I’m in the curious position as I write this intro of having no idea how long this week’s Curios is going to sit in inbox limbo, held hostage by whatever fcukup is currently causing your work email to be fcuked into next week, and so as such I’m slightly-disinclined to put much effort into an intro which noone might end up seeing (except, well, that’s actually always the case, isn’t it? ARE ANY OF YOU REAL ANYMORE).
BUT! I do, briefly, want to mention that, at the end of a(nother) week in which we’re once again reminded of quite how much of modern life, and indeed the weird vicissitudes of human civilisation and history, is determined solely by male sexual incontinence in all its various forms, I find the Jensen Huang thing VERY funny. Not because of the philandering (poor – if, fine, not *literally* – the soon-to-be-former Mrs Huang), or the spying, but because of the degree to which it’s just so perfectly emblematic of so much of our species. Ambition? CHECK! Avidity? CHECK? Arrogance? CHECK! An absolute inability for men to say no to the possibility of sex? CHECK CHECK CHECK! Truly, it’s a microcosm for SO MUCH of what makes us ‘special’ and, in an odd way, there’s been something reassuring in the realisation that however much we may now live algomandated, mathematically-determined virtual lives, we’re also basically the same useless, horny monkeys as we were three thousand years ago; all that’s changed is the quality and breadth of protein we have at our disposal. There’s a direct throughline to Jensen in 2026 from some tribal chieftain in 1898BC losing territory carefully won over several generations as a result of one poorly-advised dalliance.
Anyway, if you’re reading this and your work email’s still down, YOU’RE WELCOME ENJOY THE LINKS ON THE BOSS’S TIME!
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios and you are not better than Jensen, if you are honest with yourself, and you know it.
THE SECTION WHICH CAN’T WAIT UNTIL WE’VE ALL SWITCHED TO A SOVEREIGN SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE INSTEAD, PT.1:
- The Killchain Tribunal: It’s rare that I start with a proper, “YOU MUST PLAY THIS” recommendation, but, seriously, YOU MUST PLAY THIS. It is clever and interesting and HORRIBLE and Morally Interesting and really nicely-made, and it will make you feel bad, and, honestly, WHAT MORE RECOMMENDATION DO YOU NEED? Eh? You need me to tell you what it is? Oh, ok, fine. The Killchain Tribunal is an interactive experience (it is very much not a game) which, basically, tasks you with examining the facts behind three separate instances of military action being undertaken against illegitimate targets by AI-assisted systems of varying degrees of autonomy and sophistication, and determining where in the so-called ‘kill chain’ responsibility for the errors – and, subsequently, the deaths – should sit. You do this by watching three short vignettes in which you’re presented with the same visual interface as combatants and get to hear their communications, giving you the chance to see what information they had at their disposal and how they were assessing it before a selection of unfortunate civilians got mulched – at six separate points in each, you get to weigh in on who you think is, fundamentally, responsible for different actions being taken. None of this is real – all the scenarios you’re shown are fake – but everything is pretty much plausible, even down to the final scenario with the chillingly-familiar LLM in the loop (there’s a very dark gag at the end which made me do a proper, horrified lol-bark) and I promise you the first time you realise you’re watching unknowing civilians as dots on a military map, ambling unwittingly towards their death, you will feel FCUKING AWFUL. Honestly, this is so so so smart – it’s a good piece of interactive storytelling, a great educational tool, it makes you THINK, and (if you’ll allow me the brief indulgence of linking to my own work) it addresses a series of very contemporary concerns. This should win prizes. Oh, and because I imagine some of you care, I am pretty sure it’s built with significant amounts of AI assistance – but even if you think you hate AI, please do try this because it’s ace.
- Battle Draw: It’s only been a few months since he won the 2026 Tiny Award, but the seemingly-tireless fount of fun internet stuff that is Neal Agarwal has once again seen fit to bless you (yes, YOU, you ingrate!) with a truly magical little browsertoy. Battle Joy at first didn’t capture me – it’s an autobattler, which, if you’re not familiar with the genre, basically means ‘pick a bunch of different combat units from a menu and then chuck them into a BATTLE ARENA to see which wins in the final reckoning, and which in general I can take or leave; in this instance there are about 20-odd different unit types – soldiers of various sorts (archers, romans, ninjas, etc), then a tab full of animals (gorillas, snakes, cheetahs, etc), and then some mythical, fantastical beasts for good measure (zombies, dragons, you know the drill) – and it initially seemed a bit shallow and simplistic…and then I played around some more and realised it is SO FUN. Basically there are all sorts of hidden, weird little systems buried within the code, all of which interact with each other in all sorts of interesting ways – so for example a wizard can turn other units into frogs, the size of the frog will be determined by the type of creature affected, larger frogs can be ridden, horse-like, by certain other units (like, for example, gorillas), units can be set on fire, or turned into zombies, or turned invisible, or…oh, look, just have a play, this is really very clever indeed and there’s a LOT of joy in just filling the screen with two dozen grenadiers, nine dragons and about 100-odd mice and seeing what happens.
- Chimera: I initially dismissed this as an AI-powered ripoff of the unsettling wonder that was Pink Trombone (a website I have now mentioned twice in as many weeks, suggesting that fleshy, laryngeal simulation is once again THE NEW HOTNESS!), and while I was *sort-of* right (this is very much, er, ‘inspired by’ the original and I am pretty sure it’s a machine-coded site) it’s also, I have to concede, actually quite fun, mainly by dint of the setting that lets you make the model sing, and where you can see all the mad contortions that your meaty soundpipes have to make to produce the pleasing warbling we all so love to hear (the ‘beatbox’ view is pretty cool too). The logical next step here is to render this in those very thin cross-sections of Actual People you occasionally see in museums, or in the style of now-deceased German thanatophile Gunter von Hagens’ ‘Bodyworlds’, so if anyone would like to make that (now I come to think of it, really quite horrible) idea come to life then you can have it for FREE!
- How Fit Does TikTok Think You Are?: To be honest I’m a touch skeptical of this, but, also, we’re all vain and curious, so. I featured Ayo Omolewa’s breakdowns of app code in here a few weeks ago – one of his latest ones was on TikTok, in which he broke down some of the factors which its algorithm apparently takes into account when choosing which videos to show you (you can see the whole thing here – caveat emptor as it’s just one bloke and he doesn’t show his workings, but, well, it’s not *not* creepy, and the ‘are you lying down?’ thing is…a bit dark imho), and this is a recreation he built on his website which apparently runs the app’s attractiveness assessment on you in-browser. Want to know whether TikTok thinks YOUR face is pretty enough to show to the world? TAKE THE TEST AND FIND OUT! Fwiw I did try this out in a moment of unlikely, uncharacteristic vanity and all I’m going to say is that based on the score it gave me I am calling bullsh1t because it was…kinder than I think is accurate, let’s just say.
- Paint By Numbers Together: On the one hand, you may look at this and think ‘Matt, why the everliving fcuk would I want to waste some of this precious gift of life bestowed on me by some unknown force on doing a digital paint-by-numbers experiment with a bunch of strangers online?’ – on the other, try it for three minutes and then tell me it’s not soothing as all fcuk. SEE? THIS IS MINDFULNESS YOU CNUTS! This does seem like people are slowly, gently coming across it and filling it in, and while it’s really not My Sort Of Vibe, in general, I can’t pretend I didn’t enjoy spending a quiet five minutes clicking the right colours into the right squares and playing a small part in bringing a collaborative landscape to life.
- Portals: Endless Worlds: Those of you who do the Full Curios Experience and do both this section AND the longreads are a) wonderful, dedicated people who are really sucking the marrow from the bones of life, well done!; and b) going to read about this a bit later on, but, for the rest of you, this is an experimental site made by Ethan Mollick as part of his pre-release access to Anthropic’s latest AI model. It is…yeah, this is very impressive, seriously. It’s worth clicking the big longread link and finding out a bit more about the process of how it was made (oh, fine, you can have it early, here), but, should you be LAZY and ENTITLED then I can give you a brief explanation; basically Mollick “gave Claude a one-paragraph description of an endless, hands-off journey through 3D worlds linked by portals, and told it to “do this and make it awe inspiring,”” and this is the resulting site. All the graphics are made by The Machine, but, more impressively, all the *ideas* came from The Machine, meaning all the 400+ different 3d worlds you can fly through were ‘imagined’ by the LLM. It’s worth spending a bit of time with this one, because the variety is astonishing and there are so many nice little touches in so many of the worlds you pass through, tiny little visual easter eggs and flourishes of animation and things that, if you squint, might almost be…jokes, maybe, and, yes, ok, it is also fair to say that it’s all derivative of stuff that has been made in the past by Actual People (BAD PLAGIARISM MACHINE!) but, still, it’s pretty fcuking mad.
- Backrooms: Dimension 9: Gah, *another* machinelink – sorry, but this one’s pretty incredible too, turns out. This is basically a sort of 3d walking simulator, through which you can explore an AI-generated version of the ‘Backrooms’ trope (and this is an interesting part of it, imho – Backrooms’ status as a sort of Creative Commons-ish canvas available to anyone to use makes it feel like it’s something which is…ok to have AI riff on, though I would be curious to know whether you all agree) – it’s all experienced through a sort of film camera grain, lending the whole thing a very eerie quality (as is right and proper), and there are MYSTERIOUS THINGS to uncover throughout, and, maybe, some sort of larger, overarching story-slash-horrific-truth to discover, and while I haven’t spent quite enough time with this to work out whether the depth is real or simply another example of shiny-but-shallow machinework, it’s another undeniably stunning bit of worldbuilding by the latest round of models.
- Komrad: This is a one-note gag, but it very much made me laugh (what can I say? There’s a certain style of bleak, Latvian joke-style humour which this mines which I find personally very appealing) and maybe it will make you briefly smile too, It was sent to me by its creator, Jony, who wrote: “Komrad is a parody of this year’s AI agent launches: basically everyone promises us an “AI Agent that does everything for you”, so I created one that does nothing for you (and is proud of it). Experience wise it’s a terminal from a fictional Soviet ministry. Just type a request and you’ll get the hang of it immediately.” This is no more than 30-45s, but there’s something quite nice about the tone/style/vibe of the thing, even if it is AN Other Claudesite.
- HearHearFM: Have you ever thought “wow, I love writing film reviews on Letterboxd and sharing my opinions with the wider cinema-loving community; I wish I could do the same for concerts which I have attended!”? You…you have? How queer. Still, consider your weird desire fulfilled thanks to HearHearFM, which is, er, Letterboxd but for gigs! The site’s Claudeslop, but it exists as an iOS app too and, look, I haven’t tried this because as I might have mentioned before I couldn’t give anything resembling a fcuk about ‘communities’ but perhaps this will be the appwebsitething which finally makes your oddly-unsatisfying life complete. Maybe.
- Animatronic Rehearsal: I know I say this more often than behooves someone who writes a newsletter about ‘interesting links’, but, er, I really don’t have the faintest fcuking clue what this website is about or what it’s for. Still, click the link and enjoy a CG representation of, er, a…weird robot cat skeleton? Singing? While being controlled/manipulated by an off-screen pair of hands, wrangling some sort of homebrewed, hacked-together control system in a weird sort of steam/crustpunk fashion? YES THAT IS ALL YOU ARE GETTING, CLICK THE LINK AND JUST GO WITH IT!
- Scorchball: A reader writes! I mean, I say ‘reader’, none of these fcukers read Curios, they just find it when asking Claude to recommend a newsletter to promote their fcuking projects, the INGRATES. Ahem. Anyway, SOME FCUKER CALLED TOM WRITES! “I made a 24/7 live sports channel for a made-up sport, simulated and shown in pixel art, called Scorchball TV. Basically you can drop into the channel and something is always happening: a live match, highlights, studio analysts talking about stuff, there’s even an offseason draft and awards show. It’s pretty goofy and I paid $50 for the domain for the year for some reason, but I am reasonably proud that it’s out there for people to see and perhaps even enjoy. I think it’s a relatively unique site and concept, and might be something people would entertain visiting.” This is, to be clear, entirely pointless and all very lo-fi, to the point where it looks quite a lot like a C64 game, and yet…look, I am not proud of this but I have to admit that I spent approximately six minutes ‘watching’ a game of this made-up sport the other evening (I was waiting for water to boil, leave me alone) and…it was strangely, weirdly, inexplicably addictive, although I really couldn’t tell you why. Anyway, part of me likes this more than I feel I ought to; I am, tentatively, glad it exists (even though, to be clear, it really doesn’t need to).
- Reader Funded: This purports to be a global directory of ALL of the reader-funded publishing projects in the world – to which, obviously, LOL IT IS NOTHING OF THE SORT. But! It’s an interesting idea – LLMslop, obvs, but still – and, to my mind at least, most useful as a reminder of the fact that THE CREATOR ECONOMY IS B0LLOCKS! Look at the number of sites on here. Look at the ‘new’ tab. How is anyone meant to find them all? How is discovery supposed to work? How are all these people going to earn money from individual subscribers? How does the economics of any of this work outside the top 1%? IT DOESN’T FFS! Still, if you want a place to find new newsletters or podcasts to read (or sponsor or whatever) this might be interesting or useful in some small way.
- The AI Song Contest 2026 Finalists: The AI Song of the Year Contest is back for 2026! NOONE CARES! Nonetheless, if you’re curious as to what the community of people making music with The Machine has decided is the best/most interesting output of the past 12 months you can check out the shortlist here; I personally don’t think that the outputs are as weird or interesting-sounding as they have been in previous years in which I have featured this, but perhaps I am just jaded. In any case, this leans more towards electronica and beats and noise than any attempt to pass this off as Actual Real Humans – fwiw, my personal pick is this absolute horrorshow of a track by Dada Bots, but pick your own!
- Lidar Great Britain: Would you like a map of the UK where you can see the topography of the land rendered as LIDAR scans? Do you know what those words mean? Can…can you explain some of it to me?
- Local Bath House: Via Kris, this is a beautiful little…interactive experience thing, which simulates the experience of going to a small bath house in minimal, pleasingly-pastel-ish graphical style. This is, honestly, soothing in a way in which I didn’t expect it to me, and I enjoyed the ritual elements included in the experience (you WILL take a shower!). Via Kris, as all the loveliest websites are.
- Queer Phone: I like this. A project by Queer Streams, a queer collective based in Bristol, UK, interested in building, subverting and hacking technology, which offers a UK phone number which you can call to listen to poems, messages, and soundscapes of and from the queer community. ACTUAL DIGITAL ART!. “The project aims to repurpose and expand the way we can use our mobile phones to connect to our community – to provide a space for new forms of voices and a resource for new ways of feeling and being together. We want to provide a counter to the expansive yet extractive promises of the social media on our phones and hegemonic communication networks that have led to people, especially marginalised groups, feeling detached and alienated from the community around them. As artist Paul Chan writes “communication technology has increased communication and decreased understanding”. We believe that reducing the experience of communication to simple and direct sound (or transcripts for users who require them) facilitates a freedom of expression between people who are connected through their queerness. In turn, the telephone line allows for a web of disembodied voices to share ways of caring, of desire and of recognition.” SO THERE.
- Poet Horse: A website based off a simple observation, specifically: “The best way to read a poem is to pretend each line is the name of a horse; so the poem is just a list of horses.” Want to see poems presented as, er, horses? EVERY WORD A HORSE??? Oddly this…sort-of works; it turns out that putting words on horses makes EVERY utterance very powerful. There’s a system of rules at play underpinning the horses/poems; not every word has a horse, so there’s an element of constraint on what can be composed using the equine interface and, look, this is…quite hard to explain, it turns out, so just click the link and let yourself be swept up in the patchwork horsey verse. READ A HORSEY POEM!
- GovBins: A website collecting photographs of all the different types of bin used by the UK’s councils, for recycling and garden waste and all the other types of waste we as a society produce. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT! This has been running since 2017, but is somehow still also THE most Bluesky-coded website I have ever seen.
By Josh Juett
THE SECTION WHICH CAN’T WAIT UNTIL WE’VE ALL SWITCHED TO A SOVEREIGN SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE INSTEAD, PT.2:
- Lo-Pi Radio: Another week, another really smart project by the clever people at The Pudding; this is a neat little in-browser infinite beats tool, which makes music based on the infinite, never-repeating sequence that is Pi. Each digit corresponds to a different note – per the explanation, “Every note of the melody you hear is the next digit of pi, in order. Each digit is a note in the Fmaj scale. 0 and 9 are rests (silence). Digits are not skipped or changed, but we’ve created a set of simple rules (and some fiddly ones that aren’t worth explaining) that decide when each note plays and how long it lasts to best match the underlying progression.” As I have previously mentioned (Christ, I am SO TEDIOUSLY REPETIOUS, I am sorry; in my defence, though, you try writing 10k works a week for all this time and see how fcuking original YOU feel. What’s that? You wouldn’t write all these words in the first place? FINE, MOCK MY SICKNESS YOU FCUKING CNUTS), I do love a good sonification project and this is both a neat idea and a really sonically-pleasing execution.
- Remade Wiki: Via Patrick at Sentiers comes this repository of vibecoded software ripo…sorry, ‘independent software reimplementations’! “Some of the most interesting projects in software engineering begin with a simple question: What if we built this ourselves? Whether it’s recreating a familiar application, reproducing an operating system’s behavior, or implementing a compatible alternative from scratch, these projects demonstrate what’s possible through curiosity, ingenuity, and persistence. Yet many of these efforts are scattered across GitHub, personal websites, and obscure corners of the internet. Some have thriving communities. Others are maintained by a handful of dedicated developers. Many are difficult to discover unless you already know what you’re looking for. Remade was created to bring these projects together.” This is all very much technical software for technical people, but if you’re in the market for (eg) an alternative to Ableton, say, or a Spotify-esque shell for music, then you will very much find it here (but, also, CAVEAT FCUKING EMPTOR). Oh, and there’s this one for SaaS products too, if you’re interested. On the one hand, incidents like today’s MSoft issues might make you think ‘hmm, moving off the Big Tech Stack might not be a bad idea’; on the other, you think this stuff is any MORE secure? WELCOME TO THE RICKETY FUTURE, EVERYONE!
- The 2026 Nikon Microphotography Contest: I thought we’d done this already this year, but apparently that was the video selection – this is the still image contest for photos of REALLY REALLY SMALL STUFF and WOW are these some, er, photos of some really really small things! The winning image this year is very pleasing, I must say, not least because it’s a little more layman-comprehensible than some of the previous victors and other entrants; like, I understand that being able to take a photo of a single atomic particle is really impressive but, also, it’s just a blob and I don’t really know what it means, whereas show me ink dripping onto paper and I know what’s going on and can appreciate the TRUE MAJESTY of the image. I’m…I’m quite basic and thick, it turns out, which is a depressing realisation to come to at the exact point at which my professional ‘utility’ (lol) gets whittled down to basically-zero.
- The Retro Codex: This is a nice idea – I don’t love the execution and general vibes of the whole thing (Jesus, I am SO DEMANDING) but the concept is cute. Retrocodex exists to offer a corrective to all the things you may have been taught at school (or which were generally considered by society to be TRUTHS) but which have since been superseded by science or just GENERAL HUMAN LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT and which are no longer in fact the case; type in your year of high school graduation (it assumes you’re American, and, well, I am too tired to argue with it) and it will offer you a breakdown of all the things you might have been taught and how they have since been corrected. None of what you’ll get shown here should surprise you – you ought, I hope, have disabused yourself by now of the idea that brown sugar is somehow superior in health terms to white sugar, for example – but there’s a vaguely-curious bit of spelunking to do if you’d like to laugh at Past Us about all the dumb things we used to believe (don’t think too hard about what a version of this 30 years hence might look like and what beliefs we’re going to end up loling at – or, more likely not loling at all and instead looking back with regret and anger – come 2060).
- Cameo: An utterly pointless idea which I cannot for the life of me imagining anyone wanting to experience or use, but which is weird enough to briefly intrigue me! Cameo isn’t the ‘book Nigel Farage to say something racist on camera for the lols’ website with which it shares a name – instead, this is, er, a platform which lets you pretend that you’re any previously-living notable person (as defined by ‘has a page on English Wikipedia’), write a social media post in their name and imagined style about their life, and then pick a selection of other imagined historical figures to respond to said message. WHY?? WHO WANTS THIS? WHO IS PAYING FOR THE TOKEN COST? Literally inexplicable, and yet here we are.
- Doory: Another potentially-useful tool for those of you looking for a free tool with which to make posters, flyers and the rest, but who don’t want to a) pay for Canva; or b) use The Machine; Doory is, as far as I can tell, entirely free and can be used either online or downloaded and used locally, and you can use it to do all sorts of design gubbins that I personally don’t care about because I am about as visual as…fcuk, I can’t think of a famous blind person right now (sorry, famous blind people, for your societal erasure), but insert whichever immediately springs to mind. Anyway, this could be useful for loads of you so YOU’RE WELCOME.
- MakaKids: You may have seen the news this week that the UK is considering restricting access to YouTube Kids as part of the implementation of the as-yet-undefined social media ban set to come into force next spring – MakaKids is a potential workaround for that (and, also, an alternative for any of you who have small children, have tried out YouTube Kids and realised that it’s full of weird sh1t and the algo can go to some…strange places if you don’t pay close attention). Per the blurb, “Maka is the only streaming app for kids 0-6 built on child development science. Every episode in the Maka catalog is sourced by our experts and evaluated through a framework developed with researchers at Yale Child Study Center to ensure alignment to your child’s age and stage. There’s no algorithm optimized for maximizing watch time, no autoplay into random content, and no ads. We’re not trying to keep your kid watching longer. We’re helping them watch better…The catalog is a mix of shows you and your kid(s) already know like Sesame Street, Franklin, and Pocoyo plus newer discoveries from boutique studios like Pompon Little Bear and work by independent creators like Wooby & Fotty. Each show is hand-picked for how it supports a child’s development.” That’s obviously the promo copy – I a) don’t have kids; and b) have no interest in watching kids’ TV and so I can’t personally tell you whether this is good or not…but, equally, something that is actually vetted by people feels like a better idea, safety-and-quality-wise, than the alternative, so a tentative recommendation for this.
- Starlog Magazine: As I have bored you with all before, I do not personally care for Star Wars, Star Trek or any of that jazz – no shade to you if you do (and, look, you’re a middle-aged person reading an overlong, obsessive newsletter about Odd Things On The Internet, there’s a better-than-evens chance that you’re a closer Trekker or weirdo Midichlorian obsessive, and THAT’S OK – just, er, don’t ever try and talk to me about it because I will think significantly less of you), though, and, by way of proof that I don’t hold your tedious fandom against you, let me offer you this WONDERFUL archive collection of back issues of Starlog Magazine, which started in the…1960s? and has seemingly gone on FOREVER. Basically every single big scifi property has been covered in here, and a certain type of geek may click this link and never emerge (gift or trap – YOU DECIDE!).
- Walkably: Ooh, this is an interesting tool – a bit uncomfortably close to the 15-minute cities idea for you to share it in your local Facebook Group without someone making dark references to state control and chemtrails, fine, but for anyone who’s not an embarrassing, brain-captured moron then it’s a really neat tool for examining the livability of almost any address in Europe (it covers 31 countries including the UK, so PRACTICALLY the whole continent). Plug in any address and it will give you a walkability score based on how many of a set number of amenities (shops, culture, medical assistance, etc) are accessible within walking distance. SO useful for anyone traveling, moving house, or just generally researching a local area – bookmark it, you might find it useful.
- The Sunshine Atlas: I don’t, as a rule, tend to thing I suffer from moodswings at the changing seasons, but FCUK ME has this week been a tough one in terms of cold and leaden skies and wanting to basically just turn myself off until January (ok, fine, the imminent arrival of The Worst Time Of The Year doesn’t help either). If you would like to speculate as to where might be better to spend November than London (clue: SO MANY PLACES), you might enjoy The Sunshine Atlas, a website collecting information about how sunny the world’s cities are and showing it to you on a map, so you can plan exactly where the best place to emigrate to next year is because you have decided you are never putting yourself through the misery of an anglowinter ever again.
- Harmonica Automatica: This is all vibecoded, I think, but if you can see past that then there’s something actually quite pleasant going on here; the site is basically an ambient music generator with accompanying visualiser, letting you spin up ambient soundscapes based on…some sort of maths, which you can fiddle with and twist and shape, and which come with their own soothing, vaguely-meditative graphics…I didn’t want to like this when it was sent to me because, well, it’s a touch slop-y, but I have had it playing in the background while I type this and…I don’t hate it. Christ, WHAT a recommendation, fcuk’s sake Matt.
- Watched Earth: Oh balls, I didn’t want to like this either – and in many respects I don’t, it commits all the horrible design crimes I despise in Claude-coded sites, and the copy is grating in the extreme, and the interface and UX/UI is full of unnecessary cruft and meaningless guff…but, also, the fact that this can just be…spun up by The Machine (ok, fine, I am sure this wasn’t quite a one-shot project, but you know what I mean) is quite amazing. Put in any location in the world and it will pull satellite imagery including that site taken in the past 7 days; you can create timelapses of satellite images over the past decade so you can see how a region has been redeveloped over time…this is, annoyingly, really interesting and potentially quite useful, and I slightly-hate the fact that I think that.
- Hacker Tube: Would you like a website which collects ONLY the best-rated videos to have been posted on Hacker News over the past two decades? OH GOOD! This is like YouTube if you replaced the algorithm with ‘the collective wisdom of a bunch of increasingly middle-aged code geeks’, and if you want to find some VERY nerdy documentaries then I suggest setting the minimum video length to 1h+ and just surrendering to your Special Interest.
- The BlueskyMapsFeed: This is an interesting idea which at present doesn’t *quite* work, but which I think with a bit of tweaking could be genuinely useful. Basically it’s a topic triangulation tool for Bluesky feeds; you type in three topics you’re interested in and it shows you a map of users that sit around the intersection of those three topics. By clicking and dragging to capture a set of said users, it creates custom feeds of those people; so, in theory, you could use this to find people who post at the intersection of (eg) ‘green politics’ ‘fisting’ and ‘open source gardening’ (look, it’s Bluesky) and then create a custom feed JUST of those people. Which is potentially really really useful, or it would be if the interface was a bit better-designed and les clunky (this is where the vibecoding falls over a bit, as ever), but there’s enough utility here to make it worth fiddling with (and, also, it’s just such a smart way of finding people to follow and possibly something that is worth, er,’taking inspiration’ from).
- The Deep Cut: Ugh, MORE CLAUDESLOP – BUT! Also! A genuinely-useful tool which I think a lot of you will enjoy if you can just look past the design and the horrid copy! “The Deep Cut is a small window into the Internet Archive’s music collection. Each search brings five albums at random, each in a different style, leaving room for unexpected discoveries beyond recommendation feeds. Albums come from across the archive’s music collections: Jamendo, Netlabels, the Free Music Archive, Unlocked Recordings, digitized LPs, open source releases, hip-hop mixtapes, and Brazilian, Latin American and Colombian campesino music. Classical recordings are left out. Every pick is random. Each search samples a different slice of the archive and shuffles it, so nothing is ranked by plays or by what you listened to before. The one exception is hip-hop mixtapes, which need at least 1,000 downloads to keep out anonymous DJ compilations. Each album is checked before it reaches you: at least four tracks, an original cover, and no podcasts, radio or lectures. Releases from 2025 on also leave out albums that say they were made with AI tools such as Suno or Udio. Artist, year and region appear only when the record states them.” See what I mean about the prose? Still, this is actually quite fun and worth a play.
- The Beatles Never Broke Up: Those of you who are Beatles fans may know of this already – after all, it’s been going for YEARS – but it was new to me; based on the url I was expecting it to be AI rubbish, but NO! This is a GENUINE, OLDSCHOOL MUSICAL CURIOSITY! Would you like to read the story of one man’s chance encounter with an interdimensional traveller, who gifted him a tape from an alternate universe in which The Beatles never broke up? Would you like to LISTEN to that record? OH GOOD! I love this SO MUCH, honestly, and the amount of time and effort that has gone into the whole fictive project (becauseI do not in fact believe that there was ever a chance encounter with an interdimensional traveler, sorry).
- Free Photo Muscle: Look, I have no idea who you are and what you are into, or indeed why you might want a website seemingly dedicated to providing free stock photography of very, very muscular Japanese men, and I am not going to ask ANY questions about why you might want to click this link and stare covetously at their abs. I unironically love this, even though muscular Japanese men aren’t personally my cup of sexy tea – this selection in particular has given me huge joy.
- Quintu: Ok, full disclosure, this game is NOT for me – it is numbers-y and maths-y and I bounced off it pretty much immediately, but a) it was sent in by Tony, the person who made it, who seems nice; and b) Curios is not about ME and what I like (ok, fine it is a *bit*, but), it’s about YOU, and for all I know you will be rendered tumescent with maths-y joy by this.
- Starry Night Rider: Ride a bicycle through a (vibecoded) 3d representation of a Van Gogh-style city, collecting orbs and generally just sort of racing about the place; this is technically very impressive, but not *that* much fun – click it as a proof of concept, and then click the next one to see something similar-but-better.
- Truck: THIS IS A GENUINELY FUN LITTLE GAME! Ok, so as far as I can tell this is a partly-vibecoded toy made as a promo by New York-based studio TCW – it’s basically a simple ‘pick up and deliver parcels around a 3d city, racing against the clock’ game, and as such it is HUGELY derivative, but, honestly, fcuk me is this ACTUALLY FUN; I played it for a good 15 minutes last night and COULD HAVE KEPT GOING, which almost never happens with stuff like this. Honestly, this is really quite good – and a nice example of how ‘make a game as a promo tool’ really should be right at the top of every advermarketingprcnut’s list of ‘lazy, boilerplate activations to pitch in 2026’ because, honestly, the barrier to making something potentially quite good has never been lower.
- Taipei Rush: While you wait the SEVEN LONG DAYS til you can go on virtual Floridian killing sprees, why not amuse yourself with this VERY SHONKY but actually quite fun lofi GTA clone – the link here takes you to the ‘London’ version, which actually runs on a small-scale replica of central London’s actual map, lets you walk or drive, commit crimes, has actual missions and stuff you can do…ok, this very much looks like it’s been built in ‘my first open world game engine’, but as a quick, curious timewaster then this is worth a look.
- Formula Zero: Last up in the games this week, an EXCELLENT little in-browser racing sim which lets you pretend to be a fast car dullard – but, excitingly, an ELECTRIC fast car dullard! This is very fun and, importantly, nips along at a fair old clip, even on my hugely-inadequate kit – this is a good 10 minutes of pleasing 3d racing for you to enjoy. ENJOY IT.
By Matt Walla
OUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS APPROPRIATELY-CHILLY-FEELING SYNTH SELECTION BY FUTURO TROPICALE!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Transforming Idiot Generation: Ok, fine, the *actual* name of this website (not, I don’t think, actually a Tumblr, but spiritually it very much is one) is ‘Jizai Toys’, but its subtitle is SO much better. This is the webpage of…some guy in (I think) Japan, who makes custom transforming robot designs, and WOW these are silly and fun and kind of ingenious, and this site celebrated its 20 year anniversary about 6 weeks ago and Jesus that is a LOT of transforming robot toys. THIS is what life is all about.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- The Match Archive: An Insta feed accompanying a forthcoming book celebrating, er, the majestic beauty of the branded matchbook which features a whole bunch of excellent examples of the very specific on-book design aesthetic which, I promise, is genuinely quite cool to look through. Also, as an aside, this made me HUGELY nostalgic for an era in which drinking and smoking in bars was a thing – yes, I know smoking is gross and life is objectively better for everyone when you can’t do it in public but, also, I REALLY want to sit at a bar and drink a strong cocktail and smoke about a dozen fags (as it happens I want to do that RIGHT NOW, which given it’s 10:12am feels…problematic, on reflection).
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Russell Brand and Timely Amnesia: You have, I am sure, read all that you probably need or want to read about both Russell Brand and David Walliams, but if you can stomach any more then I think Mic Wright does a good job in this piece at looking at the degree to which the media (across the political spectrum, broadly-speaking) has attempted to somehow minimise the extent to which it championed (in this case) Brand (but that also applies to Walliams too) and how…unseemly it is when everyone attempts to point the finger of blame at others while also affecting a degree of ‘who me?’ when anyone might have the temerity to suggest that they too might have promoted the man regardless of whatever might have been known about his character and proclivities at the time. My one repeated thought on this – I don’t even work in TV or comedy but have been adjacent and media-ish enough for the past 15-20 years to have heard Bad Things about Brand in the late-00s and Walliams about a decade or so ago, which means that if you DID actually work in these industries then it is, broadly, impossible that you won’t also have done so, and as such I think it’s impossible for anyone who booked these fcuks to claim ignorance and so anyone so doing can and should be held up for it because while you can’t stop some men being rapists you definitely CAN not hire rapists when you have a reasonable degree of confidence that they might, in fact, be rapists.
- Lessons from the Brazilian Elections (pt.II): This is a really interesting roundup of thoughts in the aftermath of the recent Brazilian elections, why the results shook out as they did, etc – in particular it provides a degree more detail and nuance as to the exact shape of the social media mechanics of the Lula campaign and who exactly was coordinating it, which has been largely absent from a lot of the somewhat-facile threaded analysis I’ve seen floating about social media in the past few weeks.
- How Trump Has Gotten Richer: I know, I know, I don’t want to think about That Fcuking Man anymore either, but this is an interesting series of posts (unrolled) by Dan Alexander, a writer at Forbes, who neatly explains some of the financial chicanery which has seen the President of the US somehow manage to enrich himself to the tune of upwards of $3bn over the course of the past two years – the answer, which you might have arrived at yourself already, is a combination of ‘massive corruption in plain site’, ‘taking advantage of morons’ and ‘the sort of financial chicanery which you have to sort of grudgingly admit is quite clever, even if obviously despicable’. Anyway, read this closing line and feel the rage start to bubble as you contemplate exactly how hard ‘not freezing to death’ is going to fcuk you financially this year – THANKS DONALD YOU CNUT PLEASE DIE SOON: “The “60 Minutes” clip closes with this line from Trump: “I don’t take a salary, you know.” The presidential salary is $400,000. If you make $3 billion a year, then you make $400,000 every 70 minutes. Including when you’re sleeping.”
- The UK Bongo Laws: You may have seen the comedy memes doing the rounds about how the UK has banned face-sitting – WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE POOR SMOTHERING FETISHISTS! – but the reality of the recent updates to the Crime and Policing Act are worth learning a bit more about because they speak to an increasingly common facet of UK legislation and policy; to whit, eye-catching, vaguely-moral-sounding pronouncements, often presented with the general fig leaf of ‘protecting [INSERT VULNERABLE GROUP HERE] from harns’, which it turns out don’t stand up to scrutiny because noone has wanted to do the hard work of thinking how the fcuk the policy is actually going to be enforced because they were too excited about the press release and the headlines. This article is a good explainer by Curios favourite Emma Garland – it’s also worth knowing that the exact parameters of what is and isn’t now illegal HAVE YET TO BE FULLY SET OUT, that Ofcom isn’t set to consult on this fully until next year, and that if you ask OnlyFans and other Big Bongo Players what their enforcement protocols are they reply that they are waiting for Ofcom’s say-so…so IT’S ALL FCUKING MEANINGLESS ANYWAY! Honestly, it’s all SO stupid (and I say this as someone who’s less immediately ‘bongo is fine’ than lots of similarly-lefty people).
- The New Jagged AI Frontier: Ok, this is the Ethan Mollick post trailed a bit earlier on, about his experiences trialing the new Anthropic model Fable 5.2 – look, I like Ethan Mollick and I think he is smart and broadly fair, but I would, given the chance, like to take him to task for his (to my mind, hyperbolic and unhelpful) invocation of AGI here. Still , there’s no doubt that everything that he shows and describes here is genuinely impressive, as are the various sites he has built to showcase the model’s abilities which you can click through to from the article. Of course this development might all come to a crashing halt thanks to Jensen’s Priapic Wants, but even if things slow to a crawl for a while as the monetary house of cards collapses it feels quite a lot like the existing generation of models is going to prove quite transformative across a wide selection of fields and industries (OH DEAR, WHITE COLLAR DRONES).
- Horny Grandmas: Don’t look at me like that, I am just lifting WIRED’s own headline here. This is a piece about how older people – ok, older women – are increasingly turning to OnlyFans and the like, to feed the growing demand for older-years bongo…or at least that’s how it’s presented prima facie, all ‘look at the horny kids offering sexy granny a lovely third-act career!’, which is… I don’t know, it feels like an off editorial choice to take this angle rather than (to my mind) the significantly more realistic read of the same story which would read ‘septuagenarians w4nk for pennies as retirement becomes impossible dream’ (HIRE ME WIRED YOU COWARDS). Is it…is it good that old people can’t afford to stop working and are having to find piecework as bongo clipartists? IT DOES NOT FEEL GOOD! Now I write this up, I wonder whether this is the result of some OnlyFans PR outreach, which, honestly, would be even darker.
- The TikTok of Bongo: Seeing as we’re doing phonew4nks, here’s a piece about a new bongo platform which is being set up by sex workers themselves, marketed as ‘the TikTok of pr0n’ (which I thought was something that Pronhub had implemented a few years back tbh, but this is Not My Thing and so I may be wrong on this). This piece in Dazed is an interview with the creators behind it – I thought it was interesting less because of the ‘TikTok’ angle and more because of what they are saying about the need to provide community – not for the audiences (I do not believe the solitary masturbator necessarily wants ‘community’, in the main, and for those that do there’s Reddit) but for the workers, which feels, broadly, like a laudable and useful aim.
- InstaComedySitcomShows: This makes quite a lot of sense, on reflection – a Business Insider (sorry) piece on the new wave of (very) shortform episodic comedy content cropping up on Insta, some of which is having significant success in terms of numbers (something something Quibi something). “In August, Stahl put out the first episode of “Near Death,” which follows a revolving cast of people who’ve experienced near-death experiences and have to face “Death” himself, played by “Veep” actor Matt Walsh. The show got 10 million views across Instagram and Facebook in about a month. There’s a successful social sitcom recipe here: A main character (sometimes two) experiences different iterations of more-or-less the same situation. It’s what has worked for “Brooklyn Coffee Shop,” where the baristas, played by Pooja Tripathi and Darryl Gene Daughtry Jr., interact with a new customer each episode, as well as for “Secondhand Exchange,” Elliott Walker’s “Time Travel Department,” and Mutuals Media’s “Gen Z Therapist.””
- Hollywood’s AI Whisperer: This is a ridiculous and moderately-infuriating piece; my rage was only slightly assuaged by the knowledge that the article’s existence may itself sound the death knell for its subject’s career. Charles Porch is an unremarkable-sounding guy who, per this piece, seems to have a singular talent – making famous people like him by dint of being…unremarkable, and unthreatening, and un-beggy. This has resulted in him having a weird, VERY well-connected life, meandering through jobs in tech and brand while at the same time being friends with LOTS of famous, and now he’s the person who OpenAI is getting to socialise its products amongst the upper social cadres in Hollywood and beyond. Who was it who brokered the dinner with Gwyneth Paltrow and Sam Altman? THIS FCUKER! Who’s, er, going round telling the Real Housewives of LA that they *must* us GPT to plan their next SOPHISTICATED SOIREE? THIS FCUKER! This is very silly and very frivolous (and there is, to my mind, QUITE A LOT of unsaid/unspoken stuff about how exactly some of this world works floating inbetween the lines here), but, also, it made me quite angry, because, well, it’s all bullsh1t and very stupid and yet everyone in here is so rich and, well, WHY ISN’T IT ME WHY AM I NOT PAID MILLIONS TO TELL MY MATES TO USE LLMS AS THERAPY FFS?
- I Wish Tech Companies Knew More About Me: This is obviously a joke title, but I rather enjoyed this piece in which the author lists in cumulatively-exhausting fashion all the things that tech companies ought to know about them but which they for some reason don’t seem to be able to make use of, and which, on balance, it might be quite convenient if they did. Honestly, if nothing else this is quite a good ideas prompt for any business which does own a reasonable degree of customer data and wants some inspiration as to ways it might use it to be Actually Useful.
- Debunking The London Banana: This is a Good Blogpost by venerable London blogger The Diamond Geezer. You may have seen the concept of the ‘London Banana’ floating around the web again over the past week, a good 18 months or so after its original genesis as a viral bit of urban analysis (briefly, if you’re not familiar, someone posited that the ‘good bits’ of London neatly mapped to a crescent (or banana)-shaped section of the city, and anyone could basically ignore everything outside that area – it was obviously b0llocks, but it DROVE DISCOURSE) – that’s because the Diamond Geezer did a light bit of data analysis and realised that it neatly mapped onto ‘parts of London with the largest number of Waitroses’ or…MONEY! The linked piece is where he expands upon the analysis a bit and runs a few more numbers to demonstrate that the only things that the ‘London Banana’ maps against are, broadly, wealthy people, and that it’s not a map of the ‘best’ places so much as the fanciest ones, and that the two things really aren’t the same at all.
- The Rise of the Overprepared Concertgoer: I confess to not having really paid attention to the modern phenomenon of being VERY PREPARED for gigs, although I suppose the general chat around the most recent Taylor Swift and Beyonce tours might have given me a vague idea…anyway, this is a piece about the TREND of ‘knowing exactly what the setlist is going to be before you go to a gig so you can ensure you know all the right words and can be publicly seen to see along with the requisite degree of enthusiasm lest you get clipped for socials not engaging sufficiently and suffer a catastrophic degree of online backlash from the wider Standom’, which, honestly, is about as exhausting to learn about as it was to type that last phrase.
- Children of Men: Despite my longstanding anticinephilia, I did actually go and see dystopian thriller Children of Men at the cinema when it came out; I have never seen it since, but I might reconsider that after reading this excellent look back at the film around its 20th anniversary (not least because it’s set in 2027, and it’s always fun to look at how wrong they got their depiction of a broken, immiserated nation seemingly intent on locking itself away from the rest of the world as it turns inward and gets ever-sicke…oh); this is a great piece looking at the film, the way it was shot and the way it built atmosphere, tone and vibe (and I say that as someone who generally couldn’t give two fcuks about the cinematographer’s craft).
- Notes on San Marino: Another travelogue from the seemingly-permanently-itinerant Matt Lakeman, who finds himself in the tiny mountainous country of San Marino (lads, you’re Italian ffs, give it up) and uses the opportunity to provide an EXHAUSTIVE (but, honestly, really interesting) history of the nation and how it has managed to maintain its independence over the centuries. He doesn’t, for some reason, mention the fact that you used to be able to buy INSANELY cheap music in San Marino in the 1980s and 1990s – you could, though, and stopping off there so me and my cousins could stock up on tapes and CDs is a core memory of certain holidays from My Distant Youth – but I will forgive him. In common with Lakeman’s other pieces I’ve featured here, there are a couple of places where I don’t feel…hugely comfortable with his politics, but this is largely benign and REALLY interesting (in a very geeky way).
- EV Listening: Even as a non-driver with no interest whatsoever in cars, I found this piece about the changing sound of motoring which is resulting from the victory of electric cars over the combustion engine to be really interesting, smart and surprisingly-evocative: “The critic Becca Rothfeld recently wrote in The Point that the crisis of today’s liberalism comes down to an impoverished aesthetic vision: a vision “more technological than it is substantive,” full of “shiny new amenities” and “no mention of the human interaction they facilitate.” Maybe another way of saying this is that there is no greater emblem of contemporary liberal aesthetics than the ambient whirr of electric vehicles. Within their cold, round hum is a Biden-era fantasy of effective climate policy, reindustrialization, a clean new frontier for reprising midcentury consumer democracy. In the US, they therefore sound both novel and entombed, strange and familiar, retro rip-offs of space-age Hollywood that bristle against easy historical narrative. They are the sound of a phantom future stuck in the past and emergent, dreamt up with its vision swiveling backwards and forwards, buried alive by Trump’s fossilized counter-fantasy and yet destined to supply the sonic mark of tomorrow’s American road, its hollow futurism weighed down by midnight memories of automation.”
- Embarking Forever: This is about poetry and Minecraft and poetry IN Minecraft, and despite the fact that I am neither a poet nor indeed someone who has EVER played Minecraft I thought it was BEAUTIFUL – gorgeous and lyrical about the craft or writing and poetry and how constraints can breed wonderful work, and this is, I promise, a far, far better piece of writing than it needs to be or than you might expect. I personally like the presentation, by the way, but if you don’t then there’s a link to a plaintext version of the text a little further down the page.
- Among The Wagner Fanatics: Finally this week, Rosa Lyster writes in the LRB about visiting the world’s premiere festival of the music of Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, where it’s been taking place for the past 150 years. This is very funny, but I promise you it will also make you want to chuck on the Ring Cycle (a bit): “You can’t identify a Wagner enthusiast just by looking at someone, especially if they are in swimwear. As I studied the other guests at the baths, it seemed possible that none of them had ever thought about Wagner, that they were able to order a Lohengrinsalat at the adjoining restaurant, Bistro Elsa, without Wagner crossing their minds. It seemed unlikely, though. To be in or even near Bayreuth is to have Wagner drilled into your consciousness. The festival lasts for a month, consisting exclusively of repeat performances of his operas, and everything in the town is oriented towards him. Along with all the swans, Wagner’s face is everywhere, on busts and billboards and flyers for hair salons, staring down from ads for Pilates studios with that off-puttingly candid look in his eye and the trace of hysteria about his pressed lips. Hotels and bars and pharmacies are named after his works; the gift shops sell cookie cutters in the shape of his profile and postcards that say CHE GUEWAGNER. His silhouette is on the traffic lights near the festival theatre, a little green man with a baton and a beret bearing up valiantly under the weight of the famously enormous head. The only other place I have visited with as dominant a presiding spirit is Disneyland, though even that doesn’t fully capture it. Imagine if Disneyland had been built by Mickey Mouse himself, as a monument to his own maniacal, epoch-defining genius. That’s Bayreuth.”
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!