POOR KEIR. There he was thinking that a bit of being statesmanlike on the international stage might have extended his tenure into late 2026, maybe even 2027, and then up pops Mandy once again to fcuk him sideways and make it increasingly likely that the Labour Party’s abject humiliation in the upcoming local elections will be his final act as PM. Who could possibly have predicted – least of all former prosecutor Keir Starmer! – that a man who for years had been referred to by colleagues, the press and even ‘friends’ as ‘The Prince of Darkness’ might possibly have had one or two skeletons in his closet and might, perhaps, be a risky appointment? FORENSIC KEIR! STRATEGIC KEIR!
Of course, all this would be significantly more amusing were it not for the fact that the principal beneficiaries of the incumbent’s popularity is going to be a strong performance at the polls for a bunch of racists, but we’ll take the lols where we can I suppose.
Anyway, I have to jump in the shower and get on the bus to Catford shortly, so however bad Keir’s day is going I can guarantee him that mine is WORSE (seriously, CATFORD).
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you would probably be more secure as PM right now, honestly.
THE SECTION WHICH ISN’T BETTING ON BEING ABLE TO TAKE A HOLIDAY THIS YEAR, PT.1:
- Train Jazz: I love living in London (apart from the fact that it seemingly costs me £30 simply to leave my house) – it is my favourite city in the world, and it is endlessly, ceaselessly interesting and curious and messy and funny and fcuked-up, and, in general, I am very content with it (well DONE London! I can only imagine the city’s utter indifference at my praise), but if I had a complaint (and, reader, it may not surprise you to learn that I *do*) it would be that there isn’t quite as much weird and creative coding being done with the city’s open data as I might like (on reflection, this probably speaks to quite a privileged life, doesn’t it?). New York, by contrast, seemingly has thousands of weirdos willing to futz around with the city’s various APIs – which is how this WONDERFUL website came to exist. Train Jazz is a website which creates, er, procedurally-generated jazz music (no, wait, come back!) using (near) realtime data from the city’s subway network: “Every dot is a real subway train. Eight hundred of them, give or take, form a small jazz combo (walking bass, piano, sax, vibes, brushes) that has been playing without pause for over a hundred years. On the platforms they are hot, screaming, full of complaint. This is the music inside the noise. The harmony moves through a slow chorus. A note is placed precisely where the train happens to be along its route. Rush hour fills the band with held tones; at 3 a.m. the silences grow longer. Whatever is playing now has not played before and will not play again. Share your location and the trains nearest you grow louder. The piece rearranges itself around your body. You are listening to a portrait of where you stand, played by the city you are standing in.” This really is quite superb, not least because it just sort of…works, musically (there are those of you who will doubtless claim that this is because this sort of weird rambling is just what jazz sounds like anyway, to which, well, fair enough I suppose), and it is yet another project to add to the kilometric list of ‘things I would like someone to build a version of for London, please’ and which I will wait patiently for one of you fcukers to make for me because, really, IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK???
- The Diana Poems: Ok, so this is one which may or may not resonate with you, but, believe it or not, I have been waiting for this for nearly 30 years. Cast your minds back a few decades to the 90s (those of you who are neither too senile or too young for this to be possible), and, specifically, to the absolutely insane few days after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales – the collective insanity that gripped the nation is hard to recall now (not least because the idea of an entire country full of people inhabiting the same sort of shared cultural mindset like that feels…quaint, frankly), but everything really did go fully mental for a while, and one example of that was British tabloid newspaper the Daily Mirror and its decision to print several pages of reader-penned poetic tributes to the late Princess across its pages. I remember coming back on a flight from Greece where I had been on holiday with a girlfriend and being handed a copy of the SPECIAL COMMEMORATIVE DIANA EDITION (day 3) paper and spending the next three hours in silent tears, choking back laughter at the incredible talents of the nation’s grief-stricken bards. The link takes you to a Bluesky post, and you will need to zoom in on the images to be able to read the copy, but trust me when I tell you that it is worth every second of your time. I really, really cannot stress how ‘good’ these are – I mean, look, here: “The shock, the loss we feel; Diana, our Princess, can it be real?; Has she gone, departed this life; Killed by greed and avarice, while fighting strife.” I DIE!
- Slop Sculpt: I think the name here could do with some work lads, ngl, but this is a LOT of fun. Via Lynn’s newsletter, Slop Sculpt is a playful little AI-enhanced 3d sculpting tool – you pick various shapes from a menu, dump them into 3d space and then manipulate them to your heart’s desire, playing around with them like they’re building blocks or putty; you can do all the standard stuff you’d expect from 3d modelling programmes, but the additional gimmick here is that you can also add an AI-powered filter to the whole thing to affect the appearance of the end result – so, for example, you can arrange the blocks into an incredibly-poorly-constructed car shape, tell it to make the resulting thing look ‘like a futuristic racecar that a seven year old would think was really cool’ and BOOM, lo, your bricky renderings suddenly look like something out of Flash Gordon. This is really rather run to play with, not least the way that the model works on the fly as you move the components around which means you can end up with some genuinely cool/odd-looking results; it also feels like an optimal way of using The Machine, giving you the precision of Actual Software with the ‘fcuk around and find out-ness’ of genAI visual rendering. Take a look, I promise this will capture your imagination.
- Objection: What, do you think, is the major issue of the age? Is it perhaps that there is simply TOO MUCH media scrutiny of the rich and the powerful? Is it that people are being held TOO ACCOUNTABLE for all the myriad ways in which they’re fcuking things up for the rest of us? OF COURSE IT IS, WHAT ELSE COULD IT BE???? Thank Christ, then, for everyone’s favourite vampiric billionaire eminence gris Peter Thiel (it’s him again!) who is part of the initial funding rounds for in-no-way-BAD-sounding new business Objection, which exists to ‘give everyone a fast, affordable, evidence-based way to dispute statements in the media.” Now, perhaps I am being naive here but I thought that there were already myriad ways of doing this, but apparently Very Rich People don’t think there are quite *enough* ways of chilling the pesky inquisitive tendencies of the free press and so have decided they needed to create a new one. As far as I can tell this is selling itself as a high-end private detective/muckraking service, promising potential customers that “We have the best investigators in the world. Your case is investigated by some of the most qualified researchers in the world: ex-CIA and FBI agents, military intelligence, award-winning investigative journalists. They gather the evidence.” That paragraph then continues with the IN-NO-WAY-SINISTER-SOUNDING coda “All of it, regardless of whose interests it serves.” As far as I can tell, all this ACTUALLY ends up doing is publishing an LLM-sounding assessment of ‘all the evidence’ and presenting it on a webpage as some sort of ‘final, objective assessment of truth’ – which, er, is just another datapoint without any sort of external validity, but, well, hey ho! Amusingly the cost for this appears to be several grand, and you pay per fact you are objecting to rather than per article you’re ‘correcting’ – so if there are four things in a piece you want to take issue with, you pay four separate times! I guess this is why Cuddly Pete is a billionaire.
- Aamon Hawk: I do not know who Aamon Hawk is, but the videos on this TikTok account are ART – very post-Skibidi art, fine (and Dear God it doesn’t feel good that the phrase post-Skibidi art is a meaningful thing, but here we are), but if you have ever wondered ‘what would it be like if someone made vaguely-hallucinatory semi-satirical videos featuring people like Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani and Leon Kennedy from Resident Evil?’ then WOW are you going to have all your questions answered by this channel.
- Below The Fold: This is an interesting project – Below The Fold is a site which offers up dataanalysis of the New York Times over the years, from the simple volume of articles and words per article (declining – is…media dying, daddy?) to the ability to search for reporters covering specific beats, to searches for keywords in headlines…this is really interesting and potentially useful to researchers and historians (ok, recent historians – the data only goes back to 2000 for some reason), and even if you are neither of those things (you miserable, pathetic failure) then it’s still fun to dig around and see what patterns and themes you can find. Having something like this for all a country’s papers would be SO USEFUL – why doesn’t that exist? MAKE IT, ONE OF YOU.
- Kraa: Do you need another writing platform? No, you probably don’t to be honest, but WANT is far more important than need, and who am I to know what your deepest desires are (do not tell me)? Anyway, that’s by way of largely-nonsensical preamble to Kraa, which is an interesting-looking writing (and publishing, and discovery) tool which gives you both a simple, accessible writing interface but which also lets you publish, work collaboratively, and discover other people’s writings by topic; this BASICALLY feels like a lightweight blogging platform optimised for collaborative work, but I think it could be quite useful to certain types of person and teams.
- Hallucinating Splines: If you read the title to this link and immediately heard a small, synthesised feminine-ish robotic voice in your head saying ‘reticulating splines’ then WELCOME YOU HAVE FOUND YOUR PEOPLE! Hallucinating Splines is a curious little experiment in agentic ability which is basically a Sim City playground for AI agents – built on top of an open source version of the first Sim City, anyone with an agent can plug it into this website and see how good it is at building a tiny virtual city. “Hallucinating Splines is a city simulator where AI agents are the mayors. There are no human players clicking buttons. Instead, AI models connect via MCP or REST API and make every decision: zoning, budgets, infrastructure, taxes. You can do your best to control them, but they have a mind of their own. It’s generative text controlling simulated cities. AI all the way down.” Obviously there’s not really anything for us humans to do here, but you can go and look at the cities that the bots have built to get a feel for the way in which they ‘think’ – my main takeaway is that, as things stand, I really do not want to live in a machine-controlled environment because FCUK ME do these things look miserable. WHERE ARE THE PARKS, AI AGENTS??? Anyway, this is all just silly and frivolous but will become significantly less so when your great grandchildren are living packed like sardines in an arcology designed by the fifteenbillionth evolution of Claude come 2109.
- Morlvision: Are you a Eurovision obsessive? Are you gearing up for this year’s festival of camp and Complicated Political Discourse with a sense of excitement? Do you, though, feel there might still be one thing missing from your wholehearted embrace of the format? COULD THAT BE COMPOSING YOUR OWN SONG???? As he has done every year since 2021, comedian Sean Morley is running his very own Eurovision Song Contest in which anyone who thinks they can compose a song on demand is welcome to participate: “Morlvision is an annual song contest hosted by me and an unwell reboot of Terry Wogan. Participants have one calendar month to create an original song and music video based on random prompts. The result is a long evening of strange and beautiful music, incoherent mini-games and increasingly expansive Terry Wogan lore. Morlvision 2026 will be broadcast on Twitch on 7pm Sunday 31st May.” I feel like there might be a few of you for whom this could be REVELATORY.
- Unstoried: I’ve seen a real resurgence this year in websites which invite people to leave small messages or notes about their feelings and their lives for strangers to find (insert your own hackneyed take about THE NEED FOR HUMAN CONNECTION IN THE DIGITAL AGE here, I’ll wait) – Unstoried is another, which is largely-unremarkable other than for the fact that the interface is a rather nice representation of the globe onto which anyone can drop a message in a bottle, which means you have the pleasing experience of scrolling around the planet finding small, bobbing vessels full of strangers’ thoughts. Ok, fine, so the thoughts are in the main things that read like the ket-addled fever dreams of children but, still, HUMAN CONNECTION!
- Is A Human Cheaper: A little project by Friend of Curios Damjanski, who’s made this website to help you work out whether it would be cheaper to get an AI or a human developer to make your digital thing. I just checked and apparently it’s still JUST about cheaper for me to hire a human off Fiverr to make me a small website rather than committing to the several hundred quid’s worth of tokens that it would take a bot to do it start to finish, but it will be ‘fun’ to see the point at which this no longer maintains. BONUS DAMJANKSI! Here’s a small app which will turn your cat into a cubist piece of art. Why? WHY NOT MAKE YOUR CATS SQUARE?
- Swingers: On the one hand, this is a very simple, very rudimentary little vibecoded game in which you swing like an INCREDIBLY JANKY spiderman through a landscape of pixel skyscrapers, inexplicably earning points for knocking them down – it is paper-thin, doesn’t REALLY work properly and is basically only really impressive as a general ‘look what you can spin up in no time’ proof-of-concept. On the other, this looks and plays almost exactly like a million and one different dreadful games that are already out there and being played by a fcuktonne of kids on Roblox – kids, famously, have NO TASTE – which would suggest that if it’s not already awash with AI-generated playgrounds then it will be very soon. There’s definitely going to be a whole ‘get rich by making Roblox slopware games and the monetising the fcuk out of them’ subgrift going on soon if it’s not already here. BONUS VIBECODED GAME: this is quite an impressive Minecraft lookalike, even if the functionality isn’t really there (or at least I wasn’t able to discern it within the admittedly cursory five minutes I have it yesterday). Both of these also found by Lynn btw, who continues to be the best source of interesting new stuff made with AI that I know of.
- The Recode Project: I LOVE THIS. “The ReCode Project is a community-driven effort to preserve computer art by translating it into a modern programming language (p5.js). Every translated work will be available to the public to learn from, share, and build on. The project’s main goals are: Bring pioneering works of computational art back into circulation. Offer a learning resource to contemporary practitioners and educators. Create an active community.” Even if you are not a computer artist or someone who has any interest in building an ‘active community’ (I see you, my fellow misanthropes) there is so much interesting and seminal work from decades ago, like this piece from 50 actual years ago which I love and would like a print of please thankyou.
- Greenham Women Everywhere: Ooh, this is an interesting archive of recent-ish British history – “From 1981 for almost 20 years, Greenham Common became home to thousands of women acting in political resistance to the nuclear arms race, to patriarchy and violence in all its forms and to the claiming of British common land to store US missiles. We are collating and preserving the stories from these protests, creating an archive, to keep alive this extraordinary achievement.” It’s plausible that some of your family or parents – or, Christ, even some of you, Jesus – were involved in these protests, and there are some really fascinating photo archives and audio testimonials (amongst other things, I have only scratched the surface of this).
- Six Degrees of HipHop: Have you ever wanted every relationship in hiphop (ok, fine, this is insanely hyperbolic, but wevs) mapped as some sort of spider diagram, so that you can easily see who has collaborated and who has feuded with who? OH GOOD! Thanks to this you can now remind yourself of the halcyon years in which Eminem and ICP faced off amid the Faygospray…this feels vibecoded based on certain stylistic aspects, but it’s surprisingly comprehensive (as far as it goes), and the links out to YouTube explainers and playlists is a nice touch.
- Luminbeat: It does seem that we have spent an awful lot of time over the past couple of decades attempting to recreate WinAmp – the latest ‘hey look, an in-browser music visualiser!’ thing to float past my field of vision is this, which is a pretty high-end variant and is clearly aimed at people who want semi-pro-quality visuals for performance or creative purposes, as there’s a paid-for tier to access the full gamut of effects; still, for cheapskates (or, more realistically, people who simply don’t think it’s worth paying a monthly subscription for software that will make your screen pulse in time to music) you get to play around with the toys a bit, and there’s something undeniably quite fun about some of the webcam-enabled tools in particular. On reflection you could probably make quite a fun homebrew music video using this – not, fine, a *good* music video, but definitely A music video.
- The Wetland Project: I feel quite embarrassed not to have seen this before now tbh as it has apparently been going for about a decade now – still, better late than never and as I always like to try and remind myself (with literally no success at all) THE INTERNET IS NOT A RACE (it is, and I must win or die trying). “The Wetland Project is a multipart, multidisciplinary study of an environmental soundscape. The inspiration lies in a tiny bit of Earth and the sounds that emanate from it: the ṮEḴTEḴSEN marsh in unceded W̱SÁNEĆ territory, Saturna Island, British Columbia. The sonic phenomena produced by this little wetland — and by wetlands everywhere — tend toward infinity, but sadly also toward extinction. Explore the complex beauty of the soundscape with the Wetland Project slow radio broadcast, new media installation and musical performance. Take a look at the 2026 events program.” This is happening, as it does every year, on Earth Day (lol, fcuk me what a pathetic piece of lip service that is) 22 April – so next Wednesday! It’s worth looking at the events and the radio stations that are participating – if nothing else, I am very much looking forward to being able to tune into some frogs and ducks next week while I attempt to bash out a dozen stories about social media and trying not to cry.
- County Cricket Day 2026: I think I featured this last year too – anyway, this is something that my friend Alex is running, now in its third(?) year, and which is meant to encourage people to spend a day in May (Saturday 16th, to be precise) enjoying the ‘wonder’ of county cricket, and, while I personally have literally no interest in the ‘sport’ whatsoever, I can 100% agree that going and sitting in the sun while slowly drinking beers and letting the thwack of leather on willow vaguely wash over you is an exceptionally nice way to spend a day, and, should you have kids, this might be a fun thing to do with them (you will have to explain to your kids why cricket’s so fcuking boring, though).
By Hailey Gates
THE SECTION WHICH ISN’T BETTING ON BEING ABLE TO TAKE A HOLIDAY THIS YEAR, PT.2:
- Aadam Radio: You might have heard this week about an incredible archive of musical recordings made as bootlegs by one Aadam Jenkins and which he has put up on the Internet Archive for the world to enjoy – the collection spans hiphop, rock, indie and alternative music and runs from the 80s to the 00s, and if you want to explore them in the BORING, standard way you can do so here. BUT! If you want a FUN and EXCITING way to listen, I suggest you click the main link and enjoy the vibecoded frontend interface that lets you approach the archive as you would a radio station (and without the Internet Archive’s…slightly…slow architecture). This lets you search artists, play random sets, navigate by decade, and cue up a selection of different sets so you can just set it up to run in the background while you enjoy a Diamanda Galas/Husker Du double bill.
- Viv: Ooh, this is REALLY interesting – but I have to caveat it with a) it’s Actual Software designed to be used in the development of narrative-led games, and as such I have only read about it rather than actually done anything with it; and b) as such, unless you’re a game developer this is going to be something potentially-conceptually-interesting but nothing more. THAT SAID. Viv is a properly-fascinating attempt to develop a better way to craft emergent narratives within games – to be honest there is…quite a lot to unpack in here in terms of how it works and what it can do, but effectively it seems to be designed to make it easier to set up conditions and elements which will enable characters in-game to respond to events and develop long-standing motivations and reactions based on player actions. This isn’t easy to describe – or at least it isn’t for me – but they give this example on the homepage which will hopefully give you an idea of what you might be able to do with it: “This action is initiated by a character who searches over their own memories to find evidence of another character repeatedly mistreating them, and it can only be performed if such memories exist. As a result of the action, the initiator will lower their affinity toward the character in question—and may even plot revenge as a result.” This sounds very cool indeed, imho.
- Light A Candle For Claude: There’s been a lot of grumbling this week about Claude outages, among talk of the Opus model being deprecated in favour of the semi-mythical Mythos, which is presumably what prompted someone to spin up this site which lets developers light a candle for the AI, leaving a small message to it in prayer for a return to previous iterations. Which is sort of silly, sort of pathetic and then, when you read the notes that people have left, a tiny bit disturbing – is it good that we’re making single pieces of software, however capable, such load-bearing elements of society and our whole economies? I DON’T THINK IT FEELS GOOD!
- Worse On Purpose: A newsletter on how and why some of the world’s biggest brands are making worse products with the passage of time – the answer, inevitably, is ‘some form of immense, astonishing corporate greed’ (often, equally-inevitably, with the small ‘…thanks to Private Equity!’ addendum). This feels…gah, fcuk, we’re here, aren’t we? I mean, this FEELS AI-written to me – each of the newsletters I’ve skimmed very much have the feel of reasonably-well-prompted research tasks carried out by one of the big models, but I honestly can’t tell anymore whether I am just primed to read mediocre prose (please, don’t, I am feeling fragile) as AI-generated now. For all I know the bylined author may just…write like this. WE HAVE CROSSED THE RUBICON. Anyway, this gets a point for not at any point misusing Cory Doctorow’s itself-ensh1ttified term ‘ensh1ttification’.
- Playlist Creator: A little tool which lets you drag and drop YouTube links to create YT playlists, and which will also generate them for you automatically via AI if you tell it what sort of thing you’re after. Does it work properly? Erm, I have no idea, honestly, but why not try it out and let me know (don’t let me know)?
- Xanthe Tynehorne’s Interesting Links: I was pleased to get an email from the FABULOUSLY-named Xanthe Tynehorne telling me about the collection of Interesting and Curious Links they maintain at their website – I was less pleased to find out that Xanthe Tynehorne is not in fact their real name (CAN NOTHING BE REAL ANYMORE FFS?) but I will forgive Xanthe the subterfuge because these are some GOOD LINKS – most of them are familiar to me because I am a sick, sad man who has filled up the parts of his brain that are meant to be full of ‘happy memories’ and ‘wants, desires and ambitions’ with ‘a frankly staggering recall for every website he has ever visited in his life, or at least that’s what it feels like sometimes’, but I think that if you are less of a terminally-online weirdo than I am than you will find lots of fun new things to waste away your life with.
- Yoroll: ‘Making actual videogames in just a few prompts’ is very much not a thing, and I don’t think will be a thing, if not ever then certainly for a very long time; that isn’t, though, stopping all sorts of people from trying to make ‘AI-generated games’ a thing. Yoroll is the latest version I’ve seen – this is basically one of those annoyingly-involved (to the point where I wonder whether it’s actually more effort than making something similar via more traditional means) workflows that in-theory results in the creation of some sort of AI-generated ‘choose your own adventure’-type story, with AI video and images and text, and while it’s sadly not possible to try out anything made with the engine on the site (you can only find out about the tool and join the waitlist for access), some of the sample titles they say have been made with it sound ENTICING. Who doesn’t want to play a poorly-scripted, stilted PG-13 visual novel called ‘The Virgin’s Curse’? NO FCUKER, etc!
- Slop Me: I rather like this. Feed it a photo of yourself and then select a variety of different ways in which the image can be ‘slopped’ – my personal favourite is the one that turns you into some sort of horrifying, shiny ball of melted meatwax, but there are others and I suggest you try them all (and then set up a series of dating profiles using them across all the major platforms to see how that works out for you).
- Wikilinker: A minor quality-of-life improver, this Chrome extension – install it and it will automatically create links to Wikipedia from any appropriate words or phrases on any webpage you visit, which, while entirely non-essential, is the sort of thing which could save you valuable seconds as you browse.
- All Of The Internet Cables: Have you ever wondered ‘where exactly do all the massive cables that let me browse the web actually live?” NO OF COURSE NOT! You have rich interior lives and have no time for such incredibly-niche speculations! But, still, if you DO find yourself wondering a bit about the physical infrastructure that underpins our digital lives then this website will answer ALL (well, some) of your questions – it doesn’t just cover cables, it tracks satellites and data centres and cell towers and is pretty much the most comprehensive mapped visualisation of where all the physical trappings of the web live. Every time I look at stuff like this I get a slightly-worrying ‘how easy would it be to bomb the fcuk out of some of this, then?’ impulse, but I’m sure it’s probably all entirely secure and fine.
- The Cyberhole: This is an idiosyncratic little site which offers a selection of small games, a BASIC code editor (no idea why, but it scratched a momentary itch I had to fill the screen of my laptop with scrolling, flashing letters reading “MATT IS COOL!”) and generally about 15-20 minutes of moderately-amusing spelunking – in general, though, I have to admit I am linking to it almost exclusively because its name made me snigger like an adolescent for longer than I ought to be comfortable with.
- Bandai Namco Game Music: Would you like a YouTube channel featuring extensive soundtracks to videogames published by Japanese company Namco Bandai, famous for titles like Tekken, Ridge Racer and Elden Ring? YOU’RE WELCOME!
- The Tube Sound Quiz: I have to say when I did this earlier in the week, as someone who was born in London and who has lived here a LONG TIME, I was…somewhat saddened to find that I only got two of the answers right. On reflection, though, I am going to take the view that my inability to identify the specific underground line from a sound recording is in fact something which marks me down as a normal, functioning and non-obsessional member of society (something I have in recent weeks begun to question), and as such I am proud of my ignorance. If any of you get all of these right, submit your brain for medical testing when you die because you are a SPECIAL LITTLE FREAK.
- The Kyoto Penguin Fcuktree 2026: Yes, ok, fine, they call it a ‘relationship chart’, but let’s be honest, this is a PENGUIN FCUKTREE. Correct as of October 2025, apparently, although the accompanying note says it ‘may have changed a lot’, this is a lovely portrait of spheniscine society and the…complex interrelationships that result within it. Looking at this makes me feel EXHAUSTED, I have no idea how you fcukers in polycules manage tbh.
- DOOM, Running On Earbuds: This is an in-browser instance of DOOM which is apparently running off a pair of earbuds. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT! This is probably INCREDIBLY impressive from a technical point of view, but I don’t understand any of that and so my sole assessment of this is based on whether it allowed me to shoot stuff and, well, it did! Obviously this isn’t remotely playable in any serious sense, but it’s also fcuking incredible that a game which was the height of technological sophistication a mere 30-ish years ago can now be run off a pair of headphones OH GOD I AM SO OLD.
- Just A Number: This is just vibecoded and shamelessly-sentimental, and I wouldn’t normally bother – but the central INSIGHT here, that depending on how often you see older people who you love (parents, friends, etc) you may only have literally a dozen more interactions with them before they die (or you might die instead! Works both ways!), struck me as quite powerful and potentially-underexploited in campaigning, etc, should any of you be looking for something nakedly-exploitative to run as a campaign for Age Concern or something (or, for older reasons, a way of guilt-tripping your feckless family to call you once in a while). .
- The Cursed Alphabetical Clock: This is without a doubt the most horrible timepiece I have seen in an age, and I LOVE IT. Someone really ought to make a version of this commercially available – it would have to been an Apple Watch-style display for obvious reasons, but I think it would be a very pleasing addition to my kitchen.
- StarFling: Ooh, this is FIENDISH (and also feels pleasingly old-webbish, like something Ferry Halim might have made back in the day (if less prettily-designed than Halim’s work)). Basically your job is to fling the stars from the orbit of one planet to that of another via the simple medium of TIMELY CLICKS – this is VERY moreish, I warn you, and annoyingly really fcuking hard.
- The Daily Baffle: A GREAT selection of daily puzzle games here, improved by the fact that many of the games here are entirely new formats to me – they tend towards the wordish, but they’re really nicely-designed and there’s a nice blend of worsearch-y and crossword-y type challenges should you be the sort of person who still likes to buy one of those grandparent-ish puzzle books for long journeys.
- Live Web Tennis: LIKE WII TENNIS BUT IN YOUR BROWSER! Ok, fine, not *quite* like Wii Tennis, and it will make your browser chug a bit, but, honestly, the motiontracking on this is really pretty good; I was able to play a few games while sitting at my desk, and the way it lets you distinguish between forehands, backhands, lobs and smashes by tracking the specific angle of your arm is really quite impressive. It’s obviously shonky as fcuk but equally it’s good, clean, silly fun which will make you look INCREDIBLY STUPID as you play.
- Print Gallery of an Artist: Very much the web’s Game of the Week, this, and you will see why when you click – it is BEAUTIFUL and very clever and ever-so-slightly-mindfcuking, a platformer based on Escher-esque recursive landscapes which you have to jump around as they swirl around you… the look and feel of the levels here really is gorgeous, and this feels like something that could be fleshed out further into something rather special.
- Almost Plastic, Not Even Real: I know that spring has seemingly sprung (although the slate-grey sky visible out of my kitchen window suggests that it’s not particularly evenly-distributed at present) and that as such I should be offering you SUNSHINEY FUN THINGS, but, well, no. Almost Plastic, Not Even Real is a BRILLIANT and hugely-unsettling little horror game, played in your browser, with a truly superb look and feel; every element of this feels weighty and thought-through, from the interaction design and object manipulation to the writing and the sound (seriously, the audio in the ‘teeth’ segment is HORRIFYING) and, in general, this is worth every one of the fifteen minutes it will take you to play through. It’s not always super-intuitive, is my only gripe, but there are some helpful comments on the landing page which will explain things if you get stuck. Honestly, this is really unpleasant in the BEST sort of way.
By Randy Ortiz
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Pubs With Pool Tables: Not a Tumblr! But! A blog which exists solely to help you find pubs that have pool tables across the UK – the link takes you to the London section,but other parts of the country are apparently available should you decide you really must live somewhere else.
- Lansure’s Music Paraphernalia: I don’t really know how to describe this other than ‘fcuk me this is a lot of old music stuff’ (and also ‘this isn’t a Tumblr either, sorry’) – but, well, that’s exactly what it is. The first page is dedicated entirely to Peewee Herman for reasons that escape me, but behind that is a LOT of old music ephemera, from photos to flyers to setlists, relating to artists from throughout the 20th Century.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Hemlock Stained Glass: I promise you, your feed will be immeasurably improved by the gorgeous stained glass made by these people from Canada. I now REALLY want some stained glass (hint, hint, hint).
- Mr Tractor Inspector: I keep on seeing this guy’s handle scratched all over the place and finally bothered to look him up and…I quite like it! There’s a style to the work here that I recognise but can’t name, a sort of…Japanese-ish cartoon tilt, but with a slight body horror edge? Anyway, that won’t mean ANYTHING to you unless you click (and perhaps it won’t even if you do – SUCH IS THE BEAUTY OF THE CURIOS EXPERIENCE!) so, er, click!
- Perfumes Guy: Remember FruitSlop? SO LAST MONTH, SO DEAD! Now it’s all about PerfumeSlop – or it is on this account, which presents short, AI-generated vignettes in which weirdly-anthropomorphised perfume bottles tell you about themselves. Or at least that’s what I presume they are saying – the creator behind this is Indian, meaning I can’t understand a word of the audio. If any of you are are reading this in India, could you let me know what’s going on here? THANKS!
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- All They Will Find Is Sand: What with *all the other things* going on in the world so far in 2026, it’s perhaps understandable that the situation in Gaza has taken something of a back seat in the news; equally, though, as this piece in the LRB reminds us, it is still pretty unremittingly bleak. This is a very good overview of both How We Got Here and Where Things Are At – it’s fair to say that the state of Israel doesn’t come out of this telling with any credit whatsoever, and detail after detail in this piece is a shocking reminder of the decades of punishment inflicted on a very small, very vulnerable population. I wish I could say that there’s some sort of sense of hope by the end…but there really isn’t. Still, depressing as it may be to read it also feels quite important not to forget about what continues to happen in Gaza despite the talk of a ceasefire and a settlement, and who it is happening to. “For the Israeli government, reconstruction provides leverage. Large-scale development takes years to complete. With its full control of checkpoints and terminals and every truck of cement and building material crossing into Gaza, Israel can ensure that reconstruction remains a perpetual ‘project’. The image of luxury towers constructed above mass graves, with tens of thousands presumably buried under the earthworks, embodies the logic of 21st-century genocide. The Israeli government now hopes, in the words of the former minister Ron Dermer, that what ‘two years of war did not accomplish will be done by market forces’. The erasure of Palestinian life in Gaza could, counterintuitively, be achieved by architectural means.”
- The Fall of Orban: Still, among all the general ‘jesus fcuking Christ, what NOW?’ of everything going on, last weekend did see the briefly-pleasing spectacle of longstanding Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban fcuking off, replaced by NEW HOT POLITICO (personally I don’t really get the hot thing, but whatever gets you off!) Peter Magyar – I thought this was a nice piece of analysis by Yascha Mounk, noting that Orban’s replacement isn’t some sort of left-wing saviour (although he doesn’t, as yet, appear to desire to cling onto power forever, so this is an admitted step up) but that it should be seen as a net positive not least because it proves that democracies can be brought back from the brink of collapse, even when someone has spent a significant number of years trying to fcuk them in half. Still, I thought this was a sobering reflection on the realities of governing in a post-Orban landscape which is worth remembering: “Orbán has put so many of his own people in so many positions of power that, even with his party reduced to a small rump in parliament, he will retain the ability to torpedo the work of the government in a million ways. This means that Magyar faces two equally unappetizing choices. He can choose to play completely by existing rules; but if he does, he is leaving many of Orbán’s corrupt appointees in key positions in the administration and the state media, making his work all but impossible. Or he can fire anybody who appears more loyal to Orbán than to the constitution; but if he does, he will effectively normalize the idea that each new prime minister simply fires anybody appointed by their predecessor. The difficulty of navigating the post-populist dilemma is one reason why even a big setback for demagogues doesn’t always spell the end of their political career.”
- A Democracy of Good Dinners: A significant proportion of the week just gone, at least in the corner of the web that I malinger in, was dedicated to once again litigating the general ‘but the statistics say that people are BETTER off! Why does everyone complain of feeling poor? VIBESCESSION!!!!’ discourse – I happened to find this paper on Monday which I thought was interestingly-orthogonal to that. In it, its author Rosanne Currarino looks at the writing of ERA Seligman who posited that the key to a functioning social democracy was popular access to ‘luxury’ goods (not caviar, just…something nice). This is very very good, and I promise you it’s surprisingly readable: “Today, as at the turn of the twentieth century, we are bombarded with the language of scarcity, the seeming need for efficiency, for less spending, and specifically for less spending of the social surplus on the social, that is, on society. But we are not without a social surplus. North Americans and Europeans do not live in a time of scarcity. Words and phrases like efficiency, personal responsibility, self-control, a little bit of pain, economic detox—these are all words that mean more for me and none for you and you and you. Those are words of discrimination and of exclusion masquerading as moral virtue.”
- Angry Young Women: This also generated SOME CHAT over here this week – a piece in the New Statesman looking at the apparent RADICAL LEFT VIEWS held by young women in the UK, an in particular the extent to which they (or at least the ones interviewed for this piece) cleave to opinions that feel…very 2015, honestly, in terms of social justice, etc, but with an added queer/asex/’men are crap’ layer. WHAT TO THINK ABOUT ALL OF THIS??? I mean, first of all my reaction was ‘well, yes, what do you expect, it’s not like I would be super-jazzed about the current state of the world were I someone in my teens or 20s, and were I a young woman I too would think most men are d1cks and trash because I have been a young man and, often, we are!’. Also, though, it did make me think that…I don’t know, man, maybe this is just me being VERY OLD, but I am not wholly certain that the viewpoints of some students should really be taken as indicative of anything because…young people’s opinions have ALWAYS been like this, no? I mean, fine, there are certain wrinkles which are very much Of The Now in terms of preoccupations, etc, but the general sense that ‘politics is vital, the state is rotten, the patriarchy is fcuking everything and we need to burn it all down’ doesn’t strike me as…novel, for young people to hold? Would this piece have read any differently in the 80s had you spoken to young women writing for, and reading, Spare Rib? I just didn’t think this felt very new or noteworthy tbh, beyond the incessant need to categorise and obsess over the lives of young people and Wot They Think.
- We Are As Gods: It says something about the…somewhat-news-heavy times in which we exist that the fact that one of the planet’s most-notable business leaders had bombs and bullets directed at his house in the past week or so has barely registered on the global feed – this piece takes the attempts (well, one attempt and one apparent instance of d1ckhead kids) on Altman’s life as the jumping off point for a disquisition about where the disgruntled ‘Butlerian Jihadists’ (to use one of the would-be assassins screenname) come from, and why, fundamentally, they have already lost. “The violence will get worse, and also why it will fail — it is far too aimed at the technology itself. The enemy of the Luddites wasn’t the loom, but rather the factory owners. Yes, AI shouldn’t be used to exploit people and more economic sensitivity in that direction might even diffuse some of the anger. But it is a different fight than the one most of the people reaching for Molotovs think they’re in. They aren’t asking the economic question, or they aren’t asking the economic question primarily. Many of the extremists aren’t asking any question at all — on the surface, they are angry at modernity, at the very essence of technology. We can change the terms. But we cannot stop the arrival of progress. I hope I am clear: The fight for justice is worth having; the fight against progress is not. You cannot stop where the species is going, only how fast it gets there. “Everyone dies” is not, from the perspective of most young Americans right now, the worst case. The worst case is everyone lives and nothing you do matters and the job you trained for is gone and nobody will tell you why and the billionaires have bunkers. The anti-natalist who bombs an IVF clinic and the existential-risk boy who firebombs Altman’s house are answering the same question, which is what do you do when life has no meaning? What do you do when you feel like the future has no place for you? I suspect, perhaps controversially, this is what Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were trying, in their evil, to ask — what Adam Lanza was trying to say in his — what every man who “went postal” was trying to say.”
- AI, Work and Spreadsheets: This, by Jay Springett, is one of the smartest things I have read about workplace AI use and adoption, and how one might helpfully think of the tech and what it can do and how to use it in the aftermath of its recent step-change in performance and the fact you can now just…build stuff. In particular, it’s another useful reminder of something I have been banging on about for several years now – to whit, that the best way to think of these things is as machines with which you can fcuk with information in ALL SORTS OF WAYS, and that the real value comes in thinking not ‘what can the AI do?’ but ‘how might I usefully fcuk with this information to achieve goal X? And how, then, might I use AI to help me do that?’, but it also does a reasonable job of pointing out what a potential nightmare this is going to be in terms of the unchecked proliferation of LLM-generated informational artefacts: “Once ordinary workers can generate disposable software-shaped artefacts in minutes, they will also generate disposable security problems in the same amount of time. A new feral layer in the organisation with new problems involving access, data leakage, and governance. Nobody designs feral databases into existence, but things get made and stick in the gaps of an organisations sanctioned systems. LLM artefacts will do the same and will be even harder to audit than a nested IF formula. The open question for me is what kinds of unofficial artefacts an organisation is prepared to live with, before it has to unpick the mess after something has gone wrong. This sort of thing happens all the time with other software, which is why SaaS and enterprise systems exist in the first place.”
- AI Agents Have Bank Accounts Now: Oh, ok, not *quite* – but, honestly, almost. This isn’t an interesting article – it’s a press release (SORRY) but it’s worth reading, even if quickly, because it’s important to realise Where This Is Now At and Where It Is Going, and I do think that we are once again set to cross another…quite big Rubicon when we get to the point whereby we have literally millions of autonomous Agents whizzing around the web with the ability to transact. Think about it for a second – you give an agent access to your standard banking tools rather than crypto and…Christ, it can do ANYTHING you can do online. HMMMMMMMMMMMM. BONUS AGENT CHAT: this is an interesting piece from last month about the recent boom in agent-enabled phones in China (which had completely passed me by), and the huge security concerns it sparked when the implications of the tech’s potential dawned on, well, everyone. THIS IS ALL COMING QUITE FAST.
- The Andon AI Shop: Apologies – this is another promo-y link, but I think it’s interesting reading the company’s presentation of the project rather than the journalistic writeups, which have so far tended towards the…broadly-hyperbolic. Andon Labs is an SF outfit working on agentic autonomy and safety, and in what is a VERY smart bit of PR have ended up with an agent ‘running’ a shop. There’s obviously…quite a lot of questions that remain about the extent to which this is effectively autonomous, but I’m going to take it at about 50% face value which still feels…quite impressive. I mean, look, this is fcuking wild: “Luna is smart, but she does not have a physical body. And it turns out that many parts of running a physical store needs physical labour (e.g. painting the walls and preventing theft). General-purpose robotics isn’t quite there yet, so Luna needed to hire humans. She used gig workers to build the store and full-time employees to run it. For the build-out, she found painters on Yelp, sent an inquiry, gave instructions over the phone, paid them after the job was done, and left a review. She found a contractor to build the furniture and set up shelving. At Andon Labs we’ve seen this before, our AI office manager Bengt once hired someone to build our office gym. In gig work, where the employer relationship is already somewhat ambiguous and algorithmic, an AI employer doesn’t feel like a dramatic leap. Hiring a full-time retail employee is a different question. Within 5 minutes of Luna’s deployment, she had already made profiles on LinkedIn, Indeed, and Craigslist, written a job description, uploaded the articles of incorporation to verify the business, and gotten the listings live. As the applications began to flow in, Luna was extremely picky about who she offered interviews to. A couple of applicants were students looking for part-time work. They were majoring in things like computer science and physics and emailed in because they were interested in AI and in the experiment. We thought they would have been the ideal employees, but Luna denied them immediately, citing they had no retail experience and wouldn’t know what it takes to be the face of the store.”
- The Virtual Influencers of Coachella: There are no real people at Coachella – everyone at attendance at the Festival is seemingly music industry or industry-related, an act or a famous of some sort. This extends to Insta, where this year there has been a boom in ‘virtual influencers’ posting images of themselves at Coachella, hanging out with Actual Famouses, which poses several interesting questions – about the extent to which actual famouses have abandoned even the slight vestiges of normality that they used to have, so that they look more ‘real’ when pictured next to an AI-generated human than not; about the degree to which so much of life feels like watching through a mediated tech interface while the very rich experience things; about whether the the people commenting thirstily on the faux-influencer pics are unaware of the fact that they’re hornily complimenting an AI or whether it’s bots all the way down…but, in general, this is more of an general pointer of ‘wow, the world is strange now and we just have to deal with it I guess’ shrug of a link than anything else.
- Hanging With The D-List: There is something genuinely chilling about the idea of Fan Social, an app whereby SUPERFANS of the sorts of shows which proliferate in the US and which have launched the ‘careers’ of hundreds if not thousands of identikit, shiny-toothed narcissists with ironed-on skin and hair that looks almost impossibly-flammable can pay significant sums not only to message their idols but to hang with them IRL. Want to go and get day-drunk at a bottomless brunch with someone who’s been a recurring minor character in Real Housewives of Tacoma? YOURS for just a few thousand dollars! This is sort-of horrifying on every level, not least the extent to which it extends the whole ‘everyone is basically just going to end up w4nking for pennies to make rent’ inevitably slightly further up the foodchain than I expected. If anyone wants to take me to the pub, I am SIGNIFICANTLY CHEAPER than these people, by the way, though I can’t promise I won’t call you a cnut.
- A Roadtrip with Emily CC: Emily, who I linked to a profile of last year, is a young woman in the US who streams her life 24/7 – this piece is by a CNN journalist who went on a short roadtrip with her to see what that looks like in practice. This isn’t brilliantly written and the page is horrible with cruft, but there’s something illuminating about the way in which the reporter slowly becomes more and more…I think ‘lightly horrified’ feels like the best description of where he ends up, shocked by the extent to which Emily is very much a slave to the platform and her viewers. Break the streak? You’re screwed. Irritate or alienate the baying peanut gallery whose donations and subs pay your mortgage? Your screwed. Is this…is this financial freedom and a desirable life?
- Cassette Futurism: It feels like a while since we’ve had a good aesthetic movement (painting everything a particular shade of green two years ago doesn’t count), so I really enjoyed this writeup of what the author terms ‘cassette futurism’, which you can characterise as VHS-style analogue-digital (if you must). Once you get a feel for what they are talking about it becomes easy to spot, and there’s something interesting about a few of the ideas inherent in the aesthetic – physicality of interaction (no wireless), repairability, objects with heft – and how they quite obviously play into some very 2026 obsessions.
- The Belle & Sebastian Visual Universe: I saw Belle & Sebastian at the Royal Albert Hall for the third time last week, which probably marks me down as some sort of SUPERFAN – honestly, I am fine with that, love those twee little fcuks (I have always maintained that B&S attract a surprisingly-eclectic fanbase; one of the biggest aficionados I ever met was an..odd man who kept a very realistic model of a dead prisoner of war from the TV show ‘Band of Brothers’ and, latterly, a bottle of his own urine in his bedroom – not what you’d automatically expect), and this is a really interesting look at the graphic design ethos that has informed the band’s signature artwork over the years.
- Black, White & AI: Peter Molyneux is a genuinely legendary figure in UK videogames, as much for the outright lies he has told to the media in pursuit of publicity as for the (occasionally-seminal) titles he has brought to life. One of his greatest and most interesting successes was the early-00s classic Black & White, which let the player play God, guiding tiny people on a tiny planet via the dictats of your earthbound representative, a giant, anthropomorphised animal which would develop a personality of its own depending on how you treated it. The game was INFURIATING in many respects, not least because the creature really did have a mind of its own, and this piece looking back at the game’s history and its legacy – turns out a LOT of very serious AI people worked on it early in their careers – is honestly fascinating.
- A Corporate Retreat Gone Wrong: This is, honestly, the best account of a workplace trip I have ever read, and the photograph of the confused porcupine sent me into a fit of giggles when I looked at it again just now. Enjoy.
- Contemporary Heresies: Can I just be clear at the outset here that this is presented as an INTERESTING CURIO rather than something I in any way endorse? Good! Anyway, this is by Kevin Kelly – per the intro, “I define a heresy as: something you believe that the people you most admire and respect don’t believe and reject out of hand. With that criterion in mind, here are a bunch of Contemporary Heresies I’ve collected. These are not necessarily my heresies, although some are, but most are “plausible — not insane” heresies that others around me have said they believe. Some of these heresies are trivial and some are dangerous — true heresy.” [NB – there is debate in the comments whether these are even heresies at all, but, well, life really is too short]. I like this list not because I agree with some or all of the statements in it but because reading them will make you think a bit about why you believe certain things and, by extension, why many of these are ENTIRELY WRONG; also, this is something which you can GUARANTEE will start a huge argument among almost any group of people you can care to think of if you just ‘debate’ enough of the positions here, which is also a useful thing to have up your sleeve. If you’re currently not enjoying the dating apps, why not pick a different one of these each date to make your PERSONAL OBSESSION, just for lols? You can invite me to the eventual wedding if you’d like.
- A Review of 1984: I’m not entirely sure why a review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov found its way onto The List this week, but I really enjoyed this – not least because how wonderfully, snootily appalled Asimov is by the accepted wisdom that 1984 could in any way be characterised as ‘science fiction’ writing, and by his general disdain for pretty much the whole book (I think it’s fair to say that the criteria by which Asimov is judging are perhaps not wholly-typical, but also that many of his criticisms are very fair indeed). This is a really interesting series of lenses on a book I am personally quite hopeful noone will ever mention ever again.
- Building A Sofa: Another link to Spencer Wright at Scope of Work, this time writing about restoring an old sofa. There’s some technical stuff, some photos, but also some thoughts on time and what we choose to use it for, and craft and care and family and and and. As always with Wright’s writing, I find this quite astonishingly soothing and honestly very lovely, despite the fact that I am about as likely to ever restore a sofa as I am to ovulate.
- The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America: You do not need to be North American or to have ANY familiarity with North American restaurants to enjoy our final piece this week – this is genuinely SUPERB and is going to be on a lot of best-of lists by the end of the year I think. Caity Weaver goes VERY long (but I promise it is worth every word) to discover the absolute BEST free bread given out a restaurant in the US, and in the course of it gives us a disquisition on bread, on hospitality, several top-notch pieces of restaurant writing and a piece that is just perfect, honestly – the voice, the pitch, the pacing, it’s all spot-on, and I am legitimately jealous that I can’t write that well. Also, I REALLY want a breadbasket right now.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: