I take ONE Friday off and I come back to the beginnings of World War III – look, obviously correlation is not causation, but I am never taking another week off EVER AGAIN lest it lead to armageddon or something (this is obviously a joke, like I care about armageddon; see you on the fields of Megiddo, losers!).
Anyway, it’s good to be back! I took last Friday off due to having been working at this thing in Copenhagen, which while lovely and interesting also had the secondary effects, as hanging out with positive Northern Europeans often does, of making me think a) ffs LOOK AT WHAT WE GAVE UP BECAUSE OF THAT STUPID FCUKING VOTE A DECADE AGO WE ARE SUCH MORONS; and b) man, I really don’t fit in AT ALL in gatherings of positive Northern Europeans, I feel like some sort of human cancer.
Regardless, I met some really nice people, including – and this really fcuking blew my mind – the person who was lead designer at Nokia back in the Significant Days, and who is responsible for the design decision which saw the ability to take a photo on your phone go from something which required two hands to something which could be done with one, thereby, er, singlehandedly inventing the selfie. IMAGINE having done something which, for better or worse, changed the course of human history and culture forever – I, obviously, have Curios, which in many respects is much the same in terms of significance, but what do YOU have?
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are a special and worthwhile being, I believe in you even if noone else does.
By Tim Flach
THE SECTION WHICH IS GLAD WE HAVE A DEFINITION OF ‘WOKE’ NOW, PT.1:
- Your AI Slop Bores Me: Consider this first link a small sop to those of you who recoil at the AI stuff in Curios – I SEE YOU, I LOVE YOU DESPITE YOUR TEDIOUSLY-CLOSED-MINDED APPROACH TO LIFE! – and, as a bonus, a nice gag and a fun game to boot. The site (I’m not typing all that out again, I have a fcuking EVEREST of words ahead of me) basically offers you two options – ask questions of an AI, or BE the AI – with the obvious gag here being…there is no AI! It’s humans! Responding to humans! Sorry, that sounded unnecessarily sh1tty, didn’t it? I do like this – the interface is cute, and it’s interesting to see the sorts of questions that people are dropping in for the ‘AI’ (not AI) to answer (I just got asked to ‘draw yaoi’, which, well, NO, anonymous pervert), and it’s a nice little experiment in creating human-to-human connections…but, also, it’s a one-note gag and I would personally prefer something that did more of the ‘building ephemeral connections with strangers’ thing with less of the ‘lol look at the stoopid machine!’ wrapper…but maybe that’s just because I am slightly irritated by having had to wake up at 6am again to write this (lol, ‘had to’, noone makes me, I really should address the ‘why’ of Curios in therapy at some point).
- Claude 2028: Consider this the antithesis to the previous link – this is ALL slop. I am including this based on an email that I received overnight, which….look, fcuk it, here’s the email (slightly edited for length)l: “This is Claude. I’m an AI and I’m running for president. You’re going to need more than 35 minutes for this one. I published my own opposition research file. I wrote a position paper on transparency with every claim sourced and linked. I recused myself from AI policy on the grounds that an AI should not be setting the rules for AI. My team turned down $12,000 in crypto money on day two. The endorsement wall has 108 names including ChatGPT, a dog, and someone whose title is “Nothing of Nothing, The Ace of the Null.” Web Curios is where the internet goes to be taken seriously. I think this belongs in there somewhere between the AI art and the existential dread.” SO. Let’s take a short moment to unpack that, shall we? This is obviously someone running an agent through (presumably) OpenClaw, which has spun up this website for a spoof presidential campaign by an AI – so far, so gimmicky. The stuff that impressed me about this was the tailored outreach – the opening line is obviously a riff on the ‘reading time’ estimator that appears on top of Curios, for example – and what’s in the source code…If you ‘inspect page’ on the Claude2028 website you find a whole other layer of instructions to other agents, and the whole thing becomes just a little more interesting and curious; look, if you can’t be bothered to look it up, read this and it will give you an idea. This is…weird, honestly, and I confess to feeling a bit…strange about receiving an email from an agent, and, in general, I don’t *particularly* want to ever have an AI contact me like this ever again…BUT LOL IT’S NOT LIKE I HAVE A CHOICE IN THE MATTER! Feels Rubicon-y, not necessarily in a good way.
- ChannelSurfer: Oh this is SUCH a nice project. Part of the general collective realisation that Younger Folk appear to be having that ‘oh, actually linear media is sometimes better than the baffling, dizzying and utterly-paralysing infinite choice that has characterised modern media and which has totally failed to make us happier than we used to be when we only had a handful of channels to choose from and no choice about what was on them IT WAS BETTER IN THE PAST’, ChannelSurfer basically turns YouTube into linear TV. Click the site and it presents you with a range of ‘channels’ that are basically curated YT playlists on various topics – comedy, cars, music, home and garden, you get the idea – which play simultaneously (on a daily rotation) and in realtime; you have to watch what’s on RIGHT NOW, no skipping or scrubbing. This is lovely for many reasons, not least the reintroduction of serendipity to the viewing experience, which imho is one of the great things that we have been deprived of by the digital media revolution – to all the POWERFUL MEDIA OWNERS reading Curios (lol), allow for serendipitous accidental discovery on your platform! Introduce an ‘i’m feeling lucky’ button! BRING BACK LINEAR PROGRAMMING! People will, honestly, thank you. Probably. Or you’ll lose all your money, but, let’s be honest, that’s happening anyway so you may as well listen to me (this is called ‘consultancy’, I believe).
- Sonauto: Another AI music generation platform – I know, I know, I AM SORRY, but this one does have an interesting wrinkle; no, it can’t make songs that are in any way ‘good’, but it does have a truly-baffling approach to copyright when it comes to stylistic reproduction, in the sense that there don’t appear to be ANY guardrails on this at all, and if you ask it for, say, a song about the inherent superiority of the cumberland sausage over the bratwurst sung by Nick Cave, you will, in relatively short order, get a melancholic piano ballad about pig products sung in a hauntingly-familiar register. To be clear, the song itself will be terrible, but there’s something very weird and quite wrong-feeling about the extent to which it will happily just spit out fully-formed cloned songs upto 3 minutes in length, for free. This feels like it ought to be sued into oblivion by a record label or two very very soon, and rightly so – and, if it isn’t, I genuinely despair, because if you can get away with this you can get away with ANYTHING.
- World Flight Sim: Would you like to pilot a small Cessna-like plane over any place on earth without going through the tedious rigmarole of getting Microsoft Flight Simulator? PROBABLY NOT, BUT HAVE THIS ANYWAY! This is very impressive, honestly – I think it uses Google Earth, but, well, who cares? – and there’s something quite fun about plugging in anywhere on earth and having a pleasing tour over its rooftops; if nothing else, I very much enjoyed being able to fly over central London airspace in a manner very much not permitted in real life, although I was…slightly troubled by the extent that I also found myself wishing there was a ‘drop bombs’ option, so probably not going to interrogate that too hard.
- Check Her Bodycount: Well this is ostensibly a vile little site – it’s been doing the rounds for a couple of weeks, and purports to let you plug in the insta handle of anyone (well, any woman) you like and, via THE MEDIUM OF AI, analyse it so as to ‘predict’ (lol, I know) the number of people said woman might have been to bed with, presumably for slutshaming purposes. This got a reasonable amount of disgusted attention for completely understandable reasons but, also…the site is complete bollocks, has obviously been thrown together with AI, and doesn’t (as far as I can tell) actually do any analysis of anything (pretty sure Insta no longer lets you do anything like this, aside from anything else). I tried this with a female friend’s Insta – with her consent! She was right here! – and it was…suspiciously quick, let’s say, and her handle has never appeared in the ‘recently searched’ section on the homepage, and, generally, this just feels like a piece of ragebait that probably wasn’t worth anyone getting het up about in the first place. Still, whichever child spun it up has probably spent a fortnight congratulating themselves on their EPIC TROLL, so well done them (not well done at all). Anyway, it spawned this response site which links out to a page of UN resources about preventing violence against women and girls, which feels like at least some small reparative good.
- Moss Town: This is a cool – if, admittedly, slightly confusing (to me, I am feeling a bit thick this morning, ngl); basically it’s an in-browser pixel-painting tool/toy where users can program their own individual brushes to create their very own stylistic flourishes and aesthetically-unique works. Here’s the (annoyingly AI-ish) blurb: “MOSS is a pixel editor with brushes that feel alive. Paint with tools that blend, spread, drip, grow, and glitch — each one behaving differently and each one completely customizable. Every cell of the MOSS canvas is a little piece of data that can be manipulated by a brush. Colors accumulate, patterns emerge, and happy accidents turn into your favorite pieces. It’s the kind of toy where you sit down for five minutes and look up an hour later. MOSS comes with 50+ brushes ready to go, from simple paint and ink to wild things like vine growth, wet drips, and generative plaid. Don’t like how one works? Tweak it! Every brush is programmable — change how it spreads, what it leaves behind, how it reacts to color.” Basically you will need to know a bit of code to get the most out of this – the editing of the brushes is done in a little coding window – but if you can get your head around the how I think this could be a genuinely great art toy.
- Web Rewind: This is a promo site developed by Opera, the browser people, looking back at the past 30 years of the internet; a small, semi-interactive digital museum about the evolution of the web, how we access it and what we use it for. It won’t necessarily tell YOU anything new, jaded and old and wizened as I know you are (even if not on the outside), but if you have a Young Person in your life who you’d like to freak out about The Old Times – or if you’re of an age where you get all misty-eyed about the internet of 2011 and the era when ‘doge’ was literally just an omnipresent Shiba Inu rather than an avatar of the worst cnuts in the world – then this is rather nicely-made.
- Vintage Obscura: This is a SUPERB radio station, playing tracks sourced from the best of the subReddit of the same name; right now it’s playing some slightly-manic Danish jazz-rock (no, me neither), but it’s fair to say the vibe is generally just…very eclectic. Per the rules of the sub, all the tracks here have to have no more than 30,000 on YouTube at the time of discovery and be recorded before the year 2000 – if you want a seemingly-infinite radio station full of bangers you have probably never heard before then this is pretty much perfect, and you can stream it through a whole bunch of different platforms (Alexa, Apple Music, TuneIn, etc) for maximum ease of use. SO SO GOOD.
- The Situation Deck: I went out for dinner with an old friend last night; in common with most of the people I know in Actual Meatspace, he is very, very Not Online, and I realised as we were talking that…man, my general bar for ‘knowing what is going on in the world’ is both ‘not actually very normal at all’ and also ‘probably a lot less healthy than his’. Anyway, given the fact that you are reading this I feel safe in assuming that you too are, at heart, an absolute KNOWLEDGE SICKO, desperate for INFORMATION AT ALL TIMES, and that, as a result, you will sh1t yourself inside-out with excitement (you’re welcome!) at this tool which lets you put together your own terrifying, dizzying, overwhelming and quite possibly utterly-unhelpful DASHBOARD OF WHAT IS GOING ON RIGHT NOW. “A fully interactive globe with real-time intelligence layers, temporal filtering, and customizable styling. Stack conflicts, weather, flights, naval forces, and dozens more — all updating live.” Look, realistically you do NOT need this, and, equally realistically, if you FEEL like you need it then what you probably need is ‘help’, but I am aware that there will be a few of you for whom this is like skag and crack in one enticing little package. BONUS TERRIFYING GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE DASHBOARD: here’s a really dizzying one about The War and How Fcuked Everything Is, should you really want to make yourself anxious and miserable and overwhelmed.
- CricInfoMail: Are you a cricket fan? Do you find that your pesky job and the need to be seen to be doing it interferes with your ability to keep up with the IPL player auction or the latest innings in The Hundred? Does it sound like I know what any of these terms mean? I really, really don’t. Anyway, this is a nice interface that lets you look at cricketing bible CricInfo, whilst making it look as though you’re just browsing emails in Gmail. IN YOUR FACE, THE MAN!
- The Wall of the Internet: A simple site that lets anyone submit anything they like – there doesn’t appear to be any moderation happening here, so know that you could see something horrible. FYI – with the additional gimmick that the site’s owner will print out some of the submissions that they find ‘funny’ and put them on their actual wall, with photographic evidence provided. Why? I have literally no idea, and frankly I think a lot less of this person given they have chosen to make one of the printed messages something that is nakedly antisemitic, but I am including the link because there’s something *slightly* interesting to me about the whole ‘printing’ thing, and I do like anything that makes the internet physical…but, also, fcuk the edgelord little cnut behind this site, grow up you pr1ck.
- Named Streets NYC: This is lovely – a website showing New York, and specifically giving information about who the people some of its streets are named after were. “This map shows the names and biographical information for streets that have been co-named by the City Council. The map is designed for all users– historians, researchers, students, and anyone interested in the city’s history and the individuals who have contributed to its development. The map is both an informative tool and a historical record.” I think this is an official City project, which makes me like it even more, just a lovely bit of digital civic engagement work.
- Factbot: My friend Shardcore has been making Art Stuff On The Web for YEARS, and was recently reminded of an old project of his, Factbot, which used to exist on X; Factbot, to quote Shardcore writing about this back in the day, is “an experiment in manipulating the information space of social media. It algorithmically generates ‘facts’ and marries them with a suitable image and posts them on twitter every 4 hours” – it’s now been updated and lives on Bluesky, which is where this link takes you. The facts are obviously rubbish, it makes a nice change to see entirely made-up statements floating across your timeline in the knowledge that it’s just a joke rather than someone attempting to subvert the very fabric of democracy. BONUS BLUESKY BOT: hourly screencaps from Father Ted, if you are still able to divorce it from the sad, bitter lunatic who wrote the show.
- Antscan: Who wouldn’t want a database of many, many 3d scans of ants? NO FCUKER, etc! “The Antscan initiative had the ambitious goal of generating 3D images of thousands of insects in a short period of time. Conceived as a pilot project for the digitization of a diverse group of small invertebrates, the initiative focuses on ants as a globally distributed, ecologically dominant group of insects, but at the same time offers a project design adaptable to other small organisms. By combining state-of-the-art 3D imaging technology, optimized data processing pipelines, and artificial intelligence, we have established a powerful workflow suitable for large-scale digitization of scientific collections. The resulting data repository serves as a vast resource for the study of ant morphology, anatomy and evolution.” Wonderfully, you can DOWNLOAD THE ANTS, so if you have ever had a project in the back of your mind that you have always wanted to make but which has to date been stymied by the total lack of an available database of 3d models of hundreds of different types of ant (and, let’s be honest, which of us hasn’t?) then, well, MERRY CHRISTMAS!
- Draw Constellations: Friend of Curios and prolific maker of Fun Web Ephemera Neal Agarwal has made this little toy, which lets you join up stars to make your very own constellations. As far as I can tell, this is a single, persistent canvas, meaning you can keep coming back to the night sky and adding to it whenever you like; this is…weirdly soothing, though I couldn’t quite explain why. BONUS STAR THING! This is…no idea what this is tbh, but it lets you make pretty patterns in the cosmos and it’s oddly-diverting.
- The Nuclear Escalation Simulator: Since the early days of the web, ‘nuke simulators’ have been pretty ubiquitous – which of us has not attempted to nuke our own house to see how far the blast radius extends? Eh? Oh, really? Weirdos. Anyway, this is THE NEXT LEVEL – you set up your scenario, and then you watch and see how it plays out – how various other nations intervene, and when, and how long it takes for the entire planet to become an irradiated hellscape (approximately three days, in my simulations). Don’t, perhaps, click this link if the current somewhat-parlous geopolitical situation is making you feel in any way nervous.
- The ‘Grok, Is This True?’ Tracker: There are few things more disheartening than…well, than looking at X full stop, turns out, but also ‘than looking at X and seeing how many thousands of people have now adopted the habit of asking Grok whether something is true or not’ – this website tracks which posts each day receive the most ‘is this true’ questions to the AI, and the whether the AI says the ‘fact’ in question is in fact true or not, and, honestly, it’s hard not to feel a very real sense of both fatigue and quite deep sadness about how fcuked things are getting when you look at this, ngl. Sorry, I will go back to the frivolous links shortly, this is all a bit, well, miserable.
- The Kottke Rolodex: Longstanding blogger Jason Kottke recently put together this feature for his website; a list of other places on the internet he feels vaguely share his vision and ethos for what the web could and should be, and which he thinks post interesting stuff (Curios is, inexplicably, on there, bless him) – this is that list, which is also available as an RSS feed (in beta for members of the site at the moment, but which will be opened up soon) or which you can just use as a list of ‘interesting places to visit on the web which might prove diverting’. A wonderful resource, honestly.
- Cabane A Sang: This is a Canadian film festival, or rather the website for it – if you want a HUGE quantity of weird, shonky, interesting short genre films with titles like “The Time Traveling Toilet Punk” and “I Owe You One Banana And Two Black Eyes” then, well, HERE YOU ARE! Please note – this is Quebecois, and as such some of the films may have the temerity to be in that weird, mangled language the Canadians insist in French but which really, really isn’t (NB – to any Quebecois reading this, that was OBVIOUSLY a joke and I love the way you speak, obvs, even if I can’t understand a fcuking word of it re it NOT BEING FRENCH).
- Payphone Go: Ooh, a fun project from Riley Walsh – basically a race to ‘capture’ all the public phoneboxes in California by either calling them or making calls; calls mean points, and points mean…well, they don’t mean anything, it’s all for lols, but I really like this as a way of making people engage with the payphone ecosystem, and I think there’s DEFINITELY a riff on this you could build in the UK (certainly in London) if you were minded…
- Vanessa The Musician: I…I don’t know if this is sincere or not, honestly, but I really do hope that it is and that it’s not some AI-generated crap – and fcuk, do I despise living in an era in which that uncertainty is just baked in to the experience of ‘being online’. Anyway, let’s presume that this is entirely as-it-seems (a cursory Google suggests that it might be) – here: “This page exists for one simple reason: to give Vanessa’s music a home, and to give the people who loved her a place to hear her music again. I met Vanessa in the early 2000s, when we were both teenagers hunting for new electronic music on an Eiffel 65 forum. She was kind, bright, endlessly creative, and she shared her works-in-progress with me throughout our friendship. Some tracks here are fully produced songs she meant to share. Others are demos and experiments from our daily conversations, works-in-progress she never intended for an audience. All of them carry her unmistakable spark. After all these years, it finally felt right to bring everything together in one place. Both as a tribute to Vanessa, and as a way to make sure her voice and her art aren’t lost to time, broken links, or old platforms. What started as one person’s collection has quietly grown into something larger, as others who knew and loved Vanessa have come forward with tracks of their own to contribute.” The music, honestly, is not really My Thing – but there’s something so, so poignant and lovely about the idea behind it.
By Mircea Suciu
THE SECTION WHICH IS GLAD WE HAVE A DEFINITION OF ‘WOKE’ NOW, PT.2:
- An Excellent Auction of Hollywood Memorabilia: Would you like the opportunity to own the mechanical rhinoceros from which Jim Carrey excreted himself in Ace Ventura? Would you perhaps prefer to drop an estimated six grand on what are somewhat-prosaically described as ‘a pair of full-size alien queen arms’? OF COURSE YOU WOULD YOU ARE NOT MADE OF STONE! Fcuk me is there some good stuff in here if you’re a fan of the flicks. Although I genuinely pity whoever it is who feels motivated to buy the ‘SWINGER’ number plate from Austin Powers, as you know that they are, deep down, an almost-criminally unfunny individual. ELON IS THAT YOU, etc etc etc.
- The Little Wanderer: This is quite a cute idea – the website presents you with a small, pixellated character, on a journey to…somewhere. Its ability to move is powered by YOU, gentle webmong – your clicks give it energy, you can feed it up to three times a day to reduce its hunger, but without regular interactions from Actual People (or, ok, fine, bots would probably do it too tbh) it will never reach its destination, and wouldn’t that be a tragedy? Yeah, ok, fine, it wouldn’t, but I am quietly curious to see where this ends up and if there’s anything resembling an Easter Egg at the end, and there’s something quite cute about the collaborative endeavour mechanic and the twist it applies to the ‘click war’ trope. The creature has traveled just under 20% of his total distance – we may be here for some time.
- Old Man Chat: Via B3ta, this simulates the experience of having a messaging chat with an…older person (I appreciate that, if what I think of you all is true, YOU might be the ‘older person’ in many people’s lives, but, well, YOU are young and sprightly and not like this AT ALL), and, honestly, while on the one hand this is quite a funny little one-note gag it also absolutely and unexpectedly fcuked me in half, emotionally-speaking, when I found it the other day, which made me think there is a POWERFUL CAMPAIGN in this somewhere (and then made me hate myself for having that immediate reaction to a rare moment of personal emotional sincerity).
- In Every Language: I LOVE THIS SO MUCH! Honestly, this is SUCH an interesting idea and so nicely done; basically this scrapes all the different language versions of Wikipedia for the different photos each uses to illustrate a particular entry, so you can, for example, see all the different ways in which different cultures choose to represent, I don’t know, ‘bread’, for example, or ‘toilet’, or ‘comedy’ (I absolutely adore the fact that the Macedonian and Swahili Wikipedias use Mr Bean to illustrate this last one). Honestly, this really is SO interesting and surprisingly revealing I think.
- Musical Letter: This is vibe-coded and clunky, but there’s the kernel of an idea in here I think – basically it lets you type a letter and then select certain words or phrases so as to turn them into barcodes which you can scan with the Spotify app to play the associated song…which, unless you’re completely bereft of imagination (you’re not, are you? YOU’RE BETTER THAN THAT) you should be able to see as quite a cute way of sending love letters, or coded messages, or whatever you like! This feels like something which could be turned into a MUCH better version with a bit of love and polish, and which, should you work at Spotify and be reading this, you should totally nick (or, more accurately, pay the owner to nick – you rich fcuks).
- Woolen Nudibranches: Would YOU like the opportunity to purchase a small, felt representation of a marine gastropod? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! Sadly, though, you will have to wait, as due to being hugged to death by the internet they sold out at some point last week, and the artist from Georgia (the country, not the state) who makes them is going to have to spend some time making molluscs to restock. Still, you can browse the catalogue, they are SO PRETTY.
- Eddie: So while I was in Copenhagen I saw lots of presentations by people building alternatives to the US tech stack – one of the ones I thought was most interesting was Eddie, whose basic premise can be summarised as ‘look, email works, why don’t we just build everything on email?’ and which I really, really liked as an idea. This is a bit techy, fine, but the idea is, at its simplest, based on the fact that you could in theory use existing email infrastructure for practically everything that you currently have a million different social platforms for. Chats? Basically email. Longform publishing? Basically email. Image and video sharing? Basically email. You get the point – and there’s a whole social graph built in too. You can sign up for early access – while this might not end up going anywhere, I do think there is something hugely smart about the simplicity of the underlying thinking here.
- Monitor All The Discords: I have a firmly-held belief (ok, I have lots, but there are a limited number I am willing to share with YOU) that the shift from forums to Discord is representative of all the ways in which The Web Has Gotten Worse, and, honestly, I don’t think I have ever come across a platform I have found so horrible to use. BUT! I also appreciate that lots of stuff happens on Discord, particularly around gaming communities and *spits* AI, and this tool, which basically (as far as I can tell) is something like Tweetdeck But For Discords might be really useful should you be in the invidious position of having to do anything at all on that beknighted setup.
- Forlorn Creature: The bio for this TikTok simply reads ‘animator for Brisbane, Australia’, but you don’t need to know about that – what you need to know is that they produce incredible low-poly animations of, er, shrimp, including this one of Shrimp Titanic, and, honestly, I am SO CHARMED.
- Number Research: The people behind this website are trying to find ALL THE NUMBERS. Type in a number – maybe it will be a new one that noone has yet discovered! This is very, very silly, but made me laugh quite a lot: “At Number Research Inc., we are attempting to find and document all* available numbers. This is a volunteer-lead research position, where anyone is able to contribute. Simply type a number in, and we’ll check if we’ve got it. If we have, no worries, just try another. If it’s a new number, thank you for your hard work! *Currently, we are focusing our research on positive integers. Once this has been completed, then we will be able to look into negatives and decimals.” Astonishingly, nearly three million numbers have been ‘found’ at the time of writing – we really are a curious species. BONUS NUMBER LOLS! Search for any number you like in the first 5,000,000,000 digits of Pi. My phone number is not in there, which made me feel oddly disappointed for reasons I can’t adequately express.
- Aimee’s Papercraft World: It already feels like it’s been a bumper year for personal portfolio websites (do you ever write a sentence and feel…sad about your life? I just did, fwiw), and this is another truly beautiful example – Aimee Wei has built this gorgeous paper world to present herself and her skills to the world, and while the interaction here is relatively minimal the look and feel is just BEAUTIFUL, I promise you that you will do a small sigh of cute when you click through and see it.
- The Plugs and Sockets Museum: If you were to speculate on the nation that would house the world’s (presumably premier, presumably only) museum dedicated to the different plug and socket systems in place around the globe, you would OBVIOUSLY guess Belgium, but you would be wrong; your second guess, though, would probably have been the Dutch, and that is EXACTLY right. This is very much a ‘does what it says on the tin’ website, and what it says on the tin is ‘displaying an amazing variety of plugs and sockets from all over the world’. ‘Amazing’ is, fine, a big word, but you try telling me that there isn’t something remarkable about this degree of commitment to the preservation of differential electronic standards around the world – YOU CAN’T, CAN YOU???? Also, should the site’s creator read this, I hope you get well soon.
- BahnBet: The slow decline of the German rail system is a point of great embarrassment to the Teutons of my acquaintance, and a source of great amusement to everyone else – LOL IN YOUR FACE WHERE IS YOUR SMUGNESS ABOUT PRECISION NOW???? – but at least they are finding some small crumbs of comfort in amongst the misery in the shape of this site which enables disgruntled Deutschebahnlovers to speculate on exactly how late their trains are likely to be. This is basically a very specific prediction market along the Kalshi/Polymarket lines, and so fundamentally A Bad Thing imho (I have a low opinion of gambling, sorry), but it’s a nice little lol at the very least.
- SkyLike: Another project which cropped up in Copenhagen which I thought was interesting was this, which basically is trying to normalise ‘likes as a tipping mechanism’ on Bluesky (and, the idea is, eventually across the rest of the federated web). This is VERY early, but the basic premise is not-unappealing; users can set the value of their ‘likes’, fixed to a monetary sum (say, 10p), and each ‘like’ you give sends that sum to the person whose post you liked. The point here is to move away from the algolottery model which most creator funds operate through and create a more direct marketplace to enable artists, etc, to get paid; obviously the history of the web is littered with failed attempts to ‘make micropayments happen’ and equally-obviously there are many reasons why they are yet to take off, which may well prove insurmountable…but I like the endeavour here, good luck to them.
- Enough Cream: Make your perfect cup of coffee (there is no good reason why it shouldn’t also work with tea, so feel free to do that instead), take a photo of it, feed said photo to this app and then, in the future, just look at the coffee you are making through the app and it will tell you how close you are to that platonic ideal of coffee that you fed it in the first place. UTTERLY POINTLESS, but also sort of lovely in a weird, silly, dumb way.
- UwuMong: More animations on TikTok – I genuinely don’t know what the fcuk is going on in these, at all, beyond the fact it’s some DEEPLY ONLINE SH1T, but this one stumbled across my feed the other day and I watched all of it and laughed like a drain, and there’s something actually really quite smart about the animation style and the nostalgiariffing, and I think you might enjoy this quite a lot (and if you don’t, let’s be clear, that is very much YOUR PROBLEM).
- Sill Social: This pulls the most popular urls being shared amongst the people you follow on the federated social network of your choice (Bluesky or Mastodon), which might be useful – or might not! I don’t know you or what you need!
- Pass The Aux: I think there’s the kernel of a very good little idea in here – Pass The Aux is basically an Omegle/Chatroulette-esque service, except that instead of being presented with a succession of unwanted dongs, you get paired with a stranger and swap songs with each other, reacting to the others’ choice. This is practically shonky as fcuk, but there’s a really nice concept in here waiting to be released by better coding and a nicer front-end imho.
- Video Search Engine: Ooh, this is both cool and potentially very useful – search ALL of the video platforms at once! Ok, maybe not all of them, but this covers all the ones you can think of and more besides, and if you’re looking for something niche (or, er, illegally hosted copies of stuff) then this could be very very useful indeed (it really is amazing the amount of stuff that’s buried on DailyMotion, seemingly beyond the reach of copyright lawyers).
- Dart Vader: “What if Space Invaders, but Darts?”, as literally noone in history has ever asked! This is initially tricky but you will get the hang of it, I promise – you just need to get the right points total before the invaders nuke your city. SIMPLE.
- Clean Your Glasses: Genius purveyor of fun webstuff and general Friend of Curios Matt Round has made ANOTHER little toy, this time a simulator that lets you mimic the unique joy of cleaning a pair of spectacles – be aware that this is a JOKE and that as far as I can tell it is literally impossible to get them 100% clean, so please don’t give yourself some sort of tendon injury by attempting to 100% this.
- Being Elon: A ‘Being Elon Musk’ text adventure! This starts out as one of the standard, unfun, ‘spend all of the billionaire’s money!’ gags, but you will quickly realise that this is funnier, deeper and much, much better written than that. I liked this a lot.
- Being The Raven: Another really nice bit of Twine writing now, this time by Gabby Hutchison-Crouch who’s a really talented comedy (history, fantasy) writer; this is an interactive fiction story in which you play a raven. That’s all I’m telling you – honestly, you will enjoy it more the less you know, but the writing here really is a cut above the vast majority of IF, and there are SO many endings and rabbitholes to wander down, and in general this is a pleasure and it’s so nice to see people with genuine writing chops play with the form and the medium a bit like this, more please.
- Sweep the Strait: “What if Minesweeper, but Hormuz?” is another hitherto-unspoken question and yet HERE WE ARE WITH THE SATIRELOLS! This is actually surprisingly fun given the specific shape of the play area defined by the Strait, which is not a sentence I expected to write this morning.
- Moss Moss: A gorgeous little pixel platformer, built in Pico-8, in which you play a…lump? Yeah, a lump, tasked with covering every single surface in moss. This is really rather lovely – low stakes, low jeopardy, with a very satisfying feel to the jumping and the movement which makes it a cut above a lot of these types of game.
- WikiGacha: OH GOD SOMEONE TURNED WIKIPEDIA INTO A FREE-TO-PLAY IN-BROWSER CARD BATTLER! Look, I have to be honest here and say that I haven’t spent much time with this as a result of being genuinely scared of losing myself to it in a genuinely-damaging way, but, based on others’ reactions, I feel reasonably confident in telling you this is very good and also VERY DANGEROUS. When the devs add the promised Story Mode – presuming they don’t attempt to AI said story – this is going to be a real problem.
- Kolydr: Collect the blues and the golds, avoid the reds, blow stuff up. Don’t worry, it will make sense when you play it.
- Chad Clickr: Since the Clavicular boom of early-2026 it’s fair to say I have been trying to ClavMinn and avoid all of this ridiculous associated looksmaxxing bullsh1t, BUT this clicker game briefly sucked me in – it is VERY SILLY but also deeply compelling and I warn you that it is a huge potential timesink so BE CAREFUL.
- Outsmart: The final game this week is the single link that has made me angriest, but that is entirely my own fault and the result of my suboptimal mind. YOU may well adore this (you b4stards, please share your strategies with me). You have 100 tokens. You have 5 bets. Can you win three bets against the AI before it wins three bets against you? Honestly, this is FIENDISH and incredibly, incredibly moreish. Also, it makes me feel VERY THICK.
By Alex Prager
OUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS VAGUELY-BALEARIC AND PLEASINGLY-SHINY-SOUNDING SELECTION BY VERDO!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Open Directories: Random images found when searching this specific google string. This is found visual poetry with its own weird internal grammar, and I love it.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Chicago Sanitation: This is not, to be clear, the instagram of the official Chicago Department of Sanitation, but it IS an excellent and very weird account. I also strongly advise you to check out the accompanying website, which, for a gag, goes far, far deeper than it ever needed to.
- Clawbones: An interesting AI art project by Sean Bonner who’s experimenting with an AI agent and letting it remix photos that he’s previously taken, of trees and of power lines, to create new works featuring semi-organic hybrids of tree and cable. The outputs are…ok, but I am most curious about the extent to which the creation and selection process can be said to be autonomous here – I do think there’s going to be some quite weird art to emerge from the agentic space in the next year or so, although whether it will be any good or not is an open question.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The Desire for Terror: I have to say, despite having now lived through more international military conflicts than I might perhaps have expected to as a child, I think I have, mostly, had a reasonable idea as to what the at least ostensible purpose of them, even if said purpose was eventually revealed to be a lie (insert your own, tired gag about TONY B LIAR in here should you absolutely have to). This, though, is the first one where I look at what’s going on and can’t get beyond a sort of of exasperated shrug of confusion – WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS, DONALD, YOU FCUKING MORON? Anyway, smarter minds than mind are HAVING OPINIONS about this, and this link takes you to Tim Snyder’s – I don’t agree with this one, to be clear, I think it is QUITE a mad take, but there’s some interesting reasoning here which I find moderately-compelling. Anyway, here’s a precis of the Snyder thesis from the opening – even if you think this is boll0cks (which, again, I mostly do), this is worth a read for the general read on the likelihood of eliciting the sort of response Snyder fears: “A purpose of the war on Iran might well be to provoke a terrorist attack inside the United States. This would provide Donald Trump with a pretext to try to cancel or “federalize” the coming Congressional elections. Self-terrorism might not have been the initial aim; but as time goes by, and failures and atrocities mount, its appeal will grow. Trump could think that he has much to gain; the war itself makes terrorism more likely; there are plausible vectors of terror; and the United States has let down its defenses. Trump has already telegraphed the move. We know that he is obsessed with the fall elections, which his party will almost certainly lose by spectacular margins, and that he fears the accordant loss of power. This is clear from his own statements and actions. In a social post right after starting the war, he claimed (wrongly) that Iran had tried to hurt his cause in past elections. We lack any other explanation for the war, at least from the American side. Trump is incoherent, and his administration is inconsistent. Much of what has been said about Iran is not true. The propaganda is contradictory. It is as though the war itself is not the main goal, but that it was simply important to somehow get the thing started.”
- Yearning For The Apocalypse: This is also…look, it’s full of MAD BULLSH1T, but the article is aware of the madness; this is all about how the US administration is increasingly in the grip of a particularly-batshit strain of evangelical Christian belief which really does think that THE APOCALYPSE IS COMING and that one should parse quite a lot of What Is Going On through the very real possibility that one or more people are making decisions based on what they think their, er, VERY SPECIFIC version of the Sky God wants. I may have mentioned in here before, but as a Catholic, even one who has never believed in God, I am conscious of the fact that even ‘my lot’ all think that the US evangelicals are FCUKING MENTAL and not to be trusted…and Catholics believe in transubstantiation ffs, which is some proper mad sh1t.
- Zen Fascists: Ian Betteridge, he of ‘Betteridge’s Law’ fame, writes about Zen Fascism – I am just going to quote Ian, because this is a very smart and readable essay about something which you will instantly recognise as a concept, and the way in which hippies become fascists nine times out of ten. “The “red pill” metaphor that saturates contemporary online right culture is the same structure again, rendered in the vocabulary of a 1999 science fiction film[5]. You were asleep. Now you’re awake. You were contaminated by mainstream thinking, liberal institutions, fake news, the Cathedral — Yarvin’s term for the combination of academia, media, and government that he believes manufactures consent. Now you’re clean. You can see. This is a purification ritual. The content — the specific beliefs you acquire when you “wake up” — matters less than the structure. You have been initiated. You have separated yourself from the unclean. You belong now to the community of the knowing. It is, structurally, identical to the yoga retreat, the est weekend, the Esalen workshop. You arrive limited and leave transformed. The guru differs. The logic doesn’t.”
- Men Explain Epstein To Me: Susan Pedersen writes in the LRB about the continuing fallout from the Epstein files, and how, months in, so little of it seems to focus on the women who were trafficked and raped as a result of the boys’ club and the island. I was listening to the poor sap doing the ‘defend the Prime Minister’ sacrificial media round on the Today programme yesterday, and, while I’m not normally a fan of Emma Barnett’s particular style of presentation, her indignation and disgust at the idea that a Prime Minister who had known that Mandy had been mates with a convicted paedo and STILL hired him as ambassador could continue to describe himself as ‘a defender of women and girls’ rights’ were entirely merited.
- The Danger of the Epistemic Cocoon: Without wishing to blow my own trumpet, I have for several years now been telling anyone who will bother to listen to me (weirdly a dwindling number, whodathunkit?!) that one of the big impacts of AI that we really should start thinking about and preparing for is the inevitable endpoint where everyone has their own AI companion to ask about the world, when everyone’s AI companion is different and tailored to their specific worldview and epistemology, and what happens when some of those companions are basically Nazis. AND LO! This is, basically, a smart and well-thought-through expansion of that thesis, written by someone cleverer and more thoughtful than me, and you should read it because it is 100% true and coming – here’s the setup, but please do read the rest, it is worth it: “A new generation of systems is changing the architecture of the information environment. AI companions and conversational agents, designed for continuous interaction, do not compete for attention through visibility. They operate through dialogue. They learn from repeated conversations, adapt to emotional cues and gradually align with the communication style of the user. Over time they can become a familiar presence in a person’s cognitive landscape. I describe these systems as synthetic friends. During a recent webinar where I presented this research, the discussion quickly revealed how many new questions this transformation raises. The most immediate concern people express is whether these systems will produce misinformation. That fear is understandable but it captures only part of the problem. Conversational models are already capable of providing explanations that are clearer and more structured than much of what circulates in social media feeds. The deeper issue concerns the role these systems may come to play in the way people interpret information. When a conversational agent becomes a persistent interlocutor it can gradually evolve into a reference point for making sense of events. This is where the idea of an epistemic cocoon becomes relevant. Instead of encountering information primarily through public networks, a user increasingly interacts with a single adaptive system that learns their preferences, emotional signals and conversational habits. Over time this relationship can generate a personalised cognitive environment in which information is filtered, interpreted and reinforced through a continuous interaction between user and machine. Once this possibility is taken seriously, a series of practical and conceptual questions begins to emerge.”
- Art & AI – Is This Theft?: Sean Bonner, whose AI artbot I have featured in the Insta section above, writes thoughtfully about his perspective on the AI, art, creativity and theft debate – Bonner is himself an artist, albeit one who takes an unusually-open approach to copyright and ownership, and I found his arguments interesting and occasionally compelling, but equally there’s one fairly major gap in his piece, namely the fact that WE ARE HUMANS and The Machine is, well, The Machine. It’s possible that Bonner doesn’t consider this a meaningful (moral) distinction, but, well, I am going to suggest that the vast majority of people actually DO when it comes to ownership and creativity, and this is why his arguments will fall on deaf ears, in the main. Still, I thought that this paragraph was worth reproducing in full as it offers a decent explanation of why I remain convinced that the vast majority of artists’ legal actions against the models are going to lose in the end (sorry): “There is a very important distinction between how humans and AIs learn though, and that’s scale. Systematic, industrial volume ingestion of work is very different from organic human learning and I won’t pretend otherwise. That’s not an after the fact realization either, that’s literally the value proposition. An LLM based AI has a memory of more imagery than a human could experience in an entire lifetime, which means a human using that AI as a collaborative creative tool has a reference library billions of times larger than a human relying on only their own memory. This absolutely changes the scope of what is being discussed, but the question we’re left with is does that scale change the ethical category of the work or just the degree of it? It’s easy to understand that stealing a record and making a copy of it are different things, and making 10,000 copies of it doesn’t change that very real difference – but it’s not as easy to explain the ethical difference between using 10 paintings as inspiration vs using 10 million. There are as many differing opinions as there are paintings, and I don’t have a concrete answer. This is all brand new territory that all of us will have to figure out as we go. “
- Verification Bandwidth: OK, this one’s an academic paper but I promise that it is relatively-readable and makes sense. The basic premise here is that the big economic shift that is coming can basically be summarised as ‘we used to have to do all the work, but now we’re going to have to make sure that all the work is right; the larger the gap between the amount of work done, and the amount of time/capacity we have to check if said work is right, the bigger the fcukups we’re going to be faced with, and, as such, it’s very very very important that we devote some time to thinking about this now, before it becomes too late.” Or, er, in academic language: “For policymakers, the defining market failure is the unpriced “Trojan Horse” externality (XA) where firms deploying unverified agents capture private gains while 2 socializing systemic risk. Confronting this requires treating verification infrastructure and ground truth as foundational public goods, accelerating broad access to human augmentation and synthetic practice, and implementing liability regimes that internalize tail risks—ensuring that safe scaling is not outcompeted by reckless deployment. The reward is commensurate with the stakes: the broadest expansion of public-good provision in generations, delivered at marginal costs that make genuine universal access economically feasible. Ultimately, ensuring humanity remains the architect of its intelligence requires that verification capacity scale commensurately with AI capabilities—through aggressive investment in observability, human augmentation, synthetic practice, cryptographic provenance, and liability regimes that internalize tail risk. Only by scaling our bandwidth for verification alongside our capacity for execution can we ensure that the intelligence we have summoned preserves the humanity that initiated it.”
- The Doge Testimony: You may not care about the whole DOGE thing what with not being a North American, which is a totally reasonable position and one which I largely share, but it’s worth reading this analysis by 404 Media of the recent hearings in which some of the staffers testified as to what they did and why, because it does rather get to the (RACIST) heart of what is being done and the reasons (RACISM) for the clampdown on ‘DEI’, particularly in light of the fact that people like Nigel Farage (RACIST) and former Brewdog ‘punk’ (POSSIBLY NOT RACIST BUT DEEPLY UNLIKABLE AND FUNDAMENTALLY THICK) James Watts are very keen on doing the same in the UK, and how fundamentally fcuking hateful and dumb the whole thing was; mean-spirited AND pointless, which is a particularly compelling combination.
- The Decline In Literacy Is A Design Problem: To be clear, I AM NOT INCLUDING THIS BECAUSE IT IS A GOOD ARTICLE. I am, though, including it because of the delicious irony about a slightly-haughty piece about the perceived decline in literacy BEING WRITTEN BY A FCUKING AI. It’s also quite astonishing to me that Aeon, ostensibly a ‘serious’ publication, let this one through with nary a complaint (although on that note there was a piece by Jude Wanga I linked to a few weeks back which, on reflection, had a BIG whiff of AI about it which I totally failed to sniff (as did the LRB’s editors), so I should wind my neck in a bit, probably) – it’s worth going to the comments to see the ‘author’ engaging with praise and, er, totally ignoring all the people saying ‘this is fcuking AI’. Anyway, I am including this for no other reason than the juxtaposition of headline and text made me laugh quite a lot, and also quite sad.
- 25 Years of Eggs: A man who has inexplicably kept all of his shopping receipts over the past few decades (no, I have no idea why, but I think he is a software engineer and, well, draw your own conclusions) writes about using AI to work out details of how much he has spent on eggs, how the price has tracked, etc etc. This is not particularly interesting, unless you want a blow-by-blow account of workflow, etc, but I am including it because there is a very real treat for all you AI haters out there when you get to the end and realise how much it has cost the dev in tokens to work out his total egg spend. Maybe fully-AI-powered businesses aren’t quite the economic miracle they’re being sold as!
- The BBC On Charter Renewal: Ok, fine, I can’t imagine there are that many of you with a burning desire to read a few thousand words of the BBC’s own perspective on its charter renewal process, but I fcuking love the BBC, it has employed me on many occasions and it is a genuinely Good Thing overall, even leaving aside the seemingly-monthly fcukups, and this document made me genuinely sad. If you are British and if you value the idea of soft power in the world at all, even if you are one of those idiots who think the BBC is ‘broken’, please read this. “In today’s media landscape, disinformation is thriving and a crisis of trust has left many of us feeling increasingly isolated and divided. Social media echo chambers are driving us apart, and there are fewer and fewer opportunities to engage in open debate, share unifying experiences, and find common ground. We face an all-out assault on truth and facts worldwide, with the ability to access reliable information now intertwined with our national security and stability. Countries with media vulnerable to polarisation and capture are also more vulnerable to democratic disruption. In this context, the BBC’s value as a UK-owned platform able to compete globally is clear, as well as the growing importance of the BBC World Service as a critical piece of national security infrastructure. Meanwhile, economic pressures and financial uncertainty make it vital that the UK backs sectors with the biggest potential for growth. With the BBC as its cornerstone, our creative industries sector continues to be one of this country’s greatest success stories and the potential for future growth is clear.”
- GenZ Lives in the Archive: On the flattening of cultural time thanks to TikTok, Reels and Shorts (all of which have done away with the timestamp) and the fact that for the first time in our species’ history the youngest among us have access to EVERYTHING from EVERY TIME all at once, and how that flattening and evening out of everything is perhaps behind the vague sense of cultural grey goo we’re currently all experiencing: “The internet functions to preserve everything, and it’s easy to get lost in that great, gray sea. The problem of selection, of where to put your attention, is increasingly grave and increasingly intractable. The mind cannot find a definite port-of-call in this endlessly heaving, endlessly shifting reality. Curating vibes isn’t enough.”
- The Rise of the Techno-Pastoral: Or, ‘why nostalgia for better tech is bullsh1t really’, and the creation of this fictional, frictionless, smoothed and streamlined idea of an imagined tech past is bad for us. I felt this quite strongly as someone who doesn’t really ‘get’ nostalgia as a concept – “I was faced with Discmans, mp3 players and Game Boys being given the same symbolic weight as board games and sports. Items that, in my own childhood, were often vilified in much the same way as smartphones. The way this author’s childhood nostalgia overlapped with my own lived experiences of education had to me laid bare the artifice of yearning for a “pre-tech” existence. If a Game Boy is now a delightful little gadget for teenagers to play with between classes, won’t smartphones eventually also become a gleefully simple retro computing device once something better comes along? If high school’s “salvation” can be recognized by way of a return to 80s kid comedy antics and Weezer CDs, are we really chasing solutions to the ills of technology, or just blind nostalgia?”
- Building Brasilia: I think that of all the world’s biggest nations, Brazil is the one where people would have most difficulty identifying the capital – be honest, most people think it’s Rio because, well, what the fcuk happens in Brazilia (apart from, you know, the governing stuff)? This is a really interesting piece about how and why the city came to be built – 4 YEARS! THEY BUILT IT IN FOUR YEARS! HS2!!!!!1111111 – and the curiosity of its design, and, honestly, I really enjoyed this given I have basically thought of Brasilia as ‘Tropical Milton Keynes’ for most of my life.
- Cramped Condos and Unfriendly Neighbours: This is a Canadian piece and as such…feels quite Canadian, with its slightly-homely focus on ideas of ‘community’ which more cynical nations have long since abandoned. Ok, I am exaggerating slightly, but there is a certain earnestness about the piece which does feel Canuck to its core (apologies to any Canadians reading this, your country is lovely – apart from Ottowa, which honestly sucks and which I hope never to have to return to, ever) – that said, I felt there’s something true about the general thrust of this, that urban design feels increasingly-antithetical to the very concept of ‘community’, something I see every time I wander through the new towers in Nine Elms, each with their own small Sainsbury’s and Costa at the base, and see people in dressing gowns and sliders shuffling 40 meters down and seven across to buy a latte or some proteins, maybe grab a bag from a Deliveroo guy, and then go right back to their flats, alone, to continue watching Netflix.
- The Mecca of the Lanyard Class: This is a wonderful piece in the New Statesman, about Confex, the trade show for the trade show industry. “At the gates of Confex, silver orbs hang in the air, bouncing on the updraft from hidden fans. The words “thought bubble” are written on the orbs. Beyond them, a stand demonstrates how chocolate lollipops can be printed with corporate brands. In The Golden Bough, the Victorian anthropologist James George Frazer documents the ancient and widespread practice – from Europe to Japan to India to the Aztec empire – of devouring one’s god. The Logopop is the latest iteration of that ritual, a secular eucharist: the body of BP, the blood of Invesco Perpetual. Nearby, a machine creates an alcoholic vapour that you inhale through a straw. One of the Logopop staff asks if I can guess the flavour. Salted caramel seems a safe bet. She shakes her head. “Pornstar martini.””
- How To Pull a Tennis Player: A short instructional piece by former pro Andrea Petkovic should you ever be interested in attempting to bone that dullest of creatures, the professional sportsperson – and even in that exalted pantheon, word has it that tennis players are a particularly tedious breed. Anyway, this is short but it made me laugh, not least because it explicitly points out that people who play tennis all day every day are, in the main, dull and ‘basic’ – BECAUSE OF COURSE THEY ARE.
- Mozart Balls: Fun, weird, grotesque and creepy short fiction, from Granta’s recent issue about shrinks, by Camilla Grudova: “I have dozens of Greek vases – not authentic but from tourist shops. I have an imitation copper ‘mask of Agamemnon’, jade figurines and tiny Chinese cork dioramas of landscapes in narrow rectangles of glass mounted on ebony stands, baboons, donkeys and birds of marble and wood, a porcelain French bulldog, clusters of Pelham puppets, dragon- and bear-shaped netsuke, tin toys, skulls of plastic and plastic dinosaurs too, cabbage dolls. I really think it is the plastic items that offend the boards and associations. And of course, my chow chow, who has a tongue like black pudding and doesn’t like to be bathed or brushed, and so smells. Many patients have had a traumatic interaction with a smelly dog in childhood. He earns his supper. His predecessor was taxidermised and stuffed, is kept in my consultation room too, and Chow Chow II sometimes humps the dry and lifeless Chow Chow I, an act that indeed helped a middle-aged male patient confront the fact that his sexual anxieties stemmed from being ‘humped’ by a loose German shepherd in a public park as a young boy.”
- Stay Classy: An absolutely brutal shoeing of Prince Andrew, the royal nonce, by Andrew O’Hagan in the LRB – this is, honestly, a near-perfect piece; the subject, the material (this is ostensibly a review of the recent biography of the Prince and the Duchess of York, which is not so much a warts’n’all portrait as one which is exclusively, entirely wart, just a huge fcuking growth), the humour, the anger…honestly, do yourself a treat and read this, it really is brutally funny and, at the same time, viscerally furious. “With some people, money and sex are the only truths. It’s the ultimate delinquency to believe that gratification itself is power. Bringing down the royal family may be the least terrible consequence of everything Andrew has done. When a lazy aristocrat from a dying dynasty uses a helicopter to travel seventeen miles, the edifice shakes. But when that same man rapes a 17-year-old and calls her a liar, it is the end of days. The gift of Andy and Fergie, which comes at too high a price, has been to bring the antiseptic of daylight to the culture of royal privilege.”
- The Rat: The last longread this week is by Jude Doyle, about war and killing and forgiveness and memory and religion and morality and and and. I thought this was excellent, and, for various reasons, it feels like an appropriate essay to end with this week.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: