Did any of you feel a strange, almost-irresistible desire to stare at the sun on Wednesday? No? Oh, ok, fine. Anyway, it was a genuinely lovely moment here in London as people flooded the streets and did the unthinkable, talking and even smiling at strangers as though, I don’t know, we were a COMMUNITY or something; NEVER AGAIN.
Anyway, this week’s Other Big News was one of my godchildren getting her A-Level results, making me feel both proud (fcuk knows why, her academic success has literally nothing whatsoever to do with me) and like I am so close to the grave I can practically taste the mortuarists makeup. LIKE SANDS THROUGH TIME’S HOURGLASS, SO TOO ARE THE DAYS OF OUR LIVES. Er, innit.
Below you will once again find a selection of the week’s finest links, culled and collated and curated for your clicking pleasure; I am going to finish typing this and go for a nap, as it turns out that four hours of sleep is not, in fact, an optimal number for me to have achieved last night and I feel increasingly like my brain is about to fall out of my nose.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can put the colander down now.
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD QUITE LIKE THE BINFACE GUY TO GO AWAY FOR A YEAR OR SO PLEASE IF THAT’S OK, PT.1:
- I Didn’t Set A Cookie: For reasons I genuinely don’t understand, the past few weeks have seen an unexpected resurgence in people online (or at least the ones who I keep a constant, surveilling eye on – not *you*, obviously, I don’t watch *you*, that would be weird and creepy and, frankly, a strange inversion of the writer/reader relationship that I don’t think either of us would enjoy) discussing the whole ‘are our phones listening to us in order to harvest even MORE data for the purposes of flogging us advertising’ thing – leaving aside the fact that it does rather feel like after 15 years of smartphones we should have all learned how the fcuking things work by now, can we just all take a deep breath and once again say in unison “NO THEY FCUKING AREN’T”? Ok, good! The reason, of course, that your phone isn’t listening to you so as it can serve you more accurate advertising is that, honestly, it doesn’t fcuking need to because we already have a perfectly good set of digital tracking and surveillance protocols in place – as witnessed by this excellent, creepy little site which, when you click the link, will tell you a genuinely eye-opening amount of facts about who and where you are and what device you’re on and even how old it is (ngl, telling me I probably ought to buy a new laptop felt like a low blow). There’s even a bit on-page which invites you type a phrase in and does a bit of light analysis of your typing style, which is something I always forget is possible and which really did creep me out slightly – honestly, this is really smart and nicely-done and SO INCREDIBLY SINISTER, so feel free to send it to everyone you know who is incredibly paranoid about the HORRIBLE DIGITAL PANOPTICON in which we live because it will freak the fcuk out of them in really pleasing fashion (but, seriously, YOUR PHONE ISN’T FCUKING LISTENING TO YOU).
- Cyberspace Online: On the one hand, my posting this link here is largely pointless – social media is DEAD and OVER and attempts to resurrect it from the ground up seem to fundamentally misunderstand the relationship we have with both the web and ourselves in 2026 (after all, do we really want to ‘connect with people online’ any more? After two decades of seeing what ‘people online’ are like? lol!); on the other, I really like this attempt to ‘make posting nice again’ and the way in which the site functions, and maybe there will be one or two of you who have managed to maintain a vague sense of hope and optimism and for whom this will feel like an exciting new dawn that is pregnant with promise and definitely *not* pregnant with a horrible litter of teeming monstrosities waiting to strip the very psychic flesh from your bones (ok, yes, fine, but I am TIRED and it is early, give me a chance here). Cyberspace Online is, basically, a NEW, TEXT-BASED SOCIAL PLATFORM, something which literally noone wants or has asked for (cf the continually declining numbers of Bluesky users – what do you MEAN, ‘normal people don’t want to spend time on a largely text-based platform, let alone one populated seemingly-exclusively by humourless scolds with an incredible and largely-unwarranted sense of moral superiority’?) but which someone has nonetheless seen fit to build; this is VERY OLDSCHOOL, from design to function, but also has some really lovely ideas built into it, from the feed that shows all the songs posted to the platform and isolates them so you can browse tracks, or the map which shows where all the users are, to the global feed, to the fact that they have a whole ‘netiquette’ section which patiently explains to users how not to be a total d1ck (you’d think that after some three decades of being online we’d have evolved some sort of widely-accepted social protocols around this, but, well, have we fcuk!) – generally this is a proper throwback to a semi-idealised version of Being Online, when it was niche and Not For Normies, and, honestly, I think it is LOVELY. It will never be big, it will appeal almost exclusively to old people and the (sorry, but) weird, it will never expand beyond (I think) a few tens of thousands of people at most, but if you would like to try A Different Small Social Network then this could, maybe, be fun.
- A Full, AI-Created Film: Annoyingly this only seems to exist as an upload to X, so apologies for the fact that this link is sending you to Elon’s Racist Bongo Empire – still, I think that this really is worth engaging with, not because the film is good (I mean, look, it *might* be – I have only spent about 20 mins scrubbing through it because, look, I don’t like films, let alone ‘lads together action movies’ – but I am going to also bet not-insignificant money that, by all objective standards, it really isn’t) but because it represents a real leap forward in what I think is possible with the tech. This is basically a sort of massive tech demo for Seeddance and Higgsfield – a full, feature-length comedy action film (imagine if AI were currently good enough to spit out a movie based on a prompt reading ‘make me something that felt a bit like a straight to video Guy Richie flick and you are sort-of there) made with AI, but in a way in which showcases the top end of what is possible with the tech right now and which involves a serious degree of craft rather than just ‘chucking in a prompt and hoping’. The budget for this was, per the blurb, a couple of million quid – the script is written by a real human (and you really can tell – it’s not great, but it’s ten million times better than anything an AI could write), the actors are real people, and every scene is blocked out and ‘directed’…honestly, however much you might ‘HATE AI’ (you tedious, performative fcuk), this is worth clicking, not least because the thread on X gives a really detailed breakdown of how it was made and the extent to which The Machine is working alongside actual human creativity to make the final product, and exactly what is required from a technical point of view to create something this slick. It feels like a sign of how this stuff is *actually* going to be used; not spinning up whole films from a single prompt but effectively as a sort of CGI-plus tool which can take actors and costumes and dialogue and direction and bring them together. This is frankly insane, particularly when you think about how janky AI video was just 18-24 months ago and how far it has come.
- Dora: Would you like the opportunity to explore a new city (or even an old one, I’m not judging) via the medium of an app that gives you a reactive audio tour of the place based on where you are? OH GOOD! Dora is a platform, currently live in six cities (including New York, Milan and Paris), which basically provides a reactive audioguide, walking tours and the like, all through your phone. The idea, per the blurb, is to effectively offer all the WONDER of a guided tour without the annoyance of, well, having to deal with a guide, or other people, and instead get a bespoke tour based on what YOU want to see. Per the app store blurb (this is currently iOS-only), “every Dora story is carefully researched, thoughtfully written, and professionally narrated. Rather than reading long articles while standing in front of a place, you can simply listen, look around, and experience it in context” – which is interesting, given that, as far as I can tell based on the clips available on the website, the audio is a fairly-hideous AI voiceover. Are…are you LYING to me, Dora? This basically feels like it’s been entirely spun up with AI, but what I think is curious (and possibly an indication of Where We Are in terms of the general stench around the tech at the moment) is that at no point does the website or the app acknowledge that at all – there is literally NO MENTION of artificial intelligence on the site, despite the fact that this clearly has ‘LLM’ running through it like a stick of rock. NICE TRY KIDS, BUT NOONE IS FOOLED AND EVERYONE CAN SEE YOUR MACHINE KNICKERS (er, so to speak).
- Predictions Timeline: I hadn’t previously come across Manifold Markets before, but, as far as I can tell, it’s a small-scale prediction market, along the lines of Kalshi or Polymarket but comparatively tiny; this site is quite a clever idea, taking predictions make on the marketplace and mapping them on a theoretical timeline, so you can see all the things that people think might happen in the future. This is, weirdly, absolutely fascinating, a sort of collective imagining of potential futures – maybe tomorrow WILL be Tim Cook’s last day as Apple CEO (although I doubt he’ll resign on a Saturday tbh); maybe Vladimir Putin will die on EXACTLY October 21 2032; maybe London will get a taller building than the Shard in 15 years; maybe pigs WILL get rights (genuinely curious as to what the ‘win’ conditions are for this one)! This is a really strange, curious set of potential future fictions and I would LOVE to see this replicated with a market someone actually uses.
- Other Eclipses: I thought the nicest thing about the eclipse this week was the genuine and heartwarming sense of community it seemed to engender in Londoners – while we are, in the main, a city that would barely deign to p1ss on each other were we on fire, Wednesday brought on a rarely-seen sense of citywide camaraderie as people flocked into the streets to stare confusedly at their colanders (honestly, the number of people who’d heard that colanders were useful to experience the MAGICAL CELESTIAL SHOW vs the number of people who understood HOW they were useful was…very funny to me) and chat to their neighbours, possibly for the first time ever, and flirt (honestly, there will be a LOT of relationships based on a ‘we met during the eclipse’ origin story, based on a small sample of interactions I witnessed, and that is SO CUTE), and it made me feel, briefly, all warm and fuzzy and generally Good About People. Anyway, this website lets you see what eclipses would look like were you able to see them on each of the other planets in the solar system – would you like to experience the incredibly-underwhelming reality of what it looks like when, I don’t know, Phobos passes in front of the sun? WELL NOW YOU CAN! This does rather hammer home what an incredible thing it is that the Earth’s moon just so happens to be the EXACT right size to completely obscure the Sun at certain specific moments in its orbit; COULD THIS BE INTELLIGENT DESIGN? Er, no, I don’t think so, but don’t let me stop you feeling a sligjhtly-spooky sense of wonder at the near coincidence of the whole thing. BONUS ECLIPSE SITE: this lets you see ALL OF THE ECLIPSES IN HISTORY, where they fell and when they happened, as well as where all the ones over the next 50 years will be, should you wish to plan a trip for The Future (lol, good luck predicting where is going to be visitable in 40 years’ time based on how fcuked everything is starting to look now).
- The Canvas Browser: Ooh, this is quite neat – I don’t really understand what it’s for or why anyone might need it, but it’s a cool idea and I am impressed that it’s possible. This is, basically, a site that lets you open and arrange *another* set of browser windows within the tab, so you can open multiple different webpages at the same time in a single view. Which, I appreciate, is an explanation so clunky as to be nearly completely nonsensical, but I am VERY sleepy and I promise it will make sense as soon as you click (probably). What’s clever – and what, on reflection, makes it potentially-useful – is that you can open websites in multiple different countries in the same window view; so, for example, if you wanted to compare and contrast the BBC homepage across each continent then, well, NOW YOU CAN! I have a feeling that this is technically very clever indeed, but, er, I’m not technical enough to understand why or how.
- The Archive of Archives: Oh this is very cool, I like it a LOT. David Sizemore wrote to me to tell me about this site, which he made and which is, er, an archive of archives! Per David, this is “an online archive of other archives I’ve run across online. I love when folks feel passionately enough about something to document it meticulously. It’s great when they’re well designed, and it’s often better when they look like they were created in TextEdit back in 1997. I imagine you’ll be familiar with quite a few of them, since I found some through your blog, but hopefully there’s some new gems in there to discover…Because this is an open source project that anyone can submit to. Folks will need the barest of technical know-how (a github account and the ability to generate a thumbnail somehow), but if they do, they’re welcome to submit a PR for their favorite online archive. I’ve had a handful of submissions, and it’s always lovely to see them come through.” David built this with the help of AI, but the frontend work is his own – and GOD is it nicer for not looking like Claudeslop. Also, MAN are there some great sites on here – from classics like Rotating Sandwiches to things that were wholly new to me, like this collection of ice cream wrappers from Malaysia – and there’s a whole afternoon’s worth of digging in here for the curious (and, honestly, like you have anything better to do with the next couple of hours, come on, be honest).
- Stone Tools: You know those websites that act as repositories for old videogames from Back In The Day? Well this is like that, except instead of fun, ludic pursuits this is instead collecting old, obsolete productivity software from the 80s and 90s. This is made and maintained by one Christopher Drum, who explains it thusly: “Stone Tools is a blog about the productivity software of the 8/16-bit home computing era, written by a human, Christopher Drum. If you want a blog about retro-gaming, you’ll need to look elsewhere. If you want to read about someone examining the Y2K bug in database software of the 80s, you’ve come to the right place.” Look, I obviously don’t know who you are or what you like or anything about you, but, equally, I think there is a non-zero possibility that one of you freaks is practically tumescent with excitement at the prospect of getting your hands dirty with some CAD software originally designed for the Atari ST (I SEE YOU).
- Falling Letters: Via Andy, this is a weird, silly little website which, when you type into the textbox, will send the individual letters tumbling to the floor. Why? I HAVE NO IDEA ASK THE MYSTERIOUS JOOHYUN PARK WHO MADE IT.
- LEGO Trains: Would you like a TikTok account which seemingly exists solely to share videos of LEGO trains – specifically, trains that (afaik – I am not a LEGO expert, so I am very much guessing here) are from the ‘technics’ range of ‘adult, engineering-ish’ LEGO sets rather than the ones aimed at literal children, and which are battery operated, and which, in these videos, are being made to do some very impressive things indeed (things which, despite me having spent a couple of minutes staring at one of the videos just now, I don’t *really* understand)? YES, YES YOU WOULD, I KNOW YOU AND I KNOW YOUR DARK DESIRES! I reckon you could make quite a decent music video for some minimal techno with this sort of footage, imho.
- The Mother Bracelet: Obviously making fun of the use of English on a foreign website is pathetic, childish and very unfair; on the other, there’s something about the register of the English on this site for a smart device (as far as I can tell, a hybrid Apple Watch/Oura-type thing) which really tickles me, not least because it makes the whole thing sound even more sinister than these things generally feel. The specific gimmick for, er, MOTHER, is that it charges via..some sort of magic, vaguely-scifi technology, meaning that the movement of the user’s wrist is used to generate power for the device, which means you need NEVER TAKE IT OFF – per the blurb, this is good because “”Remove it from your body to charge.” This challenge across all devices resulted in downtime (time when data could not be collected), hindering the accurate recording of healthcare data. In addition, the act of “removing the device from the body to charge” itself creates discomfort when wearing it, hindering continued use of the device.” WELL EXACTLY. Also, there’s this WONDERFUL-sounding bonus element to the tech – you can earn POINTS “Accumulate your life log as points (energy). You can use them to support projects or give gifts to family and friends. Keeping a record can become a source of motivation for the people you care about.” I love this so so so much, can one of you buy one and, er, give me some points? THANKS!
- Printing Films: Per the ‘About’ section, “PrintingFilms.com is a collection of vintage films that showcase the technologies and processes of printing, journalism, and typography. It was established by Doug Wilson in 2012 after his work as director of Linotype: The Film. The collection started when Doug was given a box of 16mm Linotype promotional films in 2011 by Dave Seat for digitization.” I bet you’ve never thought “wow, I wish there was a single place online where I could find a series of short films about the history of Monotype”, but, well, I exist to fulfil even your unimagined desires.
- Riot Bingo: Do you sometimes feel that everything is falling apart around our ears, and that, honestly, perhaps it’s time that we TOOK TO THE STREETS to MAKE OUR FEELINGS KNOWN? No, of course you don’t, you’re a middle-class milquetoast who spends most of their lives behind a screen and whose relationship to ‘activism’ is in the main entirely theoretical! BUT! Should you even want a handy guide as to when it might be time to RISE UP, perhaps you will enjoy game-making artist Andrew Sheeran’s new project – Riot Bingo is a self-updating site which tracks the news across a bunch of different indicators to keep track of exactly when we might want to start FOMENTING CHAOS. As Andrew explains it, it’s “like a Doomsday Clock with receipts, tracking the various ways in which systems, societies and institutions fail.Each square on the board represents a failure mode of modern society – Democratic backsliding, Environmental breakdown, Responsibility laundering, etc. Throughout the month, Riot Bingo searches for evidence that they’re happening. If a square gathers enough evidence, it gets checked off. The board gradually fills but is deliberately reset at the start of each month. Only a really bad month will result in bingo. Are things truly getting worse? How quickly are they getting worse? What failures are increasing in frequency and severity? Are the systems and institutions that govern us still worthy of our trust? And ultimately…IS IT TIME TO TAKE TO THE STREETS?” This is clever and funny and I think there’s possibly a bigger idea in here somewhere should someone less exhausted than me want to spend some time thinking about it.
- Widthipedia: Friend of Curios Matt Round is back with another fun, silly project – this one is a version of Wikipedia which opens a different entry depending on the size and proportions of your browser window. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT??? For obvious reasons this won’t really work on mobile – but none of you are perverted enough to read Curios on your phone, surely. Matt’s site – the excellent and fun-packe vole.wtf – turned 7 this week, so HAPPY BIRTHDAY to it (is…is it strange to wish a website ‘happy birthday’? NO IT ISN’T FCUK OFF).
By Sam Cheng and Shauna Summers
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD QUITE LIKE THE BINFACE GUY TO GO AWAY FOR A YEAR OR SO PLEASE IF THAT’S OK, PT.2:
- Klubnacht ID: I have never been to Berghain – not, you understand, because I am not COOL enough (fcuk you, I am INCREDIBLY cool, what could be cooler than spending 16 years of one’s life producing a weekly newsletter of links for an audience of tens of webmongs? NOTHING, NOTHING COULD BE COOLER, IN YOUR FACE STEVE MCQUEEN AND PRINCE AND BASQUIAT AND ALL YOU OTHER PEOPLE PREVIOUSLY CONSIDERED THE VERY ACME OF HIP, YOU ARE NOTHING TO ME!) but simply because I haven’t ever really ‘done’ proper clubbing in Berlin and so it’s never really come up. Still, now I don’t need to thanks to this website, which is SUCH a cool idea – it basically takes tracks listed in the ‘Berghain Community’ subReddit (which apparently is a place where people go to share stuff that was played at the venue in the past week) and posts links to them on this site, along with creating a running playlist of sounds from the dancefloor, so you can stream (at the time of writing) some 2,500 tracks and imagine that you too are in one of Europe’s most-exclusive nightspots (except without the p1sspigs and the smell of lube and the…troubling sounds coming from the darkroom) (if you DO have troubling sounds coming from your darkroom, keep them very much to yourself please).
- Weird Balls: Thomas Fernique is in some way associated with a Parisian university; for reasons known only to him, he has become curious about footballs and how they are stitched together, and how they might be stitched DIFFERENTLY. “The most iconic soccer ball is probably the telstar. It is made of 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons, with no two adjacent pentagons (this can be taken as a definition). What if we allow adjacent pentagons? Then we can get different balls. These are specific fullerenes or buckyballs, and there are 1812 different ones (up to isometry).” The main link uptop takes you to a page where you can see ALL THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF FOOTBALL it might be possible to create by combining a Telstar’s panels in different ways – I cannot stress to you quite how…upsetting and *wrong* these look and feel, honestly, and I can’t quite explain why I find them so unsettling; there’s something just inherently creepy about seeing something that your brain is telling you should be spherical but which, as you spin the object around, you realise is all misshapen and lumpen and WEIRD. I would buy one of these in a heartbeat, should someone fancy stitching a wrong and faintly-impossible football for me.
- Cheap Food Map: This is, sadly, not something which will be any use to any of you outside North America – still, for those of you unfortunate enough to reside within the confines of that benighted nation, welcome to a world of VALUE SCRAN! This is a simple site which maps eateries which offer meals for less than $10 and seems to cover the whole of the US with some pretty-comprehensive recommendations; I am uncertain as to where it’s scraping the recs from – the site’s vibecoded, I think, based on the horrible copy on the ‘About’ page – and so I can’t 100% vouch for its accuracy, but thanks to it I have now learned that there is a Taco spot in Richardson, Texas, which does $0.99 tacos on a Thursday and fcuk me I don’t understand the economics of that AT ALL but it sounds like a bargain (don’t think too hard about what’s *in* the tacos, is my top tip should you choose to visit).
- Nic Wands: The personal portfolio website of one Nic Wands, who dropped me a line saying “I wanted to do a bit of a shameless plug and submit something I made that I think you might be interested in. It’s a portfolio site I made for my work as a developer/creative technologist. I used the amazing gifcities archive to find gifs representing each project, and made this infinitely scrolling, randomly generating wall of madness that I find quite fun to click around on.” This is LOVELY, and playful, and I particularly enjoyed how it doesn’t quite feel like anyone else’s portfolio that I’ve ever seen; there’s a pleasingly-distinctive aesthetic to the whole thing which I find very satisfying indeed. Aside from anything else, Nic’s made some really fun stuff in his time and there are some cool projects to be found if you click around and explore.
- EveryCube: You may have a vague idea of the vast number of potential permutations of faces which can be created on a Rubik’s Cube, but I bet you don’t *really* have the faintest idea of what a mind-flayingly vast number of potential different combinations of colours can be created across its six faces (no, don’t lie, you don’t) – BUT NOW YOU CAN EXPLORE THE ENORMITY FOR YOURSELF! This website lets you visualise EVERY SINGLE DIFFERENT PERMUTATION of faces that it’s possible to create on a standard cube – there is literally NO other function here, but, honestly, what more could you ask for? I am particularly pleased that I am discovering this now rather than 5 years ago when some fcuker would have been trying to sell every single different combination as individual NFTs (and some other fcukers would have doubtless bought some).
- Lost and Found: Ooh, I love this – a site by Riley Walz, which pulls images of objects which wash up at the Lost & Found department of stadia and airports (and, er, other places) around (I think) North America and presents them in a long, dizzying collection of abandoned objects – mostly books and phones, as you might expect, but with enough oddities thrown in to make the scroll worthwhile. The pumpkin, in particular, really confused me.
- Gingham: Would you like a small website that lets you create gingham patterns in a variety of different colours and densities, which you could if you wanted use as a phone background? No, you probably don’t, do you, I imagine your desires and wants are significantly more expansive and, dare I say it, complex; that said, I have nothing else for you so you may as well have this link and try not to look disappointed.
- Boat Names: Jon Keegan, at Beautiful Public Data, has done a deep dive into registered boat names in North America, and presented them as this semi-interactive dataset that you can explore. There’s a bunch of accompanying explanatory copy to go along with the analysis, and breakdowns of some of the more popular names across different categories – who in the name of FCUK is out there deciding to call their prized vessel ‘SEA SLUT II’? WHO???? – but the real joy is scrolling to the ‘random pull of names’ and exploring the mad, strange world of maritime nomenclature in all its odd glory. “Bottom Scratcher”? “Gaslog Westminster”?? “Mighty STI”???? Man, people are weird.
- Brickster: Would you like to be able to play LEGO in your browser? Would you like the tool with which you do that to be built on the Atmosphere protocol and so therefore allow you to log in with your Bluesky account? Er, why? Anyway, that is very much what this site does – you can build to your heart’s content, as well as exploring some of the (very impressive) things that others have made on the platform, and, look, while this is very much Not My Sort of Thing, it’s also got a really pleasing, user-friendly interface and looks like it could be quite a soothing and dare I say it meditative experience for someone with significantly more patience and crafting skill than I personally possess.
- Sopwith: Oh God, this…this is almost Proustian for me, honestly. Sopwith is a quite incredible relic – a game originally coded in the early-80s, designed to be nothing more than a tech demo but which somehow made it onto the market as a commercial product and which you can still play now, in-browser (you can read a bit about it here). When I was a little kid and I would go and visit my dad, he had an Amstrad PC and one of the (very few) games it came with was this; I spent, Christ, HOURS playing this (I was very small and I was very, very sh1t at it), and firing it up this week practically reduced me to tears with, you know, MEMORIES and THE CRUSHING SENSE OF TIME PASSING AND MY OWN SLOW MARCH TOWARDS THE SWEET EMBRACE OF DEATH, all those sorts of good things. I can’t for a second pretend that this is a ‘good’ game, but there’s something interesting about it as a relic of its time – also, you can drop a bomb on yourself if you deploy one while flying upside down, which always made me laugh as a kid and, turns out, still does in middle age.
- Fable: Ok, I know I said I wasn’t going to feature ClaudeSlop in Curios anymore and, in the main, I intend to stick with that, but this game, despite being PURE vibecoded dreck is also, I have to concede, quite fun – each day you’re presented with five photographs of (mostly) animals, which start VERY ZOOMED IN and which zoom out slowly; your task is to guess which of four creatures each picture is of, with points allocated based on how quickly you’re able to guess the right creature; there’s something quite cool about the way it forces you to reappraise otherwise-familiar critters. Man do ocelots look weird when you observe them at 10000x zoom, by the way.
- Long Story Short: Gah, dammit, this is vibecoded too, but it’s ALSO quite a fun game; mailed into me by Akash Wadhwani, your goal here is to take a sentence and reduce it to five words while still maintaining the meaning; there’s something genuinely fun and slightly-chewy about trying to whittle the copy down to its bare minimum, and obviously for those of you who are Professional Wordsmiths this will be a piece of p1ss; for a general audience, though, this is both Quite Fun and actually a reasonably-useful tool to get better at communicating in English.
- Black Emago: GAH! FCUK! THIS IS AI TOO! JESUS CHRIST ALIVE! Annoyingly, though, it’s also quite a lot of fun – this is basically a massively-multiplayer survival maze game; you’re dumped into a topdown shooter and your goal is to make it through as many levels as you can, picking up weapons and avoiding the monsters and trying to work out what is going on. Unusually for this sort of thing there’s an element of backstory, and I rather enjoyed the overall look and feel of the game element (even if the menu and UI made me weary with their Claude-ishness).
- Neuralimina: Ooh, this is fun and VERY SINISTER – Neuralimina is an in-browser little point-and-click game in which you…actually, no, I am not going to tell you ANYTHING, you will just have to go in cold and see if you can work out what the fcuk is going on. Honestly, this is really quite creepy, and WEIRD, and it’s very nicely-designed (and if you get stuck there are hints on the page if you scroll down) – enjoy.
- Family Reunion: The final game in this week’s Curios is (I think) a demo for a full title, but a very generous demo – there is a LOT of game in here, and what a strange, interesting game it is. Family Reunion puts you in the shoes of a small child who’s sitting at a table during a family dinner and who is VERY BORED. Your task is to make it through dinner without dying of tedium – I don’t want to explain too much about what happens or how it works, as discovering the gameplay mechanics is half the fun, but I promise you that this is very cute, and very imaginative, and very funny, and if you have ever been a small, bored person then it will feel oddly-resonant. I’ve played through this twice now – the different personas you can select at the outset make a real difference to gameplay – and it is DELIGHTFUL, I promise you.
By Dakarai Akil
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Anime User Interfaces: Very oldschool-feeling Tumblr, this, collecting gifs of (mostly) tech interfaces in anime, but with enough leeway and stylistic variation to keep it interesting. Fcuk me this all looks SO COOL, even in 2026; more anime-style user interfaces in real life, please, practicality be damned.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- T Marsh: Photos, animations and a generally WONDERFUL aesthetic on the Insta feed of one T Marsh, who came to my attention via a very kind email from reader Keith Griffin (THANKS KEITH) – this is very cool indeed imho.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- What Was The Internet?: 2026 seems to be the year in which, along with slowly coming to the realisation that, yes, actually, we really HAVE fcuked the planet in half, we also have come to the collective realisation that the internet might, in some meaningful sense, be sort-of over; or, at the very least, that we’re possibly coming to the end of a Specific Era of Online Time, based on the rise of AI, machine-generated content, waves of agentic ‘intelligences’ and the rest. This is an interesting collection of essays published in the Boston Review by a selection of writers including Cory Doctorow and Joanna Walsh, about their specific memories of The Web That Once Was – from Google (back when it promised not to be ‘evil’ – OH YOU SWEET SUMMER CHILDREN!!) to online communities to digital publishing, all of the different things that the web once was and which in many respects it no longer is (or at least no longer is in quite the same way). There’s a pleasing lack of nostalgia in these pieces – while they describe a web that used to exist, and while there’s an obvious degree of regret at the deterioration of much of what they describe, there’s also no attempt to pretend that Everything Was Amazing and Perfect (it wasn’t), and, in the main, this feels like a clear-eyed set of memories about a period in global culture (or at least a Western expression of it) which, it increasingly feels, was weirdly anomalous and whose like we will not see again.
- Meanings of Ceasefire: Zinaida Miller writes in the London Review of Books about the latest ‘ceasefire’ in the Middle East and what it means (clue: it means ‘fcuk all’), and how we are meant to respond to a world and a conflict in which we seem to have entirely lost the connection between ‘what people say’ and ‘what actually happens in real life’ (one might, of course, argue that that’s a longterm feature of war, to which, well, fair enough I suppose). “Many people have asked whether these are ceasefires at all. But the question is not whether a ceasefire is real but what it does. At best, ceasefires are interim arrangements that gesture towards peace by temporarily suspending formal hostilities, either with a view to longer-term resolution or other political or humanitarian objectives. They can offer a respite in the fighting to give the parties time to recover and potentially to discuss alternatives to war. Unlike peace agreements – which require negotiation, compromise and (ostensibly) long-term commitment – ceasefires are by definition temporary, partial and immediate. But they also construe violence narrowly and reinforce imbalances of power. They are as much a way to govern a population as a road to peace. Gaza is a paradigm for the way that ceasefires prioritise kinetic violence, often leaving other forms – blockades, siege, starvation – in place. When the opposing sides in a conflict are unequally matched, the weaker party may use a ceasefire to buy time to rearm, as Hizbullah did after 2006, but the stronger can use it to convert a temporary arrangement into a durable regime. Spectacular violence is largely subsumed into structural deprivation while sporadic attacks become part of the ceasefire. What look like violations are in fact a feature: the ceasefire does not need to be observed to remain in force. It needs only to be proclaimed.”
- Why Everything Is Starting To Look The Same: My only quibble with this piece of data analysis is its title (things started to look the same a decade or so ago, at the very least) – otherwise this is SO GOOD (and not only because it provides a neat, data-led set of proofpoints for something I have been saying for YEARS). This is a post by data genius Lauren Leek (see Curios passim for more of her excellent work), in which she analyses a series of datapoints including, for example, the shops on London high streets, what films are most-watched worldwide, and song lyrics, to neatly make the point that, yes, everything is clustering in certain spaces and that is largely down to so much of the world being driven by data these days, and how that results in environments and culture which lack diversity and interest and surprise, because (and I have said this before, but it bears repeating) THE MIDDLE OF THE BELL CURVE IS WHERE BIG DATA WILL PULL YOU, AND THE MIDDLE OF THE BELL CURVE IS A FCUKING DULL PLACE WHERE NOTHING INTERESTING HAPPENS, EVER. This is just great – smart and interesting and a little depressing, and feels like the sort of thing that any of you working in strategy or similar silly, pointless made-up advermarketingpr jobs (while they still exist!) should probably internalise asap (also, there’s a really good bit at the end which neatly dismantles the bullsh1t concept of ‘synthetic audiences’ in a way I found really helpful). If you’re interested in a companion piece to this, by the way, then you might enjoy this paper which looks into the economics and production of low-quality AI junk videos in China; it basically makes many of the same points as Leek does, but focused specifically on the flattening nature of algorithmic delivery systems on the variety of material produced and shared – after all, as various people quoted in the paper agree, when the algorithm is always surfacing videos that look one way, when those are the ones that do numbers and which therefore make the most bank, why would you bother making anything else? As one disillusioned creator puts it, “in today’s platform environment, creating content that you want while also wanting to make money is almost impossible.” FEELS BAD, MAN.
- Videogame Mods and ‘Good’ AI: An interesting piece by Mark Warren at excellent gaming site Rock Paper Shotgun, on the use of generative AI in the videogame modding scene and the conflict that arises in the author (and the wider community) when confronted with the contrast between their stated position (to whit, “AI IS EVIL AND WE SHOULD CALL OUT THOSE USING IT AND SHAME THEM”) and the growing reality of its actually being quite useful, and allowing for the creation of a bunch of cool stuff which simply wouldn’t exist were it not for the EVIL tech. I thought this quote from a dev was a nice summary of the central question: “”If I’d opted out of using AI tools, it would have taken me significantly more time to create Bard Hero and I’d have to learn and develop other skills I do not currently possess,” he continued. “While technically possible with my background, it would have taken months, maybe a year or more, of very hard work. Now, would I actually be willing to dedicate that much time to such a project? No. LLMs let you prototype fast enough to answer questions like ‘Sure… it’s a cool idea, but is this even possible?’ in one evening instead of a month.”” Which, effectively, has long been my position, and one which I broadly stick by even though if I see one more Claudeslop site so help me god I will…shake my fist impotently at my screen and do nothing, obvs.
- Mark’s Manifesto: Not, to be clear, a link to the whole thing – I read it, and, honestly, fcuk me is it boring and fcuk me did it not need to be 6,500 words (unlike Curios, where EVERY WORD is golden and vital!) – but instead to The Verge’s neat skewering of some of the reasons why it was b0llocks. The main takeaway, for me at least, is that it seemed like a tacit admission that Meta is giving up on chasing the frontier; the other is that, as per usual, Zuckerberg appears to have only a passing acquaintance with how the other 8billion people on the planet might choose to spend their time, and doesn’t wholly comprehend that there might be elements of one’s life that one might be quite happy NOT optimising, that sometimes it’s nice to just…do things, imperfectly, and that not everyone wants to inject The Machine into their existence to make their hobby 0.6% more efficient or to, I don’t know, bring them closer to their loved ones. “What strengthens a relationship? Almost always, it is personal investment. Perhaps an AI agent might be better at predicting what my father will want for his birthday than I am, but it definitionally cannot give him my time and consideration. Love is not just a feeling; it is a way of paying attention. Zuckerberg uses an example that is telling, in a grim kind of way: He asked an AI to pick out a “personalized” recipe to bake with his daughter. He could have considered what kind of baking his daughter enjoys, what her skill set is and what he might be able to teach her, then picked a recipe. Maybe he would have picked a bad recipe, and they would have bungled it — but that might have been a fun experience and a good story. Or maybe he would have picked a family recipe, and it would have given him the opportunity to tell her about when he was a child, or what his grandmother was like. Certainly he’s a busy man, but wouldn’t that make the gift of his attention to her hobby even more precious? Perhaps he might have come to understand her better by spending more time thinking about what she likes. Without that attention, the baking they do together seems more focused on accomplishment than quality time.”
- Open Source vs Open Weight: To be honest I am linking this piece as much to remind myself to be more precise about this distinction as it is because it’s a good explainer – still, it IS a good explainer, in which Gary Marcus neatly outlines why Open Source is not the same as Open Weight when it comes to AI, and how most of the time when people say the former they should instead be saying the latter.
- AI Modding Doesn’t Work: I have a fcuking laundry list of Things Which I Think Are Interesting And Useful Learnings From The Web Which I Don’t Think We Value Enough, and one of the big ones is ‘MODS ARE REALLY REALLY IMPORTANT FOR HEALTHY COMMUNITIES’ – honestly, the best communities I have ever been a part of online have been the ones which have clear rules, strictly applied with an iron fist, and this piece is a good explainer and illustration of what is lost when that’s outsourced to The Machine which, inevitably, Gets Stuff Wrong. Sadly, though, modding well is a genuine skill, it’s hard, and it’s expensive (or requires dedicated volunteers, but even that is only possible up to a certain scale, beyond which it becomes pretty much impossible), which is why OBVIOUSLY big tech is looking to automate it wherever possible, with…predictable effects.
- The Chinese AI Boyfriend Ban: YOu may have missed the announcement earlier this year that China has banned ‘AI Boyfriends’ as an app category – this piece in Rest of World looks at how users have reacted to having their digital paramours suddenly sunsetted; as you might expect, there has been no little distress, but this is also an interesting example of the shift in regulation, away from controlling content to instead imposing limits on the scope and type of human-AI interaction.
- Baby’s First AI Surveillance System: I had no idea that there was a category of AI-enabled devices which purport to track and monitor infant sleep cycles (surely the traditional methods – ie they scream when they wake up – still works perfectly well?), but apparently there are and they are proving increasingly popular; perhaps unsurprisingly, as this NYT piece points out, there are some…less-than-great privacy and data protection questions raised by the tech, as well as the general rights question of the extent to which it is even ethical to do this to someone who can’t consent because, well, they’re just a kid. Aside from anything else, there’s something very odd to me about the fact that we are simultaneously in an era in which people have finally wise up to the fact that maybe putting photos of your kids all over the web might not, long-term, be a good idea, but where we’re also seemingly perfectly happy to feed footage of them kipping to The Machine. Anyway, this all sounds MAD and AWFUL and I want to scream in the faces of all the people flogging (and buying) this stuff that WE HAVE SURVIVED FOR SEVERAL THOUSAND YEARS WITHOUT THIS STUFF WE DO NOT NEED TO QUANTIFY EVERYTHING. “Sleep tracking and optimization will remain the base of Nanit’s business, Ms. Salinas said. But already, the app offers some health features, such as automatically detecting and recording audio of coughs that can be shared with pediatricians. The company sees growth potential in giving its app the ability to weigh in on speech and motor development, which Nanit’s camera could track ambiently. Hypothetically, Ms. Salinas said, the app could flag a delay and offer parents tips for improvement, like reading more bedtime stories. Children might one day grow up to resent this intrusion, with data on their formative years stored indefinitely on a corporation’s servers. (Nanit says that its data is secure and is never sold or used for marketing.) But Ms. Salinas argues that children, in the future, may want access to their earliest health analytics for a variety of reasons. “Maybe a kid wants to be a professional athlete later on and they want to be able to go back and understand how their sleep developed and what that means for their potential,” she said. She also suggested that when our own Nanit-tracked children have children, they’ll value the ability to go back and look at their own bedtimes. Nanit does not store video footage forever, but her comment made me wonder if that function was inevitable. I shuddered to imagine a permanent record of every time I’ve testily denied a fourth book over vocal protest.”
- The Videogamification Of Real Life: This is an interesting article about a phenomenon I have been curious about for while, specifically ‘how does the fact that so many young people are now used to spending huge swathes of their time in virtual worlds represented by avatars bleed into the real world?’ – this covers fashion, digital culture and all sorts of other bits besides, although imho I think there’s a whole additional vector around sex and bongo which I think could probably do with being explored too. Still, this is fascinating and something which I think you might see quite a lot of more mainstream attention paid to in the not-too-distant future. This excerpt gives a flavour, but it’s worth reading the whole thing “Games have become low-risk testing grounds for identity. Players can try on aesthetics before they try them on physically. The avatar becomes the first draft of the self. That’s why this shift is bigger than digital fashion. It speaks to a new order of taste formation. Sure, young people arebeing influenced by celebrities, stylists, magazines or TikTok creators. Potentially more powerful, however, is that they’re now influenced by their own playable alter egos.”
- GenZ and Weird Parties: Or, “wow, a whole generation appears to have forgotten how to have spontaneous fun without the scaffolding of an event or activity on which to hang an evening on” – this is about the rise of specifically-themed ‘activity’-type parties (you know, ‘ppt parties’ or ‘meme parties’ or, I don’t know, ‘dress up like Nigel Farage’ parties (this last one perhaps TOO NICHE), and how they are proving increasingly popular for a generation that is always, to some extent, ‘hanging out’ with its friends (in the groupchat, in the comments, in the feed), and which, per this piece, now needs a ‘higher bar’ to warrant getting together in person. Obviously a) people can and should have fun however they want; and b) I am old, joyless and dead inside, but fcuk me did this make me feel a bit sad inside. I do wonder to what extent this is born of these being people who grew up in an era in which kids are seemingly no longer allowed to just…be…and who instead seem to spend their every waking moment doing some sort of improving activity or club or sport, and who as a result aren’t very good at just…existing, with no ulterior purpose. Oh, and while we’re on the subject, this piece felt adjacent to the main link here – welcome to the world my least-favourite neologism of 2026, ‘hobbyamory’! VILE, isn’t it? NO THANKS TO YOU, NEW YORK TIMES! Anyway, this is about young people packing their calendars with ACTIVITIES in the hope of meeting someone while, I don’t know, doing macrame or hand-carving buttplugs or something – why is the NYT seemingly intent on making me hate young people? Stop it, NYT!
- GenZ Dress Like They’ve Never Worn Clothes: Another NYT piece, which I am including not because I agree with it – I don’t, none of the GenZ people I know exhibit any of the sartorial quirks described here – but because it is VERY funny; partly intentionally, but also because of the general vibe of ‘confused father who doesn’t understand anything and doesn’t like feeling this baffled by the modern world’ that the whole article carries. The author, Thomas Morton, used to work at VICE and you really can hear the plaintive ‘but…but I used to be young and cool once and now I comprehend NOTHING’ cries between every line.
- The Rise of the Private Equity Boyfriend: Inspired by Olivia Rodrigo now dating some finance chud, this is a piece about the rise in popularity of the now-legendary ‘Man In Finance’ – look, I don’t think this is that deep tbh, and you can boil it down to a combination of a few things; a) famouses are rich and will want to date other rich people; and b) tech, traditionally a place to find rich people, is now toxic and so you can’t date tech guys any more. I mean, I think that’s literally it, but if anyone has a better explanation then please do tell me. I found this quote, by the way, possibly the most depressing thing I have read all week: “When you end up with a private-equity guy, your life gets far more interesting.” HOW DESOLATE MUST YOUR LIFE BE FOR THIS TO BE TRUE???
- Did Sydney Sweeney Actually Sell Jeans?: Christ, the discourse mill spins so fast these days that it seems like literally DECADES ago that the internet was alight with chat about pulchritudinous starlet Sydney Sweeney’s in-no-way-race-baiting campaign for American Eagle jeans – it was apparently only a year ago ffs, how does time even work anymore? Anyway, this is a really interesting piece by Anu Lingala looking at whether, after the controversy subsided, the campaign ACTUALLY flogged any denim, and if so who to, and what it did to the American Eagle brand overall. This is an excellent piece of analysis which anyone working in advermarketingpr ought to have a read of – the tl;dr is ‘it did flog some jeans but also massively fcuked the brand with a core audience group’, but it’s worth going through the whole thing as it’s a bit more nuanced than the initial headline read might suggest.
- How Diplomats See The World: OK, this one’s written by a US diplomat so it might be nation-specific, but in general I thought this an interesting appraisal of the way in which people in the diplomatic corps are encouraged to conceive of the world and the systems within it. “The accurate version of a story is usually the complicated one. The rules of the job force diplomats to capture complexity. A diplomatic cable has to get sign-off from different embassy offices — including the political or economic sections who see the same host-country issues from a different angle — as well as the ambassador, who might see people in the sector you wrote about at a reception later that week. Back in DC, many more offices will read it: labor and population desks, the economic growth teams, human rights offices. If your account is one-sided, you look out of touch. You must write the version that holds up from every angle.”
- One For Sorrow: James Ramsden was, for a while at least, one of the hottest names in London restaurants; one of the founders of Pidgin, which was for years my favourite restaurant in the city until it closed a few years back, and who created a few other significantly-less-successful venues over the years, none of which now remain. Here he writes for The Fence Magazine about what it’s like running restaurants in London, and, specifically, why so many of his efforts didn’t work; I think this is a BEAUTIFUL article, funny and very sad in an understated way, and revealing about some of the small truths that underpin both the hospitality trade and also entrepreneurship more generally, and if you’ve any interest in restaurants (and specifically restaurants in London) this is a must-read.
- Do Men Want Smart Women?: I’ve seen this essay shared all over the place this week, often with laudatory commentary attached; I didn’t think it was anywhere near as good as some other commenters, but it *is* very well-written even if I don’t buy quite a lot of the author’s central thesis and found the personal story she anchors it to…a touch unsympathetic, if I’m honest. Anyway, should you want a Reliable Dinner Party Discourse Starter for your next catchup with a large, mixed group of friends (one which could, if you deploy it correctly, quite possibly end a relationship or two) then get this one under your belt – it examines the question of the extent to which men seek mental stimulation from a partner, through the lens of novels by Philip Roth and Edith Wharton, and whether you agree with it or not it will definitely make you think (and, if you’re me, shout at the screen quite a bit). “I wasn’t so naïve as to have thought until then that most men valued intellectual connection above all else—I knew perfectly well that, when it came to women, most men seemed to value beauty more than anything. But I wasn’t interested in “most men.” What surprised me was that this was my ex, who had such a vigorous mind, such an appetite for both rigor and original thought. Yet even he apparently didn’t find intellectual compatibility with a woman essential, provided she brought certain other qualities to the table. Maybe the kind of mutual respect that meant so much to me was take-it-or-leave-it for him—not nothing, perhaps, but simply one offering on the buffet of choices, something he might opt for in a certain mood the way one might choose Ethiopian food one night and Thai the next. Was he typical, even of men who are brilliant, in being capable of enjoying and inspiring that kind of intellectual connection? If so, what did that mean—for me, for my romantic prospects?”
- Your Face Sounds Disgusting: I absolutely adored this article, translated from the original Croatian, about going to get botox, and the general treatments/tweakments industrial complex, and beauty and femininity and pain and age and image and gender and and and – it is SO good, honestly. “To be fair, many of the women did try to compliment me, saying I looked good because I hadn’t gone overboard; if I hadn’t told them, they wouldn’t have noticed. It haunted me. Should I have kept quiet, pretending I woke up like this? I can look in the mirror again, but I am fairly sure I won’t see Beyoncé. I know they meant puffy, soggy, dough-like faces. Sausage lips. Ducks. Filler fatigue: a condition caused by prolonged and excessive filler injections that gradually stretch and weaken the facial tissue. The filler craze peaked about a decade ago, when beauty trends dictated that we should all look voluptuous and pouty. Everyone wanted to be a sexy baby, and these are the consequences.”
- A Thousand Searchlights Sweep The Sky: I enjoyed this piece a lot, although I don’t think it 100% works – an unusual mix of fictionalised anecdote and straight commentary/analysis by Will Harrison, about prediction markets, trends, and (again) the flattening effect of everything everywhere being data, this is VERY stylish, for better and worse. “I have wanted, for as long as I can remember, to put reading before all else, to treat it as the primary act rather than the preparatory one. The best writing carries a quality that only reading teaches, a sense that if you look closely enough, molecules that seem to be standing firm are actually quivering, always in motion. The writer who has absorbed this notion walks alongside the reader, flashlight in hand, groping in the dark, remaining open to epiphany, to improvisation, to wrong turns, to the demands of the clause that precedes the one currently being constructed. Yet the magazine writer today is simply not incentivized—or even permitted, in the absence of any collective recourse—to carry this imaginative spirit into their work, or to discover what their readership might be capable of receiving. Working within this machinery, the most a writer can hope to achieve is the creation of an alluring facsimile. Their inner world gets trampled routinely by an industry completely beholden to timeliness and the proven point. And when the writer loses this inner world, their reader loses something too: their patience, their empathy, their contradictory thoughts, their humor, their awareness that all of this is being stripped from them, and any sense that things could be otherwise.”
- Once More In Triple Time: I have not a single musical bone in my body, but I nonetheless absolutely adored this article by Erik Anderson, in which he visits Salzberg and gets captivated by the life and history and work of its other, less-storied musical son, one Heinrich Biber. I promise you, you needn’t have any interest in classical music, or Austria, or Biber, or Mozart, or even, really, music, for this to be captivating; it is SO good, seriously.
- Not Like Other Girls: Our final longread of the week is this excellent horror story by AL Goldfuss, about a creature from the sea that finds itself inhabiting a woman’s body and moving in with a man. This is VERY effective bodyhorror, creepy and intensely-other without being too graphic, and it has stayed with me since I read it last weekend and I recommend it to you unreservedly.
By Ellen Jansen
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!