One of the funny things about politics if you spend any time vaguely close to it is the realisation that so many people in that sphere have spent literally their WHOLE LIVES working to attain the exalted position of MP, or Minister, or even SpAd; these are men and women who have played the LONG game, in many cases, joining the Party while at university, maybe working for an MP or at a think tank or as a sympathetic lobbyist, standing in unwinnable seat after unwinnable seat to demonstrate their loyalty and commitment before FINALLY being granted the holy grail of a safe (or at least vaguely-winnable) constituency and, they hope, further ascending the greasy pole to the giddy heights of RUNNING THE NATION.
Starmer, of course, isn’t quite one of these, but many of those around him are, certainly in the INNER CIRCLE of weirdos that make up No10, which begs the question HOW THE FCUK ARE YOU SO FCUKING BAD AT THIS STUFF THIS IS LITERALLY ALL YOU HAVE EVER WANTED TO DO OR WORK AT YOU HAVE PUT THE FCUKING 10,000 HOURS IN HONESTLY HOW FCUKING USELESS *ARE* YOU?
Anyway, this would be funnier if it weren’t accelerating the probability of Even Worse People being in charge in a few short years time, and the general population’s faith in institutions of government and state being even-further eroded. Ah well, problems for future us!
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are probably wondering which person who knows him well told me that Morgan McSweeney is “a horrid, and crucially actually quite stupid, little cnut” but I am not telling.
THE SECTION WHICH AMONGST ALL THE EPSTEIN EMAILS FINDS THE FUNNIEST THING IS THAT EVEN A MASSIVE, SKEEZY PAEDO THOUGHT TRUMP WAS A TOUCH BEYOND THE PALE, PT.1:
- Alive Internet Theory: Normally when I write stuff up I tend to attempt to give some sort of overview of the experience before attempting to deliver a verdict as to WHAT I THINK, but I feel it’s important to state at the outset that this might be my favourite site/project of the year (and it’s been a good year for Interesting Stuff On The Web – IN YOUR FACE YOU MISERABLE FCUKS WHO SAY EVERYTHING IS GETTING WORSE – oh, hang on, *I’m* one of those miserable fcuks too, aren’t I? Hey ho). Alive Internet Theory is a project by perennial maker of Interesting Things Spencer Chang, which, to massively simplify, presents ‘stuff people have made and put online’ as some sort of dizzying waterfalltorrent in your browser; as Spencer puts it, “As dead internet theory enters mainstream discourse—the belief that bots will eventually outnumber real people—alive internet theory offers a counter-narrative: the internet will always be filled with real people: looking for each other, answering calls for help, and sharing laughs even in the midst of arguing. alive internet theory is a séance with this living internet. Resurrecting tens of millions of digital artifacts from the Internet Archive, visitors are immersed in a relentless barrage of human expression as they travel through the life of the web as we created it—every image, video, song, and text uploaded by a real person on the web.” The experience is DIZZYING; you can at the outset use the slider at the top of the screen to select a rough time period that you want it to spelunk from, but then you hit the ‘start experience’ button and you get a frankly DIZZYING barrage of images and videoclips and audio, like hundreds of televisions arranged in a shop window, all tuned to different channels and playing at the same time and flickering between stations and if you have ever watched a film, usually scifi, that features some sort of dizzying barrage of MEDIA to connote the, I don’t know, baffling density of the now then this is basically that but real. What I find most beautiful about this, aside from the messiness and the humanity, is that every single thing that it’s pulling is made by *us* – each element, each image or screencap or videoclip or audiofile is a person or people leaving a small scratch on the surface of human experience, and the overall experience is a messy, chaotic, noisy, confusing and nonsensical tornado of audiovisual overload, which is basically what ‘being alive’ feels like. I know that I say this about something most weeks (IT DOESN’T MAKE IT LESS TRUE) but, honestly, if this were the only link in here this week you wouldn’t go away feeling short-changed (HAVE I EVER SHORT-CHANGED YOU YOU FCUKING INGRATES????). Put this in a fcuking gallery, this is US as ART.
- The Art of Interacting Incorrectly: I am going to have to do the slightly-lazy-feeling thing here and dump the exposition at top because, well, if I tried to do this in my own words we’d be here all morning and it still wouldn’t make any sense. “The Art of Interacting Incorrectly is a project that challenges the seamlessness of our interactions with technology by subverting how it can be used. Through using unconventional methods to create various animations of a horse running, drawing from Eadweard Muybridge’s A Horse In Motion, the project explores how disrupting technology can encourage more thoughtful and engaged interactions with it. By taking familiar aspects of using a laptop and presenting them in unfamiliar ways, it aims to reintroduce a sense of novelty to our experience with everyday digital tools. Each animation embraces the limitations, quirks and textures of the mediums being used.” Get that? Hm, ok. Basically, click this link, start the ‘experience’ and then enjoy clicking the various links you’re presented with and enjoy some genuinely wonderful animations of various methods of computer control depicting equine motion. I know, I know, it doesn’t make sense in words, but trust me when I say that the ‘galloping horse made of mice’ really is oddly beautiful.
- 10,000 Rooms You Could Call Home: In what’s been a very fertile week for ‘slightly-esoteric webart projects’, this is another beauty; made by a nameless developer, this is…perhaps best described as an interactive art project and a meditation on place and belonging, but frankly I’m sure you can come up with your own, better characterisation. The developer describes it as follows: “Open doors, furniture and boxes strewn about. You are constantly moving in or moving out. This game was developed in the houses of good friends who graciously lent me their beds, in a continent that I only started living in a month ago. The audio is sourced from my archive of recordings in various locations throughout the past year. In a friend’s house, at a bar, or my grandparents’ home, all places that made me want to capture its sound.” The dev says ‘game’ here, but there’s no ludic element – rather you’re invited to move your very simple avatar around a top-down series of interconnected rooms; the graphics are minimal to the point of abstraction, but each room comes with its own soundscape which creates a sense of place and movement and delivers a very real atmosphere to each tiny vignette which helps your mind create detail where the ASCII-ish graphics provide none. Occasional notes, marked by ‘x’s on the map, provide small additional details; not narrative so much as flashes of colour, and the whole thing is interesting and poignant and a tiny bit sad, and transported me briefly to the other side of the world as I played with it; I think this is really very beautiful indeed and you should spend a few minutes with it.
- Divine: It’s testament to my unerring ability to fail to discern stuff that will gain mainstream traction that when Vine came out all those years ago I DEFINITELY spent a lot of time sniffing about how 6 seconds was a pointlessly-short time constraint on video and that it would be impossible to create anything of worth; fast forward to now and, while the nostalgia for the platform is in part born of all of us getting FCUKING OLD(er), it’s also true that, despite its relatively short lifespan, Vine was actually really influential in terms of the impact it had on people’s understanding of video as a creative medium and online humour in general (also it gave us the Paul brothers, should you need reminding why it wans’t ALL good). While we wait for Racist Apartheid Toad to come up with whatever revenant AI-led aberration he pitches as The New Vine, Jack Dorsey (lowkey one of the worst of the tech cnuts, on balance, although lacking in cartoon villain vibes) and pals have released Divine, which is purporting to be Vine 2.0 – the link here takes you to the ‘Discover’ feed, which right now is mostly full of OLD VINES FROM THE PAST due to the team behind this having resurrected a whole load of previous videos from the internet archive (there is an iOS version, but it’s in TestFlight and they are limiting signups for now) and offers you a wonderful opportunity to time travel back to 2012ish when everything was better (it wasn’t, you were just LESS OLD). It’ll be interesting to see if this takes off in any meaningful sense – there’s a lot of ‘NO AI CONTENT’ all over the FAQs (although, er, I’m not wholly convinced as to the ability of any platforms to meaningfully act on this), there’s a load of bumpfs about the openness of its protocols and the theoretical ability for people to build around the platform, and, in general, given the general nostalgia for Vine it might have a shot of gaining traction; on the other hand, given every single fcuking social-adjacent platform in the world in 2025 ‘does video’, it’s unclear as to why the fcuk anyone would want to add yet another minorly-distinct variant to their lives. Still, if you want yet ANOTHER feed of moving pictures to numb the pain of being alive then HERE YOU ARE!
- The Bad UX World Cup: I am slightly-ashamed that I’ve previously been unaware of the existence of the Bad UX World Cup – SORRY, CONNOISSEURS OF BAD UX. Anyway, better late than never – this is a creative challenge (and smart PR exercise by some webdesign company) in which UX designers compete to devise the most preposterous and unwieldy date selection interface, and, honestly, you cannot begin to imagine some of the genuinely-fiendish variants on ‘select some numbers from a drop-down’ that the entrants have come up with here. The Soulsalike version with the impossible time constraint, the one with the floating digits that evade capture, the winner which attempts to merge ‘select a date’ with ‘Tinder’ in a truly evil piece of webwork…honestly, these are EVIL in the very best way.
- Stone Club: Do YOU like stones? Would YOU like to join a society whose raison d’etre is to share said love of stones with a wider community of, er, stone lovers? OH GOOD! Stone Club is…Stone Club is a VIBE, I think it’s fair to say, an art project and podcast series community and it self-describes thusly: “Founded by artists Lally MacBeth & Matthew Shaw, Stone Club was set up as a place for stone enthusiasts to congregate, to muse and most importantly to stomp to stones. Stone Club believes the journey is as important as the destination and encourages people to pause and think about place in new ways; connecting ancient sites through community and conversation. Stone Club aims to bring new perspectives to prehistory in a collaborative and inclusive way.” What this means in practice is that there is for the sort of people who like walking and hiking and NATURE, and (I am guessing here) possibly folk music, and who quite possibly use phrases like ‘feeling kinship with nature’ with no discernible trace of irony, and I think it’s lovely and VERY, VERY ENGLISH. Also, the gallery of ‘stones we like’ is sort-of magnificent, so if nothing else that’s worth a look (also, this made me very much go to Avebury again).
- Book Recommendations: As we approach the very worst time of the year, thoughts will inevitably turn to either a) what books shall I buy for all of those people who I sort-of know?; or b) what books shall I hoard for myself to help me get through the endless fcuking fug of tinsel and forced bonhomie? Whichever side of this binary you find yourself on, this website could prove useful – using some data from Goodreads, this basically lets you put in any title you like and, at the press of a button, pull up a list of recommendations or titles which it thinks are similar, or to find users who have read specific titles so that you can go through *their* reading lists to find other, more obscure, books which you might also like… this is a very useful tool indeed, if you can look past the fact that the interface is, er, ‘minimal’ at best and that it’s not really explained particularly well; if you’re after a quick and easy way to get book recs that’s a tiny bit more ‘scientific’ than ‘picking five things from the end-of-year ‘best of’ lists’ then you could do worse than bookmark this imho.
- Buy A Whole Bunch Of Stuff From Films: AUCTION CORNER! This week’s selection of expensive things which, realistically, none of you are ever going to buy but which you might enjoy looking it while gazing sadly at the crippled ruins of your bank account, is a forthcoming sale of ‘entertainment memorabilia’ taking place in London on 5 December – what does ‘entertainment memorabilia’ actually mean? IT MEANS SO MUCH STUFF! Would you like a model space probe from 2001? GREAT! Would you perhaps care to drop half a million quid on a gun from Star Wars? WHY YOU MAD FCUK THAT IS GENUINELY INSANE AND STAR WARS IS SH1T! What about the actual hoverboard from Back To The Future Two for a mere £100kish? BARGAIN! Honestly, I hate the word ‘iconic’ (it is meaningless and, in my experience, is overused by overgymed men in sports marketing) but some of this stuff does merit the epithet.
- Social Media Political Advertising By Country: For several years now the team at Who Targets Me? have been doing God’s work attempting to provide an aggregate overview of political ad spending and targeting on social media across the world’s major countries, despite the best efforts of the platforms hosting said ads to obfuscate this (very important) information; this week they have updated a bunch of their dashboards and reports to make it easier to parse the information, and hence I am linking to them again because a) it is really important that SOMEONE is doing this and I don’t feel they get the credit they deserve; and b) it’s hugely useful and very easy to use.
- Public Monster: AN EASY WAY TO MAKE WEBSITES! Well, easy-ish – it’s not quite a drag-and-drop setup, but, basically Public Monster is a super-simple publishing and hosting setup which lets anyone upload html, CSS, images and the like and, just like that, spin up a small, lightweight site on a public.monster url – this won’t let you do anything hugely sophisticated, fine, but as a quick-and-dirty way of both getting online and messing about safety with code this feels like a lovely little project (also, it has a very web 1.0 aesthetic which I am personally a sucker for).
- Deck Genius: This is quite a smart use of AI, specifically aimed at the startup/founder community – upload your ‘deck’ (IT’S A FCUKING PRESENTATION, A POWERPOINT OR POSSIBLY A KEYNOTE FFS, IT IS NOT A FCUKING DECK CAN WE STOP) and it will analyse it for you from the point of view of a potential investor, highlighting lacunae in your pitch and suggesting tweaks and improvements. Perhaps most remarkably given the people it’s aimed at, the people behind this (Ada Ventures) aren’t looking to make any money out of it at all and are offering the service as a freebie, bless them, which is honestly unheard of in this space.
- Image Prompt Inspiration: Another little project by Lynn, this is a quick tool to deliver visual inspiration for (for example) writing prompts and the like; on landing you’re presented with three images drawn from Flickr’s Creative Commons library associated with three random keywords; click ‘reroll’ in the top right and it does it all again with three randomly-selected words as the prompts. So, for example, it just gave me ‘pain’, ‘site’ and ‘company’ and, look, fcuk knows what in the name of Christ I am meant to think of the combination of images it threw up (some sort of Hogarthian horror involving someone being poked in the eye, some sort of agate and, er, a skeleton cheerfully ripping a late-18thC germanic flag to shreds) but perhaps this will unlock UNTOLD CREATIVE BOUNTY within your soul.
- 2wai: MAKE YOUR OWN AI AVATAR OF YOURSELF! Have you ever wanted to make a small digital facsimile of yourself that can live in your phone? No, of course not, why the fcuk would you want to do that? AND YET HERE WE ARE! 2wai is a slightly-odd proposition, and it’s unclear who exactly it’s aimed at – it feels a bit like an influencer/celebrity-focused thing at first, with the idea being that you can create some sort of full-body representation of yourself to allow fans to interact with it at their convenience, but they also seem to be exhorting any and everyone to get involved with making their digital doppelganger; the gimmick here is that you can ‘train’ it on your personality and it can then act as a digital extension of you, answering questions and interacting and generally allowing you to EXTEND YOUR BRAND FOREVER INTO THE METAVERSE, with natural language voice chat and all the LLM-enabled gubbins you’d expect. Obviously this is terrible and stupid and this particular version is unlikely to catch on, but there’s something interestingly-scifi (in the bad way) about the vibes to this.
- SlopTrough: This got sent to me overnight and I confess to not having properly tried it out yet, for reasons that I think will become obvious when you read the description and click the link. “Some people sure seem to love watching AI slop. So we created the slop trough, a digital trough that feeds you slop to your heart’s content, just as long as you turn on your webcam and get down on all fours. Oink! Oink!” So this does, seemingly use webcam and image/pose recognition to require you to assume an all-fours position in view of your phone or laptop to access ‘some content’ and given that a) it was 624am when I saw this, and I am not getting on my hands and knees for ANY fcuker at 624am; and b) there’s nothing to suggest that the site doesn’t just take a photo of you on all fours, begging like the content pig you know yourself at heart to be, and share it with the web, I am respectfully going to leave it to one of YOU, gentle readers, to try this one out and get back to me. Er, any takers? Please do email me and let me know how you get on.
- Joii: Do YOU menstruate? OH GOOD! Or, possibly, not, given that for many people menses is uncomfortable, stressful and not a wholly-fun time. Joii is an interesting idea to help people better track their periods and the health of their uterine cycle – it’s both an app and some pads which help you track the volume of one’s period and associated information to help monitor it over time; it can apparently help in identifying serious conditions such as endometriosis and the like and, generally, if you or someone you know struggles with period health then this could be a genuinely useful tool to help get a better handle on it and to get information to share with medical professionals when seeking treatment. A Good Thing, I think (but, er, I say that as someone entirely bereft of ovaries, etc, so what do I know?).
- Frolly: Do you like dogs? Do you think that the most important quality that a potential sexual or romantic partner could have is that they also like dogs? Do you…do you ever feel you should perhaps expand your horizons a bit? ANYWAY! Frolly is DATING FOR TEDIOUS DOG OBSESSIVES! Yes, that’s right, if you’re one of those people who for some reason thinks that ‘can’t go for a walk without petting every dog I see!!!!!’ is an acceptable piece of ‘personality’ to breadcrumb on a dating app profile (DOGS ARE NOT A FCUKING PERSONALITY SUSAN) then WOW is this the Hinge-alternative for you! Look, I am not a dog person – they smell, they sh1t everywhere and they are stupid, and you have to walk them – but even the name here gives me very real conniptions; I’m sorry, but there’s something bile-rasingly twee about ‘our name is a portmanteau of ‘frolic’ and ‘jolly’!’. Anyway, for those of you for whom the twin red flags of ‘live laugh love vibes’ and ‘fcuking dogs’ aren’t terminally offputting, this looks like reasonably-standard dating app fodder; create a profile, spend most of the time writing about how amazing your dog is, swipe, match, chat, meet and then have your hearts broken when you realise that despite the fact that you are totally compatible it turns out that your hounds fcuking hate each other. So it goes. Oh, 25% of their profits go to animal charities, which I suppose is A Good Thing.
- The Death Stranding 2 Exoskeleton: Videogame tie-in merch has come a long way since I used to get given promo tees when working in games PR; witness this astonishing piece of kit released as part of the promo for the recent blockbuster postapocalyptic delivery simulator Death Stranding 2 bu Hideo Kojima, an ACTUAL FUNCTIONING FCUKING EXOSKELETON. Gain super-strength! Gain super-stamina! BECOME A CYBORG! Albeit one acting as a promotional billboard for a videogame. This doesn’t appear to be available for sale – rather, there’s a competition to win three of them – but still, this is…very weird and, much as I might scoff, I would absolutely rip your arm off for one of these if only as it would make the walk to the shops significantly faster and more interesting.
OUR NEXT MIX IS THIS PLEASINGLY-SPARE SELECTION OF HOUSEY, ITALO-Y NUMBERS COMPILED BY BABYSCHON!
THE SECTION WHICH AMONGST ALL THE EPSTEIN EMAILS FINDS THE FUNNIEST THING IS THAT EVEN A MASSIVE, SKEEZY PAEDO THOUGHT TRUMP WAS A TOUCH BEYOND THE PALE, PT.2:
- DocType: 2025 has been a good year for webby nostalgia – from the Internet Phone Book (which sold out its first two print runs) to this latest project from prolific Maker Of Fun Things and Friend of Curios Matt Round which is a WONDERFUL throwback to the early era of home computing, when there existed such things a PRINTED MAGAZINES featuring pages and pages of code for you to type in to your BBC Micro in painstaking detail in the hope that you would do so accurately and that, at the end, you would be able to play a very rudimentary videogame (but which, more accurately, wouldn’t work properly because you’d accidentally swapped a full stop for a comma somewhere in the preceding 300 lines of incomprehensible gibberish. This is AN ACTUAL BOOK available to buy for the price of a London pint, and which contains ten separate games for you to play – should you be willing to take the time to type out the code. On the one hand this is just a bit of throwback nostalgia; on the other, though, it’s actually quite a nice way to get into the principle of coding as, to my mind at least, the act of typing it out helps you get a slight handle on what all the different bits ARE and what they are doing. I have ordered my copy but it’s yet to arrive, so I can’t vouch for the quality, but Matt’s projects are always reliably great and he has poured a lot of love into this and, should you be a Person Of A Certain Vintage or just a bit of a weirdo then I think this is worth a look. Also, it reminded me of that time when I was about 8 and I somehow managed to persuade my primary school teacher to let me spend literally TWO DAYS on one of these things, attempting to craft a ‘boxing’ game on the class computer; my disappointment when I finally managed to do it without errors and the resulting ‘game’ was literally ‘two white squares on a black background, flickering slightly as they ‘punched’ each other’ is impossible to convey in language. GREAT FUN!
- Things On Mars: To be clear, things that WE have placed there rather than ‘things that are there because of mysterious alien civilisations’ – this is a 3d representation of the red planet created by NASA which shows the various landers and modules that we’ve sent up to Mars over the years, letting you see where they are on the planet’s surface and learn a bit more about what the fcuk it was they were doing up there.
- The UK Ephemera Society: I absolutely ADORE this. “Do you collect ephemera? Menus, football programmes, valentines, railway timetables, bookmarks, election leaflets, travel brochures – or perhaps items related to magic or women’s suffrage? Maybe you are preserving pizza flyers, store catalogues, or paper tickets before they vanish forever. Do you study particular aspects of social, cultural or business history, or are you just as interested in graphic design and printing and the ways in which ephemera have evolved over the years? Do you simply love old documents and find yourself fascinated by the paper trails left by past generations? Whatever your passion, The Ephemera Society is for you. Founded in 1975, we are dedicated to the collection, conservation, study, and educational use of ephemera – what we define as ‘the minor transient documents of everyday life’.” Containing essays about collecting odd and pointless stuff and explorations of weird collections, you can become a member for a mere £35, and they do EVENTS! You can join a global community of ephemera enthusiasts! Look, as I repeatedly say when I write this, I genuinely have no idea who the fcuk the vast majority of you are or what you’re into, but, having said that, I have a…reasonably-strong suspicion that quite a few of you will find this something of a spiritual home.
- Salaryman Tokyo: I found this late-on this week and as such haven’t been able to dig too much – as such I can’t promise that it’s not masking some sort of weird opinions or worldview, and, obviously, my knowledge of Japan, Tokyo and Japanese culture is minimal and so I can’t speak to the representativeness or otherwise of what’s being depicted here. All that said, this is a fascinating YT channel which presents short films from the point of view (visual as well as mental) of an anonymous Japanese salaryman, sharing a view of his average day as he wakes, commutes, works and eats, all punctuated with his thoughts on Japanese society and working culture – it’s fair to say that it’s not a *hugely* positive vibe, but it really is a fascinating slice of urban anthropology (oh, and for the ‘ALL AI IS BAD’ brigade, he uses AI for the YT thumbnails here but, well, cut the poor fcuk some slack, he’s working 12+ hour days here alongside the video editing and is entitled to a shortcut or two imho.
- Elias Marrow: You may have seen a news story this week about a GUERILLA ARTIST doing the whole ‘sneak into a gallery, put up one of their own pictures in secret’ thing in Wales – that artist goes by the name ‘Elias Marrow’ and this is their website, and while it’s light on detail I am very much a fan of the MYSTERY AND WEIRDNESS of the whole thing, and while I am perhaps not wholly-sold on the, er, quality of the work being deposited I am 100% in favour of this sort of activity and so more power to Marrow.
- Jules Esick: Jules Esick is a photographer; their work is lovely, but the reason I’m featuring this link is because the interface here is AMAZING; I love the way in which you’re just presented with four images on landing, and clicking them takes you through a winding, semi-random labyrinthine path through the work, sometimes crossing back on yourself, each time you tap an image seeing it subdivide into different, semi-related, aesthetically-linked photos…ok, fine, that was perhaps a little abstract and won’t really have helped you understand what the fcuk is going on here, so why not just click the link and find out for yourselves? In general Curios tends to be better when you just ignore the words and dive straight in, which does sort of rather raise the question of what the fcuk the point of me is, but, well, let’s not dwell too hard.
- Curiosity Is Life: A mantra to live by! But also, er, the strapline for this website for (I think) a Japanese company that makes, er, ledgers? What, exactly, *is* a ledger? ANWAY! This is BEAUTIFUL, far far nicer than it needs to be, and as far as I can tell is just a sort of vibey celebration of the brand’s overall ethos and a celebration of the power of creativity; it’s SO nicely made, presented as a colourful book whose pages you flip with glorious animation to accompany each movement; the design, the copy, the jaunty little soundtrack…honestly, every single part of this is joyful and if it’s as grey where you are as it is in London at 915am this morning (fcuk I am LATE must get a move on chiz chiz) then this will, I promise, brighten your day no end.
- The Keepsake Project: Another ACTUAL THING YOU BUY (sorry, but, well, it’s that time of year, innit) and not the first of its ilk I’ve seen or featured, but, potentially, something that for a few of you might appeal; the Keepsake Project is one of those ‘MAKE A LOVELY BOOK OF MEMORIES FOR A LOVED ONE’ services, which lets you collaborate with friends and family members to create a celebration of an individual through shared recollection. You can imagine how this works – you add stories, images, etc, as a collective, and there’s a seemingly-robust DTP system that lets you arrange it all into a coherently-designed whole for eventual printing and giving to the (hopefully) happy and grateful recipient. I have to say I quite like the idea of using one of these to create a hatebook, but, er, that possibly just speaks to what a deeply-emotionally-broken person I at heart am, so.
- Focus Friend: An app which is basically a ‘CONCENTRATE YOU FCUK’ assistant for your phone (think pomodoro timer, that type of vibe) except instead of some BORING phonelock or clock-type setup the gimmick here is that your concentration nourishes a LITTLE GUY WHO LIVES IN YOUR PHONE; the more you focus, the more points (or whatever) you earn to furnish your little guy’s living space, the way the dress and all that sort of jazz. There are also, it seems, potential downsides to breaking your focus – per the blurb, “When you Focus, your Bean Friend will Focus. If you interrupt your Bean by turning off the timer, they’ll be really really sad.” It is not clear how this sadness will manifest, whether at some point should you sack off the PPT in favour of playing Candy Crush for three hours you will return to your Little Guy’s Little Room to find it hanging from the light fitting but, well, let’s presume it doesn’t get that dark.
- The Geology of North America: A map! Showing the geological make up of the continent! Who hasn’t wanted to know whether the state of Missouri is mostly built on sedimentary or igneous rock formations? NO FCUKER, etc!
- Itiner-E: Would you like a really, really detailed guide to the Roman road network around Europe? OH GOOD! “Itiner-e aims to host the most detailed open digital dataset of roads in the entire Roman Empire. The data creation is a collaborative ongoing project edited by a scholarly community. Itiner-e allows you to view, query and download roads. Each road segment has a URI that allows it to be cited and linked by external resources. It also includes a route-finding tool to explore travel itineries and times in the ancient world (beta version).” If nothing else it’s worth clicking this for the zoomed-out view which shows you the scale of the network – my God, the Empire was VAST and while I knew that it extended all the way into Egypt it’s quite astonishing seeing the extent of the arterial network as it branches across North Africa.
- Dangerous Roads: Thanks to Elle for sending this my way; Dangerous Roads is, er, a celebration of dangerous roads around the world, should you be the sort of person who once navigated the fabulously-named ‘road of death’ in Peru and thought ‘yes, more of those please’. There are LOADS on here, each with associated information and occasionally anecdotes, and while the definition of ‘dangerous’ is possibly a bit elastic at times (the M25 is not in any meaningful sense a ‘dangerous’ road beyond the possibility that you might get caught in an infinite tailback and die of dehydration), connoisseurs of questionable stretches of tarmac (HI!) will find a lot to love here, and there definitely are a few VERY sketchy-looking examples (this one, for example, scares the sh1t out of me).
- Waste Not: This is a great idea – simply put, “Waste Not is a simple way to search an open-source database of sustainable suppliers…The end goal is to empower brands and consumers alike to waste not and want better.” Here you can find suppliers of all sorts of different products and materials – this was started by designer Michelle Mattar as a personal project, but they have now open sourced it and it’s designed to be an organic, growing repository of people who are trying to make stuff in ways that don’t fcuk the planet sideways. The companies on this list make things which are biodegradable, recyclable, generally sustainable, and should you be in the ‘making stuff’ game then this is definitely worth a look.
- Buy Poison: This week’s ‘NO REALLY I AM BEING SERIOUS PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT TO ENGAGE WITH THIS WEBSITE BEYOND CLICKING THE INITIAL LINK AND JUST GAWPING’ offering is, er, ‘Buy Poison’, a website which, it is very keen to point out, will sell you poison! Actual poison! Why? THEY DON’T CARE! This is ALMOST CERTAINLY another way of parting idiots from their money, much like the hitman services which litter the dark web and which have been proven, repeatedly, to be scams – good scams, because your avenues for recourse when you have been defrauded while attempting to buy ILLEGAL TOOLS FOR MURDER are pretty scant – or some sort of interpol front to catch stupid aspirant criminals, but, whatever the case, this made me laugh very much indeed. Seriously, look at some of this copy: “When you receive a shipment of our product, you will also receive detailed instructions for use. Think carefully before using. The poisons we sell are 100% effective!!! We don’t care who you are. We don’t care why you buy. We don’t care how you use it. Our buy poison shop is completely automated. You buy online and pay online. No communication via email, telegram, etc. Don’t expect us to reply to your email and convince you to buy. All e-mails are monitored. We do not want to compromise your and our security., trying to convince you to buy poison. Buying poison is a serious decision that you should make yourself.” ISN’T THIS INCREDIBLE?!?!?! It does, though, take a slightly darker turn as you scroll towards the end and get to the ‘buy poisons as a gift’ section and they tell you that they will “offer mixtures of our poisons with perfumes, cosmetic products, food products and various supplements. You buy and we send it in the original packaging to your address as a gift.
We send it with a name of your choice, a popular name from the country it is arriving in, or as a promotion for a company. The person who receives the “GIFT” will see the original packaging when they open it, for example a perfume.” LOOK, As a general rule I tend not to moralise (or at least I think I don’t; am I a hectoring scold?) but can I please say, very explicitly, that I WOULD REALLY PREFER IT IF NONE OF YOU USED THIS SITE TO ATTEMPT TO KILL ANYONE PLEASE. Is that ok? And, er, does that count as legally indemnifying?
- Preaching To The Perverted: I can’t quite recall why this film floated into my mind this week, but I am SO glad it did – Preaching to the Perverted is a UK film from the late-90s in which a parliamentary assistant for the Conservative Party is tasked with, er, ‘penetrating the deviant sexual underground’ (it is very much THAT sort of film), and in so doing stumbles into the London fetish community; it was made in the period when legislation was being enacted to clamp down on ‘violent’ (read: fetish) bongo, and as such should be read as a reaction to puritanism, delivered with a VERY big wink and a nudge. It is hugely camp,very silly, in no way ‘shocking’ to anyone who’s spent more than 5 minutes online in modernity, and is in many respects a slightly-quaint throwback to an era in which noone quite knew how filthy we were all going to get. Also, the soundtrack fcuking SLAPS. You might not think it about a film that repeatedly talks about ‘heavy c0ck and ball torture’ but this is actually a very sweet, very heartwarming film, and if you have a spare couple of hours this weekend then PLEASE take my advice and watch this, I promise you you won’t regret it.
- Royal Family: A clever little puzzle game that uses the rules of chess to create daily brainteasers; the challenge each day is to place a selection of pieces in an arrangement where none of them are threatened by any of the others and, honestly, this was…harder for me than it ought to have been, shameful as it is to admit. This was made by someone called Tyler, and there are a bunch of other games by them which you can find here and which are all rather fun – THANKYOU FOR SENDING THESE TO ME, MYSTERIOUS TYLER, SHOULD YOU EVER HAPPEN TO SEE THIS!
- Tiny Mario: Objectively-speaking, this webthing which lets you play Mario in the url bar of your browser is the worst version of Mario ever created in terms of playability; it is, though, an ASTONISHING feat and testament to the power of minimalism and the extent to which we have all sort of internalised the layout and structure of world 1-1 in the original NES Mario Bros. It’s fcuking IMPOSSIBLE, mind.
- Rule34dle: A simple game which asks you to guess which of two fictional characters has had more bongo created about them. This was, to me, by turns baffling (I am not an anime guy and so a lot of the characters here were mysterious ciphers to me) and horrifying (HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE MADE BONGO FEATURING LISA SIMPSON???????), but there’s something undeniably…well, very Curios about something that lays bare the mucal crenellations of the fractal majesty of human sexuality so clearly.
- Tetrio: ALL OF THE TETRISES! Multiplayer Tetris! Challenge Tetris! Infinite, no-challenge Tetris! All of your block-based needs in a single, handy wrapper.
- Too High: Our final game this week simulates the experience of being at a party and being TOO HIGH and trying to make conversation, and while it’s a simple and slightly one-note gag, it made me laugh and it might make you laugh too (the trick is to just sort of try and guide the words into the right spaces, which will make sense should you click the link).
By Henriette H
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Cake Blog: Cakes, without context. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT MUST YOU QUESTION EVERYTHING JUST TAKE MY GIFTS WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Merveilleux Scientifique: This is a lovely feed which posts images, book covers and various ephemera related to the French scifi movement known as Merveilleux Scientifique which you can read a bit more about here. The aesthetics here are WONDERFUL, and I think will appeal to rather a lot of you.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The Pivot: I can’t pretend we’re opening with a *hugely* cheering number this week, but I thought that this essay by Charlie Stross was an excellent summation of Where We Are Now as regards climate and the environment and the steps we are still, basically, failing to take to address the fact that AS THINGS STAND WE ARE FCUKED (still, COP will sort it all ou…eh? oh). This is long, and a bit depressing, but it is well-written and well-argued and it is clear, and I checked it with a couple of people who I know who know a LOT more about the energy sector and How It Works than I do and their general assessment was ‘yeah, this is broadly right’…so, well. This is basically Stross laying out his thesis as to why this is a PIVOTAL MOMENT – while I am slightly more bullish on the potential utility of AI than he seems to be, everything else here had me nodding like a seal, not least the following: “As long as we have global supply chains and bulk shipping we can shuffle food around the globe to cover localized shortfalls, but if we lose stable agriculture globally for any length of time then we are all going to die: our economic system has shifted to just-in-time over the past fifty years, and while it’s great for efficiency, efficiency is the reciprocal of resilience. We don’t have the reserves we would need to survive the coming turbulence by traditional means. This, in part, explains the polycrisis: nobody can fix what’s wrong using existing tools..If we can just get through the rest of this decade without widespread agricultural collapses, a nuclear war, a global fascist international dictatorship taking hold, and a complete collapse of the international financial system caused by black gold suddenly turning out to be worthless, we might be pretty well set to handle the challenges of the 2030s. But this year, 2025, is the pivot. This can’t go on. So it’s going to stop. And then—” BONUS ENVIROTECH PIECE! This is a more-hopeful counter to the main link, all about how cheap solar panels are transforming the energy landscape and market across Africa, and it made me feel…almost hopeful, for a second or two.
- Impartiality at the BBC: Former Newsnight Policy Editor Lewis Goodall writes about the current ‘crisis’ at the BBC and why the organisation is so fcuked; I rather lost interest in the second half which is basically Goodall detailing all the ways in which he feels he was fcuked over by Robbie Gibb when at Newsnight, but the first is a decent, clear-eyed assessment of what several decades of right-wing political and media manoeuvering have done to the organisation and how it’s held to impossible standards while those criticising it, to put it mildly, are…not. It’s hard not to read this without nodding “Instead of some proportion from much of the British media class, we are treated to the tragicomic absurdity of a former British prime minister willing to admonish the national broadcaster and demand the resignation of its Director General, all in the name of defending Donald Trump’s reputation for truth-telling. But it’s worse than that- it is a textbook example of how populists win. We have the ridiculous carnival of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, of all people, admonishing the BBC for its lack of integrity. And they can get away with it, because no-one expects anything from them and yet we expect everything from the people and places who actually give a damn.” BONUS BBC! For the real heads, this is a decent explanation of the actual meat of the fcukup (the edited Trump footage) and the wider issues discussed in the Prescott Report and What It Means, by Daniel Trilling for Equator.
- The Monks In The Casino: This has been linked to a LOT this week by various people, but if you’re yet to see it then it’s a very good piece on American men, isolation and the rise of a certain sort of ideal of solitary,monastic self-control as the ur-indicator of physical and emotional optimisation – coupled with tech-based dopamine delivery systems. Not for the first time this year it reminded me of this from a few months back and the horrible investor’s indication that he was going to invest in ‘opiates of the masses’ as that was set to be a big western growth area as the employment market shrinks and people’s worlds do too in parallel. Yes it’s about the US, but read this and tell me it doesn’t apply wherever you might live too: “While I know that some men are lonely, I do not think that what afflicts America’s young today can be properly called a loneliness crisis. It seems more to me like an absence-of-loneliness crisis. It is a being-consantly-alone-and-not-even-thinking-that’s-a-problem crisis. Americans—and young men, especially—are choosing to spend historic gobs of time by themselves without feeling the internal cue to go be with other people, because it has simply gotten too pleasurable to exist without them. Several years ago, the philosopher Andrew Taggart coined the term “secular monks” to describe young men who associate solitude with strength. When porn seems less fraught than sexual partners, and when late night parties seem lower status than early-morning Pilates, a toxic asceticism is spreading throughout American life. No, the problem is not loneliness. The problem is that we’ve forgotten how to feel lonely in the first place.” BONUS MEN CONTENT! This is a surprisingly-good takedown of Scott Galloway’s new book on masculinity and men and WHAT MUST BE DONE in the New Yorker, which correctly skewers the man’s misogyny in a way that Nick Robinson singularly failed to even touch on in his weirdly-fawning interview with the Professor on Today last week.
- The Death of Brand Social: Trend Report is a GREAT newsletter for any of you working in brands/trends and the associated space, but CHRIST does reading it give me a headache (pottle, I know I know) – still, I am linking it this week because there’s an extended riff (you have to scroll down to the image of the Duolingo owl to find it) about how ‘brands on social media’ is basically dead, even if said brands haven’t quite realised it yet. It’s been pleasing watching the rest of the world catch up to the broad idea that ‘social media basically doesn’t meaningfully exist in the way of which we conceived it for much of the 2010s’, and this extends to brands – good luck to all the agencies that made ‘WE DO YOUR SOCIALZZZZZZZZZ’ their whole pitch! This is smart and spot-on, and tracks the natural consequence of the shift to ‘brands acting like people on main’ pretty much perfectly: “As brands “are” people, they take on our dimensionality too: they too become political. Their not standing up for Palestine and their not standing up for DEI are obvious signs: they’re playing in our digital faces, patting their monopolistic backs while doing digital “woke”-and-not face to fit in, all as these spaces are converted from playgrounds to malls where you must tape your mouth to enter as “God Bless The USA” deafens. Small canaries tweet such a shift too: see Mariah Carey and Sephora telling you and your boycott to fcuk off, see Nicki Minaj fawning over attention from the MAGA universe. Zoom out just a bit further to see the collapse of the creator economy happening in tandem with brands moving from bringing influencers in-house to making “employee generated content” happening in tandem with the increasingly human-less landscape of social and tech, as Uber pivots to driverless cars and as Amazon continues trying to make human-free operations happen and as Meta fills feeds with machine-made content over posts by people: they do not need and do not care about you, hence the ongoing need to dump real people. They just want your money while continuing to subject you to stock-and-bond torture of the economic and ideological variety, one reply with a wink on your viral TikTok post at a time. When will brand association move from cringe to shameful?” BRING BACK SELLING OUT.
- How To Use The Internet Again: YOU don’t need this – YOU are a Curios reader and therefore your approach to the web is CURIOUS and FREE-RANGE (and, on some level, almost certainly deeply-unhealthy on a psychological and maybe emotional level, but let’s not think about that too hard!), but you may know people who still think ‘the web’ is ‘insta and tiktok and amazon and whichever news portal best confirms my prejudices’ and who might therefore benefit from this useful guide as to how to maybe use the web…better. “You can’t call it the “online world” if you never leave your feed. If your entire internet life happens inside TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, or Twitter, you’re simply mall-walking, and malls are fine: predictable, climate-controlled, food courts and chain stores on every corner, but don’t mistake the mall for the city. The city is bigger, stranger, full of alleys, basements, and hidden doors. That’s the real internet, and you haven’t been there in a while. This curriculum is designed to remind you what the internet used to be—and still is. I’ve built it to help you get your digital spark back. After this course, you won’t complain to the algorithm gods anymore, praying for a better feed.”
- The Future of Search: A *slightly* misleading title to this LRB piece – it’s better read as a history of Google, from early beginnings to the present day, where its status as the de facto knowledge portal for the majority of the world is under threat for the first time in a decade. You will, probably, know a lot of this, but it’s an excellent overview of how the company began, how it evolved and why it is likely to change significantly in the coming years. What it DOESN’T mention, though, is the fact that my mate Scott worked for Google and once told me when we were VERY stoned (so, er, caveats apply) that when he worked there in the early-00s he was shown an early version of Google Earth that let him see LIVE SATELLITE FOOTAGE OF HIS GARDEN, WHICH HE COULD TELL WAS LIVE BECAUSE HE COULD SEE HIS CAT MOVING AROUND THE GARDEN. Just *think* of all the mad stuff that they have built since then which has never seen the light of day (or at least not outside of govt or military circles).
- Where Do The Children Play?: I really enjoyed this essay as a smart semi-corrective to the PHONES BAD INTERNET BAD discourse – Eli Stark Elster writes about how, contrary to being TERRIBLE BADLANDS, online spaces actually afford children and young people the opportunity for unsupervised play and socialisation that is often denied them in a world in which everything is optimised for safety and security. It doesn’t pretend that online is not without its threats and hazards, but it’s certainly a healthier and more intelligent way of thinking about digital spaces and children than a lot of the kneejerk reactions I have seen in the past year or so: “Why do our children spend more time in Fortnite than forests? Usually, we blame the change on tech companies. They make their platforms as addicting as possible, and the youth simply can’t resist — once a toddler locks eyes with an iPad, game over. I want to suggest an alternative: digital space is the only place left where children can grow up without us1. For most of our evolutionary history, childhood wasn’t an adult affair. Independent worlds and peer cultures were the crux of development, as they still are among the BaYaka; kids spent their time together, largely beyond the prying eyes of grown-ups. But in the West, the grown-ups have paved over the forests and creeks where children would have once hidden. They have exposed the secret places. So the children seek out a world of their own, as they have for millennia, if not longer. They find a proverbial forest to wander. They don’t know what we know: this forest has eyes and teeth.”
- Kids Hate The Media: Ok, this is US data and US kids but, again, I struggle to imagine that these findings wouldn’t be replicated pretty much anywhere else in 2025. Young people think the media is untrustworthy, biased…actually, look, here: “An overwhelming majority of teens (84%) described news media with negative words — often characterizing media as intentionally deceptive or invoking negative emotional feelings. The top five words submitted by teens were “Fake, “Crazy, “Boring, “Biased,” and “Sad,” according to a very depressing word cloud published in the report.” I know I keep wanging on about IMMINENT EPISTEMOLOGICAL COLLAPSE, but, well, THIS DOES NOT FEEL GREAT.
- Another AI Jobs Piece: Your appetite for this may vary, fine, but I thought that this article in New York Magazine was a good overview of Where We Are At, well-reported and full of good interviews with actual people rather than simply parroting CEO lines – it acknowledges that a lot of the job market stuff happening at the moment is likely broader economics being masked by the fig leaf of AI for shareholder/market-facing purposes, but also points out that, well, lots of actual people are losing their jobs, and there are a lot fewer jobs out there, and that feels like a HELL OF A COINCIDENCE. Oh, and if you want more, there is some fresh data here which makes for…sobering reading for the artists, writers and photographers, as you might expect. I know I have featured this stuff a lot over the past couple of years, but it’s because I am QUITE WORRIED that we are still not taking it seriously enough; even if AI progress stopped RIGHT NOW (which it won’t) the tech is still good enough at this point to do A LOT OF PEOPLE’S JOBS FOR A FRACTION OF THE COST, and if you don’t think that that is something that business literally designed to maximise profit and shareholder value won’t continue to jump at then I have several bridges to sell you.
- Private Equity Killed Media: Long-term readers will perhaps recall my firmly-held belief that, come the revolution, the Private Equity cnuts will be some of the first up against the wall (lol revolution, like THAT’S ever going to happen), closely followed by the VC cnuts – this is a decent piece from Megan Greenwell, former editor-in-chief of Deadspin, about how in particular the PE industry hollowed out the buzzy media companies of the 00s and 10s (your VICEs, etc), and while it’s not going to tell you anything new about the way these cnuts operate and what they do, it’s a nice reminder that, well, they’re cnuts. “After several years of reporting on and obsessing over how private equity works and why, I finally understand the root of my misconceptions about capitalism. I had thought that the point of buying a beloved, profitable publication was to make it more profitable, to strengthen the fundamentals of its business model in hopes of a lucrative exit years down the road. That is not the point of buying a beloved, profitable publication (or any business). The point is to make the private equity firm more profitable. The Denver Post and Deadspin and Vice News are just widgets, endlessly interchangeable in the service of maximizing shareholder value. Only chumps make money by selling goods or services these days; the real geniuses rely on management fees, deal fees, dividend recapitalizations, real estate deals, and the like. That allows — requires! — a private equity firm to divorce its incentives from that of its own portfolio company, making it, at best, agnostic to whether the company lives or dies. In many cases, the best decision for the firm is the one that directly undermines the company it controls. The reason there are no weird blogs anymore is that it’s more fruitful to drive them out of business.”
- Rebuilding Syria’s Tech: Genuinely fascinating interview with Syrian Minister for Communications and IT, Abdulsalam Haykal, about what it’s like having a job whose brief is literally ‘rebuild the digital infrastructure of a country ravaged by decades of war and dictatorial rule’. So so so interesting, you NEVER hear stories like this – credit to Rest of World for continuing to bring genuinely unique reporting to a wider audience.
- The Ozma Problem: I enjoyed this a lot (and it made my head hurt a bit) – the Ozma problem is…oh, look, I am going to just have to lift something from the piece because I’ll just make a pig’s ear of it: “In 1960, Project Ozma was launched in West Virginia. Named after the ruler of the fictional Land of Oz, Project Ozma was a huge telescope that listened for signals from space, signals that could be proof of extraterrestrial intelligence. Unfortunately, the project only ran for a few months, and it had no major success. Let’s say the telescope had picked up these signals. How would we on Earth respond? We would need to convert their signals, after which we would send our own. Telescopes and computers use binary code. And directionality is crucial to understanding binary, as it is read left to right and decoded right to left. So, if we are sending binary signals to aliens, we need to be sure they understand which direction is left and which is right. How can we be sure they share our understanding of directions?”
- The London Ringways: I do like a good urban ‘what if?’, and this is a particular treat – London Centric does a good dive into the proposed London Ringway network which would have created a load of absolutely fcuking MASSIVE motorways around London to ease traffic congestion and, in so doing, absolutely obliterated large parts of the city; Brixton basically wouldn’t exist, Chelsea would be VERY different, and the whole character of the city would have been dramatically different (and, to be clear, worse). This is MAD – on a smaller scale, people are 100% going to look back at stuff like the Garden Bridge fiasco and Boris’s floating airport rubbish with similar eyes.
- How The Traffic Light Changed The World: Not, I appreciate, a headline that will have you rushing to click, but I promise you this is interesting – not least as I had no idea that London can lay claim to the first EVER traffic light, near Westminster (also, it sounds EXCELLENT, like some sort of weird HG Wells-imagined steampunk scifi contraption, and I am very much up for the idea of the modern versions being redesigned in this sort of style). Properly interesting in the way that very specific pieces about ostensibly-dull things often are.
- The Guide To Pub Etiquette: The Pellicle is another of the UK’s burgeoning crop of high-quality independent magazines; it focuses on booze, and this guide to How To Behave In Pubs In 2025 is FULL of sensible advice (don’t fcuking queue, don’t play CONTENT out loud, etc), but I would like to add another request – this one is more for publicans than punters, but can we PLEASE start setting up a separate Guinness tap and bar setup so those fcukers who insist on ordering four pints of guinness no longer end up forcing everyone to wait 10 minutes while the tedious and unnecessary ‘two-step pour’ boll0cks is enacted? I am increasingly of the opinion that the boom in Guinness drinking is down in part to the fact that lots of younger people don’t actually like drinking very much, and Guinness is perfect for that – it’s filling so you can’t drink loads and it doesn’t *really* taste like booze – and, honestly, those people shouldn’t be in fcuking pubs anyway. Wow, turns out I feel that quite strongly! I AM SO FUN AT PARTIES!
- Flesh, Redux: I was delighted to see Flesh by David Szalay win the Booker; it was my personal favourite of the nominees, and is a generally SUPERB book and exercise in style. I linked to an excerpt from it published in Granta back in…oh, God, in February or March, and I’m including it again for those of you who want a taste of Flesh to see if you like it. Honestly, this passage remains one of the best things I have read all year.
- Showing Up: William Bartlett writes about his wife’s terminal illness; I really liked this, not least because it is some of the least-sentimental writing about marriage and sickness and death I have ever read, and it captures very well what I know are some of the complexities inherent in the end of someone’s life who you love but perhaps have not always liked, and to whom you are inextricably bound. It’s rare to read something where the author seems to take so little interest in the reader liking them, and, perversely, that made me like the author much more. I cried like a child at this one, so caveat emptor and all that.
- The Scammer Next Door: This is a wonderful article; Snigdha Poonam writes about nearly getting scammed, and then deciding to try and join the scammers, and what she learned about the sorts of operations that see thousands of people in India, the UK, US and elsewhere get tricked into parting with their savings. This is entertaining throughout, despite the fact that the subject matter isn’t really anything to laugh about.
- Confusing Sober Sex: Sex, addiction, shame and the self, all explored in this piece by Erin Williams; I am *slightly* bored of confessional essays, I, er, confess, but this one has stuck with me all week, partly because so much of what Williams writes feels of the now in a way that applies regardless of one’s relationship with booze or drugs. “Before I got sober in AA, sex and drinking were the same technology. Both annihilated the mean girl in my head. Both promised short-term relief from self-consciousness. Both exacted a price that compounded into shame. I won’t romanticize the archive. Freedom there was indistinguishable from self-abandonment and (occasionally) from danger. The harm was real. I chased validation through sex with strangers, each night a new mirage that might save me from myself. I know intimately the post-sunrise walk home in a party dress, ripped stockings, hair smashed on one side and wild on the other, mascara in raccoon crescents, head splitting. It was, in part, the shame of a drunken indiscretion that finally compelled me to end what had been my life’s most consistent relationship: my love affair with alcohol. I’d gleefully planned my boyfriend’s 30th birthday party. I left him and the party before midnight, absconding with another man. I lied to him about where I’d gone, and I couldn’t face celebrating his 31st. I quit drinking and took him to see a movie. I was four days sober.”
- Pr0n: A short story about a class of people writing erotic fiction, which features almost nothing erotic whatsoever, this is funny and strange and (and I don’t quite know how to explain this) feels almost PERFECTLY seasonally and weather-appropriate.
- Sea Swimming: Not actually that long a read, this is…what, a writing exercise, an extended paragraph, a prose-poem? No idea, sorry. It is GORGEOUS writing, though, by Ladonna Witmer – I don’t want to give you an excerpt, you just have to sort of inhale it in one go, rolling the sentences around your mouth as you do.
- How I Will Help You: Finally this week – in a Curios with a lot of excellent prose (not mine, to be clear) – the most striking writing I read all week; this is quite…rich, but, pound-for-pound, I think it’s possibly the strongest piece of all the longreads. “On one side: rot. The algorithm has eaten most of your attention and is picking its teeth, very smug, very assured. The future was taken out behind a strip mall and put down years ago, and now we just keep reanimating it, putting sunglasses on it, telling it to get back out there and dance for all those nice people. The oceans are trembling. Your friends are dissolving into their phones like sugar into tea. Politics is a warehouse full of damp cardboard. Sex talks like a podcast now. Half the people you know are already practicing being ghosts: low-light, no demands, not too vivid, not too sharp, don’t spook anyone. On the other side: unbearable shining. Because here you still are.”
By Anne Moses
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS !:
- A very teenage girl song, now, which I am including because it’s not a bad tune but more because I don’t think I have ever heard anyone sing about the very specific pain of sending some bloke a sexy photo and him not seeming at all bothered or interested – it’s by LØLØ and it’s called ‘me with no shirt on’ (and if someone can tell me what particular song the verse refrain is clearly ripping the melody from that would be ace, it’s really bugging me).