalism is already pretty degraded and you as an outlet have basically stopped caring; and the second, that MAN can a motivated individual now really cause havoc thanks to AI combined with other people’s carelessness.
- Chinese Cookbooks: This is very much written from the perspective of Chinese Americans, but I found it a lovely piece about the attempts to codify a cuisine, to translate it for different audiences, and through doing so to bridge gaps between generations of immigrants whose experience of both food and ethnicity is obviously defined by their upbringing and geography.
- What Dating Is Like For Single Men: I know, I know, but in the interests of balancing out some of the ‘women are giving up because men are all trash’ pieces, I thought it might be interesting to read one asking men what they feel about all this (ok, fine, not the first one I have featured but I am a sucker for these pieces, mainly because they make me feel better about myself and, well, who doesn’t want that? NO FCUKER, etc etc) – the answer, per The Cut, is ‘lost and confused’, but, seemingly, not enough to stop behaving like weirdos. As ever with pieces like this, I want to grab literally EVERYONE involved by the shoulders and shake them and ask them ‘HOW DID YOU GET THIS BROKEN AND ODD???’. Or, er, maybe it’s MY inability to really feel anything any more that is at fault? COULD NOT BE TRUE, OBVS. Ahem. Seriously, though, read this and tell me that both of the men in this don’t sound really, really sad inside – I mean, personal brand? “Being a little corny is part of his brand — he posts himself dancing to Tom Jones and trying on cream-colored slacks. Still, it stung to go out with a woman who subsequently posted on Reddit that he was awkward and “kind of cringe” on their date. “I’ve always had that insecurity,” he said. Broadcasting one’s intentions? Being honest about your desires? That’s beta shit. “Nobody wants to see a dating profile that’s like, ‘I’m looking for love,’” a 30-year-old Fort Greene man told me. “What are you, a normie fcuking bot?”” NO ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS SHOULD THINK LIKE THIS OR EVEN HAVE THE VOCABULARY TO ARTICULATE SUCH FEELINGS!
- The Rise of Anime: A nice-looking, if imho disappointingly lightweight, look at the insane growth in popularity of anime, specifically in the US but also globally. I thought this was an interesting read, but felt it failed to properly dig into the two main drivers of its popularity over the past 30-ish years, specifically its insane popularity amongst black kids and the growth of Crunchyroll (in fairness it does allude to both, but doesn’t give them the space they warrant).
- Hanging Out In Roblox: A REALLY good piece in New York Magazine in which Sam Biddle spends a week hanging out in Roblox as an adult and shares his experiences. I’ve been of the opinion for a few years now that Roblox is going to have a Facebook moment at some point in the not-too-distant future where we collectively realise a) how many people use it; and b) that we don’t really know what they are doing there or what it is doing to them, and it’s hard not to read this piece without thinking that there is going to be some pretty largescale parental conniption coming down the line in a few years. It’s also, though, hard not to read this and to once again say ‘the metaverse already exists, and it is this, and everyone laughing at the Zuckerbergian bet from a few years ago might feel very silly when this generation grow up and want a more sophisticated version of these spaces to inhabit’.
- The Review of Oz: Specifically, ‘a review of the reimagined version of The Wizard of Oz available to watch at The Sphere, and whether or not it is THE FUTURE OF CINEMA’. I think the critic gave this a VERY easy ride imho, and that the whole thing sounds, frankly, miserable and the very definition of everything being flattened into CONTENT, but it’s worth reading as a rundown of what the experience entails and what that might mean for how the past gets repackaged and resold to new generations.
- The Great Magazine Archive: I am pretty sure I have featured James Hymans and his magazine archive – or at least part of that archive – in Curios before, but it’s 11:38 and I am running VERY late and don’t have time to check right now (or indeed for these sorts of pointless authorial digressions ffs Matt!), but in case you’re not aware of it already it’s possibly the greatest single archive of magazines anywhere in the world, and it currently lives in boxes and crates, basically, and it REALLY needs a philanthropist or brand to just basically pay to get it all digitised and preserved because MY GOD this is a cultural patrimony and an incredible history of media and humanity and it would be a genuine tragedy were this to decay and vanish. Can one of you get a client or employer to pony up the cash, please? Come on, at least one of you fcuks must have a job with access to proper money.
- The Celebrity Yacht Cruise: This is a VERY odd piece in Vanity Fair, about a super-VIP shindig on a billionaire’s yacht – who went, who didn’t, who did what with whom…except it’s VF, and so it’s all puffpiece-y and largely circumspect, but it contains a GREAT chat with Martha Stewart and some lovely cruise ship commentary, and at no point does its author allude to or even suggest they have read DFW, and as such I enjoyed it VERY much indeed and I think you will too if you have even a passing interest in love/hating the very rich and famous. Also, can I just shout out Ellie Goulding for her ability to blag her way onto such things as this? To my mind it would be like Polly Paulusma suddenly appearing to play the US Presidential Inauguration, or Kid Harpoon being booked for MBS’s birthday.
- Sex In The Bongo Cinema: I missed this last month, but this is a surprisingly-lovely piece of writing in which the author and her partner go to an actual sex cinema in, er, Huddersfield, and have a public fcuk in front of the other patrons; it’s one of the least-erotic things I have ever read (your mileage may of course vary), but it’s also surprisingly-sweet and kind about the place and the patrons, and, I don’t know, I found this oddly-heartwarming, which isn’t something I thought I would be moved to write about two people boning while a bunch of middle-aged men look on and attempt to wrangle themselves to tumescence and beyond.
- Taking Offense: Have you read Miranda July’s ‘All Fours’? I bought it for a couple of friends of mine last year and spent the subsequent few months worrying that it was going to cause them to leave their husbands, but it seems to have gone ok so far. Anyway, this essay is a DEEP READING by Garth Greenwell of a specific sex scene in the novel and, honestly, I loved reading this SO MUCH, partly because it was a far more intelligent and interesting and wide-ranging interpretation than I could possibly have ever arrived at on my own, but also because it’s funny and interetsing and well-written enough to stand up as a piece of writing even if you’ve not read the original text. If you have read it, though, this is sort-of essential I think.
- Wikipedia Persists: This has been, rightly, recommended everywhere since it was published; this is a LONG piece about how Wikipedia works, and why it works, and the mechanics of editing, and it is a brilliantly-researched and written piece about something which has become infrastructural without us really knowing how or why or ever intending for it to become so.
- Intrigue on the Slopes: I found this piece in the Paris Review really interesting – it’s the account of the American delegation’s attendance at the annual Ski Club of International Journalists, which, the author assures us, “is as real as you or me. It exists not only in the fantasies of frustrated Swiss radio hosts and overworked Kazakhstani investigative reporters but in the Nock Mountains of Austria, the Karawanks of Slovenia, the Mangfall Alps of Germany, and other magnificent alpine ranges, where for seventy winters journalists from all over the world have gathered to ski and drink and bask in conviviality.” It’s been going for decades, it’s a bit of a jolly, and, with all institutions such as this, it is RIVEN WITH POLITICS. This account is funny, gossipy and one of the most mannered pieces of writing I have read in an AGE; there’s lots of STYLISTIC WORK going on here, and your mileage will largely depend on the extent to which you can forgive someone who’s not a writer in DFW’s league (sorry, but) running with VERY DFW-style tics such as referring to themselves as ‘Our Journalist’ – I enjoyed this a lot, despite its occasional overegging of the pudding, but I appreciate it might not be for everyone; honestly, though, this is basically a Wes Anderson film in article form if you ask me, and, now I think of it, he would film it BEAUTIFULLY (obvs).
- San Fermin: Our final longread this week is Janis Hopkins writing about finding himself in Pamplona for the running of the bulls (and the festival of San Fermin, which the bulls are a part of) – I’ve linked to his writing before on a few occasions, and I loved immoderately; you can almost taste the calimotxo (and don’t you wish you couldn’t). Wins bonus points for only mentioning Hemingway in passing, too.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS (AND THIS IS THE JIM E BROWN ALBUM, PLEASE DO CHECK OUT THE SONG TITLES!:
- I discovered Jim E Brown yesterday; I don’t know quite what to make of it, but I think I love it. This is…what, a character study in music? Jim E Brown is the OBVIOUSLY FICTITIOUS musical persona of…some English guy, with a whole mythos built up around him. The character is a drunk loser – if you’re of a vintage to remember the Peter Baynham character in early Lee & Herring then you will have a vague handle on it – and he SINGS SONGS, and this is one of them, called ‘I Opened My Mouth Too Wide Today (And It Hurts)’, and, honestly, the song is LOADS better than it needs to be and I sort-of like it? Almost? Anyway, even if you hate this I INSIST that you now go and find the album on bandcamp – I have linked to it in the section heading, PLEASE read the song titles, I think this person might actually be a genius.