REJOICE, FOR THE WHEELS OF JUSTICE ARE GRINDING! Except, maybe, don’t rejoice just yet, because a) he’s on the hook for state secrets stuff, not international paedo cabal stuff; and b) he might be a horrible, dismally-thick, potentially-rapey cnut, Prince Andrew, but he’s a horrible, dismally-thick, potentially-rapey cnut who can still afford very high-quality legal representation and who as such may well get away completely scott-free, regardless of all the (very enjoyable) schadenfreude of the past few days.
Still, it’s rare that we get to glory in some ACTUAL(oh, ok, fine, potential) ACCOUNTABILITY here in 2026 – an era in which it seems we have decided to take the concept of ‘consequences for one’s actions’ and fcuk it all the way into the sun – so don’t let me p1ss on your chips here; feel free to imagine Andrew getting jugged at HMP Kirkham at some point into 2027.
In the meantime it is once again the end of another week – as I type, Radio 4 has spent the past 10 minutes teeing up a segment on Clavicular by explaining what terms like ‘Chad’, Stacey’ and ‘blackpill’ mean to an audience of middle-aged suburban normies, suggesting that this might be the point at which the history books agree that culture died – and I need to book some flights to Copenhagen. You, though, should sit right here and enjoy these links, which as ever are the very cream of this week’s web (or at least whatever it is that floats to the top).
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios and you should still call him Prince Andrew, you know, don’t let them pretend he’s not one of THEIRS, the cnuts.
By Nguan
LET’S KICK OFF THE WEEK WITH A CRACKING OLDSCHOOL HIPHOP MIX BY DJ GREEN LANTERN!
THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THE ANDREW ARREST IS GOOD AS FAR AS IT GOES BUT WHICH WOULD ALSO QUITE LIKE TO SEE SOMEONE GET DONE FOR THE NONCING NOW PLEASE, PT.1:
- A Genuinely Good AI Short Film: Apologies to the link here, which takes you to X (and, of course, for the genuine, full-body shudder that so many of you will have felt on seeing the letters ‘A’ and ‘I’ in such close proximity to each other, and not safely buttressed by comforting bromides like ‘slop’ or ‘is sh1t and guaranteed to fail’ – don’t worry, though, I have faith that you will be able to cope), but I’ve not found a mirror of this anywhere else and it really is worth seeing. This was made by Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke as part of the New Year’s celebrations which took place this week, in a collaboration with Bytedance to promote its new Seeddance 2.0 video model which I mentioned last week, and I think this might be the first AI short that I have watched and…enjoyed? This isn’t super-flashy, it doesn’t do anything particularly crazy, it’s just a smartly-written, nicely-directed film about the director coming face-to-face with the AI version of himself and talking about creativity, art, authorial obsolescence and other things besides, and if you can watch this and still come away thinking ‘slop! Meritless! Empty! Burn it all down!’ then, well, you might be beyond help. Leaving aside a few obvious things – it’s a promo for the brand behind the tech! It’s part of a larger, broadly-propagandist swathe of content designed to promote Chinese technical mastery! – this is a great example of what can be achieved with AI by someone who IS A GOOD FILMMAKER, and what you can do with relatively-accessible tech if you can write a script and think at least semi-cogently about shot blocking, etc, and if you have any curiosity about what ‘good’ Machine-generated content looks like in 2026 then you sort of owe it to yourself to watch this. I PROMISE YOU WILL NOT BURST INTO FLAMES! GOD WILL NOT SMITE YOU!
- Sandboxels: Well this is an absolute JOY. Friend of Curios, TinyAwards judge and prolific creator of Fun Internet Toy Things Neal Agarwal is back with a NEW TOY (not one of his own; he’s bought and badged it, I think), and it is a GOOD ONE. Sandboxels initially looks like one of those pixellated material simulators, which let you create geological landscapes by dropping various digital ‘elements’ into a box and seeing how they accrete, basically like those old ‘paint with sand’-type souvenirs that were seemingly everywhere in the 1980s (this…this won’t mean anything to anyone but me, will it?), but then you start to play and you realise it is VERY interactive. You can drop a DIZZYING array of things into the box – elements and animals and flora of various sorts, and, er, WEAPONS, and then sort of just see what happens. Create a mountain! Create a valley! Fill the valley with people! DROWN THEM IN A RIVER OF FIRE! This, honestly, goes DEEP – there are all sorts of hidden interactions you can discover depending on how you combine various elements, and it all gets VERY chaotic very quickly, and it’s quite hard to restrain yourself from visiting Biblical-style (Old Testament, to be clear) pixellated horror on the tiny homunculi. Except, well, they’re not real, so why exercise restraint? BE THE SADISTIC GOD YOU KNOW YOU HAVE ALWAYS DREAMED OF BECOMING!
- A Map Of Us: Occasionally I stumble upon a site so beautiful and so near-perfect that it makes me want to send it to everyone I know (but I don’t, because they told me a long time ago that they mostly don’t give a flying fcuk about my ‘weird internet sh1t’ – which, in a roundabout way, is why this newsletter exists, blame my meatspace friends’ complete and total lack of appreciation for THE BEAUTY OF THE WEB, the cnuts), and which makes me wonder ‘how has this evaded my attention for this long?’ So it is with A Map Of Us, a genuinely WONDERFUL and occasionally emotionally-devastating site which is, as you might have guessed from the title, a map onto which anyone can drop a memory – the site doesn’t specify what sort, but, as the title might suggest, tends towards love and relationships – “AMOU is a shared map of our memories. Tiny notes tied to real places. It’s a feelings journal, world guide, and letter to the world, all in one place. Leave a mou, read others nearby, and slowly stitch together A Map Of Us.” There are some light guidelines and (hopefully obvious) notes about not being a cnut and not sharing any personal information, but otherwise people are free to post what they like, and…oh, God, SO MUCH BEAUTY AND PAIN. A random selection from near my house: “this is where we met up for the first time and we were both so nervous. hi, I know you don’t want to hear from me but I just wanted to tell you that my mum is finally cancer free and I wanted to thank you for the support you give me during that time. I know we’ve broken up and we said we weren’t going to be strangers but now look at us.”… “You first kissed me at a house party and then at this tube station, and I still wish I could go back to that night to relive it – maybe in another life things would have turned out differently.”…”Thank you for teaching me to love myself. I’m sorry for using my hurt to hurt you.” I could lose hours to this, I think it is BEAUTIFUL.
- Fictional Inbox: OK, technically this is called ‘Unread’, but my title’s more descriptive and I am sticking with it. Neat little LLM-based site, this, which on landing asks you to nominate anyone you can imagine and then spins up a Gmail account for them, ‘imagining’ their inbox, their sent items, their drafts…Per all of these sorts of things, the LLM’s textual output is always a little thinner and less impressive than your ideal imagination would want it to be, but it’s quite a fun distraction to run through a laundry list of characters from your favourite books or films and get a glimpse into another potential dimension of their character; I just got it to spin up the inbox of Richard Papen, the cipherlike narrator of ‘The Secret History’, and it gave me a nice, imagined set of backchannel comms between him and the other protagonists (something which would no doubt cause Donna Tartt no degree of psychic pain, but we can probably assume that she is never going to know about this, so it’s probably fine), and it’s worth a play with your own personal longstanding favourites. Oh, it will also do ‘real’ people too, although there are limits (for some reason I just decided to try ‘Katie Price’, and, perhaps thankfully, it demurred on ‘safety’ grounds).
- Buy A Chinese Gymnastics Robot: You may have seen the OTHER Big Cultural Propaganda Moment that came out of the big Chinese NY TV jamboree this week – to whit, the…not-unimpressive synchronised robot gymnastics/kung fu display (which, if you missed it, you can see here)! If you look at that and think ‘you know what, I REALLY want my very own capering, kung fu-ing robot companion to live in my home and potentially protect me from harm!’ then, well, do I have good news for you (via my friend Alex)! According to the OFFICIAL WEBSITE of the makers, the main link uptop here, you can buy one of these little guys for the low, low price of…£1000! THAT IS AMAZING! Ok, fine, you could go on holiday, or you could put the cash towards retraining in a profession that’s not currently being fcuked from the inside out by the twin pressures of the market and technology (lol!), but, well, neither of those two options is as fun as purchasing a plastic pal who can wield a Bo stick and do backflips! There is…limited information about exactly how shipping works (or at least there is based on Google’s ability to translate the homepage), and I have an idea that there might be one or two questions at customs, but this is your opportunity to make 2026 your SPECIAL ROBOT YEAR! If nothing else maybe you can rent him out to help with the mortgage payments.
- Fantasy Herd: OH GOD I LOVE THIS IDEA! Never let it be said that life in New Zealand works at a slower pace than elsewhere in the world – but, well, they are doing ‘fantasy cow herding’ as a game, so make of that what you will. This is a SUPERB bit of promo work by NZ dairy Meadow Fresh, via Elle – they’re basically tracking the milk production of their cows, and letting punters create fantasy, er, milking squads from them in the manner of fantasy football; each week (I think – I confess to not having delved into the exact mechanics) the stats will be tracked (milk production, etc) and the cows allotted scores, and the rankings determined, and there will be POINTS and PRIZES and possibly a deep sense of national pride at stake as…some Kiwis compete to be the BEST virtual cow selector of all! This is a really fun idea and feels like something that could very much be picked up and replicated by the Right, Enterprising Brand, or just a local farmer looking to make a few quid. Can we expand this? Can we gamify the entirety of the food chain? Fantasy Battery Hens? Betting on which calves will render the greatest quantity of sellable meat when finally brought to slaughter? Have I…have I just sullied this whole thing? I have, haven’t I?
- Live Planetracker: Would you like to see all the planes taking off and landing from heathrow right now and would you like to be able to zoom around so you can see their relative heights? YES YOU WOULD! This is very cool, mainly because of the fact it’s the first one of these to give you a real sense of the spatial sense required to stop these massive metal tubes from flying into each other – I know people always say this, but MAN does being an air traffic controller look like an incredibly fcuking hard job. Anyway, this is mesmerising and will give a small proportion of you a near-erotic frisson (look, I know some of you are into planes, it’s fine, I don’t judge (or, rather, I do, but I have no idea who the fcuk you are and so the judgement is cold and impersonal)).
- Link Bouquet: A cute idea, this – send someone a bundle of links, where each separate url is represented by a different flower in a bouquet. I mean, it’s functionally pretty useless and a bit of a bugger to actually add and arrange the links, but I quite like the idea of thinking of links as a gift bundle. After all, what is Web Curios but a present, conceived of and crafted and presented to YOU each week, like the fundamentally-unwanted and unpleasantly-visceral leavings of a an old and increasingly-incontinent cat? It is NOTHING.
- Jefftube: A HUGE CAVEAT EMPTOR here – this is all of the vids from the Epstein files in browsable, viewable form, extracted via the previously-linked Gmail-esque skin for the whole set, Jmail. I have clicked the link, I have scrolled a bit, and I have done nothing else here due to the overwhelming sensation of…well, honestly, of incredibly-fcuking-creepy disgust that washes over me from browsing the thumbnails alone, and I can’t really recommend clicking this because it’s all just too fcuking horrible. Still, for the terminally curious, HERE’S A LOT OF HORRID EVIDENCE! NB – I don’t think there’s anything actively NSFW in here, promise, but I do mean it when I say it will make you feel Sad Inside.
- Current: This has been VERY BUZZY this week – Current is a new RSS reader, iOS-only, which has some neat design gubbins baked in, including a feature which removes the inbox-style ‘unread’ counter from your incoming feeds, thereby, per the designer, eliminating the unnecessary sense of pressure that comes from all those unread issues of Curios piling up (I know, you know, let us never speak of it). This all looks very nice and might well be very useful for all of you Cult-of-Mac people looking for an improved RSS setup – I have to say my goodwill for the project was slightly dented by its homepage, which, while beautiful, has a scroll-reveal design which…forces…you…to…read…at…the…pace…of…a…not…particularly…gifted…six…year…old, and which as a result really got on my tits.
- The Unsent Project: Another very emo project which I definitely feel angry that I haven’t seen before now, The Unsent Project is, as the name would suggest, a place for people to send in messages that they didn’t send to their first loves. This has been going 10 YEARS ffs, why did none of you tell me about it before? “The Unsent Project is a collection of over 5,000,000 unsent text messages to first loves. Messages are submitted anonymously from people all over the world. Rora Blue started the Unsent Project in 2015 to figure out what color people see love in. To investigate this, submissions are displayed on the color the submitter associates with their first love. The content of the submissions are wide ranging, encompassing just about every emotion. The term first love is open to interpretation and messages have been submitted to lovers, best friends, exes, parents, siblings, and even pets. All texts are submitted and stored digitally in an online archive which can be sorted by name and color. The Unsent Project aims to provide an emotional outlet for those that need it.” I am obviously Somewhat Overtired this morning as, again, these are proving…somewhat ruinous to me right now and I am going to have to swiftly move on. BONUS VAGUELY-SYNTHESTESIAC EMOCONTENT! This project, by artist Rora Blue, is called ‘After The Beep’, and collects voicemails submitted by anonymous people – voicenote apologies, explanations, messages of love… – all coded based on the colour the senders THINK the voicenote evokes. Scroll down the page – the messages are grouped by perceived colour, giving you a really interesting insight into the extent to which we tend to ascribe visual signals to emotional/aural ones. This is a very cool idea which I would like to see as an installation somewhere.
- Bet on CCTV: I am not quite sure where Roobet, the gambling site on which this is hosted, is based, but you can’t access it from the UK – VPN yourself in, though, and you will be confronted with what feels like a VERY 2026 digital pursuit, a stream of…a crossroads! Per this writeup, for anyone who doesn’t fancy spoofing their IP address in order to, er, watch traffic, “it offers a break for online bettors from traditional gambling games and classic slot experiences by leaning into real-life street traffic by way of CCTV footage. That simple mechanic has the game going viral. In this online betting game, players will be watching licensed camera feeds while an AI counts the number of vehicles that cross a set detection zone. The count is shown with on-screen overlays, and everyone watching that round sees the same footage at the same time, so the outcome is clearly evident.” I am, honestly, slightly agog at this – I know that thanks to Polymarket, Kalshi and the algolottery of THE CREATOR ECONOMY (lol) we have never lived in a more gamble-y culture, but the idea that people will just sit at a desk and bet actual cashmoney on the number of cars that will pass an intersection in the coming 30s is…well, I suppose it’s not technically any more mental than betting on how many throw ins there are going to be in the second half of a third-tier Chinese football match, but it FEELS worse, somehow. How long do you think before someone works out where these intersections are and figures out how to rig the system by bulk-booking Ubers to drive past en-masse to beat the odds? Er, asking for a friend.
- Wimmelbuilder: I don’t speak a word of German – oh, ok, fine, I speak about nineteen words of German, but that’s it – and so until this week I had no idea that there was a specific German term for ‘those books where you have to find a specific figure on a page, amidst a crowd of vaguely-similar looking figures, in the manner popularised by ‘Where’s Wally?’ (HE IS NOT CALLED ‘WALDO’ WALDO IS A FCUKING SH1T NAME) and that that word was in fact ‘wimmelbilderbuch’. Now, though, I am EDUCATED (and so are you) thanks to this excellent little subReddit which collects examples of the genre, often by artists just posting their work for the love of it and for the delectation of the, er, wimmelbilderbuchgemeinschaft. Hours of good, wholesome, eye-straining fun!
THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THE ANDREW ARREST IS GOOD AS FAR AS IT GOES BUT WHICH WOULD ALSO QUITE LIKE TO SEE SOMEONE GET DONE FOR THE NONCING NOW PLEASE, PT.2:
- The AntiFreeze Gallery: Very much one for those of you currently ‘enjoying’ life in North America, specifically the USA, and who would like to contribute to an archival project recording the, er, Very Specific Times you are currently enduring. Day Lane wrote to me, saying “My new project is the Antifreeze Archive (antifreeze.gallery/), an attempt to archive all the pieces of paper that are produced by communities in response to federal occupation of American cities. Things like: flyers, posters, Know-Your-Rights cards, ice hotline cards, etc. We’re asking people in American cities to mail in submissions to be preserved for future generations.” This feels like a useful and important project – so much of what is being done at an on-street and grassroots level to protest ICE is analogue, and it feels significant somehow to seek to document and preserve actions taken by people in the face of fascism – should you be in the US, or know people who are, and be in a position to contribute materials to the project then you can find full details about how to do so on the site; it’s a newish initiative and so the archive’s limited at present; spread the word and help it grow.
- Ribbit Chat: I know, I know, NOONE WANTS OR NEEDS ANY MORE DIGITAL PLATFORMS. And yet! Like fungi, they continue to proliferate (and, like fungi, it’s impossible to tell whether they will make you sick until you engage with them! Will this community provide me with information and laughter and succour and support, or will it give me Nazi brainworms? What a fun lottery!)! Ribbit Chat is, admittedly, a cute new addition to the seemingly-infinite range of ‘places you can go and talk to strangers on the internet’ – its gimmick is that it is VERY oldschool and VERY stripped back, with minimal features and, at present, a community of seemingly a few hundred semi-dedicated users; I’ve been lurking all week and it’s reasonably-well-trafficked and seems entirely benign and friendly, so if you too are, er, benign and friendly and the sort of geek who can look at a very-8-bit-styled chatroom interface populated by a few dozen other too-online weirdos talking about their peculiar obsessions and think ‘I WANT A PIECE OF THAT’ then, well, dive in! But be nice, I don’t want to be responsible for murdering a nascent community via sending terrible cnuts to ruin it.
- Women’s Sizing: One of the easiest ways in which to be reminded of one’s privilege as a man is to take a fleeting look at the general insanity of women’s fashion – capricious, often actively-harmful to its wearers (I refuse to believe that the people who design women’s shoes aren’t malevolent sadists; it is 2026 ffs! They shouldn’t hurt you that much!) and with sizing protocols that are at best batsh1t insane and at worst an act of determined psychological cruelty (“what’s that? You expect a size 10 to be a consistent measurement rather than an arbitrary designation that could apply to anything from a thimble to a circus tent? YOU IDIOT! YOU RUBE! YOU MORON!”) – here, the dataviz geniuses at The Pudding apply their dedicated craft to exploring the ways in which women’s clothes sizing (in the US, at least – this is very much working of American population and clothing data) tends to fit adolescents more than it does actual grown adults, and how widely-divergent sizing is across brands, and how, objectively, mental this is when you look at it as a phenomenon across the industry. Of course, none of this matters given we’re all going to be reduced to stitching our own smocks out of burlap come the eventual collapse of the labour market, but, still, it shouldn’t be this way!
- XKCD 501 Generator: You know that XKCD comic in which two stick figures talk about how their profession tends to overestimate the degree to which the general public are familiar with certain specific technical elements within the field? No? Well click the link and refamiliarise yourself with it, you’ve DEFINITELY seen it. Anway, this lets you edit the text to create your very own versions specific to whatever it is that you do – so should you want to create some VERY NICHE lols for, say, the proctologists in your life, now’s your chance! NB – if there is any part of you that flared in recognition when you read ‘XKCD 501’, you really, really need to get out more (yes, pottle, wevs).
- Infinite Terrain: A small, silly, beautiful, pointless little procedural generation toy, via Lynn, which lets you guide a small red ball around an initially-empty landscape; as you move, so a natural landscape springs up around you, with grass and trees and flowers and rocks appearing to mark your path. You can tweak the procgen settings in a sidebar to adjust the fecundity of the landscape, and while this is basically just a little tech/coding demo, there’s something genuinely very relaxing about just sort of rolling through a meadow that gets created as you pass, like some sort of non-stressful version of Monkeyball (which, if you missed it the other week, SLAPS in-browser).
- NewsGrouper: This is both a rallying cry and a sort-of lament; NewsGrouper is a portal providing access to Usenet groups, which as all of the Old Internet Heads will know are some of the oldest still-extant community groups to exist online, the bulletin boards which formed the building blocks of the nascent web in the 80s and 90s, back when normies didn’t even know that ‘the internet’ was a coming thing and all the nipples were rendered in ASCII. Usenet Groups still exist, and NewsGrouper offers a way into them…or it does if you don’t live in the UK, which thanks to the MAGIC of the Online Safety Act has led to Usenet removing itself from our digital map due to the onerous nature of regulatory compliance (the OSA, ladies in gentleman – regulation which blocks access to a four-decade-old set of forums about LINUX implementation but has no powers to regulate an AI chatbot that will p0rnify any photo of any person you feed it! WELL DONE, LEGISLATORS, YOU’RE REALLY GOOD AT THIS DIGITAL STUFF!). Still, I am linking this because a) I know that there are approximately seven of you reading this from outside the UK; and b) it’s interesting to see that there are communities here that are STILL ACTIVE – I love that there are still people logging onto usenet all these years later, and the proof it provides that communities don’t have to be huge, or monetised, or multimedia, to still provide value. A reminder that it’s always worth striking out and finding your people online, because if you can carve out a small corner for yourselves away from the social media cnuts then chances are you will just be left alone to tend it forever, which, increasingly, feels As It Should Be.
- The Stamps of Mt. Fuji: So I was ignorant of this, but I *think* this is about climbing Mount Fuji and the fact that, at the various staging posts and huts that exist on the trail, one can collect various stamps marking one’s ascent The site’s made by a design studio called PixelJam; per the blurb, “In 2022, I climbed Mount Fuji via the Yoshida trail, a humbling experience that left a lasting impact. The simplicity of iron-branding on walking sticks fascinated me, as did the warm hospitality of hut owners. Motivated by these encounters, I began an art project to share Mount Fuji’s stations and stamps with people worldwide. Please welcome this special edition of the ½8 journal, where we navigate from the 5th station all the way to the summit.” This is lovely – calm and meditative and, oddly, the autoplaying ambient soundscape is in no way irritating, which is a small but noteworthy point considering how grating I usually find ‘THE SOUNDS OF NATURE’ in these sorts of projects. I still don’t really understand the ‘stamps’ thing, though.
- Papa Reo: A GOOD USE OF AI! A project dedicated to creating an LLM that reflects the language and culture of indigenous New Zealand communities, “Papa Reo will enable smaller Indigenous language communities to develop their own speech recognition and natural language processing capabilities, ensuring that the sovereignty of the data remains with them and the benefits derived from these technologies goes directly to their communities…Our vision is for a multilingual language platform that will develop cutting edge natural language processing methods and tools. The programme will begin with te reo Māori, ensuring intergenerational transmission and accessibility to the language alongside the rapid development of technologies. New Zealand English will be touched on to support multilingual language use and, drawing on international collaborators, advance Hawaiian and Samoan languages. This is pioneering data science research that will ultimately support minority languages worldwide.” This is, obviously, a very specific project which won’t necessarily mean a lot to most of you, but as an exercise in using LLMs for cultural preservation and linguistic exploration I think it’s a fascinating one.
- Slow Ways: I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings – LOL I FCUKING LOVE IT – but, for those of you, like me, stuck on Damp Brexit Racism Island, winter is still with us for a few weeks longer yet; I know that it’s late-February and you *think* spring is on its way, but it’s important to remember that we are set for approximately one week of illusory warmth before it gets sh1t again for a bit – IT HAPPENS EVERY YEAR AND WE ARE ALWAYS FOOLED BY FAKE SPRING FFS, how is it that we can never, ever remember? Anyway, this link is one for when the weather picks up a bit and things like ‘going for a nice walk’ become legitimate options rather than cruel taunts; Slow Ways is a crowdsourced map of the best walking routes around the UK, a BRILLIANT resource for anyone outdoorsy. “Slow Ways is our citizen-made national walking network, connecting all of Britain’s towns, cities and national landscapes. It is enjoyed and made by people like you. Use Slow Ways for the everyday and the epic: to discover local walks, create challenges and plan long-distance journeys. We are a not-for-profit initiative created by thousands of citizens. Together we are making it easier to walk from A to B because we believe that if people know they can walk somewhere, they will! Here you’ll find over 10,000 walks that have been shared by people across the country, including thousands of reviews with practical advice and friendly guidance to support your adventures.” Honestly, SUCH a good idea – bookmark it, send it to your walking friends, make plans to hike the Ridgeway in the Summer, or alternatively enjoy the warm glow you get from the concept and then close the tab and get back to browsing like the internet-poisoned webgoblin we both know you at heart are.
- OpenFactBook: There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth a few weeks back when the CIA announced with no warning that it was shuttering its Global Fact Book, a repository of stats and data about all the world’s countries, accessible via just a fewclicks. BUT! Thankfully, while the Bureau might be cnuts – and let me be the first to exclaim a shocked WHODATHUNKIT??? at that notion! – the rest of the world is full of the GOOD and the altruistic, some of whom have recreated the information on a whole new site. Want a whole bunch of socioeconomic data about anywhere you care to think of? OH GOOD! Thanks to this I now know that French Polynesia has just over 300,000 inhabitants and a frankly-staggering number of airports (you will NEVER guess how many), which, honestly, is life-changing information.
- The Museum of Money: Do you ever think that society’s relationship with lucre is somewhat…well…unhealthy? Do you ever wonder whether our millennia-long veneration of COIN is a good thing? Well cast all those questions and concerns aside as you prepare to experience the MUSEUM OF MONEY, an actual, honest-to-goodness, real-life ‘attraction’ (lol, America, this is what you have instead of culture, SHAME) in Dallas, Texas, whose website I here present for your enjoyment and delectation. The Museum of Money is one of those DEEPLY EXPERIENTIAL setups which seemingly exists solely as a backdrop for people to ‘create content’ against – so, for example, you can sit in a BATH OF MONEY like some sort of Temu Scrooge McDuck, ‘dive into the vault of Money Magic!’, chat with, er, AI 80s Patrick Bateman-analogue ‘Dex Diamondhands’ (WHAT THE FCUK IS THIS HODL BULLSHIT IS IT 2021 AGAIN???) about money (also, why?), or – and I feel the need to quote this in full, because it made me feel quite queasy I don’t see why I should suffer alone – “step into our low‑key luxe zone, where the stakes feel high, the fantasy runs richer, and every photo cashes out as pure boss‑level bragging rights.” This is, let’s be clear, FCUKING HORRIFIC, but also a quite perfect act of entirely-unintentional satire. “Through playful, hands-on exhibits and data-driven storytelling, we trace money’s journey from minting presses to blockchain nodes. Laugh, learn, and leave richer in every sense because every dollar holds a story, and here, you’re the storyteller.” Tickets start at $30 – EVERYONE LEAVES RICHER!!! You know what? We fcuking deserve everything that’s coming to us, honestly.
- How Much Is Your Attention Worth?: Tell this website where you live and how old you are and it will tell you, based on available data, how much money advertisers have spent targeting you over the course of your lifetime, your CPM as a consumer… – think of this as money you have, to an extent, STOLEN from brands (everyone reading this who works in advermarketingpr, THIS IS REVENGE!). My total is a slightly-terrifying $130kish; the only consolation is that there is no WAY they have made this back from me.
- World Claimed: Another year, ANOTHER version of the Million Dollar Homepage! This time it’s a whole globe you can mark with whatever you like – it’s divided into a fcuktonne of different squares, and you can choose to buy one or more of them to graffiti with whatever you like. Astonishingly, and despite the fact that this must be the 300th variant on Alex Tew’s insanely-influential project that I have seen over the years, this has sold over 9,000 ‘plots’ of virtual land, suggesting that someone is actually making money out of this, suggesting that a) there’s nothing new under the sun; b) just because I have seen something a million times doesn’t mean anyone else will have seen it once; c) man, people will spend money on some weird sh1t.
- Kalina: Via Patrick at Sentiers, this is a YouTube channel featuring long, 4k films of nature. Is everything outside colossal and jagged and horrible? Yes, of course it is, watch an hour of snowy ambient winter landscapes and pretend that things are better (they aren’t).
- Scoundrel: This is a little roguelike played with a deck of standard playing cards – this doesn’t *quite* work (there are a few too many obvious failstates that I’ve encountered which block you arbitrarily based on the luck of the draw), but there’s something interesting about the baseline idea and mechanics here which are worth exploring further I think.
- Guess the Accent: A game that invites you to listen to a fragment of spoken English and identify where in the world the speaker comes from based on their accent. I initially got really excited because I thought that it would do granular and distinguish between dialects and regions, but sadly it’s national-level only, meaning occasionally you’ll get asked to identify a North American, a Brit or an Aussie which, if you’re a native speaker, is obviously a piece of p1ss, but it’s interesting how much I was thrown by different European voices; turns out the Finns sound very Spanish, who knew? Anyway, if someone wants to build the county–by-county version of this for the UK I reckon that would do NUMBERS so that will be £50 for the idea please thankyou.
- Cover Story: Via Lauren’s ‘Essential Ephemera’ newsletter comes this cute little game – select 10 tiles to uncover at random and, based on what’s revealed, guess the album title and artist. The difficulty here very much depends on whether you uncover the text of the album’s title which is often included on the artwork, but it’s a generally fun little mechanic.
- Guess The Colour: Not the first ‘here’s a colour, now remember it and attempt to recreate it exactly using RGB sliders’ game I have seen over the years, but the gimmick here – aggregate your total score over five rounds, new colours every day – makes this a particularly-fun variant, and there’s a multiplayer game to for those of you with those funny things called ‘friends’.
- Idle Civ: Another of Lynn’s recent picks, this is a GREAT little Civilisation analogue – rather than having to micromanage stuff it just sort of happens in the tab, with you ducking in to select knowledge tree upgrades and what to build and occasionally where to move units, and, look, just open this up and check in every five minutes during the working day as a ‘reward’ for, er, having typed three lines or read an email, I guarantee it will improve your professional existence no end (if not, admittedly , your output – but, honestly, fcuk that, who cares, it’s all pointless anyway).
By Kumi Oguro
THE LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS VERY SMOOTH SELECTION OF 80s-INFLECTED RARITIES MIXED BY MR CHINN!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- FMTOWNSMARTY: (Mostly) A collection of screenshots and gifs of 8bit graphics of indeterminate origin, with a very strong ‘haunted games collection’ vibe to it should that mean anything at all to you.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Filzmäuse: Felt art! Lovely pictures of felt art! All by Viennese art collective Filzmäuse, “a wickedly creative artist collective weaving wit, wool, and wild ideas into something delightfully absurd.” Via Jana’s always-excellent newsletter which, by the way, is a must-read if you’re into baking.
- StoryDJ: Former editor Paul shared this with me earlier this week, calling this ‘a lovely example of AI hauntology’ and, well, I can’t really top that. These are very cool little video vignettes, atmospheric and…weird.
- Abandoned Google Cars: Also via former editor Paul, an Insta sharing shots of abandoned cars spotted on Google Streetview, because who doesn’t want to see the wreck of a Ford Astra on a roadside near Bern? NO FCUKER, etc!
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Listless Liberalism: The journey undergone by the term ‘liberal’ over the course of the past century is a semantically-interesting one, from the classic Rawlsian position of the mid-20thC to the current version which, whatever you might think of Rawls, has travelled…some distance from the place you end up if you take the ‘state of nature’ thought experiment in any way seriously. This piece takes broadly defines liberalism in its most modern, American and derided incarnation – which, you know, is fine, set your terms and all that – and assesses its failings through the prism of two books, the much-discussed ‘vision for the future’ described in ‘Abundance’, and ‘Liberalism: In Defence of Freedom’ by Cass Sunstein. While this is annoyingly myopic in its focus on the US – GUYS THIS IS A GLOBAL CONVERSATION WE ARE HERE TOO YOU KNOW – the conclusions it draws about the reasons for the ‘failures’ of liberalisms’ current shape feel accurate in the extreme: “The problem with the aesthetics and the problem with the politics are, it turns out, one and the same. Both display a hall monitor’s love of rules and regulations; both wish to reduce the gnarl of a person to the simple purity of a plot on a graph. As Trilling put it in a passage about a similarly blinkered worldview, “what is meant negatively is that man cannot be comprehended in a formula; what is meant positively is the sense of complication and possibility, of surprise, intensification, variety, unfoldment, worth.” The sort of art and argument that could make its audience want to be liberal would have to begin by regarding its audience as agents. It would have to enlist them as equals instead of demoting them to the role of pupils; it would have to demonstrate just what form—or, more appropriately to the liberal sensibility, forms—the beautiful abrasions of communal self-determination might take.”
- Living in a Culture of Futurelessness: This is less a longform article and more a writeup framing the findings of a piece of research into the attitudes of young people to the future, both theirs and more generally, and What It Means. It may not surprise you that the general vibe isn’t, er, *great*, and I thought there was something particularly interesting about the cliff-edge of optimism described here: “We identified what we call a ‘cliff edge of optimism’. Around the age of 16, belief in the future drops sharply – 16-24 year-olds are five times more likely to say they are scared about the future than those aged 12–15. These should be the years of experimentation, risk-taking and expansive possibility. Instead, they are increasingly experienced as ‘lost years’.” There’s some talk later on in the piece about What Might Be Done, and, again, I thought these were potentially interesting places to start thinking and doing; particularly the first: “Our research points to three areas of innovation that can help us fall back in love with the future: rebuilding collective narratives of progress; creating cultural spaces that reward experimentation over nostalgia; and restoring intergenerational responsibility for imagining what comes next.” ‘Rebuilding collective narratives of progress’ struck me as a useful and important counterbalance to the increasingly-batshit (and, again, VERY RACIST) ‘we had progress once when it was only white people in the West’ narrative increasingly accepted as the de facto TRUTH by your wingnut right-wingers (oh hi, Restore UK!), and something that feels both plausible to construct and vital to do sooner rather than later.
- AI & Jobs: Some Scenarios: One day I am going to stop wanging on about this, but only when either a) AI vanishes or b) when it feels like governments have started looking this problem squarely in the face rather than staring up at the sky and just sort of humming a vague refrain about ‘economic recalibration’ and ‘reskilling’ whenever it’s mentioned’. Derek Thompson is reliably smart on this stuff, and the various outline scenarios that he posits here are clear, sensible and, to my mind, non-hyperbolic, not always the case with this stuff. Here he sets out a world in which AI *won’t* destroy all the jobs and the economy and one it which it *will* (pick your fighter! Obviously midpoints on this continuum are very much available) – and, look, I know which one my money’s on, but let’s all hope I’m as wrong about this as I have tended to be about every single big political call in my lifetime!
- The Left Is Missing Out on AI: WOW did this go down like a cup of cold sick amongst the anti crowd! The essay, by one Dan Kagan-Kans, is a series of arguments that suggest that, by adopting a reflexive ‘this tech sucks and we hate it and it’s stupid and sh1t and won’t work and is a bubble and is going to burst and anyone who likes it or is interested in it is a quisling moron sh1thead who hates art and humanity’ attitude, the left in general is…not helping anything; perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of people who hold those attitudes read this and thought, er, exactly the things I just outlined! Plenty of the criticisms I’ve seen levied at this piece are entirely fair – it’s far too US-centric in terms of the policy chats, etc, it makes a lot of claims that are assertions presented as facts, and it makes the CARDINAL SIN of not providing footnotes and references for everything…and, yes, it is baggy, and it does make quite a lot of overreach-y claims, and there’s a certain implicit ‘this tech is good actually’ view buried in here that I don’t like either (and if you want a more blow-by-blow takedown, this is a decent one), but… Look, the fact is that simply sticking your fingers in your ears and pretending that this sh1t is going away is stupid. You can want it to! That is fine! But that doesn’t make it true! And, look, while I don’t WANT the plutocrat class to get its wish and to gut the working world of humans in favour of lovely, cheap AI, I think that to ignore the very real possibility of that happening is…fundamentally fcuking dumb! Simply sitting on Bluesky cackling every time someone posts a screenshot of the free tier of GPT getting something wrong is not, in any way, going to stop a fcuktonne of companies replacing mid-tier staff with the paid version of these models which are, honestly , 100% good enough to do the job of almost all junior researchers in white collar office jobs right now (and that’s just one example). You don’t have to like it – and it is good that you don’t! – but might I gently suggest that you would be better served seeking to lobby your legislators to start thinking about What They Are Going To Do About This rather than hoping against hope that either the tech suddenly just…stops (it won’t), or that capitalism suddenly stops being about maximising shareholder value (it won’t do that either).
- The People Who Resist AI in China: Anothe really interesting dispatch from China via Jeffrey Ding, who this week has collated a bunch of writing from people who are actively resisting AI adoption, contrary to the oft-conceived popular opinion that everyone in the country is embracing this with both hands. An interesting degree of nuance and a nice counterpoint to the prevailing ‘the West might hate AI but everyone else loves it’ narrative that I have been guilty of peddling at times. A note of caution, though, which links to the previous piece; as the accounts suggest, the meaningful degree to which it’s possible to ‘resist’ this technology is lessening by the week. “Escaping AI and finding a job less susceptible to its replacement is the first thought for most people worried about AI affecting their work and livelihoods. However, as AI capabilities continue to improve, like playing a battle royale game, the safe zone is shrinking.”
- A Guide To Which Models To Use In February 2026: A useful, sensible, reasonably-unhypey guide to the State of the Tech by Curios favourite Ethan Mollick, guiding you through what you should use for what, when.
- Why AI Writing Is Still So Sh1t: So the actual title of this is ‘semantic ablation’ which, honestly, what the fcuk? Despite that horror, this is actually a very good, clear and comprehensible piece about all the reasons why AI models are, and continue to be, absolutely dogsh1t prose stylists – the short answer here is ‘because of being anchored to the linguistic mean, where nothing stylistically interesting happens’, but there’s a far more nuanced explanation in the full version which I really do recommend you click. Not long – in fact mercifully short – but probably the most helpful text I have yet read on why you should never, ever get The Machine to write copy for you (unless your readers are clueless morons who don’t deserve quality prose – which, you know what, they might well be, fcuk those cnuts).
- The State of Videogaming: Games industry whisperer Matthew Ball here with his annual precis of ‘Where Things Are At In The Industry’ – in common with seemingly every other business vertical in the world right now (apart from maybe ‘guns’ and ‘rare earth metals’), the outlook is…not good, but I found some of the wrinkles in here as to the ‘why’ interesting. The points about competition for interest and attention now coming from gambling and things like prediction markets is…honestly, chilling (I know we have occasional moral panics about videogames, but if you can’t see that ‘gambling for actual money’ is objectively a more dangerous – and addictive! – pastime than ‘moving pixels on a screen for lols’ then, well, I don’t know what to tell you), the rise of Roblox as an industry-eater (there are whole categories of title that used to exist for the 10-14ish age bracket for which there simply isn’t a viable market anymore thanks to a single platform, which is frankly mad), the potential impact of GTA6 on the entire industry and what that sort of a black hole does to the market as a whole…even if you’re not interested in games, anyone with a passing interest in entertainment media (and global culture, and business, and economics) could do worse than paying attention to this, because, lest you need reminding, videogames are probably the biggest entertainment vertical in the world right now (if you conceive of telly, YT, TikTok and Reels, etc, as all being distinct – fine, ‘watching moving pictures’ still wins, but you get my point).
- Slow Trains, Fast Country: More ChinaChat, again thanks to Alex, this is a piece featuring translated interviews with people travelling vast distances across China to reunite with family over the New Year celebrations, and offers another interesting corrective to to the ‘all urban, all the time!’ picture presented by the majority of the past few years’ sinohype. “For years, high-speed rail has been held up as one of China’s proudest achievements. In this piece, I simply hope to turn the spotlight, for a moment, towards the more than 300 million migrant workers whose labor keeps Chinese cities running. We rarely see them in headlines, but no city could function a single day without them. Instead of boarding the sleek, ubiquitous bullet trains, millions of migrant workers choose the slowest options still running: old slow trains, hard-seat carriages, overnight journeys that leave your back aching and your legs numb. Each of them has a reason for choosing this route. Most of those reasons have to do with children and parents, with saving every possible yuan for the people waiting at home.” These are, in many cases, very poignant indeed – the contrast between the very human worry and exhaustion you hear described in these accounts and what Alex termed “all the dancing robot tech pr0n” is stark.
- Prediction Markets, Redux: The latest ‘wow, this stuff really does have something of a chokehold on culture right now’ moment for the prediction markets came this week with the news that Substack is partnering with Polymarket to embed realtime prediction market data into posts – so we can all look forward to a whole new incoming newsletter grift, where people charge for PRIVILEGED ACCESS (lol) to prediction market analysis and insider trade opportunities in a totally unregulated way! I really do believe that this is one of the more slept-on stories of the year, at least outside the US, and something which should be seen as far more of a global ‘canary in the coalmine’ than I think it currently is being; anyway, this is a really interesting look at some of the players, the main companies and the rewards and risks being taken by the players, all in the interests of MAKING IT RICH QUICK (when the only way out of the bucket is to win the predictive or algolotteries…is that good? DOESN’T *FEEL* GOOD!); genuinely curious to see where we end up with this come year’s end, and exactly which other FUN AND EXCITING AND REVOLUTIONARY new markets get opened up to speculative lols. Oh, and this story about the companies preparing preemptively to expand into China felt like another one to file under Ominous Foreshadowing.
- ‘Rather Right Wing’: Speaking of ‘ominous signals’, this piece about Bumble in Germany and its recent changes to how one can designate one’s politics on the platform felt…not great! It’s a German article, but right-click to translate it in Chrome and you can enjoy learning about the fact that the dating app quietly introduced a new way of describing one’s politics in the Germanic world, one which exists to seemingly soften and euphemise and, well, normalise a host of potentially QUITE HORRIBLE viewpoints. What do you think designating oneself ‘rather right wing’ (an option which has replaced ‘conservative’ when selecting one’s political orientation) might mean, in a country with the AfD continuing to poll strongly and the, er, particular history which Germany is burdened with?
- More Than Skin Deep: So now that Clavicular has been profiled in the NYT and achieved a Guardian explainer we can declare the phenomenon over and move on, right (lol, unfortunately this is seemingly His Year, at least until he eventually dies onstream come August – NB Web Curios and its author would like to state for the record that it wishes no harm to Clavicular, but also that if you happen to put a bet on this and it pays out that, well, you know where to find me to share my cut)? Anyway, as part of the Wider Discourse around That Man And His Sad Life, I found this blogpost (part one of two) which looks at Looksmaxxing culture in a wider sense than just through the lens of its most famous proponent, and which does a good job of outlining how fcuking sad and lonely and miserable it is, and how, at its heart, it’s a moneymaking scheme because OF COURSE IT FCUKING IS. This is, be warned, really really miserable and sad and you will feel grubby reading it (so, er, just like Curios!).
- The Perks of Being a Mole Rat: On animal longevity, and some of the reasons why we believe different biological organisms attain extended lifespans and what that mine mean for our own pursuit of longevity. On which note, it strikes me as broadly plausible that we might be the last generation for a while that feels that ‘living longer’ is aspirational rather than simply an extension to one’s sentence – MAKES YOU THINK (and maybe cry a bit).
- Wall Street Raider: Oh, I love this story! Back in the day, a man called Michael Jenkins dreamt up a computer simulation of Wall Street way back in the 1970s, before the tech existed to make it a reality. ONce the tech appeared, Jenkins did something pretty fcuking incredible and coded the simulation himself, writing code to model markets companies, stock trading, inflation, interest rates, all these interlocking systems based on real-world factors, all simulated and running on objectively tiny amounts of memory, a frankly astonishing accomplishment, described in the piece as “the most comprehensive financial simulator ever created—so complex that most people bounced off it, but those who broke through became devoted for life.” For years, people have been trying to recode it for modern systems – but failing because of the complexity of the systems involved, and the fact that you sort-of need to know how actual markets work to recreate them in code…except now someone has managed it. This is very geeky, fine, but it’s a really interesting story and I love the fact that this guy basically simulated Wall Street in basic 40+ years ago, on his own, based on the contents of his head.
- How Joe Rogan Became: A great New Yorker piece on the Joe Rogan podcast and how it ascended to become possibly the most influential global media property in the world – the reason it works is because the author has taken the time to go back through and listen to a LOT of the podcasts (Jesus, can you *imagine*?) and as such you get a really nice longitudinal reading of how the tone and topics have shifted while maintaining Rogan’s Curious Khan persona. It’s perhaps more generous to its host than some might have been – it’s obvious the author has a soft spot – but in general it’s a decently-objective look at a major centre of informational gravity.
- Textual Blunders: This is SO interesting – a (very) long piece about the impact of mistranscribed texts, the errata that insinuate themselves into the canon thanks to a pair of tired eyes or a lazy homophone, that can turn a sensible sentence into something to be parsed for meaning by scholars for centuries hence. Honestly, this is so charmingly-written it glides past despite its length and it’s a genuine pleasure to read as well as being genuinely instructive: “the most common kind of mistake then is the replacement of a word by another of similar shape, usually a more common word. The horse-hoe recommended by Jethro Tull becomes a horse-shoe; the fossil plants called calamites become calamities; immortality becomes immorality, and so forth. F.W. Hall in his Companion to Classical Texts cites two beautiful examples from the Times newspaper: “One doctor described his case as that of miniature development” (for immature); and, “The Crown makes no claim to lumbago found in lands sold by it prior to 1901” (the mineral plumbago being intended). An edition of the Bible printed in 1717 by the Clarendon Press gave the heading to Luke Chap. 20 as “Parable of the Vinegar” (for vineyard). Sometimes the mistake seems to have arisen from a mis-hearing of dictation, as when the Daily Telegraph at some time in the 1950s assured the British people in regard to one of their recurrent financial crises that “We have shot the rabbits and are now in clear water again.” This last error [rabbits for rapids] leads us to another curious cause of copying-mistakes, which could be called preoccupation. The notion of shooting, no doubt, brought rabbits and such small deer into the compositor’s mind.”
- Cut Gems: On the act of touching up photographs of thousands of gemstones for the digital collection of the American Museum of Natural History in New York – this is far better written than it needs be, on photography and The Nature of Work and images and representation and curation and all sorts besides.
- Updike: Ok, a caveat – you probably need to be familiar with John Updike’s work to get the most out of this, but if you’re a fan (or even if you’re someone who’s aware but unenamoured of his output) then this is a fabulous piece by James Wolcott in the LRB, taking Updike’s life and his work and offering a perspective on the whole, detailing his preoccupations and obsessions (as Updike himself might have put it, mainly cnut) and his prose. I loved this and it made me want to read the Rabbit novels again, and Couples which I honestly think is a great book, sniffed at though it may be when compared to the greats. Also, MAN does this contain some quite incredible written asides which sort of have to be read to be believed – the one to Joan Cudhea in particular had me spluttering in disbelief.
- Poetry and Memory: I enjoyed this piece so much that I am including it despite the fact that I honestly hate reading things on Electric Literature SO MUCH – honestly, everything about the design and layout of their pages causes me psychic pain, what the fcuk are they thinking? Anyway, this is by Victoria Kornick, about writing poetry and the relationship she now feels between thoughts expressed in verse, the pauses and the beats, and her own mind and memory, and it’s beautiful throughout: “Poetry accounts for pauses in a way that prose refuses to. This was one of the reasons I loved it: how I could mark the breath of a caesura on the page, how I could scan syllables for emphasis and note line breaks with slash marks, stanza breaks with double slashes.Poetry accounts for pauses in a way that prose refuses to. When I teach poetry now, I show my students a line and cover the one below it. What would it mean if you only had access to the first? For example, if I began: “I had a seizure, though perhaps not” It would cast doubt on the fact of the seizure, pausing your reading before you reach the rest of the sentence. Each line is, for a moment, true, even if the next complicates or negates it. “I had a seizure, though perhaps not / my first.” The line break allows for a brief deception, an omission, a doubling in meaning. Enjambment is, in some ways, a trick. But it is also powerful to hold two truths together at once—each line on its own, and what they become together.”
- How To Talk To An Uber Driver: In common with many men of my generation, I think, I loved the writing of Will Self when I was a teenager – filthy, horrible, transgressive, verbose and staggeringly self-possessed, it was also technically superb, and I devoured his earliest novels (and still occasionally do – My Idea of Fun remains one of the most unpleasant and best books I have ever read) – but it’s fair to say that his star has waned over the past few years, partly as a result of a certain inevitable recalibration of the canon, partly as a result of his slide towards a certain type of reactionary middle-aged mandom and, in my head at least, partly as a result of him never really recovering from being absolutely bodied by his son on Twitter all those years ago (“He’s a novelist who hasn’t sold any of his last two books so he assumes that the whole medium is dying”, wrote Luther Self, beautifully). Still, he is BACK, writing for The Dispatch about talking to Uber drivers in London, and he still has it…sort-of. I’m not sure whether I enjoyed it more than it warrants because of nostalgia, but there’s a lot of Self classics in here, erudition and bluntness and some quite astonishing self-regard, in this discursive exquisition on why one should always talk to one’s cab drivers, and it was nice to spend 15 minutes in his company again.
- Whatever Creek Meadows: Our final longread this week is from the latest Granta – I know that the Sheila Heti ‘doing therapy while on psychedelics’ piece is getting all the love, but I found this much, much better. Benjamin Kunkel’s short story, about friends on a hike and the reasonably-low-stakes fallout that ensues, has a quality to the prose that I absolutely adore; the gimmick here is that each paragraph is a single, run-on sentence (you can perhaps guess why I like it so…), which is a technique I have definitely seen employed by Famous Writers before but which feels somehow fresh and fun in his hands, and the general tone of this is so perfectly internal monologue-y and intimate and conversational, and so exactly redolent of its narrator’s mental state throughout, that it feels almost-perfect. I really, really liked this, the first really good short I have read online this year imho – see what you think.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS !: