Webcurios 19/09/25

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Reading Time: 38 minutes

 

DID YOU ENJOY THE POMP? DID YOU ENJOY THE CEREMONY? DID YOU ENJOY THE SYCOPHANCY?

Well it doesn’t matter whether you did or not, YOU DON’T COUNT. Only one man counts and he is now safely back in Free Speech Paradise Land having a different selection of lips applied to his perineum, while we wash the taste out of our mouths and hope that a few days of light suction will mean we’re spared the caprices of the mad king for a few months longer.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you’re right, it HAS been a long week.

By Henni Alftan

START THIS WEEK’S CURIOS OFF WITH THIS EXCELLENT, VAGUELY-CINEMATIC-FEELING MIX BY THE RELIABLY TALENTED DJ FOOD! 

THE SECTION WHICH BELIEVES IN FREE SPEECH BUT ALSO, FUNDAMENTALLY, THAT US LATE NIGHT COMEDY TALKSHOWS ARE THE MOST OVERRATED FORMAT IN THE HISTORY OF TELEVISION, PT.1:  

  • A Clock: We begin with something WONDERFUL. You may – or you may not be, what do I know, who the fcuk are you, etc – be aware of an artwork from 2010 called ‘The Clock’ by artist Christian Markley; in case you’re not, it’s a 24h piece of video art which is composed entirely of clips from films which are about the time, all cut together to create a whole day/night cycle from these moments in fiction, with the passage of time being marked by either the hour being mentioned in dialogue or shown on a clock on-screen. For both practical and art world reasons, the work is a touring piece which is only available to see in galleries, meaning your chance of seeing it is entirely dependent on it and you sharing a hemisphere at the same time (and your having the time and inclination to go and check it out) – which is why, to DEMOCRATISE THE ART, a mysterious person known only as THE CLOCKMAKER (look, if that’s what the want to be called) has seen fit to remake the whole thing, ish, based on this shotlist compiled by fans. To access the whole thing you have to pony up a fee – which, honestly, feels reasonable, this is a frankly-insane amount of work – but you also get access to a 10m snippet just by logging in as a free-tier Patreon member and I can’t stress enough how much I recommend it; this really is quite quite wonderful, and I am genuinely quite tempted to chuck THE CLOCKMAKER a few quid so I can return to this at various points during the day to see how it progresses. This is BEAUTIFUL and visually compelling, and despite there being no central narrative thread whatsoever it’s impossible not to start creating your own internally-coherent set of explanations for how the vignettes link, which in itself is its own nested act of storytelling…SO GOOD, click the link and enjoy.
  • Scan Your Can: There is no scanning taking place at this website; there are, to the best of my knowledge, no cans either (of ANY sort, should any perverts from the 1970s be reading this). Instead, this is a VERY strange little webproject – I don’t really know how to describe it to you, but, well, the point of Web Curios is at least to some small extent that I try and communicate this stuff to you, so, well, here goes! It’s basically a sort of branching…what, story? Meditative experience? THERAPEUTIC AID? No clue, but basically your job here is just to turn the volume up, listen along, follow the instructions, click the buttons and SEE WHERE IT TAKES YOU. As ever with stuff like this I have to offer a small warning – I have only followed one particular branch of this rabbit warren to the end, and while that didn’t take me anywhere horrible I can’t vouch that you won’t be at some point be confronted with anything unpleasant should you take a different path to me (but it doesn’t FEEL like it’s going to get snuff-y, in case that acts as some sort of vague reassurance). This is unsettling and weird, but in a good way.
  • Elitist Britain: Those of you reading this from the UK may be SHOCKED to learn that there is a strong, longstanding correlation between ‘having gone to public school’ and ‘being in charge of stuff’ – I KNOW!! This is a newly-launched website presenting data from the Sutton Trust which breaks down, sector by sector, the percentages of people in senior positions who were either public school educated or went to Oxbridge, giving you a neat breakdown of exactly which of the UK’s main industries are most riddled with oldschool elitist bias. There is, perhaps depressingly, nothing in here that’s likely to shock you – most MPs and members of the judiciary and members of the media classes were educated at elite institutions, which is something you have probably noticed if you’ve paid even a passing iota of attention to How Stuff Works here – and if I’m going to be critical (and why the fcuk shouldn’t I? What’s that? Because I’m a useless no-mark who doesn’t actually make or achieve anything? I mean, it’s a fair point but, well, I’ve started, so) I might suggest that the website’s, well, a bit dry, and not very compelling, and does rather present WALLS OF TEXT and quite a lot of very similar-looking/sounding data without quite making it shiny or interactive enough to capture the interest of the casual browser (to which the Sutton trust might reasonably respond that this is a serious piece of work and they didn’t have either  the time or money to waste on emblazoning it with all sorts of unnecessary digital distractions, which, well, fair enough really. Two things stood out to me, in passing: a) the ‘creative industries’ here are restricted to ‘tv and film’ and ‘pop stars’, which feels…well, a bit reductive to be honest; and b) ‘influencer’ is the most-democratic category of all when it comes to educational background, which is…both sort-of good and also interesting from the point of view of the idea of the creation of a new small business/entrepreneurial class and how that might track politically (back to the ‘we are all small business owners now’ chat from the past few elections, if that rings any bells). Anyway, there’s a bunch of potentially useful and interesting information in here if you either want to MAKE SOME POINTS about a specific industry and its closed shopness or if you just want to feel a bit impotently sad about the extent to which life outcomes continue to be determined by stuff like this.
  • Borrowed Time: Clocks! Again! This time a new clock every day, all rendered in LOVELY CREATIVE CODE! Today’s is inspired by The Matrix, all falling greentext; this one, inexplicably, is made of elephants. This has been going since March this year, there are 140+ individual clocks linked to from the main page, and, if you’re interested, there’s even a largely-nonsensical manifesto explaining that, er, “WE APPROPRIATE BEAUTIFUL images, scavenged from the infinite scroll of the Internet. Pictures distort time. We catch them as they swim by, and remix them. We are not thieves; we are alchemists.” Alright then.
  • Clyx: It feels like we are very much in peak ‘APPS TO FOSTER CONNECTION LIKE WHAT WE USED TO HAVE BACK IN THE OLD DAYS’ season – Clyx is *very* buzzy at the moment, but it’s essentially another in the ‘communities based on your interests that you can take offline’ family of apps; per the strapline, “We’re bringing online communities together IRL through themed moments inspired by their favorite internet obsessions” (which, let’s be honest, is SPECTACULARLY clunky even by the standards of this sort of terrible positional marketingw4nk). What this practically means is that it’s a combined events/map service which shows things that are happening, filterable by interest/event type (gigs! Talks! Knitting circles! You get the gist), which also acts as a ticketing and lowkey social portal? Basically like DICE but with better local discovery and more of a social layer, as far as I can tell – oh, and it’s very much aimed at WOMEN (it says so on the app page and everything) so I presume the hope is that it doesn’t get clogged up by gross men attempting to share pictures of their erections in a space very much not designed for that sort of thing. Is this good? Is it useful? Will it take off and revolutionise the whole process of going out and deciding what to do? I have literally no idea, why don’t YOU decide?
  • A Whole Bunch Of Things You Can Do With The Latest Google AI Image Tool: Via Lynn’s excellent roundup of AI visual toys and the like comes this really helpful set of instructions that outline a range of different things that you can do with NanoBanana, the irritatingly-named update to Google’s image generation AI (which you get access to if you’re a Pro subscriber to Gemini iirc) – this is both a LONG laundry list of ideas and potential use-cases and a set of instructions as to prompts you can use to render each, and while I know a lot of you will automatically react to this with cries of horror and disgust (I HEAR YOU FFS) I think it’s equally important, even if you have a strong, innate hatred for All This Stuff, to have an idea of what it’s actually capable of. Some of the ideas and examples here are really quite interesting – the ability to isolate elements in an image, for example, and to restore a partial image to its whole state, are godsends for people like me who always found Photoshop or GIMP (Dear God GIMP, what a fcuking horrible bit of software) a bit too painful to deal with. Also, if you have small kids then I bet there are a bunch of things in here that they will enjoy messing around with, so if you can stand POLLUTING THEIR INNOCENT MINDS WITH AI then it might be fun to let them experiment with some of these techniques.
  • Orifice: Regular readers will recall that one of the occasional annual highlights of the web calendar is the end-of-year roundup by Defector of ‘things we got stuck inside ourselves this year’, drawn from US medical reports – this is, sadly, not that (WAIT A FEW MONTHS MY IMPATIENT PRETTIES!), but it *is* a tribute to, well, people putting things inside themselves, put together by a design company called Heirloom. It is very pretty and it made me laugh. To be clear, this is entirely safe for work, but I can’t promise it won’t give you ideas.
  • Ditherinator: Upload a phot, turn it into a dithered black and white version of said picture! Lots of settings you can fiddle with to see whether you can make a pornographic photo of yourself look entirely-innocent via the medium of visual effects (maybe don’t do this, on reflection, I have no idea what happens to the images here).
  • Random: A selection of digital design and computation expermients by one Vasilis Van Gemert, which, per the explanation, “explore the visual effects of random numbers on colour, form and time.” These are divided into categories and subcategories – daily works, specific technical studies, etc – and then further within those; there is a LOT of work in here, it’s presented in a very minimal and unshowy-manner, and, if you’re interested in colour and digital design and specifically-constrained visual arts projects, along with automated creation based on code and algorithms, then I think you will find a lot to love here. Although I am utterly baffled by what is going on with the mini carrots and the peeled cucumbers here.
  • The Hot Air Factory: Would you like to know how much energy The Machine uses? Wouldn’t we all! Sadly, though, the people currently holding its reins don’t seem in any way inclined to tell us – could it be…could it be they’re hiding something? Could it be that the answers won’t make us feel good? WHO COULD POSSIBLY TELL?! Anyway, the Hot Air Factory is a rather cute prototypical idea by design studio Oio, which is designed to offer a practical evocation of the differential energy requirements of an AI model depending on what you ask it to do, the sophistication of the model in question, etc. The idea is really simple – it’s basically an local LLM on-device connected to a 3d printed fan, which produces different amounts of air based on the computational requirements you’re asking of the LLM at any given moment, the idea being that it offers you a nice, easy reminder of the fact that every time you ask something of The Machine there’s a concomitant energy cost (of course, that’s the same every time you type a query into Google, or open the tap, or order yet another bunch of tat off Amazon, but that’s not so zeitgeisty in 2025) – this feels like a cute educational aid or small domestic art installation waiting to happen, and while it’s prototypical you can get in touch with the people at Oio and express your interest in seeing a version of this available to get your hands on, should you so desire. Quite want one, ngl.
  • Chrono Trains: I LOVE THIS! Plug in any train station in Europe (those of you on other, less-good continents will have to go without, I’m afraid) and this website will show you exactly how far you can travel on the continent’s rail networks within a set period of time. Useful for those of you looking to see how easy it will be to flee the scene of a murder using environmentally-friendly means, or, er, just looking to plan a travel itinerary. Oh, AND it gives you links to buy tickets for the journeys it plans out, which is just perfect. I COULD GET TO MARSEILLES IN 8 HOURS FFS. What am I *doing* with my life? Why am I sitting in my pants in Vauxhall typing words about the internet when I could instead be about to visit Southern France and drink pastis and throw fireworks in the streets with wild Mediterranean abandon? I am TERRIBLE at being alive.
  • Adrift: A very poignant little website – you’re presented with a body of water, on which are floating a succession of small paper boats. Each boat is a message left by another visitor to the site, a small note expressing a doubt they currently feel. I have no idea who built this or where they are from, but the messages are all in English – there is something…quite desperately heartbreaking about these small messages from strangers cast out onto this digital sea, and your appreciation of this will depend largely on how unbearably-poignant you find messages like ‘can I make rent?’, ‘should I divorce my wife if she wants a third child and I don’t?’, or ‘were they ever really my friends?’.
  • Pendulum: It’s a pendulum simulator. Ok, fine, a DOUBLE pendulum simulator. Basically this is maths at its most hypnotic.
  • Secrets of Maps: This is cute – a little website which explains exactly how Google Maps works out a route when you ask it for directions, explaining a bunch of different mechanisms that *could* be used to determine the optimal route between two points on a streetmap vs the system that Google actually alighted upon. This ACTUALLY taught me something.
  • Meteora: Ooh, this is fun! Pick different cities, MAKE MUSIC FROM THEIR DATA! It’s…very minimal and won’t win any awards for its aesthetic presentation, but the basic gimmick – “This website uses openly available meteorological data (openmeteo API) to generate sounds depending on the weather of the location typed” – is a nice one, and there’s something pleasing about trying to make some sort of symphonic composition out of the fact that it’s going to be 80% humidity in Jakarta today. It’s fair to say that making anything…good out of this is proving challenging, but if you really like atonal drone music then WOW are you going to have yourself a fun time.
  • Pano Date: I have literally no idea why someone might want to find out the exact date on which a Google Streetview image was taken, but now, thanks to this tool, you can! Actually, on reflection, this feels like it could be the load-bearing plotpoint for a murder mystery, so if anyone happens to see this and has a revelatory moment that leads to them becoming the next Richard Osman, could you, er, maybe mention me in the acknowledgements? I DON’T ASK FOR MUCH FFS.
  • The Audubon Photo Awards Winners 2025: One of the more pleasing of the annual photo contests I feature in here, the Audubon Society, as you all OBVIOUSLY know, is the US bird enthusiasts’ club and this is their annual celebration of pictures of overevolved dinosaurs. My personal favourite here is the shot of the Savanna Hawk because, basically, it feels quite OF THE NOW, but, as ever, I invite you to pick your own.
  • Fcuk With Text: Type in any text you like and apply a dizzying range of effects to it which you can then cut and paste and use wherever else you might like (subject to formatting constraints). Want to render the phrase “I LOVE YOU SO MUCH I MIGHT DIE” in a font that screams “and if you don’t love me back ON YOUR HEAD BE IT”? This website will very much cater for you, in that case (but, er, maybe don’t do that, on reflection?).
  • A Wall of Gifs: A fullscreen scrolling canvas animation of old Gifs, pulled from the Internet Archives’ old Geocities collection, scrolling randomly from right to left and presenting a pleasingly-hypnotic visual slideshow of a very specific aesthetic. I like this a LOT, and would quite like someone to supply code to create something similar with different source imagery – I would LOVE to see this with nothing but, say, rotating sandwiches, for example.
  • Make AI Great Again: I think I mentioned something the other week about AI being effectively the new vector for p1ss-poor ‘satirical’ content online – now that you can use Grok or Veo3 to spit out videoclips of famouses (or at least AI-imagined versions of them), it’s relatively quick work to cobble together ‘amusing’ shorts featuring, say, the world’s leaders doing HILARIOUS AND IMPROBABLE THINGS! And so it is with this YouTube channel, which features seemingly HUNDREDS of YT shorts depicting, in the main, Europe’s leaders, and Trump, and Zelenskyy, in various vignettes – here, for example, is an HILARIOUS clip of Trump eating McDonald’s in bed (served to him by JD Vance in a maid’s outfit, which, ok, yes, I confess to sniggering at) while getting upset at Putin and Xi and Kim all hanging out without him. Is this funny? NO! Are people watching it? DEAR GOD YES! All of these have millions of views – fine, it’s YT shorts and so it’s getting a mad algo boost into people’s timelines, but still, those are some impressive numbers if you consider the amount of time and effort that’s required to make these. INTERNATIONAL SATIRE SLOP FOR ALL! Honestly, I can’t stress enough how much of this stuff there is out there – this is one of the bigger accounts, but you should see some of the Reform-coded stuff that’s doing the rounds in the anglosphere, with laughing Nige and a downtrodden starmer and oh God we’re going to AI that frog-faced cnut into Government aren’t we.
  • I’m Not A Robot: Friend of Curios (and Tiny Award 2025 judge) Neal Agarwal knows a thing or two about making Fun Internet Stuff – this is his latest MASSIVE HIT GAME, which sees you attempting to defeat a series of increasingly-involved and deranged CAPTCHAs to prove your humanity in the face of a skeptical web browser. This gets very silly very quickly and is FAR smarter and better-designed than it needs to be.
  • Moon Cross: What, do you think, ought to be our priorities as a species right now? Focusing on the environment and its preservation? Attempting to reduce the rampant inequality of opportunity and outcome present across the globe? Addressing the seemingly-inexorable rise of some pretty fcuking unpleasant right-wing thinking across the West? NO! You fcuking IDIOT, you fcuking RUBE, you fcuking MORON! Why would you think about any of those things when instead we could be dedicating ourselves to proving God’s dominion over not only the Earth but the cosmos, by, er, ERECTING A CROSS ON THE FCUKING MOON! That’s right, this is the website of a collective of people who seem to seriously believe that one of the things we should REALLY get around to doing is putting up a monument to the Christian faith on our single planetary satellite, to, er, “consecrate the heavens and remind humanity that God is the King of the universe.” Lads, is that cross going to be visible from Earth? Because if not I struggle to see how it’s going to be doing much ‘reminding’ all the way up there out of the way. Still, if you want to get involved, you can do so by volunteering (unclear what you’re volunteering FOR, mind; for a place on the inevitable lunar module? To hold some guy ropes while you’re up there?), proselytising (OF COURSE IT’S THE FCUKING EVANGELICALS FFS!) or, inevitably, by BUYING A MODEL OF THE MOON CROSS. Honestly, there really is no grifter like a Jesus grifter, bless their cnuty little faces!

From the NYPL Picture Collection

NEXT, WHY NOT ENJOY THE WONDERFUL NEW ALBUM BY NINAJIRACHI WHICH IS CALLED, IN PERFECTLY-CURIOS-APPROPRIATE FASHION, “I LOVE MY COMPUTER”! 

THE SECTION WHICH BELIEVES IN FREE SPEECH BUT ALSO, FUNDAMENTALLY, THAT US LATE NIGHT COMEDY TALKSHOWS ARE THE MOST OVERRATED FORMAT IN THE HISTORY OF TELEVISION, PT.2:  

  •  The Straight Acting Brotherhood: I feel I need to caveat this with a big NO JUDGEMENT tag – but, also, it made me laugh a LOT. The Straight Acting Brotherhood is a membership organisation, apparently international, which is designed to foster connections between men who like men…but only ‘straight-acting men’. If you join – and it’s $150 a month, or a one-time fee of $2500, a BARGAIN!! – you get access to, er, a network of other straight-acting men, all of whom apparently have GOALS and AMBITIONS and who want to CRUSH IT just like you; there’s a degree of confusion here as to whether what you’re buying into is, to put it impolitely, some sort of an international fcuk club of BROS (but, you know, also gay) or whether this is some sort of HIGH-PERFORMANCE ACHIEVEMENT RETREAT, or whether it’s both (not sure how the high performance achievement squares with the whole ‘meeting other guys for judgement-free boning’ bit, but webs), but you will apparently meet all sorts of other LIKEMINDED GUYS who are all CRUSHING IT. I think the reason that this made me laugh so much was in part the obviously-bullsh1t nature of the offering, and in part the utter HORROR of the accompanying images; seriously, just click the link and look how SAD all the pictures look, the lonely existences depicted, the poorly-lit pics, the apartments so sparse and spartan that, honestly, no gay man I have ever met would ever consider living in them… this is one of the more ridiculously-depressing things I have seen all year, and I think you will enjoy it a lot.
  • Boombox City: Readers of a certain vintage will doubtless remember the brief period in the 1980s when the UK was gripped with BREAKDANCE FEVER and every single town centre was for a time populated by pasty-looking malcoordinated teenagers spastically-flailing to a crackly copy of ‘Rappers Delight’ in a pale (literally and figuratively) simulacrum of ‘breaking’ (where I grew up there was a guy who did this who called himself ‘Crucial Colin’ (I am not making this up) who had cerebral palsy; you may not be surprised to learn that the local response to this endeavour was, by the standards of 2025, almost unimaginably-cruel. I still think about Colin sometimes, I hope his life improved); anyway, if you DO have a vague nostalgic memory of that era then you might enjoy this website, which celebrates the massive portable tape decks known as ‘boom boxes’ (GOD I FEEL SO OLD) used to soundtrack these performances; this website offers you a LOT of pictures of, er, massive old tape-based stereos for you to reminisce over while knowing in your heart of hearts that were you to try and breakdance now you would render yourself incapable of movement for DAYS.
  • 100 Lost Species: A site seeking to draw attention to species being lost through extinction – it presents you with artists’ portraits of 100 different species which we have already lost, with information about each (where it lived, when we finally killed the last one, etc etc), with the additional gimmick that you can only spend 100 seconds on the site before it kicks you off because DO YOU SEE TIME IS RUNNING OUT DO YOU SEE?? Which is fine but, well, it does rather mean that you just fcuk off and go elsewhere at that point and stop thinking about the site entirely; oh, and the ‘artists’ portraits’ are in fact AI generated, which, well, does rather feel ironic given the whole ‘environmental impact of the machine’ thing. Hey ho.
  • Ente: Do YOU want somewhere to put photos online? Would YOU like that to be open source and to have free hosting for upto 10gb of images? Would YOU like the probably-entirely-illusory promise that it will exist, and be free, ‘FOREVER’? Great! You might like this, then.
  • Dole/Kemp 96: I don’t imagine for a second that any of you have a particularly strong desire to remind yourself of Bob Dole’s 1996 campaign for the US Presidency, but, in case you do, it turns out that the campaign website is still online, preserved as though in amber, with all of the early-web stylings and design quirks you might expect (you can even download Bob Dole wallpaper, which, ngl, I am weirdly-tempted by) – I am linking to it here because of how incredibly, almost impossibly, quaint it all seems – not just the tech and aesthetic but the messaging, the complete absence of scare tactics or attack lines, no mention whatsoever of who they were running against, no apocalyptic predictions of the terrible events that would befall the world if you made the mistake of voting the wrong way…look, let’s be clear, the world was terrible in many ways in 1996 too, but fcuk me was it appreciably less shouty.
  • Internet Addicts Anonymous: Look, I am not suggesting any of you need this – I am not! – nor indeed suggesting you drop whatever you are doing right now (ok, not…not *right* now, you can finish your Curios first, obvs) and sign up to a meeting, but, well, if there’s anyone who might potentially be in the market for an organisation that helps people grapple with a…slightly-less-than-healthy relationship with the online world then I figure it might be one of you fcukers. Not me, though. I think this is actually a serious thing, although it’s slightly hard to tell from the website which equally looks like it might have been vibecoded yesterday – still, I can’t pretend that the section on ‘information addiction’ didn’t make me pause momentarily and, not for the first time, take a deep breath and something of a critical look at some of my more recent life choices.
  • The Story Arc Engine: An interesting little Google AI toy – again via Lynn – which lets you type in the name of any book or film you care to mention and which will, in seconds, offer you a plot-point breakdown of said book or film, showing you the various stages of story and plot development across five major narrative pillars; this is a neat little proof-of-concept showing what you can build with Gemini, but, equally, feels like something that might be useful if you’re studying screen or scriptwriting or if you’re FINALLY thinking of embarking on that novel at long fcuking last (stop talking about it, just write). If you’re curious you can find a bunch of other AI-enabled tools and toys built on top of the Google stack here – there’s a lot of interesting usecases here should you care to explore.
  • Better Word Counter: Built by Giuseppe to address a minor frustration with existing wordcount systems (I do admire someone who creates solutions rather than just, you know, whinging – how does one become such a person, do you think? Can it be done? And, crucially, can it be done without any effort, ideally via the medium of subliminal instruction while one sleeps? Asking for a friend), this basically lets you take a document that exists in multiple sections and quickly and easily work out per-section wordcounts alongside the running total. This is niche, but if you work on big, multi-part pieces of work that need to hit a defined word limit (eg academic papers, tenders, etc) this could be really useful.
  • Pin2Saved: It’s been fun watching Bluesky take up a specific and slightly-weird position in the media consciousness, simultaneously a DYING NETWORK but, also, a DANGEROUS HOTBED OF VILE LEFTIST HATE – should you be one of the decreasing numbers of people persisting with the site (I am too, I NEED MY INFOFIX FFS) then you might find this cobbled-together feature useful. Bluesky recently launched a proper ‘favourites’ function, letting users bookmark posts for later; previously there had been a vague etiquette trend that you would reply to a post with a ‘pin’ emoji to indicate that you wanted to be able to find it again later, and with this little webtool you can connect your account and automatically get the posts you pin-replied to reclassified as bookmarks. Which is a neat and useful little solution that I imagine will be germane to, at most, one of you, but, as you know by now, I LOVE YOU ALL AND WANT EACH OF YOU TO BE HAPPY, HOWEVER FCUKING NICHE YOUR INTERESTS ARE!
  • The ISS P1ss Tracker: Speaking of Bluesky (seamless!), this is an account which does nothing other than post regular updates on exactly how full, to the single-digit percentage, of p1ss the urine tank on the International Space Station is. This is, on teh face of it, a very mundane account to follow – updates are literally along the lines of “The p1ss tank on the ISS is now 61% full” – but, well, I can’t pretend I don’t like to occasionally be reminded of the fact that, many hundreds of thousands of miles above me, a metal container of human urine is hurtling around the planet, occasionally depositing a frozen mass of waste into the vast infinity of the cosmos, and maybe you will too. I am conscious, as I type this, that this is the second p1ss-related link in Curios in as many weeks, and I just want to take this opportunity to reassure you that we’re not pivoting here and it really is just a coincidence I promise.
  • Yawaraka Jazz: A YouTube channel featuring some EXCELLENT crackly vinyl mixes – these are seemingly all just done by one person from what I think is their house, God love them, and are WONDERFUL; seriously, bookmark this, it’s a wonderful selection of relaxing, beautifully-selected records and a generally soothing autumnal vibe, should you be in the market for such a thing (and look, it’s mid-September ffs, IF NOT NOW THEN WHEN???). Via Kottke.
  • Good Short Books: This is a smart idea – Andrew Marder writes “I like good books. I like short books. But finding good short books can be challenging. For most needs, sorting Amazon search results by sales rank or average customer review works well, but there’s no easy way to filter or sort by book length. Given a book’s ISBN, Amazon’s Product Advertising API lets you retrieve information such as the number of pages, sales rank, price, title, and author. I downloaded this information for NPR’s Best Books from 2013 through 2024. The visualization below shows each book as a point on a scatterplot, the x-axis displays the logarithm of the number of pages and the y-axis displays the logarithm of the sales rank. Click any point to see detailed information about the book, and use the filters below to explore books by year and topic.”
  • Idle Game Maker: SUCH a fun resource, this, if you have the time and the inclination. You know those ‘clicker’-type games, right? Well this lets you make your own – it’s surprisingly flexible, if a little technical, but if you can stomach the idea of basically ‘having to write the whole thing out as a txt file’ then you could create something potentially rather fun; in particular I love the idea of creating very personal, very bespoke clicker games as presents for people, as a small thankyou or tribute or acknwoledgement, or, and this is, I concede, VERY unlikely to appeal to any of you but, well, just in case, there is 100% at least ONE person out there right now for whom a proposal via the medium of idle clicker game would be the key to their heart and loins forevermore. IS THAT PERSON YOU????? Honestly, I now want nothing more than to hear of someone popping the question with one of these, can one of you weirdos make that happen please? FOR ME???
  • Dataguessr: A DAILY GAME! Each day offers you the chance to rank countries based on different criteria – so, for example, average hours of daily sunlight, say, or ‘how much people in each country trust each other’ (Canadians, OBVIOUSLY, trust everyone, the poutine-addled fools). This is a fun minute or so’s trivia, which, if you’re me, will render you seethingly-grumpy about how ignorant it turns out you are about stuff like this.
  • Clues By Sam: A daily online version of one of those ‘every sister has a dog; how many uncles does it take to remove the fencepost?’-style logic puzzles, this is actually really nicely-designed and I like the fact that it explicitly prevents you from guessing as you move through the questions.
  • Exquisite Monster: A READER WRITES! Thanks so much to Jonathan Harford, who sent this to me earlier this week saying: “It’s an adaptation of my favorite writing/drawing party game, Eat Poop You Cat: The first player comes up with a sentence. The second player draws a picture of the sentence. The third player writes a sentence describing the picture (etc. etc.). After all players have contributed, the full chain of mutations is revealed, to the merriment and delight of all. Such webapps already exist, but mine encourages folks to create the art however they like (instead of forcing phone users to fingerpaint and desktop users to mouse-draw). It also replicates the dinner party game experience with “Party Mode”, which is for playing with friends instead of just internet randos.” So, two things – 1) this is a really nicely-made toy which I can imagine being lots of fun with family should you be blessed enough to have such a thing; 2) WHAT THE FCUK IS ‘EAT POOP YOU CAT’? IS THIS A THING DO YOU ALL KNOW ABOUT IT? And if not, if it’s just a Harford family quirk, then, er, HOW DID IT GET THAT NAME? I am baffled.
  • Bopmatch: Ooh, this is fun – a quiz where you’re asked to match artists based on their relative popularity on Spotify. You’re presented with a singer, and your job is to guess another artist who you think will basically have a similar degree of appeal on Daniel Ek’s munitions fundraising platform. Thanks to this I just discovered the slightly-surprising fact that Lana Del Rey is apparently more popular than Beyonce – WHO KNEW?
  • Subway: I don’t really understand what’s going on here, other than that this is, basically, a really simple, ASCII-ish, simulation of the experience of going on an underground rail network; there’s a slight game element in play, which you can sort of work out as you play (you can pick things up and drag them, and there are certain objects which need to be taken to certain points on the map…), but, generally, this is just sort of puzzling and curious and odd and I don’t really know what it’s for or why it exists, but I enjoy it quite a lot and I *love* the genuinely-slightly-terrifying sound design (you will know what I mean when you hear it, promise).
  • Blind & Stumbling: Our final miscellaneous link this week is this…what is this? A visual novel, I guess, except it’s all pink and pixellated and a bit hard to read, and it’s basically about having a very, very bad trip, and to be honest it’s just sort of unsettling and quite horrible and I can’t in all honesty say I *liked* it, but, equally, I really did love it rather a lot. Can these feelings exist simultaneously? CLICK THE LINK AND FIND OUT!

By Amy Dury

OUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS LOUNGE-Y, LATINATE, LATE-SUMMER SET BY LINDA MIRADA!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • How Many Cigarettes: Also probably not a Tumblr! Still, if you’ve ever wanted a site that keeps track of exactly how many tabs get smoked during the course of a variety of popular films then WELL aren’t you in luck! This is GREAT; the current prize for smokiest film currently goes to ‘Heavy Metal Parking Lot’ (no, me neither), but you will be unsurprised to learn that Casablanca is right up there. Why not make it your aim to smoke along with a few of these? EMPHYSEMA FOR CHRISTMAS!!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • It’s China, Baby!: I feel I ought to be clear about this – pretty sure that this is Chinese state propaganda designed to dazzle us over here in the West with how AMAZINGLY FUTURE China is compared to our tired old ways, much in the same way as shouty irritant IShowSpeed’s tour of the country was explicitly engineered to showcase the inherent tech superiority of the Xi regime. That said, LOOK AT ALL THE MAD FUTURESTUFF! I particularly covet a 3d-printed pangolin, geopolitics of it all be damned.
  • Coscrafts: A company that makes cosplay artefacts for serious pros – I honestly thought people still made their own kit for conventions and the like, but I guess that’s a hopelessly-naive reading of a market that’s now worth an awful lot of money; anyway, if you want to see some REALLY impressively-crafted costume work – some of the wings on display here in particular are astonishing – then CLICK NOW.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • The Day the Right Took London: So this is something of a hyperbolic headline – the right didn’t take London, they just turned up for a few hours to befoul some of its more central areas before they hove off back to the safety of the provinces again – but the piece, all about last weekend’s Big Racist Turnout, is a good one and does a decent job of demonstrating that, for all the talk about ORDINARY PEOPLE and LEGITIMATE CONCERNS, said CONCERNS do seem to have an awful lot to do with the colour of other people’s skin, or their religion, or what country they are from, which does seem to me to meet several fairly central definitions of, well, racism. I’ve had conversations over the past year with people who have been very keen to tell me that it’s rude, patronising and unhelpful to call people racist when they are ‘concerned’ about the state of the nation and their  and their kids’ futures – please do tell me exactly what this is, then: ““We’re not racist. We’re standing up for our country. What’s wrong with that?” says Janice, standing beside her friend Kerry. Unlike most people I speak to, they’re from London, in Plaistow. Janice tells me she’s seen Plaistow change immeasurably while she’s lived there, as the area has become more multicultural. “We’re the minority,” says Kerry. “There’s a school just opposite us, and I don’t see no white kids going in there.”  I ask if that’s a problem. “Yeah, it is a problem” she says sharply, scoffing at the question. “It’s full of Muslims.” Janice concurs: “And you know how they breed like rabbits.” Plaistow has been called Britain’s most mixed community, often hailed as a testament to diversity. What Janice and Kerry would like to happen is “mass deportation.”” BONUS RACISTS! More coverage, this time in the New Statesman, which draws similar conclusions about the motivations of a significant proportion of the attendees. LEGITIMATE CONCERNS!
  • A Short Note on Racism: This, by Sam Kriss, is 10 years old; I can’t remember how it floated across my timeline this week, but it’s a very good piece of analysis of how ‘racism’ has become something so unconscionable that noone will admit to being it anymore, but which is still very much prevalent as part of society; “It’s strange. For a long time anti-racists have been trying to show that racism isn’t just an overt expression of hatred towards one racialised group or another, that it’s an unvoiced hierarchy structurally embedded in the fabric of society, that the construction of race itself is mutually inextricable from racism – and yet after all that, when someone performs the most basic, crude, open expression of racism, she’s unable to recognise it as such. In a way we’re the victims of our own success. In fact, it’s not hard to imagine a slightly more literate racist-apologist defence of Ms Duncan: of course, what she said was unacceptable, but it wasn’t really racist; after all, racism is a structural relation, and what’s one person’s simple prejudice next to the large-scale bigotry of an impersonal system?” Slightly (slightly!) depressing that a decade on it’s still perfectly-resonant, but, well, hey ho!
  • The Friendly Nazis Next Door: Excellent-if-miserable satire in McSweeney’s, depressing not only for the nailed-on quality of its subject matter and tone but for the fact that it’s applicable to both the UK and (oh, ok, a significantly greater degree as of this week) US at the moment. What a surprise that all the white reporters sent out by the right wing papers to report on the white power-adjacent march came back saying that they were all perfectly-reasonable people! Whodathunkit! “Everyone says that this new crop of American Nazis is really mean, but I, a white journalist, went out to talk to them for this profile, and they were actually really nice. I mean, sure, when I first met George Nathan Bedford Forrest Wallace on his compound, I was a little thrown off by his swastika hat, Confederate-flag T-shirt, and his pants, which had a crossed-out trans flag on each leg. All those hateful clothes made him seem a little mean. But when he opened the front door of his bunker for me, and I thought, See, this is a guy with manners. He knows how to treat a lady.”
  • On Diversity and Cohesion: Ok, this is dry and academic but it’s an interesting study whose conclusions are worth a read – basically this paper looks into the extent to which cultural/ethnic diversity maps against community cohesion, or the lack thereof, so basically looks to answer the question ‘are areas that are less culturally or racially homogenous suffer from lower levels of community cohesion than areas that are culturally or racially homogenous?’; the answer is, to simplify, “not when you account for economic deprivation, no”. Worth a look should you be in the unfortunate position of having to converse with people who say things like ‘yes, but all the muslims mean that we don’t have communities anymore’.
  • Reform’s Disaster Capitalism: Another dispatch from the Reform party conference, this time by Peter Geoghegan in the LRB; you’ll be unsurprised to hear that it’s another ‘look at the cranks!’-fest (you can, after all, only write what’s presented to you), but this is a little more in-depth than last week’s piece and does a better job of talking through the extent to which the rise of Reform links to all the pleasant sorts of ideas that have been outlined in the last few links, not least the extent to which the party, and its conference, embodies the sort of ‘nudge nudge, everyone thinks it!’ racism that, honestly, it really felt like we’d sort of gotten rid of at some point in the 90s (I appreciate that as a white man my opinion of ‘the state of racism in the UK over the past 30 years’ might not be worth much, in fairness).
  • All The Sad Young Terminally Online Men: Amidst the US administration deciding this week to go full McCarthy on the sections entertainment sector following its insufficiently-hagiographic response to the killing of Charlie ‘sure said a lot of really hateful things for a man who apparently wanted to bring people together via the medium of reasoned debate!’ Kirk, a picture has started to emerge of the kid who shot him; this is a good piece about the incoherence of much of hyperonline edgelordism in 2025, the idea that there *is* no there there, no centre to grab onto, and that the memes are just that, meme. The author gloms onto the term ‘salad bar extremism’, which I get, but I do wonder whether even this is giving too much coherence to the mad cultural soup kids (lol, all of us) marinade in every waking hour of every day. BONUS ONLINE CULTURE DISPATCH: Katherine Dee writes a great piece here about the need for ACTUAL reporting with ACTUAL understanding about these subcultures and places, and how that requires a cultural engagement with the idea of ‘the web’ that we’ve been terrible at for decades now: “Because the internet has become everything, we can’t rely on sweeping generalists. We need people who understand its specific dynamics in a real way. Not self-declared “Internet Understanders” — I keep seeing these ambassadors crop up, claiming to hold the keys to all things online, which is about as useful as declaring yourself a “Culture Understander.” What we actually need are researchers who study particular phenomena in depth: how algorithms shape behavior, how communities form and dissolve, the difference between political extremism and nihilism. Just as we need economists even though “the economy” touches everything, we need experts mapping the internet’s specific effects…What the flashier, “name brand” Internet extremism writers missed in the intervening years was critical. The phenomenon KiwiFarms calls “Zoomer sadism” — surreal, absurdist cruelty now endemic to so many online spaces, not confined to the right alone. The disembodiment and desensitization that define life for so many under 45. To their credit, some people in academia tried to capture this, but their work was forgotten or ignored.”
  • Magical Systems Thinking: A few people I very much respect, intellectually-speaking, are into systems thinking as a ‘thing’ and as such its a topic I have tried to read around more in the past few years, not least because I do think ‘systems’ as a way of conceiving of stuff is a generally useful framing. This is a very interesting piece by Ed Bradon, all about how systems are inherently metamorphic – that they are not static, and that they are changed and altered by the act of their functioning, and that to think of them as static is to fundamentally misunderstand their nature, and, look, while I am obviously QUITE far away from being the sort of person who’s responsible for, I don’t know, exacting large-scale systemic change, even I can see that there’s some useful thinking in here on how to make things happen within organisations or existing structures.
  • Is AI a Bubble?: If Zitron keeps saying it is, he’ll be proved right eventually! I jest, I jest, I broadly agree that if it’s not a bubble right now then it’s certainly looking increasingly-bubble-shaped (again, though, just to reiterate for all the people at the back exercising some very motivated reasoning about What It Will Mean When It Bursts – it doesn’t mean the BAD MACHINE goes away! It just means we get the BAD MACHINE *and* a whole load of economic pain!); that said, I know the square root of fcuk all about business and financing and markets and, well, money, so I found this analysis by Azeem Azhar to be a useful overview of where we ACTUALLY are in the bubble-y hypecycle based on a bunch of indicators used by actual economists. Now, for all that I often decry Zitron as an audience-captured antihypeman, peddling a particular line for an audience willing to pay him to hear it, it’s equally fair to say that Azeem has been…VERY bullish on AI since the beginning, and almost certainly has one or two financial positions that inform that outlook, and so I can’t in all honesty position this as entirely-objective analysis; that said, his conclusion is ‘not a bubble yet, might become one but might not’; read the piece and see what YOU think (and then, er, can you come back and explain to me what I ough to think, please? THANKS!).
  • Working With Wizards: Ethan Mollick returns with a post about working with the current best-in-class models from OpenAI et al, and the extent to which there’s now a point where, rather than doing the dialogue-style back and forth with the model to get what you want, you’re instead just better off just asking it a one-shot question and seeing what happens because, basically, the models are pretty fcuking good and will often do things in ways that are surprising and, in some cases, superior to the way you might have instructed them to. Except, of course, sometimes they’re not – and you will never know which version you’re going to get! Per the previous bullet, Mollick’s very much an AI booster and has rose-tinted spectacles about this stuff, but he’s also been consistently correct about ‘how to work with these things’ over the past 3 years and as such I am inclined to listen to him. This is worth a read if you do regular work with The Machine, or if you’d like to.
  • No Fun Entrepreneurialism: I have known and worked with various startup founders over the years, from the classic techbro stereotypes, all huel and 6am gym sessions and weekends spend coding and the slowly-encroaching realisation that even if you make a world-conquering SaaS product you’re still going to die alone, to the hypercharismatic late-00s version, all Indie Sleaze-coded with the fancy show-off suits and Page 3 model girlfriends (*cough* and the gak *cough*) – this piece looks at the archetype currently holding sway in Silicon Valley, specifically a very, very dedicated coterie of people who take the whole HUSTLE AND GRIND AND SLEEP IN THE OFFICE thing to the nth degree…look, if people want to spend their lives like this then, well, good for them, but I found it quite depressing that the people profiled in the article were doing this so that they could, if they were lucky, build the BEST POSSIBLE SCHEDULING SOFTWARE EVER or something equally-unprepossessing. Although, based on their apparent personality profiles, maybe it’s for the best that they’re not trying to change the world in more significant ways.
  • The GPT Divorces: One of the weird little interplatform integrations I noticed earlier this year is the fact that WhatsApp allows you to export an entire conversation (text only, sadly, no images or voicenotes) into GPT which you can then INTERROGATE – I tried it once and decided very quickly never to do it again given the HORRIFIC way in which it immediately started giving me advice as to how I might optimise my communications with this particular interlocutor so as to achieve a variety of potential goals. Which is by way of introduction to this piece, which looks at the apparently-growing phenomenon of spouses deciding to use The Machine as their personal relationship soundingboard, telling it EVERYTHING and asking it to suggest coping strategies for when a partner’s behaviour falls below the required standard. Except it turns out that what this tends to lead to is the person using The Machine being repeatedly told that their partner is a sh1theel, and said partner getting increasingly irked at the Machine-user for not actually bothering to materially engage with their relationship and instead outsourcing the emotional labour to some fcuking maths. The result? DIVORCE!
  • Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Talk: You may recall a few months ago I featured a podcast transcript in which everyone’s favourite contender for ‘worst human being currently alive’ opined that, yes, the Antichrist is very real, and as it happens it might in fact be Greta Thunberg – well, Thiel’s now doing a series of talks in San Francisco on related, apocalyptic topics, so naturally the San Francisco Chronicle sent someone down to check out the opener. WHY ARE THESE PEOPLE ALL LIKE THIS?!?!?! WHY ARE WE ALL MEANT TO PRETEND THEY ARE GENIUSES?!?!?! I mean, just listen to this sh1t: “The consensus was that the talk largely repeated the points Thiel had made in previous interviews on the subject — namely, that the Antichrist would use the threat of Armageddon, or some looming crisis, in order to consolidate control and create a “one-world government.” One attendee recalled Thiel specifying that this figure could not be a state figurehead like Chinese President Xi Jinping, because it needs to be more global. He couldn’t recall if Thiel suggested Thunberg would make the cut. One attendee recalled that Thiel’s discussion of the Antichrist was more about a scenario than an individual. Thiel’s Antichrist scenario is one in which a unified government suppresses technology to impose order, or armageddon, wherein AI takes over and ushers in the end of the world. “We’ll either have the one government that destroys technology and takes over, or you have the AI that destroys everything,” he said.”
  • Welcome To The Bop House: This is a piece profiling a bunch of creator-slash-model-type women who moved into a shared content house together, called The Bop House – you will have read similar pieces before, and, per se, beyond the particular names and personalities and DRAMAS here outlined there’s nothing super-new, but I did find the piece’s acknowledgement of the slightly-icky Lolita-ish nature of the presentation of lots of these women refreshing; this doesn’t get talked about enough imho, but there is a…slightly-weird, to my mind at least, tension between the increasinngly-politicised movement to ‘protect women and girls’ from the right wing, and the prevalence of content which is a) obviously sexualised even if not actual bongo; and b) very much presents as YOUNG. Aside from anything else, though, it’s another exhausting story of the commodification of young women’s bodies, the male gaze and the ceaseless drive to secure the bag – a tale so modern, a tale as old as time!
  • A Minecraft Reality Show: This absolutely blew my mind, both conceptually and in terms of its popularity; also, METAVERSE KLAXON! “It was November of 2023 when Ish, a 23-year-old native of Illinois, announced a new entry in his “Minecraft Civilization” event series. Over 8,000 of his fans rushed to apply to join. The prize: the chance to become one of 1,000 players invited to “simulate a realistic civilization” on one of two Minecraft islands hosted by Ish and his team across a more than weeklong event. These videos, often presented as “experiments,” defy typical YouTube video genre conventions. They’re not scripted beyond the initial scenario devised by Ish, nor are they truly “real” simulations of a digital civilization, because players that get invited to join the events are often self consciously roleplaying, yucking it up either as fictional characters or as heightened versions of themselves. The end result for viewers—after many months of edits from Ish’s team—is a carefully crafted episode of something like a reality TV episode, all filmed within Minecraft. Ish and his team spent nearly two years editing and polishing the video about the event, which was finally published in July. So far over 19 million people have watched the two-and-half hour feature film chronicling what went down on Ish’s two islands. Many are calling it “peak cinema” and one of the best YouTube videos in the history of the platform.” This feels like a future, if not necessarily THE future.
  • Christian Pop: The Post Office near my house is notable for two things; the incredible, almost-comedic, degree of disdain shown by the people working there for their customers, and the fact that they only EVER play Christian rock radio, which, while I am waiting to suffer the ignominy of a well-deployed eyeroll for having the temerity to, I don’t know, need a stamp, seems to alternate light-hearted chat about scripture and the need to just let the Big Guy Upstairs into your heart with some…honestly impressively-hooky tunes all about now salvation could just be yours if you just tuned into his special Jesus frequency (I am paraphrasing, but you get the gist I hope). Anyway, this article is by Joelle Kid, who grew up Christian in the US and as such was exposed to that particularly American sort of religiosity which sees abstention from fun as almost as important as the active performance of Christian behaviour. I loved this – as you read it, make sure to go onto YouTube and look up the bands and songs here referenced, you’re in for a TREAT: “Angela loved a band called Superchick. In a nostalgic mood, I recently visited songmeanings.com to remind myself of the (to me, entirely befuddling) lyrics of their song “Barlow Girls.” As a kid, I’d been confused by a line in the song that references boys finding girls attractive . . . if they resemble their mothers. Online, none of the commenters—the most recent of whom made their contribution in 2006—seem to have the same hang-ups I do about dating a boy who says you remind him of his mom. “It’s good that some artists are making songs about NOT having sex,” one commenter muses. Another wrote in 2002, “When i first hear this i phreaked out!! I was like OMiGOSH!! thats me!!!! this is an awesome song.” I was struck by a sudden memory of typing “OMiGOSH” into an MSN Messenger window, carefully making sure to emphasize that I was not taking the Lord’s name in vain through a sinful “OMG.” Feeling overwhelmed by the cringeworthy nature of this memory, I decided to leave the site.”
  • 57 Things I Love In London: This is Naomi Alderman’s list, sparked by last weekend’s protests and the feeling that London is better than that, actually; I don’t agree with all 57 things on here, but, well, that’s sort of the point of city lists like these, partly to crib from and partly to inspire you to think of your own.
  • Rungi’s: A piece in Vittles, all about the market which feeds Paris. This is SO good, and made me want to wake up at 3am to go and finger some offal: “To everyday Parisians, Rungis is a distant Cockaigne, a land of plenty that few have experienced firsthand. This is a business-to-business market – you need a professional membership to sell and buy – and even though the extension of line 14 of the métro in 2024 made Rungis much more accessible, there isn’t much reason to come here to browse produce you cannot purchase anyway. Most French people will only have a mediated knowledge of Rungis, often through TV, as journalists flock to it around Christmas to report on the deliveries of foie gras, smoked salmon, capon and truffled cheeses. Feeding 18 million individuals daily and supplying 60% of the Paris region’s fresh produce consumption, the market is a food behemoth like no other in Europe. But before it could reach its current levels of efficiency and become one of the foremost fresh markets in the world, it had to sever its centuries-old ties to central Paris, slaughtering the historical core of the capital in the process. In doing so, it has profoundly changed the relationship between Parisians and the food they consume. And all in the name of the modern city.”
  • Delivering Parcels in Beijing: An excerpt from Hu Anyan’s memoir, this is a beautifully-spare and simply-written account of what it’s like being a delivery driver in one of the world’s most populous places. I really really enjoyed this.
  • American Nukes in an English Village: A great bit of reporting in the Dispatch, about the US military base where they keep some of their nukes, and the oddity for locals of knowing that the bombs are RIGHT THERE. Pleasingly-eccentric and occasionally a bit threatening, the whole vibe of this is quite Scarfolk if you know what I mean. “Twentieth-century naturalists spoke of the fens to the north of Lakenheath as like Patagonia — and as otherworldly. This isn’t just the fancy of outsiders. I’m told of Facebook groups where locals post about booms they don’t understand, audible in Mildenhall and Red Lodge. Noises like the howls of wolves. And how, when you’re not used to hearing machine gun fire, it can sound very eerie at night.”
  • House Arab: Finally this edition, hands-down the best thing I read all week; Ismail Ibrahim writes about working as an Arabic-speaking fact-checker, and then not, for a US publication after October 7th. This is superb, honestly. “The operating orthodoxy was that police killings, CIA coups, black site torture, and institutional misogyny were aberrations, deviations from the American norm that would eventually be corrected when the arc of the moral universe, long as it is, finally got around to them. I insulated myself from this flavor of stupidity by rigorously avoiding news stories, though I knew that one day some Muslims who hated the West would kill some Westerners and I would have to bite my tongue and check some pieces that implied, but never outright stated, that Arabs were predisposed to bloodlust. I hated the West, too. I hated how Westerners were always asking to itemize the bill at dinner, how they never took enough responsibility for, say, inventing fascism and nuclear weapons, or for instigating the Bengal famine. They fought in stilted HR-speak, and shoved bland food into ruddy, clammy faces. My hatred never reached the level of murderousness, though it did put me in a tricky position. I couldn’t “go home” because I had no “home” to go back to; Egypt, where my family lived, was languishing under high inflation and military dictatorship, while the Emirates, where I’d grown up, was a land of indentured servitude. Besides, I wanted to become a novelist, and novelists lived in New York.”

By Stratco

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS !: