Can I offer you a piece of advice? Next time it’s incredibly hot, if someone suggests to you that you spend nine hours at a dayrave, taking place in what are effectively two massive car parks surrounded by concrete walls, that instead of enthusiastically saying “yes please!” and overexcitedly getting On It you instead say “no, thankyou, I am Too Old For That Sort Of Thing” and stay somewhere airconditioned instead?
I, sadly, did not make that sensible decision last weekend, which means that while I had a lot of fun I also sweated out approximately seventeen litres of sweat that I could ill-afford to lose in what felt like (and possibly was) 50 degree heat under the Bristolian sun, and as a result I have spent much of this week looking and feeling even more like a wizened, desiccated shell of a ‘man’ than I normally do.
Which is why I am taking a well-earned break next week to go to Rome (for Tedious Admin Purposes), where thankfully the weather wi…eh? WHAT DID YOU SAY THE TEMPERATURES WERE GOING TO BE??? Dear fcuking Christ.
Anyway, I am off next week but I am sure you will all be too excited by the glorious new dawn of the Burnham Era Of Nonspecific-but-doubtless-GREAT Change that kicks off imminently to care – I, though, will be thinking about you (YOU, specifically) all the time.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios and you should be thankful I’m not the sort of person to post pictures of themselves because dear Christ alive do I look rough.
***BONUS TINY AWARDS NEWS SECTION! Thanks to all of you who submitted sites to this year’s Tiny Awards – we had a record number of submissions this year, and our lovely judges are currently working their way through them to pick their favourites; we should have a shortlist by early-August, so I’ll share the voting link then.***
By Angela Lane
THE SECTION WHICH HAS WATCHED THIS CLIP A LOT SINCE WEDNESDAY, PT.1:
- NYC Sim: This, objectively-speaking, a fcuking INCREDIBLE thing (and, once again, a piece of beautiful webwork which I feel slightly resentful about for its stubborn refusal to be based on New York rather than London – FFS LONDON-BASED DEVS PULL YOUR FINGERS OUT). Made by one very, very talented person, this is THE WHOLE OF NEW YORK IN YOUR BROWSER! “But Matt!,” I hear you cry (I *always* hear you cry; your screams haunt me as I sleep, why won’t you just BE QUIET??), “this isn’t anything new! It’s only a few months ago that you featured some sort of vibecoded ‘Isometric New York’ thingy! Where is the novelty?”. To which I say to you a) ffs you ingrates; and b) NO THIS IS DIFFERENT! Per David L’s description on *spits* LinkedIn, “Decided I wanted to be overstimulated by NYC all the time so I built its digital twin with real time data from the city. Now I can enjoy NYC from my couch at home, and you can too! Track live movement from air traffic, subways, buses, ferries, Citi Bikes, traffic speeds, traffic cameras, 311 complaints, weather, news headlines…and even live bird migration patterns. The 3D city is procedurally generated with ThreeJS from real city data, including 86k street segments and 305k real building footprints. I then merged all this data into a single spatial intelligence layer than an LLM agent can reason over. My “city concierge” can tell you what’s happening across the city *right now* and fly you to any part of the city you’re interested in! Daily snapshots are taken so you can look back on how the city has changed over the last week.” HONESTLY THIS IS SO FCUKING AMAZING I CAN’T TELL YOU (it’s also another one in the regular procession of links which my laptop is in no way powerful enough to cope with, which is making typing this while it’s open in a separate tab a somewhat-enervating experience) – you can zoom around the city, see buses and ferries and trains, and it feels like you’re getting a birds-eye view of the real, living, breathing city rather than a static representation of it, and while that’s obviously not *quite* what’s happening here it’s just an astonishing piece of work and a beautiful example of how you can use civic data in a way that’s engaging and fun and beautiful. Honestly, I can’t stress what an incredible endeavour this is, and how much I want this for my own city so if someone can just make one in time for me coming back from my break that would be lovely thanks. This, as with so many other very fancy bits of webwork, comes via Lynn, to whom as ever thanks.
- Clipart Studio: Well isn’t *this* lovely. Clipart Studio is a tool that lets you make zine-ish collages in the tried and tested ‘cut out’ style, using the entirety of the Internet Archive’s collection of digitised magazines as your source material. You can search for any magazine on any topic from the vast array available, and then use some relatively-simple and intuitive tools to clip out whichever bits you fancy and then arrange them on a canvas to create some really very cool works indeed; even if you yourself are, like me, completely fcuking useless when it comes to stuff like this, there’s a lot of joy to be had in clicking the link and navigating to the gallery section (there’s a tab at the bottom) – people have made some really nice stuff, and perhaps the most perfect thing about this is that none of it looks digital; there’s a beautiful physicality to the resulting works which you don’t always get with digital art projects. I mean, look at this one, or this one, or this one – this is so so so good.
- Hypertexting: I keep having these encounters with people who are somehow able to live lives that don’t involve them being perennially plugged into The Big, Endless Feed Of Awful Stuff, and wondering how exactly they do it and what it must be like. I’m going to assume, though, that if you’re reading this mess then you, like me, are someone who is now ruinously addicted to Monitoring The Situation, incapable of going more than about 20 minutes without checking a feed or two because WHAT IF SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED WHAT THEN, and that as such you might be in the market for something that makes your addiction slightly easier to access; in which case WOW are you going to potentially like Hypertext. This is, very basically, one of those ‘take all your sources and turn them into a single, dizzying feed’ tools – effectively, as far as I can tell, if your source has an RSS feed then it can be pulled into Hypertext, which creates a single, chronological scroll for all your blogs and news outlets and podcasts and and and. It’s worth clicking the link and looking at the way it works in a bit more detail, as it’s actually very clever and terrifyingly feature-rich, although I do wonder how exactly it manages not to become entirely overwhelming beyond a certain number of sources; still, if you would like to try a ONE PORTAL TO RULE THEM ALL approach to your information addiction then this (iOS-only) app could be some sort of salve to your sickness (but, also, maybe we need help).
- Nearby Glasses: I confess to having totally failed the whole ‘pervert’ reputational damage angle when considering Meta glasses in the past – what can I say, I am simply TOO PURE OF HEART, evidently (or, more accurately, I am a fcuking terrible assessor of the likely public response to ANYTHING) – but it’s becoming increasingly obvious that there’s a not-unreasonable degree of ‘ick’ becoming associated with wearing the smart specs, and it remains to be seen whether it’s surmountable either by sheer ubiquity or some sort of shift in UX which lessens the whole ‘is this person taking covert footage of me?’ fear (I don’t know, maybe legislating to make it mandatory for the glasses to play an audible ‘THIS PERSON IS FILMING YOU’ audio sting whenever the camera’s on?). Anyway, until then it seems reasonable to assume that we’re going to see our first serious assault case based on someone wearing these things out in public in Q3 2026 – should you wish to be the person perpetrating that assault (please, please do not commit any assaults) then you might like to download this app, which uses Bluetooth signals to purportedly alert you to anyone wearing the specs in your vicinity. Apparently (I didn’t know this) specific device types have specific Bluetooth markers, meaning that it’s very unlikely that this will throw up false positives (although apparently there’s an outside chance it will flag Meta VR headsets, although part of me thinks anyone wearing one of those outdoors is a) already pretty visible; and b) deserves a light cuff round the back of the head); on that basis, though, it is apparently also possible to tweak the app so that it can identify (eg) all Apple devices nearby, which sounds like, er, something of a boon to any enterprising iPhone thieves out there. I am not wholly convinced that this is going to be available that long, for various reasons, but it’s an interesting ‘where we are in our collective relationship with technology’ artefact while it lasts.
- Polling Polis: I am increasingly convinced that the endless desire for the UK media to take the temperature of Wot We All Think about the politics RIGHT NOW is a net bad for the discourse in this country, compounding the tendency of modern politics to really enjoy the campaign and really hate the small business of ‘governing’. Still, should you wish to have some sort of comprehensive overview of ALL OF THE POLLS, ALL OF THE TIME then this (Claude-coded) site, which pulls recent polling data from all of the major players and maps it, might be useful. If nothing it else it shows you what a frankly insane quantity of polling happens here – I’m not wholly convinced that anything is improved by this sort of obsessional tracking of the whims of the polis, but, well, we’re doing it so I suppose it makes sense to have it all in one place. There’s some nice functionality in here, to be fair, particularly the bit that lets you easily switch between pollsters so you can compare what, for example, Opinium think vs what Lord Ashcroft’s data shows you – very much one for the wonks, this.
- Observatory Press: This is a collection of rather cool photo projects with accompanying, small-scale code executions, which I encourage you to click around and explore – per the blurb, “Observatory Press is a New York City based photography project founded by WD Amstutz. Most of my work is diachronic. It returns to the same subject over time, watching it change, accumulate, and occasionally end. Returning to the same subject with a camera is an act of obsessive attention. Over time that obsession becomes a record of something larger than the subject itself. This site contains several ongoing and completed projects. Circles No. 2 is a typological study of circular forms photographed over many years. A Great Tree and L Tree document two specific trees in New York City through dozens of visits across changing seasons and light. Curly Tree is a completed essay. It is a record of one tree with two curling limbs, ending on the day one of those limbs broke and fell.” I have a particular soft spot for the series that showcases the various weed shop storefronts along one particular Manhattan drag, but these are all very cool.
- Pakistan Film Magazine: I have absolutely no idea whatsoever about the extent to which the Pakistani film industry is considered ICONIC in the wider cinephiliac community, but FCUK ME is this a resource and a half, and one which has been going a frankly-staggering 26 FCUKING YEARS; “Pakistan Film Magazine is the first and largest website of its kind, containing unique information, articles, facts and figures on Pakistani and pre-Partition films, artists and film songs. It is continuously updated website since May 3, 2000.” The website’s mostly in Urdu (I think it’s Urdu; apologies if I am being thick here, though), but it translates quite easily with Google and it’s worth spelunking around because if nothing else some of the film poster art here is just gorgeous.
- Rektfield: OK, this is quite mad but really rather compelling and SO FUN (if very, very silly); would you like to see the trade in crypto visualised as an ACTUAL WAR??? Yes, yes you would, don’t lie. It was sent to me by its creator, Igor, who wrote: “the price of bitcoin changes every second. tick up = the green army (buyers) advances, tick down = the red army (sellers) pushes back. the front line IS the price, the flags are price levels. every real trade on the exchange = shots fired. big trades = tank volleys and airstrikes. the announcer shouts WIPEOUT when gamblers who borrowed money to bet on the price get force-closed – that’s a helicopter getting shot down. so nothing is simulated: you’re watching actual people lose actual money, rendered as toy soldiers.” So, basically, this is a live, realtime view of crypto markets rendered as an infinite war between armies of toy soldiers – entirely pointless but it looks REALLY COOL. Also, bless Igor for indulging me when I quizzed him about why he was running his copy through an LLM (English as a second language, turns out) and being nice about my sniffiness.
- Rock, Paper, Scissors Online: Would you like to participate in an massive, online version of rock, paper, scissors players, with league tables and a vaguely-Pokemonesque look and feel? YES YOU WOULD! Who knows, maybe YOU could emerge as the greatest player in the world and garner the huge praise and respect that is due to the holder of such a title, and finally feel validated by the world you’ve so long been scorned by (I SEE YOU).
- Unsung Stories: Ooh, this is a lovely project. Richard Sedley has created this website to house the essay series he’s writing, highlighting the life stories of remarkable people who have been somewhat overlooked by history; from the ‘About’ Page, “For many years I have been fascinated by the people whose ideas or actions changed the world, but whose names most of us have never heard…People are featured because I believe their stories deserve to be better known. Some are discovered through research, while others are suggested by readers and friends. The only criterion is that most readers are unlikely to have heard of them. Every story begins with research. I read books, academic sources and reputable articles before producing a first draft. Artificial intelligence is used as a research tool to identify additional sources, test factual claims and highlight areas requiring further verification. Any new information is checked against reliable original sources before publication. Finally, every article is carefully edited, proofread and checked for originality. Although AI is used during the research and editorial process, every article is written, reviewed and approved by me. Any remaining errors are my responsibility.” Footballers and writers and scientists and researchers, men and women from across the world who have said, done and discovered things that have in some small way changed the world, this is a really nice history project and I figure that a lot of you will enjoy the small, forgotten stories it uncovers.
- Polymarket Tracker: Ooh, this is interesting – another Claude site (sorry, but this is at least a clever idea), the gimmick here is that it’s tracking trades on Polymarket that trigger one or more ‘hm, this is potentially a bit suspicious’ flags, whether in terms of looking like they’re trying to inflate the size of a market or simply betting large volumes: as the blurb has it, it’s “a live screening of wallet-level trades on Polymarket’s biggest bets, from the midterms to the World Cup, built entirely from open, unauthenticated APIs.” If nothing else it’s an interesting window into how much activity on the platform looks…well, a bit iffy tbh. WHODATHUNKIT??
- Stacking Paper: This is an interesting idea from an advermarketingpr point of view – tedious plutocrats Chase (you know, the American bank with the vaguely-anal looking logo (or at least that’s what it makes me think of, stop looking at me like that)) has launched an EXCITING NEW NEWSLETTER aimed at The Kids, all about money and how it works and stuff like that. The voice is, to me, like particularly-sharp nails on a particularly-rough blackboard (“If you’ve done some soul searching and realized you need a ~slightly~ better relationship with your wallet, then stacking paper is for you. Here, we spill everything, from the time we somehow forgot to include our electric bill in our budget, to admitting that we spent wayyy too much on our favorite artist’s merch drop.” GAH STOP IT YOU ARE A BANK STOP TALKING LIKE SOMEONE IN MARKETING’S IDEA OF A SASSY BEST FRIEND!), but I have to concede that the general principal doesn’t feel entirely dumb, and I can see this actually being a non-terrible way of getting into The Kids’ consciousness in a manner that feels at least somewhat-organic (if nothing else the Substack recommendation flywheel will do it some favours). Worth a look if you’re in the invidious position of having to sell financial services products to young people (I am so, so sorry that your life is like this).
- The Zero University: To be clear, I HATE THIS SO MUCH. But, that said, the website really is VERY shiny, and so into Curios it goes – but, again, I THINK THIS IS VILE AND POSSIBLY EVIL. The Zero University is a new (not entirely sure if it wholly ‘exists’ yet) institution which starts from the premise that education, and specifically a university education, is utterly cooked – in fact when you land on the homepage, the first thing the very shiny scrollytelling explains to you is why going to university and getting a degree is DUMB and probably for cucks, which is why whoever the fuck is behind this has created the Zero University, which will instead give you REAL LIFE SKILLS THAT EMPLOYERS WANT, which in practice seems to mean that it’s acting as a low-cost labour market for big tech. Rather than doing courses, education seemingly comes from working on, er, AI-implementation projects for large tech companies; there are projects on there for Google and OpenAI and a host of others, designed to train you to, er, make money for some of the world’s richest companies. WHAT IS THE POINT OF EDUCATION IF NOT TO RENDER YOU A BETTER AND MORE USEFUL TOOL OF CAPITAL??? Christ, this is SO depressing, fcuk the mentality behind this in half, honestly. Still, *lovely* webwork!
- Vernacular: Would you like a website that collects beautiful examples of lettering and typography from around France? YES YOU WOULD! “Jules Vernacular is the name of a growing photographic collection of handcrafted scripts. A herbarium that has been built up through Jack Usine’s typographic gatherings since the mid-2000s. It unfolds like the personal travel journal of a type designer, while shaping an authentic catalogue of popular alphabetic forms. Whether urban or rural, modest or monumental, each specimen is chosen for its singularity, its plastic qualities or its incongruities. This anthology of vernacular forms seeks neither exhaustiveness nor nostalgia, but rather strives to create a sensitive archive bearing witness to the richness of this heritage. The result is a curious portrait of France through its symbols and the words that subtitle it. Launched as a blog in 2006, Jules Vernacular is reborn in 2026 in a more elaborate version with the unchanged ambition of keeping these archives alive.” Can I just point out how much I love ‘Jules Vernacular’ as a name?
- Pedro Belleza: Ooh, this is a GREAT personal portfolio website by one Pedro Belleza (great name by the way) – basically you can choose to view it through a variety of different design-y prisms, from a greenscreen 80s-style BBS view to a few different imaginings of how you might access this sort of information in the FAR FAR FUTURE (oh, ok, the 2040s, but that feels like a million light years right now and, honestly, I’m not massively fussed about seeing them right now). This is a really clever bit of design, and a lovely way for Mr Belleza to show off his design and creative chops; kudos, this is imaginative, and really nicely-done. BONUS PERSONAL WEBSITE: this is SO SO SHINY! It’s the portfolio of Tomotsugu Oyamada from Japan, and fcuk me can this person make a beautiful website. Honestly, click the link (and make sure your sound is on, there are some nice audio touches) and enjoy the gorgeous animations and the very impressive scifi-ish interface style they’ve deployed. Hugely-skilled frontend work, this. BONUS BONUS PERSONAL WEBSITE! I’m not wholly sure what this person’s name is, but they are a developer in the Bay Area and this is their personal site and, look, you can play DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION on it! WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT FFS! Just click the ‘Play’ tab on the left and enjoy some incredibly-difficult rhythm gaming.
- The Universe Atlas: Another quite remarkable bit of coding this, the sort of thing that a few years ago you’d expect to have come out of a Google experiment but which now you can apparently just make at home; would you like to explore THE WHOLE UNIVERSE? Yes, of course you would, you’re not yet totally dead inside, congratulations. This lets you wander through the entirety of the cosmos like some sort of infinitely-lived space explorer; take the site tour (button at the bottom-right of the page) to get a satisfyingly-zoomy experience of THE INFINITE MAJESTY OF THE GALAXIES!
- Voices of Democracy: I think it’s fair to say that the current period is something of a nadir for the US in terms of the quality of political discourse and rhetoric; should you wish to remind yourself that it wasn’t always thus (though fcuk me does it feel like this current awful period has been going on forever; while on the one hand Web Curios IN NO WAY ADVOCATES FOR POLITICAL VIOLENCE, on the other it does feel like you could do the world a real power of good right now by just dropping, I don’t know, a bomb the size of Swindon on the centre of DC right now), this site will remind you of a time when the people at the center of American government weren’t mad, venal, dumb, racist cnuts. “Voices of Democracy promotes the study of great speeches and debates in U.S. history. The project features the words of those who have defined the country’s guiding principles, debated controversial social and political issues, and shaped the identity and character of the American people. The project aims to foster an understanding of the nation’s principles and history and to promote civic engagement among scholars, teachers, and students.” HOW FAR YOU HAVE FALLEN, AMERICA (it is all your fcuking fault, you did this to yourselves TWICE ffs).
- SNR Dance: I am going to quote the homepage directly here: “our number-one place for non-stop eurodance and dance music from the 90s and early 2000s! Tired of the constant stream of advertisements, talk shows and stuff that just gets in the way of music enjoyment? Look no further. Here we’re all about music!” This is exactly that – a seemingly-infinite stream of 24/7 90s/00s Eurodance of the sort so effectively parodied by that American comedian guy a couple of years back, and when I am eventually consigned to hell when I die this is 100% what my eternity of torment is going to be soundtracked by.
- An Incredibly Geeky Auction: This is a fcuking INSANE forthcoming auction at Sotheby’s, in which you will be able to bid on everything from a very, very early Apple computer, still in its original packaging, to antique orreries, to stuff owned by Einstein… this is SUCH a cool trove of stuff from the history of science and technology, and even if you’re a povvo like me it’s worth having a scroll through the lots and imagining what you would buy if you were a plute (on the offchance that you DO happen to be a plute, would you, er, like to lend me £50k? What’s that? Oh).
By Linus Borgo
THE SECTION WHICH HAS WATCHED THIS CLIP A LOT SINCE WEDNESDAY, PT.2:
- The Museum of Moist Towelettes: There are many wonderful things about the web and the way it has helped us all learn more about what a beautiful, maddening, awful, stupid, ugly, beautiful and fcuked-up bunch of meatsacks we are, but one of the things that I have found most annoying about the post-web age is the number of people in the English-speaking world who purport to find the word ‘moist’ somehow upsetting. NO YOU FCUKING DON’T, GROW UP, AND YOU ARE NOT SCARED OF CLOWNS EITHER, STOP FCUKING LYING, NEITHER OF THESE THINGS MAKES YOU INTERESTING OR QUIRKY IT JUST MARKS YOU AS A PR1CK. Ahem. Is this perhaps unfair of me? I don’t care. Anyway, that’s by way of needlessly-aggressive preamble to this website, an online museum of all the different types of hand-cleaning towels given out by restaurants, airlines and the like, and which, like sachets of condiments or detergent, will form a permanent detritus layer around the world which future civilisations will marvel at as they pick through the dead remnants of our failed civilisation in search of sustenance – beautifully, there’s even an address on the Page so you can, should you desire, send in your own moist towelettes for inclusion in the museum’s physical collection. I am SO pleased that this exists, and in the unlikely event I ever find myself in Michigan I am 100% visiting.
- LARP: This is a joke about financing, but, also, might actually work as a way of artificially-inflating your startup’s revenue (or maybe it won’t; I obviously don’t know the first fcuking thing about money or funding or business). “LARP pairs you with another founder. You send them $10,000. They send you $10,000 right back. You’ve both now booked $10,000 in revenue. The books balance. Cash never moves. Everybody’s a rocketship.” Apologies, again, for the Claude-iness of the site and the horrible writing (while I am off I am going to have a serious think about how I approach stuff like this over the rest of the year, as I think if I read one more AI-penned bit of webcopy I might take a dull knife to my wrists), but I thought the central gag was neat enough to compensate for the miserable prose (feel free to mak your own joke about Curios here, I am very tired).
- The International Aerial Photographer of the Year Contest 2026: I’ve featured this a few times in the past, and each year I do I have a small moan about the fact that the website makes it so incredibly unpleasant to actually look at the images; this year is no exception, with the organisers making the fundamentally-insane decision to ‘showcase’ the winning works via the medium of…one of those digital flipbook-type interfaces that were EVERYWHERE in around 2009 and which were a bad idea even then. Still, if you can get over the horror of having to flick through digital pages to see the images – NOONE WANTS TO TURN 100 DIGITAL PAGES, LITERALLY NOONE, I DON’T CARE HOW NICE THE ANIMATION IS – then you will find some really rather beautiful pictures; I personally find the human geography stuff in here particularly fascinating, but there’s some lovely natural landscape work in here too. SUCH a hateful interface, though.
- Shortverse: Via Kottke, this is a superb resource for the short film enthusiasts amongst you. Shortverse is a community for short film makers to post their work – the idea is that it’s a discovery platform specific to the medium, which will help get your work seen by Festival programmers and the like, while also being a place where people who like shorts can watch THOUSANDS of the fcuking things (seriously, there are some 24,000 of the bstards on here). Obviously your mileage will vary in terms of quality, etc, but that’s a hell of a catalogue to sift through; there are lots of helpful tags to help you narrow the selection, whether by language or country of origin or genre, and you can even specifically select shorts that have appeared (and won prizes) at particular Festivals…this is a WONDERFUL collection of work, seriously.
- The Victorian Web: Not, thankfully, some sort of steampunk bullsh1t imagining of ‘the internet, but in Victorian times!’, but instead a nearly-40-year-old(!!!!) web project collecting information about the Victorian era – seemingly ALL the information, based on a cursory spelunk. I am assuming that every single serious scholar of Victoriana has been all over this for years, but for the casual toe-dipper who wants to get a better insight into, I don’t know, Victorian postcard design, this is INSANE. This was, apparently, originally a project spun out of Brown University in the US, but I think it’s now its own thing – honestly, you can’t even begin to imagine how insanely BIG this is. “In the Victorian Web we encounter books, paintings, political events, and eminent and not-so-eminent Victorians in multiple contexts, which we can examine when and if we wish to do so. The Victorian Web also differs fundamentally from websites like Wikipedia and many reference works, such as Britannica, and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: Each of these justly renowned sites (which authors of material on this site use frequently) aims to present a single authoritative view of its subject. In contrast, the multivocal Victorian Web encourages multiple points of view and debate, in part because matters of contemporary interest rarely generate general agreement…In addition to providing a continually expanding collection of interlinked document and images, The Victorian Web also serves as a laboratory or testbed to discover ways to make visual and textual materials more attractive and more useful to its users. One chief area of such research involves increasingly the usefulness of so-called legacy materials, chiefly books and articles that originally appeared in print. Here the question is, “How can one add value to an electronic version of a major text that in some way makes up for the fact that reading it online deprives readers of some of the pleasures of using a physical text.” Honestly, while I don’t have any personal interest in the era, I am so, so thrilled that this exists and that there are people who maintain and curate it – fcuk me is the web wonderful sometimes.
- Female-Owned Hospitality in the UK: A custom Google Map of female-owned hospitality venues across the country; pubs and restaurants and cafes and the like, all with details of who the owner is and links to the venue’s website, socials and the like. This is a fcuking incredible, and incredibly-comprehensive, project, huge kudos to Kayla Lawrie whose work it seemingly is – should you want to make it a PROJECT to only visit fancy restaurants owned by women in the next 12 months, this will help you do it.
- Slashfriends: I feel ever so slightly conflicted about this; on the one hand, the idea of a MOVEMENT to encourage people to add a /friends page to their websites, where they list and link out to their, er, internet friends, is a cute idea and I fundamentally approve of the general ‘let’s promote other people’s websites and projects and stuff!’ ethos; on the other, it feels very nostalgia-coded, very ‘THINGS WERE BETTER WHEN WE HAD WEBRINGS’, and I am increasingly strongly convinced that nostalgia is a cancer and we should attempt to excise it from the world wherever possible and instead come up with NEW AND DIFFERENT AND MAYBE BETTER ways of creating digital community than attempting to replicate the systems and structures that existed in the pre-everyone online era. Am I…am I being a miserable fcuk? It is, I concede, entirely possible (but I maintain I am entirely right about nostalgia, it is BAD).
- Castles: I didn’t want to feature this initially – it is ANOTHER FCUKING CLAUDE SITE, and the person who made it (who I am not going to name, poor fcuker) sent it to me with an email that had clearly been written by The Machine based on a generalised instruction to ‘find websites and newsletters that write about internet stuff and then cold email them a pitch for this project’ (which, honestly, is happening at the rate of 5-10 inbound emails a day now which is fcuking insane and has caused me to amend the ‘contact’ copy on the Curios site in a desperate attempt to maybe stem the tide a bit) – but then I actually had a look and had to grudgingly concede that yes, ok, it’s actually quite a good map and a potentially-useful resource for anyone who wants to travel and see castles, and so here I am gritting my teeth and linking to it despite myself. This is actually just quite a nice little web project, and if it weren’t for the fact that it just looks so…well, so *Claude* I would be significantly more kindly-disposed towards it; the lesson here, should anyone care to take one, is ‘maybe take a bit of time to remove the horrible orange/brown look from the output to at least give it some vague semblance of humanity, maybe’.
- Station Melodies of Greater Tokyo: This, though, I LOVE – I have featured the station sounds of Tokyo’s underground before, but this is a beautiful site created by Curios reader Akash Wadhwani celebrating the compositions that accompany trains entering train stations across the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, which are apparently in the process of being phased out. Akash writes: “It’s a map of every train station in Tokyo where you can tap a station and hear its departure melody, 200 of them. One man wrote 170+ of these over 35 years, and they’re being retired as JR East moves to driver-only trains…the data work is mine (2,496 stations cross-checked from Japanese fan databases and open transit data), the melodies are the real recordings, and yes, AI helped me write the code.” This feels like Good AI – and at the very least it doesn’t look like every other bit of fcuking Claudeslop out there – and the little songs are rather beautiful, I think – although you will have to give an email to access the full map which, well, fine I guess.
- Slick Search: This is an interesting idea – Slick is a tool which lets you create super-specific customised searches, so for example only looking at specific domains, say, or for specific file or datatypes within a set of Pages…this feels like a lot of stuff which it used to be relatively-trivial to accomplish with Google before The Great Decline began a decade or so ago, and I can imagine it potentially being useful for people with very specific research needs (this is going to be used to scrape so much bongo, isn’t it? FFS).
- Orma: Ooh, I like this – to be clear, I haven’t tried it and never will because it requires you to be Someone Who Exercises and, well, no, sorry, but the theory behind it is very cute. Basically Orma is a twist on the whole ‘track your runs’ idea – except rather than showing your route or your pace or whatever else, it takes that information and creates a series of visualisations from it, shape and colour and the ability to add notes about how you felt when you finished, which builds into a rather beautiful record of your exercise; I think there’s something quite lovely about the execution here (even if, again, the fact that the whole site is written in the dead voice of The Machine has rather upset me – look, whoever’s behind this, if you read this then drop me a line and I will, I promise, rewrite the copy for you for free (but not, obviously, in the, er, ‘inimitable’ Curios house style, promise)) and, should you be an Apple user (this is annoyingly iOS-only) who exercises then you might want to give it a go as part of your relentless drive towards self-improvement and optimisation (stop it for fcuk’s sake YOU ARE STILL GOING TO DIE).
- The Serena Williams Fit-Dex: Would you like a searchable database of EVERY SINGLE OUTFIT that Serena Williams has ever worn on-court, EVER? Er, why? Anyway, such a thing does exist, and it’s the work of one Divya Prabhakar who has been a Serena Williams superfan ever since she (Prabhakar) was very small, and who’s created this site in tribute to her drip over the years: “This is an ongoing effort to catalog every outfit Serena Williams has worn on-court: each round, discipline, and tournament from 1995 to her final match in 2022 the end of time (SHE’S BAAAACK). The name takes its cue from the Pokédex — a complete compendium with one slot per entry and my obsessive goal of catching ’em all.” As someone with their own, er, slightly-obsessive ongoing web project, I very much approve of this. Also, fcuk me did Serena Williams wear some cool stuff over the years, I had totally forgotten.
- Translator Magazine: THE GREAT MAGAZINE RESURGENCE CONTINUES! “Translator is a new magazine of translated journalism and reportage from around the world, for the open-minded and the language-curious…Our core team, based in London, collaborates with contributing editors, translators, writers and publishers around the world to curate and translate journalism and non-fiction writing from beyond the Anglosphere, and explore the role of language itself in shaping the world we live in. Translator gives our readers a wider view of what the world is thinking, saying and writing by platforming the voices and stories of local journalists, writers and others.” This is a great project, a smart idea and already (it’s only upto three issues) features some genuinely interesting writing from different, singular voices covering stories from Argentina, DRC, Romania, Iran and elsewhere – very much worth a look and a subscribe to their newsletter imho.
- 200 Years of Youth: French peddlers of massively-overpriced H20 Evian are apparently celebrating their 200th birthday this year – I KNOW, I AM EXCITED TOO! – and as part of the doubtless-lavish celebrations have launched this website which is, preposterously, called ‘200 Years of Youth’. LADS IT IS JUST WATER FFS IT IS NOT THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. Still, if you would like to experience a pointlesslly-whizzy pseudo-3d CG website which is all about how AMAZING it is that they put a natural resource into plastic bottles and sell it to you at a profit margin of about 10million% then, well, HAPPY DAYS! This is basically like a really tedious, water-themed version of Myst with annoying load times, and feels like it has been created specifically to pander to the whims of a senior executive who got fixated on the idea of needing a premium-feeling web experience – I particularly enjoy the fact that I just spent a minute or so waiting for a slightly-fuzzy render of the Alps to appear, alongside the legend ‘Rain and snow falls’, which then transitions to a seemingly-molecule’s eye view of the filtration process through mountain rock…WHO THE EVERLIVING FCUK IS EVER GOING TO LOOK AT THIS? WHY DOES IT EXIST? Honestly, I *adore* pointless corporate webwank like this, well done everyone involved.
- The Everything Machine: You’ll need to visit this on your phone for it to work properly, but when you do you’ll see it’s a rather clever way of demonstrating all the details about the device that a browser can collect – the number of pixels on the screen, its orientation, the types of camera it has…nicely done.
- Ladran Perros: A website celebrating songs featuring samples of dogs. Why? WHY NOT??? I particular like the fact that it contains lots of slightly-shonky hand-drawn illustrations of dogs, and there’s a playlist of all the tracks on Spotify linked to in the bottom-left of the page if you’d like some canine sounds to accompany the rest of your day.
- The Sunset: A website by Austin Steinhart, recording the sunsets he sees and the ones he misses. “After missing the sunset one night and only seeing its splendor over Instagram later in the evening, I dreamed up a digital photo frame that displayed the best moment of the sunset from the previous night. The frame would show the best moment of the sunset from the previous night, and after the current day’s sunset finished, it would update for the next 24 hours with the most current sunset.” I adore this, and the fact that he’s included detailed instructions should anyone want to replicate the project wherever they are.
- Monument Deep Time: Our final miscellaneous link of the week is another impressive ‘fcuk me, you really can do some amazing things with The Machine now’ example from Ethan Mollick, who got Claude to spin up this incredibly-impressive and surprisingly-engaging game; per his description, “I gave Fable the code: “take this game and do something incredible with it to make it something very different. Be creative” It created DEEP TIME: create a city, watch it be abandoned and forgotten, and then dig it up as a future archeologist.” This is, frankly, insane.
OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS AN HOUR OF LOW-KEY SUNSHINEY SYNTHY HOUSE COMPILED BY LORD JACOB!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY EMPTY!
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Martin Spindler: Martin is an internet friend of mine who I have never met due to his inexplicable decision to both be German and live in Germany; nonetheless, I very much enjoy his photography, which he shares at this Insta feed, he is an annoyingly-talented man.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Palantir and the NHS: A superb piece of journalism, this, by Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin, looking at how Palantir got its claws into the British state in general and the National Health Service in particular, and, more interestingly, exactly what the practical impact of its multiple contracts have been. SO much interesting detail here – the big takeaway, to my mind, is the extent to which this is yet ANOTHER wonderful example of a scary-sounding (and, let’s be clear, evil-owned) company talking up its capabilities to a psychotic degree and managing to inveigle its way into a series of public offices by dint of some slick salesmanship and the fact that, as is so often the case with public procurement of tech and tech-adjacent services, the people doing the procuring don’t have the first fcuking clue about the practical function of what it is that they are buying. As such, the main takeaways from this are a) that the Palatir tech is, for all the talk of THE EVIL THIELIAN PANOPTICON (and, don’t get me wrong, that is very much a thing), literally nothing special at all; and b) that there is literally NOTHING that clueless management in any organisation love more than the concept of a dashboard. NOTHING. I was reminded while reading this of Cambridge Analytica, the promises they made and the gulf between those promises and the provable reality of what was capable with the tech – there are parallels here for anyone who cares to look for them, I think, along with the fact that a certain section of the left’s paranoia about/obsession with Palantir might once again end up focusing on the wrong stuff (cough FFS CAROL cough).
- AI 2040: Do you remember AI 2027, the completely-made-up-and-entirely-bullsh1t projected timeline for the potential development of AI that captured a lot of public attention a while back (and which I am happy to say I described at the time as “a VERY SILLY piece of scifi theory rather than something that deserves proper scrutiny”)? It’s now midway through 2026 and it seems fairly certain that the exponential, self-directing explosion in machine capability that the project predicted is not, in fact, going to come about…so obviously the people behind it have just published AI 2040, which is their new, revised, slightly-less-improbable-but-not-much set of projections about Where This Might All End Up. As with the last one, it’s worth a look more in terms of ‘what are people who are really into this stuff thinking about it right now?’ than a predictive ‘this is what is going to happen’ lens – this time around the authors present a vision for what they think should happen, specifically that, somehow, the world will collaboratively decide to slow the pace of AI development to stave off civilisational collapse. “Plan A is our positive vision for what should happen instead. In this scenario, humanity delays the development of superintelligence until 2040, makes all AI research public, allows dozens of companies globally to catch up to the frontier, and intentionally enters a regime of mutually assured compute destruction.” It’s worth having a read through the whole thing (it’s HORRIBLY verbose – I know, I know – but skimmable) because, well, the idea of the sort of wide-spectrum international collaboration which it posits is genuinely fcuking risible here in bellicose 2026. Do we think capital and government will leave the possibility of ‘winning’ on the table? DO WE FCUK.
- The Future of Companion Robots: A dispatch from China, now, on the future of companion robots, as imagined by the companies currently making them and betting on their being a large, and growing, market for the tech in the future. This is translated from the Chinese by Jeffrey Ding and dumped into a GDoc, so it’s not the most readable thing, but it’s honestly fascinating and…ever-so-slightly chilling, not least because the people talking here are the ones who have a very strong vested interest in making people want the tech, and convincing them to buy it. This is FULL of incredibly-bleak, quotable bits – I mean, doesn’t this make you feel happy? “Bai Xiaolei believes that while the current business model is singular (selling the device itself), the essence of emotional companionship is likely a service. Future models could include subscriptions, hardware-plus-subscription bundles, or even rental-based companionship.” – and, overall, it’s a properly interesting look at what the people who are trying to convince us that this stuff is the future are currently thinking.
- AI, IP and Copyright: Nearly four years into the Great LLM Revolution and we are still no closer to resolving any of the multiple suits that have been brought against the various model makers by creatives of all stripes, seeking redress for the fact that their works have been ingested into The Machine without consent or compensation (like this latest example of how Suno has basically just ripped millions of songs from all over the place). This is a very long, but very interesting, piece in The Dial which argues that the longer all this drags on the less likely it seems that any of the legal challenges are going to result in meaningful victories for the artists, and that there are strong arguments to suggest that the current system of copyright law simply cannot cope with the new world and is going to have to be redrawn from the ground up; which, honestly, feels about right. “Developing AI models requires resources and labor procured from a complex global supply chain. Models may be developed in one country, trained on servers in another using data scraped from websites hosted in multiple countries, before being deployed in digital systems and products worldwide. This makes it difficult for creators and rights-holders like Getty to determine exactly where the copying has taken place and who is responsible. It may require them to bring proceedings (presuming they can afford it) in multiple countries to enforce their rights. This is further complicated by the fact that copyright laws differ between territories. Although the digital world can feel like it exists beyond borders, it is subject to a patchwork of national laws. What is permitted in one country may not be in another. And in most countries, it is not yet clear whether using copyright works for AI training without the creator’s consent is permissible. As a result, some creators and legal experts are starting to suggest that copyright law is no longer fit for purpose, and needs to be reformed or supplemented by a different legal framework, one that takes into account the global nature of AI development and the novel threat that GenAI poses to creators. But copyright reform can harm as well as protect creators, and there is as yet no consensus on what a new framework might look like.”
- Who Cleans Up The Vibecoding?: A really excellent piece of writing in the FT, by one of their graphics journalists on the visual design team, about the degree to which our entire digital world (and, as a result, the physical world that is so inextricably linked to it) is a series of interlocking digital dependencies based on longstanding codebases, and that this is slowly being undermined by the slow seep of AI-generated code which its creators don’t necessarily understand. This does very much feel like something that is going to come back and bite us in the not-too-distant future; we can all look forward to the day when the National Grid falls over because a significant part of its digital infrastructure has been recoded be Claude 19 and relies on a Github repo that no longer exists. This is really smart, both on the vulnerabilities and the knowledgedrain that we’re going to have to confront as significant numbers of people start to build without really understanding how anything they are building works, or how to maintain it – FUN TIMES AHEAD!
- When Whatsapp Goes Dark: Orthoganally-related to the above, this article imagines the global impact if Whatsapp were to suddenly stop working overnight and not come back. I think this stuff is SO interesting – we really don’t think enough about how many of our social, political and economic systems rest on single points of failure, I don’t think, and in particular it feels like we (sorry, this is a ‘we’ assuming that the majority of my readership is in the West, although I am aware that that’s not 100% the case) tend to massively underestimate the extent to which significant swathes of some of the world’s most populous nations effectively function on a secondary software layer which is effectively owned by Meta. This isn’t a scaremongering piece – there’s no ‘AND THEN CIVILISATION COLLAPSED AND WE ALL TURNED TO CANNIBALISM’ kicker – but it is a very good bit of speculative writing which neatly illustrates how much would just…stop if this one app happened to vanish. The numbers here are staggering, and we really don’t consider this stuff anywhere near enough imho: “Let’s start by understanding the sheer scale of WhatsApp. The Meta owned and operated messenger has roughly 3.3 billion monthly active users as of early 2026, which is about 40% of every human alive, and somewhere north of 60% of every human with a smartphone. The platform processes more than 100 billion messages per day, out of which around 7 billion are voice messages. On top of that, users place around 5.5 billion voice calls and 2.4 billion video calls per month, which boils down to more than 2 billion minutes of voice and video traffic every 24 hours. To put this in perspective, the global SMS network, at its peak in 2012, handled about 23 billion messages per day across every carrier on Earth. WhatsApp does four to five times that volume on its own, every day, on a service that is (at least at the consumer layer) “free”. However, if we look deeper into the country-level breakdown, it becomes clear that WhatsApp usage isn’t evenly distributed across the globe. India has between 535 million and 596 million monthly active users, and regardless of whether we pick the higher number or we stick with the more conservative estimate, it is the largest single national user base on any messaging platform anywhere. Brazil has about 148 million users, and the app is installed on roughly 99% of the country’s smartphones. And 93% of those users open the app daily. Indonesia has about 112 million users, with WhatsApp being the leading messaging platform in the country, and in Zimbabwe WhatsApp alone accounts for roughly 44–50% of all mobile internet traffic. In Lebanon more than four in five adults use it, making it the dominant communications channel during multiple national crises. In a great many countries, WhatsApp is not simply a service on the internet, it actually is the internet for most practical purposes.”
- African Music’s Missing Millions: A really interesting article in Communique Magazine about the disparity in payouts from streamers, etc, to African countries and musicians from the continent versus elsewhere. Naively, I had never considered the extent to which payment terms are localised, and that the value of streams from one nation do not equate to the same payout (risible in both cases, but still) as those from another, or indeed how the fragmented rights landscape in countries like Nigeria impacts the ability of artists to get fairly remunerated from their success in the digital realm.
- A Flood of Faces: How has the fact that we now see more faces than we were ever really designed to cope with changed the manner in which we perceive each other? A question I had honestly never considered before, but which is addressed by Shephali Bhatt in this essay which wonders ‘is the face card losing its currency?’ There’s an interesting progression here, from the early days of social media to the algorithmic prioritisation of first-person to-camera content, to the pandemic era Zoomification of everything and the downgrading of the voicecall in favour of the incessant demand to be on-camera, and the extent to which all of this, and, inevitably, AI, is fcuking with our heads. “In 2024, Snapchat users created over a trillion selfies, more than double the 500 billion clicked on iPhones the same year, despite having roughly a third of iPhone’s global user base. Snapchat’s filters are widely considered more flattering than standard phone cameras, making it the default mirror for a generation that has grown up expecting the camera to improve on reality. Actors, models, and public figures have long known this chronic self-scrutiny to heighten appearance anxiety and, in some cases, tip into body dysmorphia. Mirror anxiety hands that same burden to everyone with a phone camera… and it doesn’t stop when the call ends. For the first time in human history, a vast set of people carry a running visual archive of their own face. Retake, once the preserve of photographers and their subjects, is now a universal reflex. People click, evaluate, and click again–sometimes half a dozen times–before settling on a version they’re willing to share. The face has never been so thoroughly documented, or so relentlessly judged.”
- Our Plastic Surgery Nightmare: More on Faces, this time from The New Yorker which looks into the shifting trends in plastic surgery and ‘tweakments’ and the degree to which it’s resulting in people who, let’s be honest, don’t WHOLLY look like people anymore. It’s long been a fascination of mine that some of the world’s richest people who can, presumably, all afford the very best in surgical enhancements, all seemingly decide to get exactly the same fcuking face (“I’ll have number four, please, Carlos”), although the recent trend towards less-overt work has lessened the degree to which you can walk through Mayfair and see nine different middle-aged women wearing the same terrifying rictus (thank fcuk, honestly). Still, though, it is all VERY VERY WEIRD and QUITE CREEPY and, per the previous piece, I have Some Questions about the extent to which our brains deal with this sort of thing and how exactly it is affecting us subconsciously (I would be willing to bet ‘not particularly well’). Anyway, this is a great piece which takes us through early-internet culture, the backlash to magazines and photoshop and the slow, post-social emergence of a newly-acceptable level of fakery which far surpassed that of the previous decades, and the impact of the ubiquity of bongo and bongo-adjacent aesthetics on culture: “That so many of the most visible women on the internet resemble one another has already had swift consequences in the realm of visual A.I., which understands these qualities to be central to what a woman is. When reporters at the Washington Post asked three A.I. tools to generate images of a “normal woman,” in 2024, nearly every woman produced was thin and light-skinned. When prompted to show a “beautiful woman,” every woman was thin; just two per cent showed any visible sign of age; the vast majority had light- or medium-toned skin. A.I. image generators love to spit out hot women; on X, Elon Musk regularly shares short videos of beautiful fantasy girls generated by his own technology, Grok Imagine. This past November, he posted an unselfconsciously tragic prompt—“She smiles and says ‘I will always love you’ ”—and also the result: a doe-eyed brunette, freckled and glowing. In May, he posted a video of a freaky jellyfish princess blowing bubbles. Both of these artificial females had variations of Instagram Face, and both wore a look of unconditional devotion that is mainly captured, for public consumption, in pornography—which, of course, A.I. is trained on, and is now used to produce.”
- The Gentrification of Level 1 Autism: Ok, I feel I need to caveat this one quite heavily – as someone tediously-neurotypical (I know that this might, er, surprise you to learn, given the fact that Curios is obviously my Special Interest, but I have been repeatedly assured by people who are Actually Autistic that I am normie in the extreme, and the few online tests I have taken in this direction have strongly confirmed this) I have NO SKIN in this game; I am also conscious of the fact that the author of this piece, as a diagnosed autistic, takes certain positions which I appreciate may not be mainstream and which might be very heavily contested (I think the fact that they refer to themselves as ‘Asperger’s’ might be considered problematic, for a start), and I don’t for a second want to suggest that this is the ‘right’ perspective, or even that I agree with it entirely. That said, I thought it was a really interesting piece of writing by someone who has obviously got a long history of dealing with autism and being autistic in the world, and who has Some Thoughts about the degree to which the condition is now being defined in ways which are quite significantly different to the manner in which they experience it, and which in some cases seem…not actually about having autism. I am just going to leave this here and let you dive in if you want – I think this might be a *bit* contentious: “I think it is a very good idea to draw attention to how autism can manifest differently in cultures, genders, cognitive abilities, and developmental periods. As a general rule, I encourage people to not compare themselves to a statistical baseline that is mostly made up of eight-year-old boys, so I’m glad there are other people preaching this deeply transgressive and counter-cultural gospel. Autism is a heterogeneous condition that has a lot of different presentations; quite famously, it tends to appear different in girls than in boys. It is good to ensure that a very obviously autistic woman does not entirely reject the idea that she might be autistic because she cannot measure up to the platonic ideal of Hans Asperger’s finest warrior in her mind’s eye. This readjustment can, however, be taken to such an extreme that autism, a diagnostic category defined solely by observations of external behaviours, is redefined to include people who show no external signs of autism because they are (supposedly) masking this behaviour.”
- Why Are American Ambulances So Expensive?: I know that performative European disgust at the cruel venality of the US healthcare system is tedious, but also HOW FCUKING MUCH FOR AN AMBULANCE??? This is a really interesting look at exactly why it is that the ambulance ride can often be one of the more expensive parts of the cost of treatment, and one which explains why in so many films and TV shows you see characters refusing ambulance travel for cost reasons – it’s also another example of how fcuking insane it is that anyone would willingly design a system that worked like this unless they were a sociopath which, well, FFS AMERICA WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS? Failed state, I tell you (sorry, American readers, I love you but also your country is a fcuking batsh1t mess (and yes, I know, mine are both a batsh1t mess too)).
- The Electroconvulsive Fitness Suit: 404 Media’s Josephy Cox reviews a fitness suit which, honestly, sounds fcuking HORRIBLE. When I was a kid, I was fascinated by adverts (mainly on Italian TV) advertising ‘fitness systems’ which promised to give you improbably muscle definition via the simple, easy method of attaching electrodes to yourself in strategic places and then basically using small electric shocks to make your muscles twitch as though you were doing, say, abdominal crunches – but, crucially, without the need to actually DO any fcuking crunches. I was obviously DEVASTATED when I grew up and realised that these did not in fact work and that therefore the prospect of ‘having muscles’ was sadly beyond my reach (exercise is infra dig, sorry), but now apparently the bullsh1t has been resurrected in the form of a FULL BODY ELECTROSHOCK SUIT which you can wear to…well, have a really bad time, if this very funny piece is anything to go by.
- The Tech of Terminator 2: An oral history of how they did all the mad CG stuff in T2, the whole ‘THE ROBOT IS MADE OF LIQUID METAL FFS!’ thing – this is very long and VERY techy in places, but even if you’re like me and don’t *really* understand either computer graphics or even filmmaking it’s still oddly-compelling; I especially enjoyed finding out that Industrial Light and Magic won the business to do the SFX without in fact having the first idea of exactly *how* they were going to do it, which, honestly, sounds like a genuinely-terrifying way to work.
- An Oral History of Steven Spielberg and his Films: As I never tire of telling you (and, I am sure, you NEVER tire of hearing!), I don’t really like films. BUT! I know that I am a weirdo and that all of the rest of you probably do, and that you probably have a lot of love and affection for Steven Spielberg, even though his last film was apparently rubbish and he’s turned into some sort of weird Roswell truther. This is a KILOMETRIC piece looking back at his life and work, in Vulture, which benefits from having some truly stellar names appearing in recollection; Liam Neeson! Whoopie Goldberg! Ben Kingsley! Loads of other people! All talking about how ace Steven is and what a visionary and how much they loved working with him and stuff – this is, obviously, pretty much entirely-hagiographic, but there are some lovely anecdotes in here and the affection in which the man is held seems remarkable given what a famously cnuty industry full of evil b4stards Hollywood is.
- When AI is a Member of the Family: ANother piece from the New Yorker, this is a remarkable essay which is real reportage but reads like a speculative piece of near-future fiction; a portrait of a family that talk to The Machine, who tell it their secrets and who rely on it for counsel, and how that intersects with real life in meatspace. This is intensely odd, but brilliantly so, uncanny and unsettling and novelistic, and it’s just a great piece of writing from start to finish – and one which I think is going to start feeling weirdly-prescient as the next wave of AI-native voice devices gets going soon.
- Vibecamp 2026: Rolling Stone reports from Vibecamp 2026, a gathering for the very, very online in North America. I know you think I am Very, Very Online (don’t look at me like that, I KNOW WHAT YOU THINK), and I know you probably think you are Very Very Online too (but less than me, probably), and trust me when I tell you that neither you nor I can probably hold a candle to any of these kids, who, honestly, just seem utterly fcuking BROKEN. This made me feel very sad indeed, but it’s an excellent piece of writing which is kinder than it might have been about its subjects. “THE FIRST EVENT I attend the next morning is “Twitter in Real Life.” A few dozen of us gather on the front field to meet our leader, a guy who goes by Lysander (attendees are welcome to use pseudonyms, and many do). Here’s how this works, he says: For a few minutes, you tweet stuff; then, you partner up with someone and talk about what you’ve tweeted. The tweets will facilitate the connection, is the idea. “Pretend you’re a normal person with a normal social life,” Lysander says. “Look people in the eyes, if you’re capable.” A few ironic groans bubble up behind me. Not having a Twitter account myself, and not being able to create one in time for the first conversation, I end up doing more listening than talking. That probably would have been the case anyway, because what I’m getting from my partner is an airtight soliloquy tracking Hegel to Heidegger and Heidegger to Aristotle and back again. My attention drifts as someone approaches the group next to us to ask what we’re all doing. “It’s like microdosing Twitter,” they tell him. “Oh, I’m on a macrodose,” he says. “I don’t even know if that would work.” He floats off down the hill, toward the singalong circle being led by someone with a clarion voice. (Summer has come and passed, the innocent can never last, wake me up when September ends …)”
- Regressor: This feels like a companion piece to the last article; a short piece of fiction by Sam Bodrojan, about a group of queer, hyperonline convention kids and the dissolution of their dynamic. I thought the feel of this was excellent and it marries with the tone of the last piece almost uncannily well: “They didn’t leave a note because they didn’t have to. The four of them had run away because Rue was out of a job, and Lee was staring down a bill from the psych ward, and Cal was spending too much on drugs, and Roxy never paid for anything. They couldn’t afford the city anymore, couldn’t afford to get out of the city either. But when they took Cal’s two-tone Toyota Corolla and left me at the Hyatt Regency a half-mile from the convention center, I still felt it was my fault. I was grateful that it didn’t happen at our apartment. The Hive was a two-bedroom garden unit eighteen minutes on foot from the nearest train. None of us toured the place before we signed the lease, but the cracked caulk in the bathtub and black mold in the pantry wouldn’t have made a difference. The promise – a 24/7 queer-only IRL role-play kitchen-sink community – felt like the only future we could ever want.
- Smile: Not a long read, fine, but a beautiful, devastating one; this is a poem by Anne Carson, and if you can read the last line without feeling a proper punch to the gut then you are a stronger person than I am.
By Manuel Amado
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!