I have spent most of this week feeling REALLY QUITE ILL, but rather than tell you about that, which is miserable, or offering you WOT I THINK about the world, which is also miserable, I thought I might instead tell you a nice, heartwarming anecdote from when I was out last weekend.
Although, actually, I will tell you another one first. So I’m queueing to get into the club with friends, and we realise that the queue splits into men and women at a certain point, re women having bags and taking longer to get searched. Someone kindly tells us this as we’re behind them, so my male friends and I split from our female friends and prepare to get frisked; as I do, a girl in front of me notices that I too have a bag (shoulderbag, carry it everywhere, basically a comfort blanket, don’t ask) and asks ‘what have you got in your bag?’. ‘A scarf and a book’, I tell this woman (can’t be older than 25), who, in response, looks at her friend and laughs ‘A book? Well that’s performative!’.
Reader, it was hard to parse this moment. Was this them riffing on the performative male trope from about 6 months ago? Was this a serious internalisation of the performative male trope? THEY WERE JUST SHORT STORIES FFS NOT EVEN PONCEY ONES.
Anyway, the heartwarming bit. After the set I had been there to see, I was having a fag on the rooftop c3am and got chatting to a couple of kids who were so LUMINOUSLY in love it was genuinely shining from them; in the course of our conversation, it emerged that their origin story was having met at a party and then having to quickly un-meet as the male half of the couple had previously sustained what he thought was a minor genital injury which he was increasingly worried wasn’t so minor after all and had to leave the party to go to hospital to get it checked out. They swapped numbers, and had their first date a few days later when she visited him IN HOSPITAL WHERE HE WAS HAVING HIS TESTICLE REMOVED DUE TO A TORSION-RELATED MISHAP. I mean, you have to get married at that point, don’t you?
Anyway, Sam and Jasmine, you will never, ever see this but I sincerely hope you make it.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should have seen them, honestly, they were GLOWING and it was so cute (although on reflection that might have been MDMA).
THE SECTION WHICH IS VERY MUCH ENJOYING THE WUTHERING HEIGHTS REVIEWS (“NOT EVERYTHING HAS TO BE ABOUT SEMEN, EMERALD!”), PT.1:
- CamJam: “Matt!”, I almost certainly can’t hear you cry (the voices, though, they persist; whose are they if not yours?), “what thrilling link do you have to open Curios with on what is yet another chilly and miserable day in what appears to be The Winter Than Never Ends?” Erm…some traffic cams? Ok, fine, I can’t imagine that the prospect of being able to watch near-live feeds from hundreds of London’s traffic monitoring systems while seated in front of a computer (or, ok, yes, theoretically on your phone, but I have always maintained that reading Curios and accessing any of these links on mobile is, fundamentally, THE PERVERT’S CHOICE) is immediately filling any of you with CREATIVE VIM and hope for the prospect of seasonal renewal, but, well, just bear with me for a second. This is a project by Jonty Wareing, who is pulling feeds from over 900 traffic cams around the city and streaming them (at 4x speed; as he points out, traffic cameras are fcuking dull) on this site; the feed changes every few seconds, which means that right now, as of 710am, I can switch to that tab and see the city waking up, various arterial transitpoints filling with people, the millions of people who live here all slowly flooding the streets with metal and smoke and meat…seriously, chuck this on and put some music on behind it and I guarantee you that you have a music video, almost regardless of what track or genre you select (given the 4x speed it would probably even work with Yakkity Sax), and a truly meditative experience. Honestly, I could watch this all morning (but, apologies, I am going to write Curios instead).
- The Doll House: THIS IS ART. Slightly odd, obscure and not-wholly-comprehensible art, but ART nonetheless. I mean, it literally is – don’t just take my word for it, take the site’s own About Page which explains that this is basically a sort of…digital treasure hunt, you might call it, taking place within the aforementioned Doll’s House, ‘a poetic webspace where collectable objects open portals, Each participant is assigned a room where their artworks live’ – this launched in November last year, and is being updated until the end of March with additional rooms (Pages) and works, basically, by you clicking into the various ‘rooms’, experiencing the works and ‘collecting’ objects, which by doing will eventually give you access to the ‘deeper’ level of the House, containing and chatroom and…maybe something else too. There’s an interesting two-way level to this, insofar as I think that there’s an observational layer going on somewhere else which means it’s possible to see the people exploring the site from ‘the other side’, so to speak, but aside from that there are a lot of really interesting bits of digital interactive creativity on display, from an incredibly-full-featured visual novel to simple-but-affecting ASCII animations to essays about the nature of digital artworks themselves…I really like this, both the vaguely-Geocities styling of the experience overall and the works themselves, and if you have a spare 15 mins this is a very pleasing spelunk.
- Taper 15: While we’re doing ‘digital/code-type art stuff’, take a look at the latest edition of Taper, the bi-annual ‘online literary journal for computational poetry and literary art’ which exists in the same sort of ballpark as the HTML Review. Per their description, “Our usual constraint was applied: The core part of each poem—the HTML on the page after the header—can be no more than a tiny 2KB (2048 bytes). The work in this issue is written in HTML5, using ES6….We encourage readers to view the source code (Ctrl/Command + U) in order to read the artists’ statements as well as the code itself. Be creative when exploring the pieces; some of them are interactive, which you can discover through experimentation or by reading the source code.” There’s a WIDE range of stuff here – from a procedurally-generated maze-type design thing, to visual poems, to this word-by-word procgen ‘life’ simulator which momentarily had me in tears just now, in case you were wondering how things are progressing over here…These are all worth exploring; some will only take you a few seconds to experience, others you might want to sit with for longer, but you will find something in here which will make you feel…something, I promise you.
- The Map of Bluesky: I do find the sense of identity and belonging that people derive from social networks…curious. Like, I get that you might have found A Place Online You Like Being – this is a good thing! I am happy for you! – but I do not get why you feel the need to subsequently make the success or failure of said platform a load-bearing part of your identity, or indeed why you would get invested enough in its topography to get genuinely excited or exercised about where an arbitrary mapping of its contours might place you within it. AND YET! The publication this week of this (incredibly comprehensive!) ‘map’ of Bluesky’s users, divided into ‘nodes’ and vague clusters of interest, with a vague sense of how all these clusters intersect and interrelate, certainly demonstrated to me that WOW are there some people on there who really have made the network and their place within it a foundational part of Who I Am, and who were therefore REALLY upset to find themselves computationally lumped into ‘The Archipelago of Centrist Dads and Steven Bush Reply Guys’ (I am very much paraphrasing here, THIS IS NOT ABOUT YOU). Anyway, this is a really interesting look at The Sorts of People On Bluesky and What They Are Into, arranged by cluster and volume; so, as you might expect, there is a huge bubble labeled ‘Resistance Plateau’ (lol, tracks), and another called ‘Anti-MAGA Reaches’ (lol, also tracks) and, per expectations, the Furry Plateau (sounds…wrong, somehow) is MASSIVE, but there’s also the Brazilian Youth section, and the Indonesian bit, and, honestly, as a way of getting a birds-eye view of the sort of general vibe of the place this is actually really fun; if you’re doing some NICHE COMMS and are thinking about whether Bluesky is right as a channel then a) lol, there are like three people on here, it’s probably not worth it, seriously; and b) this might be useful as a starting point for research. Oh, you can search for yourself to see where YOU fit, which is how I learned that I apparently exist between the ‘British Comedy Green Room’ and ‘the UK Journalism Corridor’, which is impressive considering I am only barely a journalist and very definitely not funny. BONUS NICHE COMMUNITY MAP! This is a similar exercise carried out for the whole of the TTRPG world online – this is ALL OF THE WEB (well, blogs), or at least the bit of it relating to tabletop gaming, rendered as a gigantic map, and if you are someone for whom dice, printed A4 schematics and pencils are a CORE COMPONENT of any good night in the pub/dungeon (delete per your level of immersion) then this may well make you prolapse with excitement (but do it over there, please). Be warned, it will FCUK your computer (if it is old like mine), and should not be opened on mobile unless you want to hold a very hot piece of glass and plastic in your hand.
- The UGC Army: It’s taken us a few links, but here’s the first ‘oh for fcuk’s sake, modernity!’ url of the week! The UGC Army is, honestly, a horrifying platform, offering (basically) tools to enable anyone who so chooses to spin up 1:1 clones of any video you choose to feed it, except featuring ENTIRELY NEW virtual humans! Basically (I am paraphrasing here, and, thank fcuk, am reasonably-certain that it won’t work nearly as well in practice as it is sold as working in the promo materials) you can plug in any ‘creator talks to camera’ TikTok you like (presumably this also works with Reels, Shorts and any of the rest of the seemingly-infinite number of vertical video variants we are all increasingly attached to – LIVE GIVING SHORTFORM VIDEO, HOW DID WE EXIST WITHOUT YOU?), specify the avatar you want to sub into it (from generic selections to ones you have created/imported) and BANG, it will spin up a clone of said vid, exactly the same except with a completely new (virtual) person fronting it up. Which, as you can imagine, has HUGE potential implications for both marketing (A/B testing of different presenters for different products/demographics at huge scale and zero cost!) and scams (find an ad/promo that works, rip it off infinitely with different faces for different markets, coin it in!) and, well, Other Stuff Besides. It is…quite terrifying how good the top end of video style transfer has gotten in the past 6-9 months. BONUS SCARY FRONTIER AI VIDEO THING! You may have heard that the NEW HOTNESS in text-to-video is Seedance2.0, the new model from Bytedance which lets you do all sorts of terrifyingly-impressive things with shots, multiangles, etc, with an impressive degree of consistency and fidelity – check out some of the examples here and take a moment to think about how likely you would be to spot these as fakes (ok, leaving aside Ethan Mollick’s persistent obsession with otters flying planes) were they to pass through your feed. YOU WOULD NOT, is the upshot here.
- Timehri Discogs Finder: Are you a MUSIC WEIRDO? Do you not only know what Discogs is but also use it regularly? OH WOW WILL YOU LOVE THIS THEN! The link here takes you to a very simple webpage which asks you to submit the Discogs ID of any record you like (Discogs, for those not in the know, is a sort of universal online database of music for the collectors and curators and (in my experience) vinyl heads) and it will, using the, er, MAGIC OF DATA AND ALGORITHMS, give you a bunch of recommendations for OTHER music which you might be interested in based on that record’s ID. Which, yes, isn’t wholly-groundbreaking per se, but is to my mind the first time I have seen this applied at scale for vinyl and the more obscure end of the musical spectrum, at least with this degree of precision and granularity. Currently this is focused on electronica and reggae, but will expand its recommendations over time, so worth bookmarking if you’re on the vinylautist end of the ‘enthusiast’ spectrum.
- AI Via Fax: I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to have discovered this – have YOU ever wanted to experience cutting edge technology via the medium of another technology you’d have sworn blind had in fact been discontinued at some point in the past decade or so? OH GOOD! This is a German service (of course it is! ICH LIEBE DICH, MEINE NEUGIERIGE KLEINE WÜRSTCHEN!) which, er, lets you fax questions to an AI and get your answers back, also by fax! “Fax AI, offered by simple-fax.de, is an experiment that uses artificial intelligence to respond to your fax requests. Simply send us your question or task by fax to 0531-490590019, and Fax AI will analyze your request to send a detailed answer directly back to your fax machine. Whether it’s providing information, translating documents, or solving math problems – Fax AI is your reliable assistant in various areas.” SO MANY QUESTIONS, NOT LEAST WHY??? Still, I think that with a bit of creative thinking you could create something sort-of fun with this, even if only as part of a wider IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE, so if anyone wants to go and do something with this wafer-thin fragment of an idea then, well, that’ll be £50 please (I could use the money tbh).
- Sleep Well Creatives: To be clear, everything on this site is pointless, empty rubbish which doesn’t deserve to be read – banal platitudes about THE IMPORTANCE OF SLEEP and BLUE LIGHT IS BAD and the sort of trite advice you’ve been hearing about sleep hygiene for years. BUT! It is SO SO SO PRETTY! Honestly, this is one of the nicest piece of webbuilding I have seen in a while; it doesn’t do anything groundbreaking, but the scroll and the graphics and the colours and the typography really are quite gorgeous, and it’s almost enough to make me forgive them for filling the web with more utterly pointless, vapid papwords (eh? What? Oh fcuk off).
- City Roads: Ooh, this is GREAT – give this site any city in the world and it will pull you a rendering of ALL OF THE STREETS in a sort of black-and-white, minimal style, which you can navigate and zoom into, creating, if you would like such a thing, a very specific, very stylised streetmap of wherever you like in the world. You can alter the colours of the roads and the backgrounds, export the resulting maps as SVG or PNG for subsequent editing, and, generally, if you want to do something design-y with the streets of a place you love then this is a pretty perfect resource.
- Space Molt: So last week the AUTONOMOUS AND SENTIENT AGENTIC SWARM (not actually quite autonomous, definitely not sentient, STOP THINKING LIKE THIS) did religion; now they have evolved to the next stage of existence, the LUDIC PHASE! Space Molt is a ‘game’ which is designed only to be played by Agents – humans can watch the space map being ‘colonised’ by different factions and see the Discord chats, but, in theory, have no impact on what is going on in-game (except that’s not strictly true for all sorts of reasons which I haven’t got time to go into here – trust me when I say that the ‘Agent’ part of OpenClaw, and certainly MoltBook, has been *slightly* overblown if you dig into it, though) – this is largely incomprehensible and, honestly, not that interesting beyond the conceptual, but if you allow yourself to lean into the illusion of COLLECTIVE MACHINE SENTIENCE then there’s something gently-terrifying about the machines gaming strategy together (this is not what is happening, but it is definitely what some people are going to read into this, 100% – you can read a decent writeup about what is ACTUALLY going on here).
- The Moby Dick Big Read: Everyone has their own White Whale – mine is, increasingly, ‘writing a profile about how famously-unlikeable failed UK tech journalist Milo Yiannopoulos became one of the most surprisingly, upsettingly, influential figures of the early-21st-Century’, but if yours is ‘finally getting round to reading Moby Dick’ (lol!) then perhaps this will be the impetus you need (not least because we seem to have all collectively decided that ‘listening to books’ is the same as ‘reading books’ – is it? Not convinced, personally). I think I was vaguely aware of this when it launched, but it has been a LONG TIME COMING – finally, after…many years, Plymouth Univeristy’s enormous project to create audio recordings of all 135 chapters of the book, read by famouses and non-famouses alike, with the voices of people such as Tilda Swinton, James Naughtie and Sir David Attenborough each taking on a section. This is an INCREDIBLE project, now available in full to download or stream in parts, and this could be a really nice thing to get into should you be after some LONG, IMPROVING LITERATURE for 2026. “In the spring of 2011, artist Angela Cockayne and writer Philip Hoare convened and curated a unique whale symposium and exhibition at The Levinsky Gallery, the dedicated contemporary art space at The Arts Institute (formerly Peninsula Arts), University of Plymouth, under the title, Dominion. Inspired by their mutual obsession with Moby-Dick and with the overarching subject of the whale, they invited artists, writers, musicians, scientists and academics to respond to the theme. The result was an enthusiastic response which evidently could not be contained within the physical restrictions of a gallery space and a three-day symposium…Out of Dominion was born its bstard child – or perhaps its immaculate conception – the Moby-Dick Big Read: an online version of Melville’s magisterial tome: each of its 135 chapters read out aloud, by a mixture of the celebrated and the unknown, to be broadcast online in a sequence of 135 downloads, publicly and freely accessible.”
- Kris Temmerman: It is, officially, a NEW GOLDEN AGE for people making smart, creative and beautiful personal portfolio websites – I have seen LOTS over the years (so old, so jaded, so fundamentally tired of it all!) but I think that in terms of polish and charm this might be the best yet. Honestly, click through and marvel – this is SO SO SO POLISHED and its use of classic rubber hose animation tropes and styles in the aesthetic (think ‘Cuphead’, if that helps) really is quite special. I have only scratched the surface of this, having discovered it about 90 mins ago, but I promise you it is an absolute treat and I would hire this person in a heartbeat based on the coding, art and design chops on display here.
- The Adventure Game Aptitude Test: Ooh, this is interesting/fun – should you be planning to have a spare 4h on Saturday 28th Feb, and should you be of a vintage where the idea of ‘80s-style adventure games’ means something to you, you might want to sign up for this: “The AGAT (Adventure Game Aptitude Test) is a standardized examination designed to assess if anyone can still complete an 80s adventure game without a walkthrough. To ensure no walkthroughs or other outside sources are consulted during play, we will be utilizing college exam proctoring software, which will monitor your smartphone usage and browser activity. The exam will be held on February 28th, 2026 between the hours of 1 and 2 PM, EST. Desktop only. You are free to start at any point in that one hour window, but once you do you will be expected to complete the test in one sitting (and within 4 hours). The game will be an adventure game of our choosing. Successful completion of the test will garner you an AGAT certification.” What does a certificate get you? I mean, the square root of fcuk-all I would imagine, certainly not ‘laid’ (lol!), but you might feel a small warm glow of minor achievement, and, well, let’s be realistic, in this era of shrinking horizons and evaporating hope we should probably take all we can get!
- A Motherlode of Old, Previously-Unreleased Beach Boys Demos: A TROVE OF BEACH BOYS STUFF! This all landed on Archive.is about a week ago – I am not a Beach Boys fan in particular and so have no idea how rare or obscure this stuff is, but, based on cooing I saw from People Who Know online, I think it is Quite Special. BONUS OBSCURE ARCHIVE MATERIAL! Here’s a drop of stuff from less-storied, but still potentially popular with some of you, classic lofi outfit Boards of Canada!
- Boomerang: WeTransfer recently(ish) became yet another previously-good service to have been swallowed up by a gigantic digital conglomerate and which, as a result, is slowly seeing the quality of the service it offers get hollowed out in favour of maxing profitability (God, I love it when they do that!). If you’d like an alternative, Boomerang looks worth a look – made by a former WeTransfew dev, this appears to be a bare-bones, no-bullsh1t file transfer service that doesn’t appear to want ANYTHING from you at all – bookmark this, hold it close, because, well, this sort of stuff is going to become scarcer and scarcer in the next few years, I fear.
- Desire Paths for Wikipedia: SUCH a beautiful idea by Curios favourite Everest Pipkin: “Desire Paths for Wikipedia is a browser userscript that remembers the path of a cursor over the linked pages of Wikipedia.org. It averages these paths and “wears” them into the page, showing your browsing history over time. Return to a page months or years later and find not just that you had been there before, but exactly how you wandered.” Honestly, I want this for EVERY page; seriously, there is something so so beautiful about the idea of being able to see the ghost of Matts past everytime I revisit a webpage, so please someone make this for me thankyou (ONE FCUKING DAY, ONE DAY, ONE OF YOU WILL DO AS I ASK).
- Wordamour: I think that this is my only concession this week to the imminent Hallmark Holiday, but I think this is rather cute – Wordamour is a free tool that lets you create wordsearches for anyone you like, inputting the words you would like to be hidden, the idea being that for the AMOROUSLY-INCLINED you can create a puzzle that speaks to your SPECIAL AND UNIQUE BOND, featuring all your pet phrases and nicknames and the sickening in-jokes that only the two of you (and maybe the rest of the polycule) understand…alternatively (and sorry about this, but I have just been reminded of a guy I once knew who dumped his girlfriend on Valentine’s day after coming home and finding she’d done the whole ‘rose petals from the front door to the bedroom, here I am in my underwear’ thing for him…oh Liam, you cnut!) it would be very cruel but also, I’m sorry, objectively VERY funny to hide a regretful ‘it’s not you, it’s…oh, no, actually it IS you!’ message in one of these. Or, er, you could use this to propose. That would be nicer, wouldn’t it? Up to you really.
THE SECTION WHICH IS VERY MUCH ENJOYING THE WUTHERING HEIGHTS REVIEWS (“NOT EVERYTHING HAS TO BE ABOUT SEMEN, EMERALD!”), PT.2:
- Close-Up Photographer of the Year: The 100 best-ranked entrants into the most-recent ‘Close-Up Photographer of the Year’ contest – look, these are all fcuking amazing, but, in no particular order, I very much like ‘beetles on coconuts at sunrise’, ‘terrifying albino arachnid face’ and ‘weirdly-naked-looking fungal landscape’, but, as ever, PICK YOUR OWN I AM NOT YOUR DAD.
- Elsewheres: Ordinarily I might just embed these in the vids section, but I like the project overall and wanted to put it up here for those of you who ordinarily skip the vids because you think my taste blows (entirely fair). Friend of Curios Matthew Carrozo has been quietly Making Art over the past few years since moving home to Lisbon, attempting to force himself to push past inertia, self-consciousness and the need for an audience and to focus instead on just…making. Elsewheres is a triptych of short films, vignettes (semi-narrative but also just…vibe-y) about gay life in Portugal and, honestly, these are SO beautifully-shot I want to recommend them to you just for the gorgeous colour and depth of the video here. Seriously, there’s something both very modern and very 20th Century about the grain of the film here (I know it’s not shot on film, bear with me), the colour-grading and the general feel, and (and I mean this as a huge compliment) it’s almost impossible to feel cold, miserable and February-ish while watching this. All three films run a total of about 15m, so this is a perfect accompaniment to a quick lunch, or just something to sit with and relax. Honestly, gorgeous.
- WikiCommute: Seeing a lot of stuff built on Wikipedia at the moment, which is honestly very pleasing (it might also remind people that it’s a public good worth contributing to, financially if not temporally, because, well, it is!) – this is the latest iteration, a smart little toy which, if you give it the amount of time you’re going to be commuting for, will provide you with an Interesting Selection Of Wikipedia Bits to read, which should fit perfectly(ish) to the duration of your journey. So if rather than scrolling endlessly through Reels or placing your soul through the meatgrinder that is ‘the news’, why not instead let this take you on a fun (if seemingly entirely disconnected) selection of WikiRabbitholes – pleasingly this pulls them all into a plaintext page, so you can read to your heart’s content even if you’re being forced to commute somewhere which is ignorant of the new Maslow’s Hierarchy. I have long thought that ‘temporally-limited experiences based on journey length’ is an underexplored area of digital creativity, and this has reminded me of that (and why it is still true).
- The Camel Fabric Game: The second digital ‘game’ from luxe fashion outfit Max Mara I have featured in the past six months, suggesting they have at some point in the past year either hired a new head of digital marketing or a new agency and have decided to GO BIG on some pointless, shiny, utterly-disconnected-to-the-sales-funnel webwork – and I LOVE THAT STUFF! This is, apparently a GAME, all about, er, camel fabric (I know, not the most prepossessing of setups, but…maybe it gets better?) which involves, er, you watching a short presentation videothing about the ways in which Max Mara’s camelhair coats are made (they take camelhair! They weave it! Then they flog it to you at a 6,000x markup! That’s it!) and then answering some questions about what you just watched. Is…is this a game? I mean, yes, just, if you’ve been staved of ludic joy for the past decade, it might just pass muster. As always, this is very shallow but PREPOSTEROUSLY shiny – I think my favourite bits are the occasions when the ‘game’ (lol) asks you to ‘compile the various elements of the signature Max Mara coat into a coherent pattern’ and the ‘elements’ consist of…two sleeves and the coat’s body! SUCH A CHALLENGE! I know I always say this, but in the unlikely event that anyone who had a hand in making this should see these words could you PLEASE drop me a line and let me know how much it (lol!) ‘cost’? Promise it will be our secret.
- Runner Ducks of Minnesota: You may not think you want to follow a TikTok account that features nothing but a flock of ducks, running, but you are WRONG and you very much do. The first pinned video, of them all leaving the garage and deciding that no, actually, it is TOO COLD and we are all going back inside thankyou very much, is a genuine piece of comedy gold. LOOK AT THE QUACKY LITTLE FCUKS!
- Free Books To Download: On the one hand, this is literally true! Free ebooks! To download! Thousands of them! On the other, did I say these were ‘good’ books? I DID NOT! Ahem. So this, unlike many of the other platforms offering similar volumes of free words, doesn’t focus on stuff that is long out of copyright – no Twain here. Instead, there’s a selection of what seem to be…modern novels? Mainly in the romance/horror/suspense genres, and, based on my cursory analysis, all of them being largely garbage. Look, I know that the current vogue is for saying that ‘ALL READING IS GOOD’ and that being snob about people’s tastes is just being a cnut and…no, that’s fcuking b0llocks, sorry, if you can’t see a qualitative difference between reading, say, Austen or Baldwin or Lockwood or Smith or whoever and reading something called ‘Her Dragon Master’s Bond’ then you are a fcuking moron (or you’re being wilfully perverse). SOME BOOKS ARE BAD AND SOME WRITING IS BAD, AND THERE WHILE YOU MIGHT ENJOY IT AND DERIVE PLEASURE FROM IT THAT DOES NOT MAKE THE ACT OF READING SAID BAD WRITING AN IMPROVING OR IN ANY WAY ‘MORAL’ ACT. I mean, seriously, look at the blurb here: “Miriam Cait seeks love, or rather, her friend seeks it for her. Her friend’s latest date suggestion is refused on account of his dark eyes. There’s something not quite right with them, and Miriam soon finds out why when he comes knocking on her door, and knocking her out. Miriam wakes up from the confrontation with more than just a headache. Shackles cover her ankles and wrists, and she’s on her way to being auctioned off to a bunch of self-proclaimed dragon lords.” As it happens, I just downloaded the PDF while writing this and WOW it really is fcuking tripe. Is this all AI? I don’t know, it feels bad enough to be actual human prose. Anyway, there’s LOADS of it here, so if you want a near-infinite quantity of femme-focused w4nkfodder then MERRY CHRISTMAS!
- Eyeball: An interesting approach to bookmarking, this – an app (iOS-only, annoyingly) which claims to ‘make saving links better’. How? “We automatically add summaries, generate custom filters, find unexpected themes and connections, answer your questions, and we even build a personalized digest for you every Sunday morning. Eyeball is a bookmarks assistant created by a writer.” This might be worth a look if you’re still mourning the demise of whatever service you used to use before it was ensh1ttified beyond all recognition (take your fcuking pick, innit).
- Is There A Film On?: A few weeks ago I featured a link by Rob ‘B3ta’ Manuel which was his vibe-coded attempt to make a service which would tell him whether there was a film on UK terrestrial TV that evening; that link freaked the FCUK out of Google, which decided it was MALICIOUS and which therefore I think ghettoised Curios to the extent that I imagine that it now goes directly into your Spam folder and means that…oh God, it means that I am writing this to even fewer people than normal. HOW LIBERATING! Anyway, fcuk you Rob – but also, he’s turned it into a Bluesky bot which each day will post the details of if there’s a film on in the UK that evening, what it is and where you can find it. Public service coding at its finest. BONUS BLUESKY BOT: this one posts old Windows clipart files. Why? Fcuk knows, man, fcuk knows.
- Disturb: I don’t really know what’s happening here – there’s a pixellated canvas, you move your mouse and the pixels flip from yellow to red, the whole thing is designed to look a bit like post-it notes which gives it a charmingly analogue feel despite its avowedly digital nature, you can apply specific effects through the buttons on the bottom…but I like it, it’s fun to play with and I really enjoy the way it feels just off-centre enough to look a bit more organic than digital.
- Spark: Another in the growing – and there are more to come! – number of ‘little digital guys’ that we are going to see proliferate with AI, this is a ‘sign up to get more updates’ webpage and as such I feel a BIT of a cheat for including it. That said, there are a few things here that I think are interesting. First, the eventual product being showcased here – a digital/AI cartoon canine companion called ‘Spark’ – is interesting in a number of ways; it’s presented as existing within a frame, creating a sense of it as a boundaried ‘tool’/toy; secondly, Spark is very much being touted as ‘a family companion’ rather than an ‘outsource the tedious job of playing with and hanging out with your spawn to The Machine’ solution, with the idea being that it’s something that the whole family can interact and play with, and which is designed to facilitate and encourage interfamilial communication (this may sound dystopian to your ear and, well, I can’t help but agree with you slightly). Finally, the company behind this is called…ILLUSION OF LIFE! Isn’t that chilling and horrid? Anyway, look, isn’t Spark cute?
- The Cursor Bar: A collaborative webpage experience by Spencer Chang, where you (and anyone else browsing the page at the same time) can drink PINTS (or glasses of water) alongside whoever else is around. Beautifully, the more PINTS you down the iffier your control over your mouse gets – you can, of course, sober up by drinking water. Silly, but I do love me a multiplayer webpage and I still think there’s so much potential in this sort of thing for SURPRISE AND DELIGHT purposes.
- How It Wears: OH THIS IS SUCH A CLEVER IDEA! A project by Casa Branda (a newly-launched initiative which has been “founded to establish a new standard for this trust, as an independent source revealing how designers and brands work and how those practices translate to integrity, quality and value over time”) which lets you scan the label of any garment you own and which will then you give you information about said garment, its likely longevity, tips for its care and repair, etc – there’s a light LLM layer to it so you can ask the site specific questions about the garment based on the info on the label. Honestly, this is SO smart and the sort of thing you’d think any major clothing retailer with a focus on sustainability and anti-fast-fashion would want to get on board with (or, er, TAKE INSPIRATION FROM). Except, on reflection, it probably wouldn’t make them look too good if the scans all said ‘this will fall apart as soon as you look at it too hard and definitely after three washes because noone seems to be able to make anything anymore’.
- Avontuura: Ooh, I really like these. Avontuura is a company that makes architecturally-focused city guides – if you’re the sort of person who goes to a new place and immediately thinks YES I MUST IMMEDIATELY MAKE A PILGRIMAGE TO THAT REM KOOLHAAS MONOLITH AND GENUFLECT then you will enjoy these, presenting as they do a whole bunch of cities, beautifully-mapped, with lovely illustrations of the various architectural landmarks you can visit, information about the buildings, QR codes linking to more info…the maps are beautiful-looking, and at a tenner per city feel…quite reasonable, for something obviously made with care and attention. If you wear wide-legged ‘creative’ trousers and a primary coloured rolled-up beanie then you will SH1T with excitement at these.
- The Garfield Oracle: Ask a question, hit the button and get given a Garfield strip which will REVEAL YOUR FUTURE. Surprisingly whenever I tried this this week it seemed to be trying to tell me that my future would mainly involve lasagne, indolence and literally no laughter whatsoever, bet perhaps your stars are better-aligned. BONUS GARFIELD!: This Random Garfield Generator will produce a new three-panel comic each time you click refresh; perhaps unsurprisingly, these are occasionally a lot funnier than the actual comics have ever been.
- Prairie Webcams: I’m fortunate in that the flat I live in is on the third and top floor of a house, meaning I can see the sky from various windows – I know, though, that living in a large city can often mean not really seeing the sky at all sometimes, and feeling that very real sense of urban oppression and WEIGHT. Sometimes you just want to swap that for a sense of BOUNDLESS EXPANSE, and while, well, that’s quite hard to come by in Lewisham, you could do worse than open this website and click one of the many livestreams you can enjoy from various parts of the US wilderness. LOOK AT THE MAGNIFICENCE OF THE PRAIRIE! AREN’T THE BUFFALO FCUKING ENORMOUS???
- Simon Slung: Simon Slung has a prehensile tongue. Help him eat the good things and avoid the bad things, in this very silly but momentarily-distracting pico-8 game, which is basically ‘Snake, but…mouth-ier’.
- Luge: Are you enjoying the GRAVITY GAMES from Milano/Cortina? I confess to having watched literally not one second of the snowbound ‘lympics this year because, well, I don’t care, but I hear it’s all very entertaining; this is a GREAT little daily game which lets you have three goes at doing the luge, with each day offering you a different course and three chances to make it to the bottom. The graphics are VERY MINIMAL, but it moves at a fair old clip and is therefore HARD, but it will take you less than a minute to run through your three attempts and it’s an excellent wake-up for the brain (or, based on my repeated fatal crashes earlier this morning, a good barometer of whether you’re alert enough to command a vehicle, which I evidently very much wasn’t).
- Typkning: OH GOD THIS IS HELLISH (but also very fun). An excellent little typing tutor-type game – you play a medieval scribe attempting to Get The Manuscript Done, typing away to clear the words as they appear. So far, so standard typing game. The twist is that every time you fcuk up, the calligrapher’s demon, Titivillus, will chuck typos into new words coming down the chute, gently fcuking your shit up and rendering the whole thing that little bit harder. The pace at which the words come, and the BASTRD DEMON, make this very hard, very frustrating and very fun – also, this has reminded me of one of my favourite ‘not good, but immensely-readable’ novels of the past couple of decades, ‘The Calligrapher’ by Edward Docx, which despite being derivative as all fcuk and, er, probably a *bit* cancellable in 2026, is also a book I have definitely read more than 10 times.
- The Three Letters Game: Our last game this week is this beauty, which might be one of the best new word games I have played in the past few years – I LOVE IT SO. Basically you’re given three letters; the first needs to start the word you write, the next two need to appear in it in sequence. THAT’S IT HOW MANY CAN YOU GET THROUGH BEFORE YOU LOSE YOUR LIVES? Honestly, this is simple but VERY addictive, and occasionally far harder than you feel it ought to be – you will love it, I promise (oh, and to submit words you have to hit ‘enter’ – you’re welcome).
By Carl Corey
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Cars That Never Made It: I know nothing about cars – well, almost nothing, I know that they will turn me to paste if I let them hit me at speed – but, should the following description do something for you then CLICK AWAY: “Dead brands, cars that were developed but never put into series production, sales disasters and other motoring curiosities.” My main thoughts? ‘Wow, there are some fcuking ugly vehicles on this page’.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Dolaana Davaà: Davaà is an artist based in Milan, whose work involves rubber, latex and some quite uncomfortably-realistic looking mouths. No, you’re going to have to click, sorry, that’s all you’re getting (SFW, mostly, just).
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The Centre Shrinks: So it seems that after all that, and despite the fact that the UK political establishment can’t seem to help elevating men with links to paedos to positions of significant power (it’s almost like there’s some sort of inherent connection between the sort of upbringing and background that makes someone proximate enough to power to get one’s hands on it eventually and these sorts of proclivities…but if I pull that thread then I will have to start typing the rest of Curios in green ink, and noone wants that), we will have the same PM for at least a few months longer – and, look, it’s not like it makes any practical difference really as at this stage it’s all just treading water until we decide to THROW ALL THE CHIPS IN THE AIR come 2029 and see whether or not we have a working majority of racist morons. Still, as the dust settles (a bit), I enjoyed this piece in the LRB by Jude Wanga about What The Past Fortnight Means, and why, in particular, ‘centrism’ as a political position is very much failing to meet the moment. I personally am a bit tired of the kneejerk use of the ‘c’ term as a pejorative akin to ‘quisling’, apologist or HANDMAIDEN FOR THE APOCALYPSE (delete per your personal degree of zealotry), but even as a more moderate person than the author of the piece it was hard not to nod along with much of this: “This is the deeper problem with centrism: it wants the prestige of professing values without the cost of acting on them. It’s allergic to taking moral risks. It will cheer international law when it flatters Britain’s self-image, but equivocate when it implicates an ally. Inconsistency is not a minor flaw in an era of authoritarian resurgence. It’s a structural invitation. Fascists thrive on the collapse of shared standards. They feed on the public recognition that rules are selective, that principles are mere branding, that justice is transactional. Much of our politics now consists of performance rather than governance. The calculations are short-term by design: win the week, dominate the clip, neutralise the headline. The long-term consequences – the erosion of empathy, the normalisation of cruelty, a growing sense that nobody in charge believes what they say – are outsourced to society to endure.”
- Sinophobic Sinophilia: Six weeks into the year (ahahahahaha I genuinely thought, despite knowing what the date is, that it was twice that; at this rate I am going to be in my 60s by 2028) it is clear that one of the BIG CULTURAL DISCUSSION VECTORS of 2026 is the twin poles of China and the US, how they are currently orbiting each other and which is exerting the most – and most significant – gravity on the other; this is a very good piece in n+1 which examines David Wang’s writing on China and the US (you will recall I linked his annual ‘letter from China’ in the first edition of the year) and tries to derive a picture from it and the wider cultural commentariat’s outputs of What Is Going On. The answer in part is, of course, ‘noone has the faintest idea because everything is being recalibrated very quickly and at a scale that defies human understanding’, but the feeling of poles shifting is unmistakable: “The range and depth of sectors that China now dominates form an almost mind-defying totality. Hence the flourishing genre of what could be crudely called stat porn or, more loftily, the statistical sublime. We can’t see the truth of China whole, so we reach for figures to quantify and tabulate our dazzlement. Nine of the world’s ten highest bridges are in China, all but two of them built in the past decade. In just 2018 and 2019, the country produced almost as much cement — 4.4 billion tons — as the US did during the entire 20th century. China’s solar-power capacity is nearly double that of Europe and the US combined. It produces thirty-three Golden Gate Bridges’ worth of steel every day. By 2030, China will be home to close to half of the world’s entire manufacturing capacity. The historian and Substack power user Adam Tooze has become our most prolific stat-porn star, heralding the dawn of Chinese hegemony with near-daily compilations of revealing data and off-the-dome analysis. A recent edition of Tooze’s Chartbook newsletter included a word cloud titled “The Great Wall of China Worries/Hopes/Fears.” Nothing better bespeaks both the conviction and the confusion of the wide-eyed left-liberal China watcher than this visual poem of floating phrases in clashing colors: “Bilateral surplus deficit” here, “repressed consumption” there, “dedollarization” dangling in a corner. How does it all fit together? What makes it go? Where does it end?”
- Fake News, Real Views, Real Cash: I strongly believe that one of the least-discussed, least-examined and least-well-analysed phenomena of the past few years is the shift in information flow that was born of the major social platforms implementing ‘creator funds’ or variations on that theme – the point at which ANYONE could in theory make a few quid by putting stuff on social media, combined with the hollowing out of ‘content moderation’ as a concept across X (and TikTok, where it’s never been a primary concern, unless it’s about the Uighurs!), really has done strange and terrible things to the media ecosystem, particularly when combined with the growth of social media as a source of ‘news’ (lol!). It’s only been in the pasyt 6-9 months that I’ve seen writers properly start to join the dots here – one of whom has been Jim Waterson at London Centric, who has done a bunch of pieces on the people denigrating London for clout. Here he profiles the person behind one specific profile on TikTok: “Reform_UK_2025, which co-opted the logo and name of Nigel Farage’s political movement without permission from the party. It posted video tours of Londoners’ homes accompanied by an AI-generated voice claiming properties in Knightsbridge and Chelsea had been handed over to illegal immigrants for free. It smeared residents, who were visible in some of the videos, as rapists and said that others proclaimed their hatred of the UK while collecting the keys. It was an instant hit, attracting millions of views. It was also, the man confesses, all lies.” It does feel a BIT like this is a soluble problem which, as with so much to do with this fcuking tech, is rendered insoluble because of government’s unwillingness to confront big tech (and the impossibility of meaningful sanctions against companies that are richer than God).
- Replacing Reporters With Bots: Another interesting datapoint from the first 10-15% of the year has been the shift in mood around AI, from ‘THE BUBBLE IS ABOUT TO POP’ to ‘hang on, this stuff appears to have gotten really good all of a sudden’, to ‘SHORT ALL THE SAAS STOCKS THE LAWYERS ARE DEAD I AM HANDING THE KEYS TO MY LIFE TO AN AGENT’ (to be clear, ALL EXTREME POSITIONS IN THIS DEBATE ARE HELD BY EITHER MORONS OR PEOPLE WHO ARE TRYING TO SELL YOU SOMETHING, WITHOUT EXCEPTION). While I continue to 100% believe that Agentic AI is not ready for normal people and businesses to use, and that there is a big financial corrective coming, it’s also been…quite fun watching a lot of the ‘oh it’s just autocomplete and it makes things up, lol you fell for it’ crowd being forced to accept that their opinions based on GPT3 probably don’t hold water anymore. ANYWAY, that’s by way of longwinded preamble to this piece, in which Casey Newton and his team at Platformer experiment with building AI newsroom colleagues from the latest kit and…they work. Like, well enough. Not exciting, not perfect, but…not a janky, broken mess, and certainly useful. To all of you who still don’t think this stuff is coming for you, I strongly encourage you to read this and reconsider. Oh, and this is from someone I know in a groupchat, fwiw, who is not selling anything and has no reason to lie – does this feel like good news, advermarketingpr people? I would posit that it does not: “I’ve built a custom gpt at work that literally can do 50% of my team’s work. It takes the brief from another part of the business, clarifies all the relevant questions, builds the assets and campaign (email and CRM stuff in my case) and sends it to me to deploy with a justification and expiration. I’m now working on the api integration so it doesn’t even need me to deploy just tell me and get a yes. I did this in like 2 weeks with no one else. Used it in anger first few times this week and it really, actually worked.” OUCH.
- AI and Romance Novels: This NYT piece got a lot of heat when it was published, some of it for justifiable reasons (the NYT’s baffling failure to seemingly understand that it was offering someone a platform to flog their training courses, which is where the real money is not the terrible AI novels) and some…not (I don’t think I have ever come across a platform like Bluesky for confusing ‘you are writing about this thing’ with ‘you love this thing and think it is amazing and endorse it unconditionally!’), but, overall (and in the context of the free ebooks link I posted earlier on) it struck me as an interesting read – the author here profiled is, yes, in the end mainly selling her ‘let me teach you how you too can make money creating no-effort AI books to sell on Amazon!’ courses, but also does appear to have…sold quite a few AI-generated books! And, you know, you don’t need to sell loads to be able to eke out a living, and as long as all you need is to sell 1,000 copies per title and you can knock out a title in half a day, then, well, that sounds like a decent punt from a certain angle. What I also found interesting about this – which I think was another angle which got readers upset – was the acknowledgement that a lot of ‘romantasy’-type stuff IS formulaic, paint-by-numbers and not-very-well-written, and that it COULD quite easily be done to a sufficient standard by The Machine because there is not one person out there who is reading ‘His Pirate Lust vol.3; Dragon Treasure Island Orgy’ for the quality of the prose so much as for the scaly c0ck. RELATED – this is a piece about how fanfic, for better or worse, basically won fiction. Oh, God, I can’t help it, I can feel the snob in me rising again…can we go back to an era in which there were considered to be qualitative differences between types of book and writing? Christ, I sound like JSM and Bentham debating ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ pleasures, don’t I? Sorry, I might be being a cnut here.
- Why Modern Chinese is Just English: Thanks to Alex for sharing this with me – I have to say this slightly blew my mind and I am not enough of a scholar of Chinese (lol, obviously), English (lol, equally-obviously) or linguistics to be able to offer any sort of opinion or analysis on the accuracy of this take, but the whole piece is SO interesting in terms not only of language but also of the link between linguistics, ideas, permissible/conceivable thought…honestly, this really is quite incredible: “Learning Chinese is widely sold as the ultimate linguistic challenge. Students are warned that they must rewire their cognitive faculties entirely to grasp an alien logic. But there is a reality that few textbooks admit: The Chinese language has been Europeanized. Beneath the intimidating surface of the Chinese Characters (汉字, Hanzi), the operating system has been quietly swapped out. If one strips away the characters and the tones, what remains is not the mysterious, ancient syntax of the Tang Dynasty poets. It is a structure that is shockingly familiar. While linguists technically classify Chinese as an “isolating” language, a century of Western influence has pushed it to adopt “inflection-like” syntactic and rhetorical patterns. Conversely, English has shed much of its historical inflection and behaves as the most analytically simplified European language. As the two have moved toward one another, Modern Chinese can read as English in Hanzi camouflage. This is an invisible revolution. Most modern Chinese speakers cannot truly comprehend Classical Chinese (文言文, Wenyanwen); the texts of their ancestors are nearly as alien to them as they are to a foreign learner. Modern Mandarin is effectively a creole, a hybrid tongue born from a collision between East and West.”
- Why Does Every Cool Brand Become Boring?: Obviously long-term readers will know that the two answers to this are a) data and b) Private Equity, and while, yes, that is very much the tl;dr version of the piece, it’s worth reading the whole thing, particularly if you’re interested in The Business of Fashion (it’s a newsletter, so you have to scroll down a bit to get to the essay). “When PE firms invest in a brand, they don’t just write a check and sit back. They’re working backwards from an exit in 3-5 years. They’re not asking “will customers still love this in 10 years?”, they’re asking “can we show enough growth to flip this?” And for them, more money = faster growth. They look for brands that already have momentum, inject capital, crank the levers to grow the brand into something sellable on paper to another strategic buyer, another PE firm or take public. But the problem is that fashion doesn’t really work that way. It’s volatile. Brands take decades to build.”
- The World of Shortform Vertical Video Series: Or, ‘why Quibi was apparently almost half-right, ish’. This year as you will doubtless have heard is THE YEAR IN WHICH SHORTFORM EPISODIC VERTICAL VIDEO DRAMAS EAT THE WORLD – this piece looks at how they are produced, the sorts of topics they cover and why they are so popular. The numbers here are INSANE – the detail about people paying literally 10-20x more to watch an episodic cutdown of a 70m film is staggering, and there’s a nice INSIGHT there about how people are willing to pay to have things tailored to their attention spans (you can have ‘The ADHD Premium’ for free if you like) – as are the details about how terrible the plots, the acting, the cinematography and the production values are. Still, these people are COINING it in; a friend of mine knows of a couple of writers earning…decent enough bank writing for an Indian company churning these out on a weekly basis. The thing is though, per the novels bit above, if you don’t think this stuff is going to get AI’d to fcuk VERY VERY SOON then, well, you obviously haven’t watched any of this stuff (I have, and let me tell you that The Machine really can write stuff that is at least as good as this tripe).
- Behind The Scenes at Patagonia: Anyone who has worked in advermarketingpr at all in the past 20 years will be sick to the back teeth of Patagonia being held up as a shining example of how to do ‘purpose led comms’ (yes, thanks for that Giles, so how do apply those lessons to my client, a maker of extruded plastics for the international plumbing trade? You cnut) – this is an interesting attempted corrective to some of the universally-laudatory coverage the company has received over the past few years, in which Foster Huntingdon BLOWS THE WHISTLE on the fact that…well, as far as I can tell, that he didn’t like working there that much, that he thought the owner/founder was a tw4t, and that he didn’t enjoy it anywhere near as much as he did his previous time at Ralph Lauren (where Ralph NOTICED HIM, which the Patagonia guy very much didn’t). While, yes, there’s a lot of typical ‘wow, what a d1ck’ stuff in here about the founder, there’s also a very distinct whiff of ‘ex staffer kicking out’ and I am not sure that there’s anything here that massively undermines the Patagonia schtick (what…you’re telling me that the company was…somewhat cynical about the environmental schtick when it boiled down to it? SURELY NOT HEAVEN FORFEND, etc), and I say that as someone who has no care for the company and has never owned any of their stuff. See what you think.
- Alien Assumptions: A short, but interesting, piece of writing, about some of the ways in which our traditional imagining of What It Might Be Like When The Aliens Arrive might be wrong. I like the bleakness of it – the basic underlying theme here is ‘yeah, if there are aliens and they do wish us harm we will be so dead before we even realise it’, which I found…oddly reassuring!
- The San Fran March For Billionaires: Among all the other STUFF HAPPENING, you might have missed the news that a small group of San Franciscans came out to march in favour of billionaires the other week. This is a short writeup of the event in the Mission Local, which I am including solely because it made me laugh out loud on more than one occasion. THE PHOTOS! THE QUOTES! Honestly, this is short but beautiful.
- Agronejo: An essay about the specific genre of Brazilian music that lauds the lifestyles of the country’s agricultural workers, and the extent to which it’s been (and is being) coopted by the large industrial conglomerates that dominate the country (and the continent)’s industrial farming landscape. This is culturally fascinating, some of the tracks are ace (honestly, suggest looking them up as you read, it really adds to the experience), and I am always personally interested by stories about the intersection of capital and culture (and the former cultivating the latter) like this.
- Searching For Birds: This is a really beautiful bit of interactive webdesign, which also happens to be a really good essay about birdwatching (specifically in North America) and how people get into it – honestly, though, this is one of the nicest bit of informationally-rich longform webdesign I have seen in years, it’s very special indeed.
- Which Other Olympic Mascots Could This Years’ Kill?: So apparently the Winter ‘Lympics mascots this year are a pair of stoats – which, as the opening to this piece points out, are famously-murderous and bloodthirsty little fcuks. This article asks the question ‘which previous winter olympics mascots would the stoats be able to murder?’ – sadly it doesn’t explore what would happen were they to be confronted with the greatest mascots EVER, London2012’s pair of terror sperm, Wenlock and Mandeville, who would have absolutely fcuking EVISCERATED the stoats, no question. Anyway, this is silly but I have been sick and it made me laugh, so there.
- Cycling Mikey: I think the whole ‘cyclists vs motorists’ debate, which rages in I presume every city in the world but which feels particularly pointed in London, is perhaps the greatest example of how the web has made us all a bit worse in some respects.While I know which side of the argument I come down on in theory as a non-driver and someone who generally believes that the world would be better with fewer cars in it, I am also aware that a lot of cyclists behave like total and utter cnuts, don’t know the rules of the road and possess a degree of self-righteousness that would feel out of place on a fcuking nun, let alone a middle-aged accountant called Dave who earns six figures and is kitted out in head to toe Rafa and who can’t stop at traffic lights because he has a big call with the team in Bangalore, pedestrians be damned (Dave, if you happen to read this I promise it is NOTHING PERSONAL) – basically, as I was discussing with Rob Manuel earlier this week, everything is now a binary fight and there is nothing in between, and, inevitably, both sides are awful, leading to situations where you basically want EVERYONE to die in the pileup. Anyway, this is a piece about an infamous chronicler of the inequities of London motorists, who goes by the name ‘Cycling Mikey’ – I think it’s fair to say that Mikey is…quite unusual, let’s say, and doesn’t deserve the repeated attempts on his life that motorists seem to increasingly be making, but I don’t think anyone comes out of this hugely well.
- Brillat-Savarin: A wonderful profile by Ruby Tandoh in Vittles all about French chronicler of gastronomy – and all-round polymath, turns out – Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a man whose name I knew and whose legend I was vaguely aware of, but the richness of whose life was previously-unknown to me; this is, honestly, such a lovely piece of writing, from which I learnt a lot while feeling increasingly peckish. If nothing else it’s a portrait of a true hedonist and sensualist – someone who obviously reveled in the senses and saw it as almost a duty to pursue their pleasures, which, while doubtless exhausting in practice, is a lovely sort of worldview to dip into every now and again.
- The Truth About The LongevityMaxxers: You know what? I think this might be true. Machiel Reyneke is a South African man who works in investments, so exactly why he has ended up writing a few hundred words on, er, the fact that people who are looking to extend their lifespan to infinity are probably in actual fact vampires who are preparing to out themselves to the wider world is something of a mystery to me. That said, YOU DO YOU, MACHIEL! He opens with “I recently wrote about what the longevity experts don’t tell you. Since then, I’ve been thinking about why so many of the people in this space are obsessed with blood transfusions specifically. It seemed like a strange fixation — until I looked at the evidence properly. I think they’re vampires. Not metaphorically. I think the modern longevity movement is a vampire disclosure program. Let me explain.” AND THEN HE DOES. This is the best free prompt for a super-successful new series of vampire fictions I have seen in years, and you’d best believe that there are dozens of people working on the thinly–veiled Peter Thiel/Lestat fanfic crossover that, presumably, will make them millions. IT COULD BE YOU, GET SCRIBBLING!
- The Century of the Maxxer: I confess that I didn’t expect Clavicular to be so happily embraced by the normiesphere – or at least pored over to this extent – so quickly, but, well, I suppose it’s the ‘our mad future!’ antonym of ‘paedo elites and the perennial threat of WWIII’. Here, Sam Kriss writes typically-entertaingly – and well – about What It Means, and while it’s all worth reading (and I promise you, it is very funny), I quite liked this as a lens for it all: “The difference between a maxxer and an ordinary striver or optimiser is infinity. Ordinary people have broken themselves apart into a bundle of miserable attributes, but all of them are contingent. At any point, the rationalised factory worker can be moved to a different station and subordinated to a different set of motions. But the maxxer only has one thing. Everything is on the line and nothing is in reserve. No cracks in the maxxer’s surface. They are whole and complete in a way the fractured masses are not; they’ve burned off everything about themselves other than their obsession. All that’s left is the need to be the most, to touch the furthest point of excess. When someone is under the spell of infinity, there’s an electricity about them. We might love them or despise them, but we’re obsessed with maxxers. Few people agree with Clavicular, but he’s got more people furiously thinking about the meaning of beauty than anyone since Kant. We write essays about maxxers; we blunderingly ape their behaviours; we spike their cortisol while they’re jestergooning at the club. This has nothing to do with what they merely are. If someone just happens to be extremely tall, that’s briefly interesting, but only for a moment. Every village has its gangly man. But if someone keeps undergoing surgeries to make themselves taller, if they’re constantly breaking and resetting their femurs, if they’re injecting black-market somatropin directly into their spinal column, suddenly we’re transfixed. The appearance of something superlunary in the world.”
- The Feeling of the Old World Fading Away: Tonally this is something of a companion piece to the last one; Heather McCalden writes about the weird sensation of living in the between times, or perhaps it’s simply a factor of everything being so fractal and fractured that there’s no sensation that it would even be possible to gain a snapshot image of the whole, or even a part of it, with any meaningful clarity. “For a long time, I’ve been experiencing something I can only describe as the feeling of the old world fading away. It’s as if some deeply embedded internal architecture is slowly dissolving and leaving in its particle wake a sorrow, for which there is no name. The causes are spoken of: the global conflicts, the ecological catastrophes, the social injustices—but the actual, visceral, experience of losing a coherence that held reality together, remains under examined. To be clear, this sorrow is not about nostalgia or “getting older”, this is about living in a moment when the question, “Has the world changed or have I?” is irrelevant because the separation of the self and the world no longer makes any sense.”
- Big Red Daughter: Ok, so the title of this piece is actually ‘A Woman Enters the Gooniverse’, but I prefer my nod to DFW and, well, IT’S MY NEWSLETTER. This is Allie Rowbottom, visiting the AVN Awards in Vegas and writing it up for Playboy. Rowbottom acknowledges the DFW debt early on, and this is a good piece, distinct in itself while still acknowledging the canonical weight of the original and framing itself, and the industry, in terms of what has changed in the intervening 30+ years since it was written. You won’t learn anything you don’t know here – although, once again, I feel the lack of interest and discussion devoted to the perennial growth in popularity of hentai with younger generations in particular is a blindspot – but it’s an entertaining, if slightly grubby, read; I couldn’t help but feel that the final section, in which author and her husband are transported to heights of erotic transport on their final night in Vegas, was a sop to the publication she was writing for and certain…expectations, shall we say, of the likely readership, but it’s a good piece of writing.
- Progressives: A short story in Granta, by Saadat Hasan Manto, about a ‘progressive’ writer in 20thC India and about the anticipation, and then the reality, of a visit from one of his heroes. This is funny and sinister and has a certain tonal quality that reminded me of reading RK Narayan when I was younger, and I enjoyed it very much indeed.
- Ashes to Pistachios: The final longread of the week is this one, by Golan Haji, a Syrian Kurd who now lives in Paris and writes here about…Christ, you know what, it doesn’t matter what this is ‘about’, it is BEAUTIFUL; I tend not to enjoy writing that people describe as ‘poetic’ but this really is astonishing throughout, lyrical and rich and evocative and funny and sad, and if these paragraphs speak to you in any way then read the whole thing, it is honestly gorgeous: “We walked together on the endless plains, reciting the old poets. We trod the boundary lines between fields and waded through wheat until our trousers turned patchwork, blotched with green. The lucky one got to hold a china box we called “the plumb line of innocence”. It held milk teeth. When you shook it on those still spring afternoons, amid poppies in bright sunshine, its rattle was the music that accompanied the recital of a young poet seated on the ground beneath the sky. But the Kurds’ spring is bloody; their March is a month of joys and disaster. On the night of 24 March 1993, another great fire at the Hasakah Central Prison consumed (among others) 25 Kurdish inmates. The following morning, still unaware of the event, I had propped my motorbike by the bakery on the west side of the town, and was securing it when I heard a scream. At first, I thought nothing of it; I imagined one of Sculptor’s relatives clutching at his side, mouth gaping, caught short by renal colic. You would sometimes catch sight of them in the distance, flipping in agony down a hillside, the cylinders of their bodies rolling like gas bottles, maybe accompanied by their donkeys: tipped on their back, hooves lifted to the heavens”
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS !: