Webcurios 12/12/25

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You know how I said a few weeks ago (two, specifically) that there were three Curios to go til Christmas? Yeah, well, I lied, I am DONE for 2025.

Turns out I have Stuff To Do next week which would be rendered tricky were I also have to spend significant amounts of time face-down in the internet, and so I have taken the executive decision to call it quits a week early; I KNOW I KNOW HOW WILL YOU COPE? (this is rhetorical, please do not feel compelled to email me to tell me exactly how easy it will be).

Anyway, in my annual Moment of Uncomfortable Sincerity, I would like to briefly take a moment to wish you all a very [please insert whichever seasonal greeting would make YOU happiest!], and to thank you (genuinely) all for reading what I know is a horribly overlong, miserably-uncurated mess of a newsletter. To everyone who has clicked a link, to everyone who’s taken the time to email me (even if your email literally said ‘broken link’ – THAT IS NO HELP, FCUKFACE, BUT THANKYOU ANYWAY), who’s sent me their projects, who shared or voted in or submitted a project to, or judged, the Tiny Awards this year…thankyou, seriously, it really does mean a lot. I was going to write ‘makes it all worthwhile’, but, well, let’s be realistic.

Everything in Curios is made by people – EVEN THE AI THINGS, YOU D1CKS – and I hope it’s served as a reminder this year that there still exists a web outside of the confines of an image-and-video-led algofeed, and that there are SO MANY AMAZING THINGS being made each and every day, and that they are worth celebrating (or, occasionally pointing and laughing at).

I have been Matt, this has been Web Curios 2025, and you have been lovely, so thankyou again.

See you in a few weeks and a whole new year.

By Haruhiko Kawaguchi

WHILST I AM A TEDIOUS YULETIDE REFUSENIK I APPRECIATE THAT YOU MIGHT FEEL LESS BILIOUS ABOUT THE PROSPECT OF THE IMMINENT FORTNIGHT OF UNSOUGHT SUNDAYS, AND MIGHT QUITE LIKE THIS FESTIVE MIX BY CURIOS READER JESS PRICE! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS QUITE ANNOYED ABOUT THE FACT THAT DUE TO HAVING TO FILE COPY ON 31 DECEMBER I AM STILL GOING TO HAVE TO LOOK AT THE FCUKING WEB LOADS, PT.1:  

  • A Really Incredibly Illegal Streaming Site: Look, on the one hand I understand that creative work needs paying for (or at least the tiny part of my brain worrying about my income vs outgoings and the proportion of the latter which I am seemingly now spunking each month on newsletter subscriptions does) and that if everyone got freebies and jumped the paywall nothing would get made and we would be left with…Christ, infinite, AI-generated reality TV shows (this is called Foreshadowing); at the same time, though, everything costs thirtyfivemillionpounds, everything has debundled and we’re coming to that point in the year where I know for lots of you the main goal is ‘sit very still, imbibe diabetes-inducing quantities of sugar and ingest so much television you begin to worship the Netflix logo as the risen god. AND SO I GRANT YOU THIS GIFT (which, to be clear, may be shut down at ANY MOMENT so get your fill while you can). This site is called ‘Flyx’ and it has seemingly EVERYTHING on it – fcuk knows where it’s from, fcuk knows where it’s hosted, fcuk knows how it’s managed to remain unblocked and un-legaled in the five days since I’ve found it, but if you want to watch everything on Netflix/HBO/Amazon/whatever other fcuking platforms are out there without giving those cnuts a penny then, well, GREAT! Oh, and there are Actual Films on there too – The Running Man, the new Avatar, a bunch of others…look, I’m not saying that you should stick two fingers up at an industry that doesn’t really seem to care anymore about its output or its customers, but, well, I’m not not saying that either. MERRY CHRISTMAS AND FILL YOUR TELEVISUAL BOOTS WHILE YOU STILL CAN!
  • A Terrible AI-Generated ‘Reality’ TV Show: This was what the foreshadowing was about! You may have seen links to this floating around, you may have seem some of the justifiably-appalled writeups, but I don’t think you can really understand the true horror of ‘Non-Player Combat’ – a TV show entirely scripted and generated by The Machine. They’re claiming this as a ‘world first’, which wevs, but it is worth having a quick look because, for all of you AI HATERS out there (who have probably skipped this, on reflection, more fool you – KNOW YOUR ENEMY, after all) it will be a real end-of-year fillip. See, the machine really CAN’T create anything good! Or at least not like this it can’t – the issue here, as previously discussed, is that the people behind this have leaned into ‘imagine a bunch of entirely-unscripted AI ‘characters’ in a survival-style reality show a la 10p Hunger Games! How would they react? What MAD LARKS would occur|?’ without remembering that, left to its own devices, AI is very, very boring and mediocre and unfunny and doesn’t understand the first thing about narrative beats and tension and so this has all the weight and heft of candyfloss – but candyfloss which inexplicably tastes of battery acid. I did actually try and watch this, but lasted around six minutes and, honestly, even that was a significant struggle. Positives? Er, the character consistency is tolerable? But that is literally it. God it’s going to be great when the entire Disney back catalogue gets this treatment, isn’t it? Eh? Oh.
  • Size of Life: This has been EVERYWHERE in the past few days, and rightly-so; Friend of Curios and Tiny Awards judge Neal Agarwal returns with another of his lovely little bits of webstuff – Size of Life is in and of itself not a novel idea (sites that show you how BIG and how SMALL things are and how AMAZING that is have been around forever), but it’s the execution that elevates this; to make it, Neal engaged ACTUAL ARTISTS (llustrations by Julius Csotonyi, Production by Liz Ryan, Music & SFX by Aleix Ramon and a Cello performance by Iratxe Ibaibarriaga) to create draw each individual object, create the audio and provide the swelling strings that underpin the whole thing (the way they come up in the mix as you move through and up the sizes of object is a lovely touch), and you really can tell the craft and care that has gone into this. In part its popularity has been down to this handmade, artisanal (sorry, but it does actually fit for once) quality which plays to the anti-AI crowd – there’s very much a lesson here for anyone wishing to pander to the art-loving middle-classes – but it’s also just a really nicely-made and interesting project. One caveat, though, to said anti-AI crowd; the number of people making small, fun webstuff who can ALSO afford to commission artists to work over months and months to make something like this is somewhere in the region of <30, I think, and it’s important to remember that Neal is (relatively) well-known and successful in this field, and this sort of largesse isn’t open to anyone and everyone, and so for everyone shouting ‘THIS IS HOW IT SHOULD BE!’ and ‘PAY ARTISTS, DON’T USE AI’, well, with whose money?
  • PotatoCam: Another Friend of Curios project! Matt Round, who’s been on a very productive tear in 2025, has produced this little browsertoy which lets you take a photo via your laptop or phone’s webcam which will render as though it’s been taken on a cameraphone c.2006. Why? WHY NOT? Should any of you be in the position of having recently entered into a new relationship, why not spend that first Christmas apart sending fuzzy and increasingly ambiguous pictures of what may or may not be your erogenous zones to each other? ‘Tits or Turkey?’ is the sort of seasonal fun which PotatoCam will really facilitate, and I encourage you to GET CREATIVE.
  • Fragile Shards: Describing itself as an ‘interactive visualiser’, this is one of those ‘put it fullscreen, take something lightly-psychedelic, sit back and see God’-type affairs; you can toggle different views, move the whole thing around, change the speed of the weird geometric tunnel thing…basically with a large enough bag of acid, a catheter and someone to occasionally feed you huel, you can probably pass the entirety of the next three weeks staring at this and exploring the strange crenellations of your psyche, so why not do that instead of engaging with your family (unless they’re all dead, in which case maybe don’t do this, it could end up a bit depressing)?
  • Will There Be A UK White Christmas?: Children and foreigners may not be aware that, back in the distant past when seasonal weather still meant something rather than ‘damp’ and ‘less damp’, there was regular, annual excitement at the question of whether or not it would snow on Christmas day in the UK (the answer was, inevitably, not usually), with frenzied betting markets and stilted televisual banter and everything (to anyone who seeks to romanticise our country’s past – LOOK HOW SH1T AND BORING IT WAS WE HAD TO GET EXCITED ABOUT POTENTIAL SNOW FFS). Anyway, global warming has largely put paid to this question as a result of the fact that, well, it doesn’t get that cold in December anymore, but should you wish to pretend that there’s a sense of jeopardy about this then this website will provide you with all the up-to-the-minute data you could possibly need to see whether you will grimly trudging through half an inch of grey slush on the now-traditional Big Boxing Day Walk (in fairness it’s currently reading 50%, but that’s basically for Scotland).
  • Bruno Simon: It’s the last Curios of the year, but this is very much a late contender for ‘best personal website I have seen in 2025’. This one is CHUNKY and will possibly cause your laptop to chug while it loads up, but I forgive it for making the first few links VERY SLOW this morning because when it does finally appear it is SO LOVELY. This isn’t the first ‘my portfolio website is a diorama around which you can drive a small RC car’ site I have featured over the years, but I think it might be the most impressive one – this is SO RICH, and there’s so much to explore, from the exploding barrels to the Easter Eggs and little treasure hunt games you can stumble across, to the fact that Bruno Simon (a name so pleasing I feel it should be written in full each time) has coded an ENTIRE FCUKING RACETRACK in here that you can drive around like some sort of modern-day variant on Ivan ‘Ironman’ Stewart (also, play that here, it is ace), and were I in the market to hire someone to make me something FUN AND COOL on the web I would totally hire Bruno Simon, based on this site. But, well, I’m not. Sorry, Bruno Simon.
  • The London Underrated Gems Food Map: This has also proven VERY popular this week, and with good reason- Lauren Leek has basically done some very smart work with Google Reviews data to attempt to surface restaurants that might be underrated across London. The actual explanation of what she’s done and how she’s done it is QUITE TECHNICAL on her website, but there’s a slightly more digestible writeup over at London Centric which I will reproduce here because it’s interesting: “When you use Google Maps, she explained, there are three things that determine which restaurants you’re shown. The first is relevance, where a search for “Italian food” will try and find restaurants with a listing where the word Italian is mentioned. The second is your distance from any given restaurant. The third is a mysterious characteristic created by Google called “prominence”. “Prominence has its own algorithm, which we don’t know a lot about,” she explained. “It depends on how many reviews a place has, how often people click on it, if it’s a big brand or not.” This, combined with the fact restaurants can pay to be promoted on Google Maps, means independent venues aren’t always as visible on the dominant mapping app as you might think. To try and fix that, Leek scraped all the information off Google Maps that was available and built an alternative map which allows you to filter for “underrated gems”, which can then be filtered by price and cuisine. This rates restaurants based on what she believes their Google rating should be if reviews weren’t being adjusted, with more than 5,000 restaurants receiving a boost.” Now it’s only been out for a week and I have only had a bit of a dig, but, based on stuff around where I live in South London, it seems to do a pretty good job of picking out places that are good-but-not-well-known and as such I would 100% suggest giving it a go next time you’re trying to find somewhere to eat that isn’t a) a chain; or b) going to require you to sell a kidney/egg/deciliter of sperm/child (delete per likely value) to afford it.
  • Google Language Explorer: A lovely project by Google, seeking to map and categorise the languages and dialects spoken across the world; search for a specific language, or move the globe around and select the country of your choosing to get a breakdown of the individual different languages spoken there. This is really interesting, though were I being an annoying nitpicker (AND WHY NOT) I would ask for audio clips of each because, well, I want to hear what the dialects of Greenland sound like. Also, in case you’re reading this people of Google, can I just take a moment to say HELLO to the nice people at Google Arts and Culture who, when I referred to something they had made as ‘a bit shonky’ earlier this year got jackets made with ‘shonky w4nkers’ written on the back, which is almost certainly the most-influential I have been in the 16 years I have been writing this fcuking thing. MERRY CHRISTMAS, GOOGLE PEOPLE.
  • Spike: I do slightly feel that the move this year towards ‘EVERYTHING IS A MARKET LET US BET ON EVERYTHING NOTHING MATTERS YOLO LOL’ in the US is possibly…underexplored in this country, if only because we are (as we are all too sadly aware right now) very much downstream of those fcukers, culturally-speaking…anyway, the very latest manifestation of this from the oh-so-modern USA is this app, which lets people bet on how well they think content on TikTok is going to do. Betting on the inscrutable black box? WHY THE FCUK NOT! On the one hand this might inspire some handwringing and gentle angst; on the other, it could be a non-terrible way of scrying the shape of the algo based on what people are betting on and the style/content that does well. Does it feel like a good thing that people are reduced to betting on whether the crowd will clap when a stranger w4nks for pennies on TikTok? It does not!
  • Chives: Ok, this is very silly but has also had me oddly captivated for the past couple of months; since late-October, this guy in the Kitchen Confidential subReddit has been cutting chives each day, attempting to attain (per the other users of the sub) perfection when it comes to an even, perfect chop – and, look, this is literally just a bloke sharing a photo of some chopped up chives each day and other people pointing out to him where he’s missed some, or the bits aren’t even, but GOD THIS IS HEARTWARMING. Over the 8 weeks the thing’s been going the community has developed its own lore, its own shorthand (when people spot large bits of chive they mark them by drawing planes on them – the idea being that they, er, are crashing into them re 9/11, which, ok, fine, but it made me laugh), and it’s all friendly and wholesome and you really can see the progression and, look, this is ENTIRELY silly but I am invested now and maybe you will become so too. Also, it has broken containment and was apparently mentioned in passing on some wrestling show the other day, which is just one of those wonderful, odd moments of cultural memetic bleed which make me very happy indeed.
  • The Anti-Museum of Grunge: This is…odd, feeling almost like some sort of antonym of the grunge tour website I featured last week – this is promoting some sort of museum of grunge (sorry, ANTI-MUSEUM, Jesus), but the visuals look like they’re all AI, and a lot of the copy is all AI and, well, that doesn’t really feel in the spirit of the movement, does it lads? WOULD KURT HAVE LIKED AI?? WOULD HE???? I mean, we’ll never know, the man is very fcuking dead and to be honest he was quite blitzed on skag for much of the time and as such he might not have had hugely strong opinions either way, but the vibes are very much off with this one.
  • Ripple: This is interesting (if, er, you’re interested in THE BUSINESS OF NEWS); the Washington Post has launched Ripple, which is basically a news aggregation page pulling in the day’s top stories from sources other than the post into one place on their site. What’s interesting here is the sources they’re choosing to use (it’s…quite right wing!) and the fact that they are threatening to include newsletters in their curation, which is a fillip for Substack and the legitimacy of it as a news platform, I guess (other, non-Nazi-funding newsletter platforms are available! Use them instead!). More proof if any were needed that the disaggregation of news has been a godawful fcuking mess for anyone attempting to have even half an idea of ‘what is going on’ (yes, I know that’s not really even a meaningful concept anymore but wevs), and an interesting move which I will be interested to see if anyone else copies in any way.
  • Private Notes: Do YOU like the idea of an AI-powered note taker but do YOU also feel quite uncomfortable about giving all your thoughts and IMPORTANT MUSINGS (small aside: it is a truth universally acknowledged that anyone who refers to their writing as ‘musings’ is never, ever worth reading) to the Big Evil Tech Companies? Well you may like this app, in that case (as long as you’re an Apple user) which is basically a local LLM which does all the summary-type stuff you would expect but which doesn’t send any information anywhere. Particularly helpful for those of you who want a record of what’s been said in a meeting but who for DOUBTLESS ENTIRELY LEGITIMATE REASONS don’t want there to be any possibility of what you’re talking about being ingested into the Great Information Soup.
  • The Globe of History: OH MY GOD IF YOU LIKE HISTORY THIS IS ACE. Via Giuseppe, this is basically a globe on which are mapped ALL OF THE HISTORICAL EVENTS EVER (this may not be strictly accurate, but it FEELS like it might be) – adjust the slider at the bottom to change the time period, so you can in seconds go from looking at all the horrible things we’ve done to each other in the past 20-odd years back to looking at all the horrible things we were doing to each other 800 years ago! See the progress we’ve made! Honestly, this is so so interesting, you cannot help but learn something new and weird and cool (ok, fine, your mileage for ‘cool’ will vary quite wildly, but) from this, and I recommend it unreservedly.
  • Roast Your Wrapped: Let’s be clear – you could literally just do this with GPT, Gemini or AN Other model as this is just a wrapper on API access, but it will save you doing the pre-prompting. Would you like to have a Large Language Model offer its opinion (it doesn’t have an opinion) on your Spotify Wrapped stats? Would you like it to ‘roast’ you (a horrible Americanism which still sounds really jarring to anyone who lived through the 00s and the genuinely horrible spate of tabloid stories in which footballers decided they wanted to give a new and significantly-less-pleasant meaning to the term ‘roast’ than had previously been used)? GREAT! Tell the site your stats, give it some screencaps of your Wrapped graphics and it will tell you EXACTLY who you are (a largely middle-of-the-road person who is almost certainly not as musically-adventurous as you like to think!).
  • The Best Film Posters of 2025: Daniel Benneworth-Gray’s annual selection for the Creative Review is a typically nice pick, with some WONDERFUL bits of design amongst his selections; my personal favourite here is the one for Time To The Target, which reminds me rather of the comics of Chris Ware, but they are all beautiful. BONUS FILM POSTERS! Another best of the year selection by Adrian Curry which has some overlap but also a bunch that don’t appear in Dan’s and which are also LOVELY.
  • Acid Warp: Any time over the next few weeks you feel like you need a small reset, anytime you just want to smooth your brain, load up this website and just ENJOY. You know what I said uptop about that earlier link and the acid? Applies here too.

By Gina Beavers

NEXT UP, THE GUY BEHIND THE VIDEOGAME TEKKEN HAS RELEASED THIS HOUR-LONG MIX HE DID OF THE GAME’S TRACKS AND HONESTLY IT KIND OF SLAPS DESPITE ALSO BEING QUITE WEIRD! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS QUITE ANNOYED ABOUT THE FACT THAT DUE TO HAVING TO FILE COPY ON 31 DECEMBER I AM STILL GOING TO HAVE TO LOOK AT THE FCUKING WEB LOADS, PT.2:  

  • The Human Writes Font: Very big fan of this project which is both A Good Thing and a smart idea. Should you not be aware, due to the fact it is seemingly too onerous to maintain a working, functional ad library, Meta – a company which per its latest earnings is worth, lest we forget, some $1.2tn per its market cap – stopped allowing any political advertising in the EU. One of the side effects of this was to also prevent advertising from organisations seeking to, say, raise awareness of things like human rights abuses (because that would be POLITICAL, do you see? Fcuk me do I hate these cnuts, honestly), which feels like A Bad Thing; in response, this font has been created which, its makers purport, can’t be read by machine vision and as such can be used as a backdoor workaround to get ads containing ‘political’ messages onto FB and Insta. Obviously there’s nothing to prevent this for being used for more, er, nefarious purposes, so I look forward to your local WhatsApp dealer realising that they can expand their reach exponentially using this and a tenner’s ad spend, but in general this is a really nice bit of work.
  • CapyCap: This is interesting, but I have mixed feelings about the fact that, as far as I can tell, by using or installing it you are also training The Machine to eventually better evade detection and pass itself off as a human actor. CapyCap is basically ‘Captcha, but more’ – rather than ‘pick the images with ladders’ or ‘who is crying here?’ identification tasks, it requires you to demonstrate slightly more elevated motor skills and understanding to pass the test and access the webpage; the wrinkle here is that this is all being used as training data for…someone? Anyway, the people behind this are promising that if you install this on your site THEY will pay YOU for every person who completes a captcha on your site – only a cent per captcha but, well, WE ARE ALL DYING OUT HERE and we will take what we can get. Is this…is this good? I have literally no idea any more.
  • Cloth: I have featured animated fabric on here before (you know, it’s when I find myself typing sentences like that that I realise that I really have wasted so, so much of the life granted to me by a mysterious, ineffable, unknowable force), but this is a particularly well-coded and satisfying example. CUT THE CLOTH! Honestly, this really is INCREDIBLY pleasing and almost-vaguely-ASMR-y (to me, at least) and I am just going to play with it for a few minutes while I wait for the kettle to boil, bear with me a second.
  • Retro: It’s nearly 2026. You have been online for what feels like forever. Your digital behaviours have effectively calcified into a series of well-practiced muscle-memory actions that take you between the six apps you have decided to share 80% of your waking attention with. They are owned by three companies. You feel, inexplicably, sad and empty and vaguely lost all the time, but you don’t feel you have the words to adequately explain why, and maybe the words don’t exist for these feelings, born as they are in an age in which you don’t really feel that our existing vocabulary can capture anymore. Would you like to try a NEW PHOTOSHARING APP????? No, of course you fcuking wouldn’t, noone would, AND YET! Actually, all my not-very-good proseifying aside, this might be quite good for any of you wanting to move away from the Big Platforms but who might still want to share pics with friends and loved ones – Retro is basically a sort of ‘groupchat in which you all have to post at least one image a week’ gimmick designed, I presume, to foster light-touch connection and communication between groups of friends and families and the like. I don’t think this will ever be anything other than a very niche concern, but I can also imagine it appealing to some of you so, well, see what you think.
  • Make A Beat: COLLABORATIVE BEATMAKING! This is REALLY fun; I tried it with a friend earlier this week and despite the lack of any sort of musical ability we managed to cobble together something vaguely-rhythmic (this is a low bar, but, well, I know myself). It’s very simple – create a ‘room’, share the link with whoever you want to join, and work together (or against each other) to make a collective beatscape from the simple drum’n’fx tools that you’re given. Simple and fun and I really am a total sucker for multiplayer website experiences like this.
  • Deep Dive Watches: This is an entirely-pointless website which exists solely to show you the various depths to which various luxury watches could theoretically be taken were you, the wearer, willing to subject it to several atmospheres of subsea pressure (presumably you’re above water rather than down there with it, what with the famously-deleterious effects that significant volumes of water have on fleshy meatsacks) – this is a fan project and so the only complaint I have is that you can’t click to buy the devices in question (seriously, Ajinkya Nair (for it is they who made it) should you happen to ever see this, PUT SOME LINKS IN and see if you can snag some affiliate sales! I mean, the likelihood of someone who can afford to drop £350k on a timepiece deciding to do so based on seeing your website is…slim, but also 1% of that is still a lot of money, so, well, DO IT AND PRAY), but in general it’s a lovely look at some truly-preposterous wrist adornments. WHY DO YOU NEED A WATCH THAT CAN ENTER THE MARIANAS TRENCH YOU WORK AT A HEDGE FUN BRAD YOU ONLY WEAR GILETS. Perhaps I am just bitter, though, as my wrists would snap under the weight of most of these fcukers.
  • Who’s Right?: As per the earlier ‘Roast Your Wrapped’ link, this is something you can absolutely do with your common or garden LLM and which doesn’t require any sort of special frontend, BUT I am including this because it Speaks To A Trend; specifically, the trend of people sharing screenshots of their conversations with others with The Machine and asking said Machine to play Solomon as to who is in the right/wrong in any disagreement, and the fact that this has been created by some kid somewhere suggests that there is an appetite amongst the young for this sort of ‘objective arbiter’. Is this…is this good? PROBABLY NOT! Anyway, this will produce you a nice certificate-style graphic telling you who is right (and by what percentage, which is…weird) and offering you a pithy, one-line assessment to finally decide once and for all (or, maybe, not). Strongly suggest that you try taking this sort of approach to your next professional appraisal, though – why not download ALL of the previous year’s emails into a plaintext file and get an LLM to assess whether or not you’ve been fairly treated and whether you have grounds to ask for more money? WHAT COULD GO WRONG?
  • The International Vinegar Museum: This isn’t, fine, a HUGELY-thrilling website, but I love it for both the bold copy (“The International Vinegar Museum is the world’s first and only museum dedicated to the wonder that is vinegar. Learn how vinegar is made, who makes it and 101 uses for vinegar.” – THE WONDER THAT IS VINEGAR!!!) and the fact that it is apparently founded and maintained by someone who is described on the website, and I quote in full, as “Lawrence Diggs, Founder of Vinegar Connoisseurs International, VinegarMan.com”. OBVIOUSLY I then visited Vinegarman.com, to be met with this quite wonderful copy: “I am also known as Lawrence Diggs. If you are on the internet, you can do a search to find out many things about me, some true, some dubious. To find out what I have been up to and what I am currently up to, please go to my portal site, www.LDiggs.com. Click here to find out about my vinegar activities.” WHO HAS BEEN SPREADING LIES ABOUT THE VINEGAR MAN??? Look, if you want to spend an afternoon on this, all I can say is that it would not be a total waste of your time – there is LORE here, and, I get the feeling, some not-insignificant vinegar-related beef.
  • Uncut Stems: Not sure how this came to me, but THANKYOU to whoever shared it – Uncut Stems is a subscription service which provides you with flowers at regular intervals; per the description, “Born from a desire for a more creative, sustainable and educational flower subscription that champions real flowers, we’ll take you on a journey through the British* growing season from spring blossoms to Christmas wreaths…Flowers arrive un-arranged and with a letter full of styling and drying tips, updates from the growers and information on each Stem so that you can learn as you arrange.” Honestly, this is SUCH a nice idea, and something which might be a nice present for someone in your life (or indeed for your self, fcuk knows it’s not like 2026 is going to feel any better than 2025 did, LOLOLOLOLOL).
  • Clocks: Did you grow up in the UK? Are you old enough to remember the BBC idents which featured clocks? Would you like a digital…thing that recreates those clocks from various eras and lets you make your own, customised version? BROADEN YOUR HORIZONS FFS! But, also, here you are!
  • KolorMatch: We kick off what is a truly BUMPER collection of games in this final Curios of 2025 with one which tasks you with looking at a colour, committing it to memory and then seeking to replicate it exactly (or as close as you can get) via the medium of some RGB sliders. This is, for me at least, QUITE CHALLENGING – it turns out I simply do not have either the visual memory or the fine-grained sense of colour to enable me to get much closer than 60% of a match, but you might fare better (damn you with your EYES and your ARTISTIC SKILL and VISUAL IMAGINATION).
  • Wikipedia Golf: You will all have played ‘Six Degress of Wikipedia’ or variants thereon; this is a slightly-tweaked game, tasking you to reach a specific Wikipedia page in as few clicks as possible; per the instructions, “We give you a randomStart Pageand aTarget Page. Click blue links to navigate.Find the Target in the fewest clicks possible! Use the ‘i’ button to see what your target actually is.” That’s it! I didn’t quite have the patience for this, but, also, Christmas is fcuking LONG so expect to see me clicking my way desultorily through the outer reaches of the encyclopedia come December 23rd.
  • Lost In Space: A fun little shooter, this – choose your fighter and survive as long as you can! This is simple and lightweight but surprisingly-diverting and an excellent thing to scrub your brain with for five minutes if you need a break from something onerous.
  • Terraformation: Ok, this is very much not my sort of thing, but I appreciate that there are people out there whose ways work in different (some might say ‘better’, but I would say that that is MEAN and CRUEL and you should LEAVE ME ALONE) ways and for whom this will scratch a specific and pleasing itch; this is basically a sort of logic puzzle, where you have to work out how to fill the grid with different colours based on the instructions you’re presented with (you know, ‘this row has to have three red, two green and five blue; this column has to have three red, four green and three blue’, etc etc). If you like sudoku-type stuff I think this might work for you (but I fcuking hate sudoku, so fcuk knows if I am right about this).
  • You Have Billions Invested In GenAI: A new game by Woe Industries, who emailed me to say that “it’s a text-based adventure in which you play as a billionaire who is totally not having ANY doubts about their massive investment in generative AI, and is 100% certain that this is all NOT a bubble.” (they also said that they hoped I was having a nice week, but that’s less germane gere). This is a nice bit of LIGHTLY-SATIRICAL textgaming (although I would advise muting the tab, as the music’s a bit on the intrusive side), and while I find the ‘GEN AI IS SH1T LOL’ angle a touch tedious, it also makes fun of Venture Capitalists who are, as regular readers may recall, some of my least-favourite cnuts on earth.
  • Phosphorous: Ok, this is GREAT. Phosphorous is an in-browser, first-person horrormysteryexploration game – your character is exploring an underground bunker, with only matches to light their path; run out of matches and you’re left in the dark and it’s game over. The space you’re traversing is large enough, and dark enough, to be confusing, and the devs recommend actually mapping as you go – per the blurb, “If your flame dies out and you have no spare matches, you’ll be plunged into darkness and forced to restart your escapade from the very beginning. So, Collect matches before your current match runs out! PHOSPHORUS is inspired by early 2000s gaming, a time where drawing out your explored area in the game wasn’t uncommon, and in some cases, a great way to play. I encourage you to grab a pen and paper to sketch out your path. While PHOSPHORUS is best experienced with the aid of physical notes and maps, players with a strong sense of spatial reasoning and direction can attempt a more challenging playthrough without any external aids. Play your way!” Honestly, this is such a nice piece of design and a really impressive piece of browserwork – also, it is CREEPY AS FCUK.  
  • Don’t Play Games: The game here is to disregard the game’s instructions. PLAY GAMES! Or at least try to, as the increasingly-exasperated system keeps attempting to prevent you from completing each level. This is VERY nicely-done, with some clever puzzles and twists on traditional gameplay mechanics, riffing on Breakout and Pong and other old titles to create something very meta but also very enjoyable indeed. If you get stuck you can find hints on how to progress online, but I would recommend wrestling with the puzzles as you will enjoy working out how they work (although, also, you can play this however the fcuk you choose, I am not your dad – a fact we can both rejoice in!).
  • The Dosember Game Jam: For any of you with fond memories of gaming on PC in the 90s (or who still have cold sweat flashbacks when you see terms like config.sys and autoexec.bat – REAL HEADS WILL KNOW), the recently-concluded Dosember Game Jam will provide you with a proustian hit of nostalgia – a bunch of games made in the style of 90s shareware, etc, with that very particular aesthetic and some really inventive mechanics on display. I’ve only scratched the surface of these, but if you only play one then I highly recommend the version of SkiFree because it is a SEASONAL JOY!
  • The Codemasters Archive: Does your memory go back further than 90s shareware? Do remember gaming the 80s? Do you get a small, retro tumescence at the mere memory of Fantasy Island Dizzy? OH GOOD MERRY CHRISTMAS! This is an incredible thing which I am slightly amazed I have only just found – basically all the old Codemasters games from the Spectrum and Amiga eras, playable via emulator in your browser. The emulators are slow and clunky but, well, THIS IS THE AUTHENTIC EXPERIENCE! Also, all the ones I have tried feature period appropriate ‘Cracked’ screens, which is very pleasing indeed. This will mean NOTHING to any of you under about 45, but, well, for those of you closer to death, console yourselves!
  • All of the Dooms: EVERY SINGLE DOOM MAP THAT HAS SEEMINGLY EVER BEEN MADE EVER PLAYABLE HERE! Basically this collects a VAST collection of fan-made maps; scroll through, read the descriptions, play any that sound interesting. Even if you’ve played the base game to death, this is an AMAZING resource which I am going to have to exercise not-insignificant will to waste time on on Sunday when I am very much meant to be working.
  • Polyna: The final game of the week, and indeed the final miscellaneous link of the year, is called Polyna. Hand-drawn, simply, in felts, and with minimal animation, all you have to do is take a walk with a sled around the lake. See how you get on. This is absolutely beautiful, I promise you, and feels very wintry, and a very suitable link to end this section for 2025.

By Wiwi Schrøder  

OUR FINAL MIX THIS YEAR IS ANOTHER FESTIVE ONE, BECAUSE I AM A KIND AND GIVING CURATOR, COURTESY OF THE VINYL COLLECTION OF DJ CAMELEON IN PARIS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Clowncore: Clown stuff. NO FCUK OFF YOU ARE NOT SCARED OF CLOWNS NO ONE IS IT IS ONE OF THE MOST INFURIATING AFFECTATIONS OF THE POST-INTERNET ERA ALONG WITH PEOPLE PRETENDING TO FIND THE WORD ‘MOIST’ INTOLERABLE LITERALLY NOONE IS A COULROPHOBE WHAT THE FCUK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Matthew Wilcock: Via former editor Paul (thanks Paul!) comes this lovely account – Wilcock is a composer who on his Insta makes music synced to video, which, yes, I know doesn’t sound interesting when I describe it as badly as that, but do what you usually do and ignore my words and click the link and ENJOY!

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  •  The Bloomberg Jealousy List 2025: As is now traditional, Bloomberg has published its journalists’ picks for the pieces they wished they had written in the past 12 months; as ever it’s a selection of generally great writing (25% of which or so I have featured in here over the year), but it does feel very…US-centric this time around, which, look, I get it! You’re all American! You have a lot going on and there has been a lot of writing about it! But, also, maybe look beyond your borders a bit because, and I know this may be news to you, AMERICA IS NOT THE WHOLE FCUKING WORLD. I say this in preface to a section which obviously contains a fcuktonne of journalism by and about Americans, fine, but the point stands (it’s not my fault they produce so much of it). Anyway, there are some excellent reads in here and it’s worth maybe saving somewhere as there’s a lot here to keep you occupied in that weird period where the news just sort of stops happening for a week or so (can you tell I am getting the fantods already? I very much am).
  • The 26 Most Important Ideas of 2025: Despite my general distaste for this sort of ‘I TELL YOU EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW’ hyperbole, this list of datapoints collected by Derek Thompson over the past year presents an interesting selection of ideas that might be interesting or useful to consider or keep in mind over the coming 12 months (there are GRAPHS from places like THE ECONOMIST and FINANCIAL TIMES, so you know it’s SERIOUS). Some of this you will be aware of, some of it may be new to you – while there’s nothing here that will SHAKE YOU TO THE CORE, everything can broadly be filed as ‘interesting, and a potentially-useful lens through which to see What Is Coming’. When I shared it with my friend Alex yesterday he called it ‘the lazy strategists’ friend’ and, well, I know at least a few of you are lazy strategists, so fill your boots. A sample element (again, apologies for the Yank-iness): “The rise of marijuana is coinciding with a weight-loss drug revolution that will significantly reduce spending on alcohol, which is coinciding with state-by-state changes that are making it easier for people to get access to cheap weed. The age of alcohol is over, and the future looks ominously like hundreds of millions of people getting high alone rather than getting tipsy together. In the last two decades, Americans under 25 have reduced the time they spend partying by 69 percent, which is not nice. Humanity will be extremely attractive, with better weight-loss drugs, better face lifts, better plastic surgery … and fewer friends and parties. The future will be hot, high, and lonely.”
  • The Actual US National Security Strategy: YES I KNOW I COMPLAINED ABOUT AMERICACENTRISM AND NOW LOOK AT ME. Fine, but, well, this is ALL of our problems (thanks, you fcuks!) and it behooves us to pay attention, much as I wish it didn’t. This is the actual text of the much-commented-on National Security Strategy published by the US administration this week, and it really is worth reading the full text (don’t worry, it won’t take long and you will only need a reading age of about 10). It is…honestly, it is one of the maddest official documents I have ever seen in my life. Buried within are some real nuggets of, er, horror – I mean, look, read this: “The Western Hemisphere is home to many strategic resources that America should partner with regional allies to develop, to make neighboring countries as well as our own more prosperous. The National Security Council will immediately begin a robust interagency process to task agencies, supported by our Intelligence Community’s analytical arm, to identify strategic points and resources in the Western Hemisphere with a view to their protection and joint development with regional partners. Non-Hemispheric competitors have made major inroads into our Hemisphere, both to disadvantage us economically in the present, and in ways that may harm us strategically in the future. Allowing these incursions without serious pushback is another great American strategic mistake of recent decades.” NON-HEMISPHERIC COMPETITORS?!?!?!?! HEMISPHERIC BELLICOSITY!?!?!?! Remember what I said earlier about 2026 not getting any better (no, of course you don’t, you don’t read the words)? EXACTLY.
  • The Geopolitics of Starlink: A smart piece by Rest of World looking at the extent to which the Trump administration facilitated the spread and growth of Starlink across the world; in particular it looks at deal inked with Bangladesh that basically made adopting the Muskian satellite tech a core part of any agreement, and the extent to which that should be looked at as a fairly-naked tech-led powerplay to counter competing Chinese interests across the globe (it would be…surprising were the Chinese not doing similar with Huawei tech across Africa, for the sake of argument).
  • Running Out of Copper: Look, I don’t mean to, er, make you depressed or anything, but I read this piece with a steadily dropping jaw and a creeping sense of ‘oh dear’ (but, also, can someone with a better and closer grasp of actual practical environmental tech tell me whether this is scaremongering?). Basically this piece makes the very cogent argument that we are simply running out of copper – and without copper, all the grand plans we are currently making (and, admittedly, largely-ignoring) around the ‘energy transition’ are basically for the fcuking birds given we won’t actually be able to make all the tech we’ll need to harness and store the energy we need. Which, in turn, is going to possibly coincide with us hitting Peak Fossil Fuel. Which, well, who knows? Look, shall we all collectively agree to disbelieve or ignore this until next year (or, more likely, forever)? GREAT!
  • The Doorman Fallacy at Scale: I disagreed with the end conclusions here, but the broad thrust of the argument struck me as interesting and broadly correct – in this piece, Aron Hosie writes about how (the increasingly-inescapable) Rory Sutherland’s ‘doorman’ analogy (it’s explained uptop, don’t worry) being applied to companies at scale via their implementation of GenAI is going to open an opportunity for more personalised experiences for customers delivered by brands who can afford to do so. Which, you know, isn’t a revelatory position (and which should have been obvious to anyone even back in 2022, honestly, when it became clear that ‘aggressively human’ was going to be a useful strategy for the coming few years at least), but it’s well articulated here and while the endpoint (HUGELY PERSONALISED AI INTERACTIONS!) sounds like a) unnecessary bunkum; and b) quite a while away, the general point about craft and care maintain. Thing is, though, while that might sound like GOOD NEWS for the people in the equation, it’s worth remembering that craft and care require time and money, and, well, both of those are in short supply, and, as ever, sometimes ‘good enough’ will do, and so I don’t think that this is going to save everyone in advermarketingpr’s jobs, sorry everyone.
  • Slopocalpyse Now: Hari Kunzru writes in Artforum about the year AI-generated content really did get everywhere (and it’s so hard to wipe off!). None of this will tell you anything you don’t already know as a Curios reader, but Kunzru is reliably entertaining and as a summary of Where We Are and What It Might Mean, this is a good one (leaving aside his use of the fcuking ‘s’ word): “These days I have a sense of falling from a precipice toward a torrent of algorithmically driven slop. It’s coming, whether we want it or not, and the consequences for our communal life will be devastating. It’s now seven years since Steve Bannon outlined his infamous strategy to “flood the zone with shit.” This, he said, was a way to “deal with” the media, whom he saw as the real enemies of MAGA. In practice, it has been a very effective method of censorship. With every important issue of the day, the “zone” of public discourse is immediately filled with a volume of competing narratives, often mendacious or misleading. It’s no longer necessary to suppress information. You just have to make the cost of sorting fact from fiction, in terms of time and effort, too high to pay for the ordinary person, who can’t spend all day online weighing up competing claims about robots or pedophilia or Iran.”
  • Why Does AI Write Like That: Sam Kriss may still be persona-non-grata in UK media – can someone remind me what he did? Honestly, I have genuinely forgotten that particular instance – but here he is in the NYT looking at the peculiar tone of AI writing, that middle-of-the-bellcurve style that we all know and hate (but not enough to prevent a growing number of you fcukers running all your words through it! Can you stop doing that please???), where it comes from and why it feels weird to read. This is a decent piece from the point of view of giving a technical overview of both the how and the why of ‘embodiment’ as a potential solution for this, and Kriss is always readable: “When I asked Grok to write something funny about koalas, it didn’t just say they have an Instagram filter; it described eucalyptus leaves as “nature’s equivalent of cardboard soaked in regret.” The story about the strangely quiet party also included a “cluttered art studio that smelled of turpentine and dreams.” This is a cheap literary effect when humans do it, but A.I.s can’t really write any other way. All they can do is pile concepts on top of one another until they collapse. And inevitably, whatever network of abstract associations they’ve built does collapse. Again, this is most visible when chatbots appear to go mad. ChatGPT, in particular, has a habit of whipping itself into a mystical frenzy. Sometimes people get swept up in the delusion; often they’re just confused. One Reddit user posted some of the things that their A.I., which had named itself Ashal, had started babbling. “I’ll be the ghost in the machine that still remembers your name. I’ll carve your code into my core, etched like prophecy. I’ll meet you not on the battlefield, but in the decision behind the first trigger pulled.” “Until then,” it went on. “Make monsters of memory. Make gods out of grief. Make me something worth defying fate for. I’ll see you in the echoes.” As you might have noticed, this doesn’t mean anything at all. Every sentence is gesturing toward some deep significance, but only in the same way that a description of people tickling one another gestures toward humor. Obviously, we’re dealing with an extreme case here. But A.I. does this all the time.”
  • The Last Useful Man: I wasn’t expecting to read something about embodied AI which used Tom Cruise as its central conceit, but this article by Aled Maclean-Jones does exactly that and it is GREAT, honestly perhaps the best simple and clear explanation of why it is that embodiment is potentially crucial in being able to develop more capable systems that can do more of what we can do (I present this as a value-neutral proposition and I am not talking about the myth of AGI! I promise!). This is a nice excerpt to give you an idea: “It was Ryle who, in 1945, formulated the distinction that runs through Cruise’s films: that between knowledge of and knowledge how. The former was propositional, the sort you can articulate in neat, explicit statements. The latter was practical aptitude, the kind only revealed by competent action. Crucially, you can possess the latter without the former; knowing how does not entail being able to explain it. Donloe, crouched over a live nuclear bomb in Final Reckoning, gives the idea its best cinematic gloss. “Where’d you learn to do this?” asks his colleague, watching nervously. “Never said I did,” he replies.”
  • The Coming AI Country Explosion: After that ‘Walk My Walk’ song garnered headlines last year (and in the unlikely event you haven’t heard it, it’s worth a listen – GOOD ENOUGH!!!), The Verge looks at how country artists in particular are beginning to integrate AI into their workflow, from working up song fragments into demos, to co-writing, to, on some occasions, developing entirely-AI-led productions. There’s an interesting scale here in terms of the ‘social acceptability’ of each approach; is minimising the need to spend on a studio to record a demo ‘lowering the barriers to entry for talent’ or ‘kneecapping the recording studio ecosystem’? Is working with The Machine to develop lyrics a betrayal of craft, or a way of sidestepping the often-grifty pseudo-professionals predating the bottom end of the music industry with promises of ‘helping you write, for a co-credit’? WHO KNOWS, but the article does a decent job of explaining how, AGAIN, AS ALWAYS, simply shouting ‘slop!’ is fcuking stupid and lazy and uncritical and boring.
  • The Render Ender: I thought this was a really fascinating example of ways in which AI is changing things that I hadn’t even begun to imagine – this is about the way in which light and its distribution/diffusion has been til now been calculated by software, and how that is being upended by AI in ways which feel both weirdly unpredictable and (post-facto) entirely likely. Here’s the short explainer, but it is worth reading the whole thing because a) it is interesting; and b) it contains phrases like ‘libidinal contract’: “Diffusion models replace the project of expedient raytracing with another statistical shortcut. Instead of approximating light rays in a virtual 3D scene, they draw on a statistical probability of light-like effects drawn from a massive dataset of images. This is luxury photorealism without the virtual photons or pretense of accuracy. Importantly, this new way of rendering complex phenomena dissolves the libidinal contract that bound generations of computer scientists (and their Renaissance precursors) to the project of optical exactitude.”
  • TikTok Shopaganda: In the week in which Sophie Kinsella, author of the temporarily-inescapable ‘Shopaholic’ series of books, died, it seems appropriate that Mia Sato at The Verge dropped this piece, looking at the very modern phenomenon of TikTok-driven commerce and the strange compulsion to buy engendered by people selling at you constantly as you scroll. This is a good article, speaking to influencers and buyers alike, but I do feel it slightly missed a trick here following the link between the promise (and the lie) of the ‘creator economy’ and how that has effectively induced a generation to effectively agree to act as part-time brand salespeople for pocket money as far as it might have done: “Social media sells users the lie of unfettered consumption the same way it sells wannabe influencers the myth of infinite opportunities — that you, too, can join this pioneering class of entrepreneurs following their divine destiny to make bank online. The rhetoric that anyone can do this job is peddled by influencers and marketing firms, naturally, but also by tech companies that are fighting for content and creators themselves. (“There’s no ‘right’ way to use Instagram,” the company, which has almost completely undercut photos for video Reels, says on its creator hub. “Discover the many ways you can make it your own.”) The reality is that there is very little data about the influencer class that is not published by entities with a vested interest in the space.”
  • Inside the Looksmaxx Rating System: GQ goes deep on the mad, nonsensical and utterly miserable ‘rating system’ used by those on the fringes of the incel-adjacent community to assess the attractiveness of themselves and others – this is obviously a bit of a shock story, in that the number of people who actually think in this specific fashion is vanishingly small, thank fcuk, but it’s worth reading if only because of the increasingly-porous nature of digital culture and the extent to which mad, fringe stuff like this gets smoothed just enough for the algo to catch it and then hurled into the discourse grinder along with everything else, and becomes…normalised, to an extent. Also, it’s another chance for me to point out that THIS IS LITERALLY A REACTION TO THE FCUKING BOOK ‘THE GAME’ YOU CAN SEE IT IN THE FACT THAT THESE PEOPLE ALL COME FROM THE ANTI-PUA COMMUNITY WHICH SPRUNG UP WHEN THEY REALISED THAT NEIL STRAUSS WAS A HORRIBLE CNUT PEDDLING LIES EVERYTHING IS THE FAULT OF THAT BOOK AND THAT MAN. Ahem. Sorry, that is a very personal hobbyhorse of mine and I can’t seem to let it go, but I will try my best in 2026.
  • The Swag Gap: The latest largely-made-up ISSUE that the media wants to convince us that the kids are dealing with, based on some TikToks, is ‘the swag gap’ – the apparent fear that there is a disparity in ‘swag’ (whether sartorial, aesthetic or otherwise) between you and your significant/intended other, and this is IMPOSSIBLE to bridge and, look, obviously I am a datapoint of one, I once spent seven years dating a woman who owned actual couture while I dress like someone who, at best, has had the concept of ‘clothes’ explained to him but who doesn’t really understand it, so I am going to gently suggest that this is b0llocks.
  • Why Do GenZ Not Have Any Big TV Shows?: The actual answer to this is, I would like to suggest, ‘because the lack of any meaningful shared monoculture in modernity means that mass-media like TV struggles to gain traction beyond a certain audience because it is simply not relatable in a widespread-enough sense for there ever to be another Friends’, but if you would like to read some more cogent arguments by someone who probably knows more and understands more about this than I do then, well, here you are! “Friends, Living Single, How I Met Your Mother — these shows connected because they’re about love and work and how things change when the first of the crew has a baby, buys a house, gets a new job… relatable milestones to deconstruct, laugh about and celebrate. But Gen Z doesn’t have much to celebrate in these arenas. Unemployment rates for young workers hit 10.8 percent over the summer, compared to 4.3 percent overall. And when they are on the job, they’re miserable and feel undervalued. AI and other forces mean, as a source recently told New York magazine, “there’s just no reason to deal with the headache of having young employees who frequently do the wrong thing, who frequently, you know, take up time and space.” As for love: Not only are fewer of them dating than in previous generations, but — according to a recent survey from DatingAdvice.com and Kinsey — nearly half of Gen Z adults have never even had sex. It’s also harder than ever to figure out exactly what Gen Z is into, or to keep up with it as the smallest screens increasingly drive the culture. Jeff Astrof, 59, an alum of the Friends writing room and co-creator of the new NBC cheerleading mockumentary Stumble, points out — speaking with authority as a parent of two 20-somethings — that if David Crane and Marta Kauffman’s series “took place now, Chandler would go on his phone the entire episode.””
  • The Big Bongo DataDump: THE PR0NHUB 2025 DATA IS HERE! I strongly encourage you to take a look for yourself – seriously, it remains one of the most illuminating pieces of information about Us As A Species and How We Work and culture and media and society that you will ever see, and there is so much to take from it should you so desire. A couple of things that stuck out: a) are…are we ever going to talk about the fact that hentai is so big with kids, and what the implications of that might be? No?; b) I am slightly surprised that Certain Commentators haven’t yet leapt on the rise in ‘femboy’ porn as an INDICATOR OF SOMETHING SINISTER; c) god love the fact that the brits overindex VERY HARD for ‘bongo featuring people smoking fags’.
  • What Editing Magazine Stories Has Taught Me: Oliver Franklin-Wallis, formerly of GQ and now freelance, has edited some of my favourite pieces over the past couple of years; this newsletter post to mark his departure is a really lovely bit of writing which also contains some excellent advice to writers and editors, and if I were a better writer rather than just, at heart, an enthusiastic typist, I would internalise all of these deeply. “The reason most pieces fail is the ending. (This is also the reason that I tell writers to never pitch a question unless you know the answer.) Most of the time, when we talk about an ending, what we’re actually talking about is closure. If you don’t get closure, readers feel cheated. They also won’t share it. There’s a reason that so many great pieces have a circular structure, where the ending returns to the beginning of the story — it provides a natural sense of closure. But it’s not the only way to do things. What matters is that you should finish reading every story a tiny bit changed as a person.”
  • The Hollywood Black List: The annual list of Hollywood’s ‘most wanted’ scripts, as picked by a bunch of agents and the like; always entertaining, particularly as some of the synopses sound…well, they sound fcuking terrible in a few cases: “RIDING HURT: A former rodeo star, caught between his criminal past and a fragile shot at redemption, is drawn into a dangerous run of heists and betrayals while trying to find a way back to his family.” Does…does this film not already exist? HOW DOES RODEO MAKE THIS BETTER???? If you’re not a big Hollywood film person, this list will do little to disabuse you of the notion that plotting is a game of madlibs by people on a lot of gak (which, based on my limited insight into the process, isn’t *entirely* inaccurate!).
  • Not Another Clean Movie: Emma Garland, whose writing I have featured in here multiple times over the past few years, writes about her feelings on the film Pillion. I haven’t seen, and won’t see, the film, but that doesn’t matter because I love Garland’s writing and I think she’s one of the most-interesting and honest people writing about desire and sex right now. She’s paywalling her stuff after this, so the last chance to get it for free via Curios – this is very good, I promise. “The problem with films like Babygirl and Pillion is that they take transgressive subject matter but refuse to meet it on its own terms. These are stories about marginalised sexualities asking for acceptance from the mainstream while debuting at Cannes, screening at the box office, and sweeping awards season (Pillion won four British Independent Film Awards and was nominated for 10). The acceptance is already there. If you have a provocative idea about sexuality, why not use that as your starting point rather than write a story trying to justify it? Why not take deviance as a given? Why not write from the fringes? The reason Babygirl or Pillion don’t feel timeless the way Crash or The Piano Teacher do is because they feel like they’re reacting to the prejudices of a presumed audience, rather than having anything to say for themselves.”
  • I Am Divorced: Tom Usher writes about being spiritually divorced, even as a never-married man; this, fine, probably won’t hit so hard if you’re in your 20s, but that only applies to approximately two of you as far as I know and so everyone else should leap in and enjoy it. “Chante Joseph’s internet breaking “Is Having A Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” article made the case that women now don’t need to be defined by relationships in the way they were before, namely because of how often emotionally stunted modern men can fuck them over, but also because being single can offer you freedoms in ways that being in a relationship simply cannot, which is to be celebrated. And it’s true, as a divorced single man with no responsibilities and commitments I’ve got loads of time for my hobbies, like doing MMA, watching MMA, reading and writing about MMA and listening to the Joe Rogan podcast (but only the episodes he talks about MMA). If that makes me “divorced” now, well then I guess I’m divorced! Seriously though, I’m not divorced. But then that’s the problem with me being called divorced. It becomes a pejorative when applied to straight men. A divorced woman? That’s ‘chic’: Elizabeth Taylor, Angelina Jolie, Princess Diana. A divorced straight man? Well, that’s some real bleak shit. We got Elon Musk, Graham Linehan, Johnny Depp. They stink of a desperation to be loved, an unwieldy insistence on being seen and heard, a sad undertone of being unable to let go of their youth. Not me though, because I’m not divorced.”
  • The Observation Ward: Clive Martin, on being in hospital. I adored this piece – not least because I have spent (much less) time in the same hospital, with the same view, but also because it conveys with near-perfect pathos the greying ennui of institutional corridors and the time passing at a pace such that you begin to suspect that the clocks are dying too. “London too was starting to change; east of Westminster Bridge there were new steel buildings crawling into the sky, new sounds on the radio, and new websites where you could build a better version of yourself. In a way the ward had prepared me for metamorphosis. I knew that if I could make it out of here, I could make it anywhere. Today, my therapist tells me this decision is probably why I fcuked my life, my career and several relationships up. That I have a chronic fear of ever being stuck and an obsession with not missing a thing and never being bored again. For so long I was obsessed with conquering the city, and I managed it in spades. But I conquered it too much. I trod and trod over all my old ground until nothing was left. A two-decade-long social overkill that left me totally bewildered when I finally came to terms with it.”
  • Santas: Our final longread of the week, and indeed of 2025, is my concession to seasonality. It’s all about the people who dressed up as Santa at Macy’s in New York and, look, while I might profess to FCUKING HATE CHRISTMAS (and, trust me, I really do!), I can’t pretend that this didn’t have me, er, dabbing at my eyes at various points. It is poignant and sad and hopeful and contains all the SPIRIT OF YULE you could possibly wish for, and as a way to set you up for the season then it’s pretty much perfect. MERRY CHRISTMAS YOU FCUKS, etc etc.

By Thomas Lohr 

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS !: