Yes, yes, it’s hot, WE FCUKING KNOW. Hopefully you’re not so broken and exhausted by the EXTREME TEMPERATURES (lol my word you really are not going to enjoy The Future, let me tell you) that you are too tired to click and read, because otherwise I’ve spaffed out 10k words of high-quality (look, it’s relative) Curios for naught.
Anyway, good weeks? I very nearly had a Very Awkward Professional moment on Wednesday when delivering a session on AI to a large global company whose name rhymes with ‘strap-on domme’ – I was *this* close to opening the session with a slide that read “How To Learn To Love The Machine (Before It Inevitably Takes Your Job in ~3y)”, which would have been…awkward, given that just a few hours prior their global CEO had sent a companywide memo to the lot of them telling them that, yes, that is in fact EXACTLY what is going to happen (and this, kids, is what you get if you book me to talk to your staff – I am, surprisingly, OPEN TO WORK!).
Enough of this, though. You are warm, and possibly a bit addled, and what you REALLY need is a long, cooling draught of possibly-slightly-lumpy web ephemera to chill you to the very marrow of your being. Which is convenient, as that’s EXACTLY what I’ve got for you.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are, I hope, enjoying the last days of Rome in Cannes because that particular gravy train feels like it’s heading towards a brick wall at pace.
By Joyce Lee
ENHANCE THE SUNSHINE WITH AN HOUR OF SKA AND REGGAE TUNES MIXED BY TOM SPOONER!
THE SECTION WHICH CAN SEE YOUR SWEAT PATCHES, PT.1:
- Reviews From Rate Your Music: One of my very favourite things about the web (after the fact that it will never reject me, never die and never leave me) is the way in which it acts as a series of tiny portals into the minds and experiences and lives and tastes of others – seems a shame, on reflection, that despite that it doesn’t in fact appear to have made us more understanding or empathetic as a species, but, well, you can’t have everything I suppose – and this simple site is a near-perfect example of that phenomenon; Reviews From Rate My Music presents you with a seemingly-infinite series of reviews of music, culled from the millions of the things found on the website Rate My Music – except each review is presented with all details of the artist its referring to redacted, so you’re just left with someone’s opinion, in isolation, which turns the text into something strangely-other; some of these are full-length personal essays, some are oblique meditations on LIFE, and some are just people being unfeasibly-enthusiastic about Andrea Bocelli, but there’s a weird poetry and poignancy to seeing other people’s opinions and feelings about music denuded of context and presented starkly and minimally as they are here. Also, some of this is just POETRY: “The cute girl you fancy introduces the sad-looking young man standing next to her as “Nick, my ex-boyfriend,” a line that takes five seconds to say, five seconds which you think nothing of, but during which Nick, who has heard these words seven times so far tonight, mentally runs through this album three times. It helps somewhat.”
- Oubey’s Mindscape: I had never heard of the German artist Oubey before this week – apparently he died in 2004, and this website exists as a sort of digital tribute to him and his work, part of a wider digital memorial called, for reasons that I am sure make perfect sense to the people involved, ‘Mindkiss’. This is…Christ, I don’t really know what this is (WELL DONE MATT SO HELPFUL!) – it’s a sort of strange picturebook world that you can click through, but there’s no real indication of how it relates to the work of the artist seeing as it all seems to be spun up using AI – you can click around and explore what are, equally-bafflingly, called ‘Mindsparks’ – presumably meant to represent things that Oubey found inspiring, which are rendered as semi-static slideshows with voice overs (again, AI-generated), you can, for reasons never make clear, collect things…WHAT IS GOING ON? Well, apparently “The OUBEY MINDSPACE makes it possible to immerse yourself audiovisually in the intellectual and spiritual world of the artist OUBEY. In this interactive virtual experience space, you can discover the artist himself and the intellectual context of his work. It was the result of a two-year creative collaboration between the Kubikfoto³ team and Dagmar Woyde-Koehler, OUBEYs lifelong companion in crime, founder and mastermind of the OUBEY MINDKISS project. Together with Ole Leifels and the Kubikfoto³ team, she developed an extraordinary posthumous homage to the late artist OUBEY.” I am generally utterly confused by this.
- Dream Recorder: You wait your whole life for an AI-assisted dream interpretation assistant and then two come along in a matter of as many weeks – TRULY, WE LIVE IN THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE TIMES! Dream Recorder is some MAGICAL BULLSH1T and I rather love the chutzpah of the people behind it – this is, to be clear, utter bunkum, but I am slightly in awe of the way in which it’s being presented as A Real Thing. Per the website, “Dream Recorder is a portal to your subconscious. The magical bedside device catches your nightly visions and plays them back as vivid, cinematic reels” – how does it ‘catch your nightly visions’? I HAVE NO IDEA MAYBE WITH A SMALL NET? Still, however it manages it, the machine will CAPTURE YOUR DREAMS and then display them, or an interpretation of them, in dreamy, low-res AI-generated video on the screen of this rather bulbous-looking viewer; you can save up to a week’s worth of dreams at a time, allowing for some DEEP ANALYSIS of whatever your subconscious is screaming at you. This is, in fairness, a homebrew art-ish project rather than a Real Thing They Are Asking For Money For – rather than buying one off the shelf you’re instead offered all the information you need to make one yourself with a Raspberry Pi, 3d printer and the rest – and as such the fact that it is all obviously lies matters slightly less than it might do otherwise; on reflection, I would quite like one of these should anyone with a 3d printer fancy making me an INCREDIBLY GENEROUS GIFT.
- Well You Know Man: IT HAS BEGUN! Yes, welcome to the age of complete online reality collapse, in which AI-generated video is finally good enough that a LOT of people, scrolling past it distractedly on their pocket-based distraction devices, simply can’t tell that it’s faked – I first saw this phenomenon in action last weekend when this video of a corpulent patriot being voxpopped outside the pub started getting shared a lot by People Who Should Know Better; now there’s a whole cottage industry of TikTok (and other) channels sprouting up posting Veo3-generated clips to ‘amuse’ and delight. Well You Know Man leans in hard to the fact that the model is seemingly very good at spinning up news-looking footage, with all its clips being of interviewers for a non-specific broadcaster (but clearly BBC-coded) doing ‘person on the street’ interviews with the Great British Public and being SHOCKED as they go off on one about whatever the creator has decided will be ‘funny’ – so you get LOTS of old people swearing, basically, or making allusions to being ‘bent like a pretzel’, which is, fine, not particularly funny but also not particularly nefarious. But, per the first clip, you just know that there are going to be less-benign, more…motivated versions of this stuff being created and seeded in Other Bits Of The Web which will be far darker, and pointing in far more dangerous directions. You can, of course, still tell this is faked with even a cursory degree of attention – the garbled shopfronts, the fact that the presenters’ mics just read ‘NEWS’, the occasionally-odd lipsyncing on the audio – but, as we all know by now, we don’t really pay that much attention to anything when we’re scrolling. BELIEVE NOTHING.
- Stormtrooper Vlogs: Sticking with AI video, seeing as we’re here, this is a YouTube channel which is again using Veo3 (I think, anyway) to create short films all about the travails of being a stormtrooper in the Star Wars extended universe – there are recurring characters and running gags and an overarching plot of sorts, but, equally, it’s all Star Wars and so I bounced off this almost immediately because, well, it’s fcuking Star Wars and I simply don’t care. That said, while it’s not one for me, this has the hallmarks of the better AI projects I’ve seen – a clear vision for What It Is Trying To Be, a clearly human-penned script (not a great one, fine, but still) and someone putting some thought into direction, shot selection, pacing and the rest – we really are now at a stage when anyone with an idea for a short film can sort of just knock a rudimentary couple of minutes together with relative ease, which very much feels like a Rubicon of sorts. Still, can we please all agree to just LET STAR WARS DIE PLEASE?
- Holy Vlogs: MORE AI VIDEO! This is a TikTok channel posting clips of ‘people from the bible (and the wider past) reimagined as influencers’ and, look, I didn’t want to like this, but I can’t pretend that ‘Cain and Abel as influencers’ didn’t make me laugh quite a lot, nor that ‘Eve showing you around the Garden of Eden’ didn’t also raise a smile. Aside from anything else it’s interesting to note how GOOD the model (Veo3, again) is at rendering this particular style of video, from the gentle bob of the camera to the background audio to the vocal stylings of the chirpy biblicals (bibfluencers?) as they go about their holy business. As soon as this stuff gets good enough to render more than 8s at a time this is going to get VERY interesting indeed.
- The Arpeggiator: MAKE MUSIC BY WAVING YOUR HANDS! Click the link and give the site access to your webcam, and then GO MENTAL – you will see yourself in all your beautiful glory (although in black and white, which I have to say, as someone who hates their own face, slightly lessened the horror of having to look at myself while using this, for which THANKS to the dev here), and you will realise that you can control the drum patterns with your left hand and the keys and synths with your right, and as such you can create BEAUTIFUL SOUNDS simply by raising and lowering your hands and wiggling your fingers like some sort of mad conductor magician-type person. I can’t for the life of me get this to make any sounds that don’t sound like the mad flute noodlings of the tone deaf, but I am going to put that down to my being a cloth-eared fcuk with no talent whatsoever rather than any limitations inherent in the software (I am SO GENEROUS), and you might find yourself composing something symphonic within mere minutes of logging on. This is LOTS of fun, and I very much like the idea of something like this being made as a large-scale multiplayer installation somewhere.
- Arina’s Story: This is both beautiful and heartbreaking – Arina’s Story is a…what, a sort of 3-d rendered storybook, I guess, telling you the story of one girl in Ukraine, the village she is from, the damage it has suffered at the hands of Russia, and her hopes for the future, all rather beautifully done in CG – you are guided through what is effectively a small walking simulator by the titular Arina, whose story you’re being told. This is all linked to a fundraiser for Ukraine, which is persistently-linked in the top right of the site; I would be fascinated to know what the conversion rate is.
- Google Weather Lab: AI FOR GOOD! Look, I know loads of you HATE THE MACHINE, but can we at least all agree that there are some aspects of the ceaseless march of technology and the seemingly-incessant drive to inflict AI on every single corner of our lives that aren’t totally awful? Please? Look, this is a CYCLONE PREDICTOR FFS, that’s pretty amazing, no? Jesus, fine, please yourselves. “Weather Lab Preview: Cyclones provides early access to experimental cyclone track forecasts from Google DeepMind (GDM) and Google Research’s (GR) AI weather models”, says the blurb, and there’s something quite pleasing about hitting ‘play’ on the model and watch the imagined futurecyclones potter and wobble around the map with a gait reminiscent of a weekend drunk. Big cyclonic week coming up off the West coast of Mexico, in case you were wondering.
- Undash: Do YOU want to outsource your writing to The Machine, but would you also like to pretend to the rest of the world that you haven’t? Undash does at least one of the copy-cleaning jobs required to pull off that subterfuge automatically – run this Chrome extension and any text that you copy from an LLM will be automatically denuded of em-dashes once you paste it into a document, saving you all those tedious moments of replacing them with colons that you would otherwise have to bear. Maybe, though, just…don’t pass off the machine’s writing as your own, maybe, because, well, it’s still quite sh1t.
- Midnight Radio: The link here takes you to the website of one James Reeves, a writer and generally-multidisciplinary-creative-type-person in the US, who twice a month for the past year has been sending out what he calls ‘Midnight Radio’ – writings about whatever takes his fancy accompanied by a short mixtape, and I discovered this this week and am slightly in love with it; honestly, I really like both the slightly-crackly and vaguely-mysterious nature of the audio bits, and the writing, and the fact that it feels like getting a letter from a penpal who you don’t really know but whose correspondence you enjoy despite not entirely understanding why…honestly, I think this is beautiful and you might too.
- PushPod: Simple, a bit boring and possibly quite useful, depending – PushPod basically turns any audio files you have on Dropbox or OneDrive into a podcast, delivered through whatever pod streaming survive you prefer. That’s it. Look, I did say it was boring.
- Music Is My Therapist: Tell this website what you’re feeling and it will suggest a suitable song for you to listen to – I have to be honest, whenever I’m confronted with something like this my immediate impulse is to plug something UNUTTERABLY BLEAK into the text box to see what The Machine says in response, and, well, on this occasion it suggested I listen to ‘Breathe Me’ by SIA and as such I was…unimpressed (I GIVE YOU A HOWL OF EXISTENTIAL PAIN AND YOU OFFER ME SIA????), but you may find this speaks to you more than it does to me. I presume that this is just cobbled together on top of an API call to GPT or similar, which makes me think there are probably quite a few more interesting wrinkles you could add in; I rather like the idea of expanding the output to encompass a whole set of things, from music to books to food to activities, that might accompany your mood, for example.
- Word Pathfinder: Ooh, I like this – any other wordcels out there should be similarly enamoured, I think. Pathfinder is a simple tool – plug in two words and it will show you a variety of ways in which you can move from one to the other, from associated concept to associated concept. Which, I concede, is a terrible attempt at an explanation – practically-speaking what that means is it has just taught me that one can get from ‘fisting’ to ‘ethics’ in a few short steps (fisting>human sexuality>consent>moral philosophy>ethics – SEE?), which I think is knowledge we can all agree we are glad to have.
- The Box: SATIRE! Louis Barclay emailed me to let me know about this neat little gag he and collaborator Nitya Kuthiala spun up – The Box is a spoof product, a full-body wearable for women to enable them to be out and about in the digital age without having to worry about someone snapping their picture and turning them into some sort of miserable deepfake bongo clip…because, you see, they are wearing a box. It’s part of a broader project which Louis is spinning up designed to gently mock tech and modernity which is called Attention – he’s looking for people to work with on ideas and Creating Stuff, so if this sounds like your sort of thing then drop him a line, I am sure he would love to hear from you.
- Italian Brainrot Generator: Plug in whatever idiotic idea you have for an Italian Brainrot-type character and this will spin up not only an image to accompany it but also (and this is the good bit) a DELICIOUS bit of audio which features an honestly-WONDERFULLY-soothing Italian voice model reading some associated copy – this doesn’t really work as an actual Brainrot generator as the output images are static rather than vids, but I cannot tell you how IMMENSELY pleasing the audio it spits out is, pure ASMR.
- ASMR Minutte: Speaking of ASMR (SEAMLESS!) (also, not a sex thing!), this TikTok channel posts nothing but AI-generated ASMR vids, which are all of…weird crystalline formation stuff? Crystal fruits being sliced up by VERY SHARP KNIVES? I have no idea why whoever;s behind this has alighted on this particular theme for the vids, but as someone who loves him a bit of ASMR (ideally soft-voiced Italian women talking about food, please do not ask me to interrogate this part of my psyche in any detail) I can confirm that these Do The Trick – again, all Veo3 which has obviously been trained on enough extant ASMR content to have the audio style of this sort of thing absolutely NAILED.
- 30 Minutes With A Stranger: This is typically GORGEOUS work by The Pudding, both in terms of the viz, which is standard for them, but also in terms of the nature of the project itself; it’s a series of visualisations of 30 minute conversations between strangers, part of a research project analysing thousands of discussions between people who had never met to learn more about conversation patterns and the like. “The corpus draws on a large and diverse sample of participants, aged 19 to 66, from all over the United States. Participants were paired using an automatic matching algorithm of our own design and were simply instructed to have a conversation with one another for at least 25 min, although many talked for much longer. The conversations occurred during 2020 and, thus, offer a unique perspective on one of the most tumultuous years in recent history, including the onset of a global pandemic and a hotly contested presidential election.” As you scroll you are shown who some of the people are, what they spoke about, how it made them feel…honestly, this is SO interesting and oddly-heartwarming, and is a lovely reminder that most of the time speaking to other people and sharing parts of ourselves with them makes us feel happier and more complete as people and dear God did I just write that what is WRONG with me?
THE SECTION WHICH CAN SEE YOUR SWEAT PATCHES, PT.2:
- Can You Look At?: I received a genuinely charming email from someone called Oleksii who wanted to tell me about something they have made, and, look, NOTHING makes me happier (or at least nothing I am comfortable telling YOU about) than people writing in and Showing Me Their Stuff. Can You Look At? is a simple daily game which each day asks you to find a specific THING and photograph of it and share it with the site for verification – that’s it, no more, but I really like the way it turns every day into a small creative treasure hunt, and the way in which it plays with the wrinkles in machine vision so that, with a bit of lateral thinking, you can ‘cheat’ and fool the machine even if you can’t find the specific thing it’s asking you to photograph. This is, honestly, really charming, and I love the simplicity and the way it plays with tech, and, broadly-speaking, you know when I say that AI is good actually because it removes the barrier to people Making Fun Little Things? I am talking about stuff like this, basically. THANKYOU OLEKSII!.
- New Best-In-Class Video: Via Lynn Cherny’s consistently-excellent and useful newsletter – which continues to be a required subscription if you’ve any serious interest in keeping up with the cutting edge of AI video and graphics generation, honestly, and which you should sign up to forthwith – comes this thread demonstrating an EXCITING NEW TEXT-TO-VIDEO MODEL from China which is seemingly at least as-good as Veo3; it’s called Seedance, apparently, and it is VERY good at shifting angles within a single generation, and at physics, and, look, I know I say this with tedious regularity but THIS STUFF IS GOING TO BE IMPOSSIBLE TO DETECT IN LESS THAN A YEAR.
- Procedurally-Generated Code Jellyfish: I’m not really sure what else you want me to say about this. Click the link, admire the digital jellies, feel the tension leave your muscles, collapse into a puddle of semi-sentient meat goo, transcend.
- StoryRabbit: This is a slightly-confusing product, but I *think* I understand what it’s trying to do – as far as I can tell, StoryRabbit is attempting to map, er, ‘stories’ to places; you download the app, and through it you can listen to location-inspired stories relating to the place you’re near. The gimmick – OF COURSE!!!! – is that the stories are…AI-generated! And read by AI-generated voices! Meaning, inevitably, they will be terrible (sorry, but in over three years that I’ve been looking at generative AI stuff I am yet to find any ‘story’-type application of it that doesn’t result in absolutely fcuking TERRIBLE writing and tension-free narratives and I see no reason why this should be any different, even if said story is voiced by, er, an AI-generated version of Orson Welles (for reasons known only to Welles’ estate they seem to have licensed his voice to these jokers – I presume times are hard and the money from Transformers: The Movie has finally run out). Perhaps the most miserable thing about this, to my mind, is the fact that there’s a big tab on the website reading ‘FOR BRANDS’ – because all the best stories start with brands! This won’t exist for too long, I don’t think, because I can’t imagine there’s anyone in the world who REALLY wants to listen to short, AI-penned stories read by robot voices, but the location-ish aspect to it did make me wonder whether with a bit of thought and a more ludic spin you could sketch out an expansive, growing and evolving Fallen London-type experience in this sort of vein. Maybe.
- Birthday Recap: What was happening in the world on the day you were born? Plug your birthday into this website and it will tell you, spitting out a bunch of links from the archives of the New York Times from the day of your screaming, mewling, puking entry into corporeal hell. What with the source organ this is resolutely-US-centric (America never really having much truck with international news means you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything particularly international), and your mileage will very much vary, but I was personally thrilled to see that one of the big stories in the US on the day of my spawning was ‘US Marines At Guantanamo Await More Marines’, which I think we can agree is an all-timer of a compelling headline.
- Obsolete Computers: Do you like OLD COMPUTING DEVICES? Do you go weak at the knees at the thought of some roughly-textured, dirty-beige moulded plastic casings and clacketty keyboards? OH GOOD! “Welcome to Obsolescence Guaranteed! After World War II, computers evolved with amazing speed, discovering the path to modern computing. The pioneering systems are fading from memory: hardware impossible to maintain, their people sadly often no longer around.
Books and artifacts can’t keep this legacy alive. To know a computer, you need a hands-on experience. This is the goal of our informal group. Making fully functional replicas, their historical software archive built in. We think of them as computer time capsules, but everyone else just calls them replicas.” This is…very niche, but I suspect that there will be a handful of middle-aged men amongst you for whom it will also prove almost powerfully erotic.
- Poetry Camera: Oh I do rather love this. Riffing off Matt Webb’s Poetry Clock Kickstarter from last year – currently going into production, by the way – this is a GREAT idea and a lovely ‘take AI and apply it to the real and physical world’ application. The idea is simple – take a photo with the camera and it will also spit out a small printed poem, generated by The Machine based on what it’s seeing through your viewfinder; the poem gets printed out via a little inbuilt, er, printer, which is a wrinkle I love; you either keep the printout or the poem is gone forever. This is currently available to preorder – US shipping only, I am devastated to report – but there are also instructions available on Github should you want to make your own version, which is a lovely touch I think. MORE OF THIS SORT OF THING PLEASE (also, if anyone is in the US and planning a trip to the UK after this launches, do get in touch as maybe I could get one ordered to your house and you could, er, bring it to me? Maybe?).
- Colours of Mexico: A beautiful little colourpalette creation project, which presents photos of doorways in Mexico along with a corresponding six-colour palette drawn from the colours in the image. Made by one Travis Bumgarner, who writes “When I was young, my mom told me I could choose the color of my room. I chose dark blue. In university, my landlord told me the same and I chose a bright orange. In a country full of white walls, I felt like an oddity. In 2015, I arrived to Mexico for the first time. The people of Mexico, without asking anybody, chose bright colors to paint their houses. I fell in love. Every time I pass by a colorful house, I feel inspired. And thus, Seis Colores was born.“ I think this is lovely (and possibly a really source of inspiration if you’re opening a Mexican restaurant and want to keep the colours ‘authentic’.
- Avertipedia: Do YOU feel that your invertebrate knowledge isn’t what it perhaps might be? Do YOU wake in the night wracked with sweats and fear that one day you might be quizzed by someone demanding invertebrate-related information and you simply won’t be able to respond? Thank FCUK, then, for avertipedia, which self-describes as “a project intended to gather all the knowledge about extinct invertebrates, non-vertebrate chordates, and other organisms which might either not be documented in any published papers, or have been incorrectly documented.” SEXY, EH? I think my favourite thing about this site is its strapline, which reads “The Real Vault of Non-Vertebrate Knowledge”, which, to my mind at least, suggests some LATENT BEEF in the non-vertebrate knowledge community. TRILOBITES AT DAWN!
- Native Land: This is absolutely fascinating and rather beautifully-presented – Native Lands is a map of, er, Native lands – so you can see the lands originally occupied by all the many, many tribes of Native Americans whose home it was before the Europeans rather selfishly came and gunned/smallpoxed them out of existence; similarly, spin the globe to the antipodes and you get to see the various territories and people’s that were there before the English decided that they would quite like it as a penal colony actually thanks mate. You can find information about the areas in question, the tribes whose territories they were and their history, and much more besides – this is a wonderful resource but one that I can’t pretend didn’t make me feel a touch queasy as I scrolled and explored because dear God what was taken from these people.
- The Steak Bake Spider: Or “a map which shows you the eight nearest outlets of Greggs to anywhere in the UK” – but, on balance, the original name is better. Scroll around until your location is in the middle of the map – you will notice as you scroll that the mapping bit looks quite like a spider running across the country, hence the name (DO YOU SEE?). My main takeaway from this is THE COUNTRY HAS TOO MANY FCUKING BRANCHES OF GREGGS IT IS NOT EVEN A GOOD BAKERY FFS DO NOT PRETEND THE SAUSAGE ROLLS ARE NICE THEY ARE NOT NICE THEY ARE FLACCID AND SAD AND I GENUINELY PITY YOU IF THESE ARE THE APOGEE OF YOUR SAUSAGE ROLL EXPERIENCE. Ahem. Interesting, didn’t know I had ANY feelings about Greggs until I started typing that; I do love it when the experience of writing Curios also becomes, well, therapy (lol this is all therapy, who am I kidding?).
- Stargazer: Via Kris, I think this is SO BEAUTIFUL – it’s by Hannah Jenkins, and it’s a very simple interface; shapes fall from the top of the sky, and by hovering over said shape as it falls you trigger a sound and a line of poetry appears on your screen. Other shapes deliver different sounds and tones, and different lines of poetry, and so by slowly moving your mouse to ‘catch’ the shapes as the fall you piece together a unique, self-created little sound-and-wordscape, just for you. Honestly, I adore this.
- Poetica: MORE DIGITAL POETRY (SEAMLESS!)! Per the short explanation, “Poetica is a tool for remixing poems or text, like you would a song, it provides you with a vocabulary of not your own words to create something new. 1. Add some text and click generate; 2. Poetica will separate words into buttons for you to playfully make a poem; 3. When you like it click Share.” This isn’t *immediately* intuitive, fine, but play around with it a bit and the way it works will quickly become clear; there’s something really quite fun about taking the bones of a text and reworking it within quite strict parameters like this, and it will appeal to any of you who’ve ever enjoyed making blackout poems or similar.
- Alexinomia Research: We are ALL weirdos, and one of the nicest things about the web has been how it’s helped us understand all the very, very different ways in which our weirdness manifests itself (how are YOU weird? TELL ME I WANT TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR ODDNESSES). Take, for example, the concept of ‘alexinomia’, something which was utterly unknown to me until this week, when I learned that it is a specific, named condition whereby some people apparently CANNOT say people’s names in conversation. Like, literally can’t. The Sigmund Freud University in Vienna is conducting research into this VERY specific phenomenon, ”characterized by knowing a name but being unable to use it in personal communication. For affected individuals, it is impossible to say, for example, “Good morning, Maria.” or “Armin! Great to see you.” They experience acute anxiety and a variety of other negative emotions in social situations in which using a personal name is intended.” I LOVE SH1T LIKE THIS – but, also, I am genuinely tempted to adopt it as a fake condition just to obviate myself of the need to ever bother to remember anyone’s name ever again.
- Pleasant Green: Are you in the market for a new, sprawling work of vaguely-spooky hauntological fiction? OH GOOD! Pleasant Green is…what is it? It’s a seemingly-massive extended fictional universe involving THE OCCULT and all sorts of other stuff – here’s the scene-setting blurb which will probably give you an idea of whether or not this is likely to be Your Sort Of Thing: “My name is Kennedy Fisher. I’m an investigator and co-host for an audio company called Red Hook Stories. (This website is not affiliated to the company in any way.) In 2018, I began investigating the disappearance of a young man called Charles Dexter Ward from a secure mental health facility in Providence, RI. The investigation led down the rabbit hole of a far-reaching occult conspiracy that seems to centre around a place called Pleasant Green, which may or may not exist. In 2020, my friend and co-host, Matthew Heawood, disappeared. Since then, I have been trying to figure out where he went and what happened to him. I have started this website as a place to store and share the information I have found, to shine a light on what is happening, and in the hope that it will encourage others to come forward with information.” You have to pay for access to the whole archive of stuff, but I can imagine for the right sort of (obsessive) person this will be VERY compelling indeed.
- Case: This is, apparently, a new magazine from Japan. I have no idea what it is about, although I am going to guess…fashion, because it is obviously all in Japanese, but I am linking to it because, look, just click and scroll and you will see why. MORE ANUERYSM-LIKE WEBDESIGN OF THIS ILK, PLEASE, I LOVE IT SO.
- DOOOTS: Ooooh this is FUN and silly and slightly-baffling in places, but, crucially, VERY ADDICTIVE. You won’t understand what is happening or why you’re doing what you’re doing, but, well, THAT’S JUST FCUKING LIFE ISN’T ITzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
- You Were Just Selling Lemonade: Make Number Go Up! But, also, SATIRE! I could explain this more fully, fine, but I feel it’s best enjoyed by going in cold – this is a fun five minutes, promise.
- A Death in Hyperspace: The final miscellaneous link of the week is a beautiful, slightly-sad piece of interactive fiction. “In A Death in Hyperspace, you play Pearl, an intelligent ship trying to solve the mystery of their captain’s death. To do this, you’ll need to talk to the passengers and crew on board.” I think this is very well done, well-written and more emotionally-resonant than I was expecting – also, I am a sucker for a nicely-made bit of IF. Enjoy.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Me Blog Write Good: Is it a Tumblr? No! Do I care? ALSO NO! Anyway, this is a VERY long-running webproject which started with some guy deciding he was going to watch ALL OF THE SIMPSON’S EPISODES EVER and blog about each one, and which has, because of the show’s refusal to die, simply gone on…and on…and on…Your mileage will vary depending on how much you know and care about the Simpsons and how much joy you get from reading one man’s increasingly-resentful episode reviews of a show he’s clearly not enjoyed for many, many years now…honestly, this is practically-perfect to me, both in terms of subject matter and dedication but also because of the fact that this is someone who has clearly become Too Committed To The Bit To Stop (YOU ARE A SOUL BROTHER TO ME, MYSTERIOUS SIMPSON’S REVIEWER, AND I LOVE YOU MORE THAN YOU CAN POSSIBLY KNOW).
- Memorial Benches: ALSO NOT A TUMBLR! This website collects plaques on memorial benches, which I might have mentioned before are something I fcuking ADORE; let me put it in writing here that when I am dead I want EITHER a) a bust on the Gianicolo; or, significantly more plausible, b) a plaque on a bench in Vauxhall gardens, ideally opposite the shonky model village, ideally reading “Matt Muir: He Hated It Here”.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Heartspotting: Photos of heart-shaped things spotted in places where you wouldn’t necessarily expect to spot heart-shaped things. This, for some reason, has really cheered me at 1002am this morning.
- Ick: Per their blurb, “A tribute to the energy that lies within distaste, Ick is an Instagram-native magazine for creative complaining. Edited by This Outfit Does Not Exist’s Dani Loftus and existing solely on social media, Ick is the place to scroll through the snarks of people you admire.” This is very much Not My Thing – I have no fcuking idea what it might even mean to be ‘icked out by the soulcycle grapefruit candle’ – but I concede that it might perhaps be yours.
- Deathrow AI: You know who apparently loves AI? SNOOP DOES! That’s right, the world’s least-discerning celebrity ambassador (you may scoff, but please remember that this man did promo work for Rustler’s Microwaveable Burgers ffs) has gone ALL-IN on The Machine, and is posting (or, more accurately, someone on his team is posting) AI-generated images and videos to Insta via this account. Want to see an AI-generated video of Snoop smoking weed with a bunch of people from history? No, you don’t, do you, because you’re not a fcuking child or an idiot, but that is what Snoop is giving us and so I feel honour-bound to share it. NGL, the lion with Snoop’s face spun me out slightly when I first clocked it.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The Vibes Are Bad: One of the odder things of the past few years has been watching the evolution of some of my favourite newsletter writers from ‘people writing well about silly, weird things on the internet’ to ‘some of the smartest commentators on What Is Happening Right Now’ – although, on reflection, it probably oughtn’t strike me as odd, given the degree to which so much of meatspace is now seemingly downstream of the digital in 2025. One such newsletter writer is Ryan Broderick who for the past year has consistently been punting out some of the smartest writing about The New Trumpian Regime and, more broadly, the web and culture and how it’s all sort of collapsing in on itself – this week he wrote this, an essay summarising ‘the vibe’ in the wake of protests across America and a war that may or may not be about to erupt across the middle east and all sorts of other mad things, which you should read all of because it is typically brilliant but whose closing section I am going to reproduce in full here because, well, he is absolutely right: “It doesn’t matter if anyone believes the unreality of what they’re seeing online. Misinformation and disinformation don’t actually need to convince anyone of anything to have an impact. They just need to make you question what you’re seeing. The Big Lie and the millions of small ones online, whatever they happen to be wherever you’re living right now, just have to cause division. To wear you down. To provide an opening for those in power, who now have both too much of it and too few concerns about how to wield it. The populist demagogues and ravenous oligarchs the internet gave birth to in the 2010s are now firmly at the helm of the global order and, also, hooked up to the same chaotic, emotionally-gratifying global information networks that we all are, both social and, now, AI-generated. And, also like us, they are being heavily influenced by them in ways we can’t totally see or predict. Which is how we’ve ended up in a place where missiles are flying, planes are dropping out of the sky, and vulnerable people are being thrown in gulags, all while our leaders are shitposting about their big, beautiful plans for more extrajudicial arrests and genocidal territorial expansion. Assured by mindless AI chatbots that their dreams of world domination and self-enrichment are valid and noble and righteous. And there is no off ramp there. Everyone, even the folks with the nuclear codes, is entertaining themselves online as the world burns. Posting through it and monitoring the situation until it finally reaches their doorstep and forces them to look up from their phone and log off.”
- Faragist TikTok: A journey through the world of Dissatisfied Brit TikTok, the country seen through the Faragist lens, where everything is broken and nothing works and the fault is not, as you might think, any of the people who might materially have been expected to have done something to fix or maintain the systems supporting us over the past few years but instead of THE FOREIGN, because of course it is. This is William Davis in the LRB offering a glimpse of what TikTok looks like down the rabbithole – you will recognise much of the rhetoric espoused and described here from…well, from most mainstream politicians in this fcuking country, or so it seems, but also from the endless analysis of THE REFORM APPEAL from the last election, and the locals, but the piece is still worth reading, in part for the style and in part for analysis like this, which I thought was an interesting observation – noone wants to fix the system, everyone just wants to beat it or escape it entirely: “ Things no longer add up. For many, work no longer pays well enough to secure a family existence. Someone somewhere is clearly getting richer, but it isn’t clear how or why. You can find a steady stream of practical advice on TikTok about how to scam the system yourself, through online shopping platforms that the supermarkets don’t want you to know about, or investment strategies and side-hustles that will pay better than your day job. In my own For You journey into Faragism, I was struck by the recurring assumption that the ultimate prize was exit of some form or other: retiring to live off passive income or emigrating to a less broken society with better weather. In contrast to the ‘win-wins’ of market liberalism, this all smacks of zero-sum Trumpian deal-making, in which one party wins because the other loses.”
- Iran, Israel and AI: Or, possibly, how the current Iran-Israel conflict is a neat encapsulation of how utterly fcuked the informational water table is thanks to the twin pillars of Elon and AI’. Both sides are sharing machine-generated propaganda, and ‘motivated bad actors’ are being incentivised to spread any old sh1t all over the web in the hope of getting a trickledown virality bonus from Daddy Elon. I know I’m like a fcuking broken record on this, and I am sorry about that, but I can’t stress enough that THIS IS THE WORST IT IS EVER GOING TO BE (again), and that if you think people are struggling to tell real from fake in June 2025 then check in again at Christmas and see how much worse it’s become. God, wasn’t it nice in that brief period when we all agreed, more or less, on what was real? Remember those days?
- One Flew Over Latent Space: A really good essay, this, by Rene who runs the Good Internet newsletter and has written on several occasions over the past few years – long before it was A Thing – about how LLMs were 100% going to send people absolutely-fcuking-loopy…which, as we keep on being told, they 100% are! This is long, but it’s a good read, taking you from Timothy Leary through Marshall Mcluhan and offering some explanations as to why, exactly, The Machine is such a persuasive interlocutor for so many people (parenthetically I was running a training session this week during which someone happily revealed that they used ChatGPT’s voicechat feature to ‘just sort of vent’ and that it was really helpful for ‘getting to the bottom of how [I’m] feeling’ and, dear reader, I felt a horrible shiver of foreshadowing horror run unbidden down my spine).
- They Still Want To Take Your Jobs: I’m including this not because it’s a super-interesting piece, but because I think the proper, blatant ‘mask off’ moment is interesting, and of a piece with a broader trend in business where everyone has collectively decided to stop pretending about what they want to use The Machine for – following Cuddly Andy Jassy’s not-hugely-surprising revelation that white collar Amazon employees probably don’t actually have any job security any more and will, in part at least, be replaced by AI feels like it might be the start of a raft of similar shareholder-facing announcements from all sorts of other large businesses, as CEOs realise that…noone’s seemingly going to do anything to prevent them gutting their workforces in favour of tech. Anyway, this is a profile of a company called ‘Mechanise’, whose stated goal is to literally eliminate jobs. Like, all jobs. Apparently that’ll take about 20 years or so, fyi.
- Shifty Stuff: Have you INHALED the new Adam Curtis? Have you been peppering your pubchat this week with references to some obscure archive clip plucked from the dusty backrooms and given GRAVITAS by its inclusion in a patchwork visual quilt which confirms how CLEVER AND SMART you are for being able to scry meaning from its threads? GOOD FOR YOU! Sadly I can’t quite bring myself to do it, in part because without the v/o work I find it loses something, and partly because I don’t necessarily need to watch 5 hours of telly to have my existing thesis of ‘well, that was the brief period of consensus reality, nice while it lasted but it is FCUKED’ explained to me. This, though, is a short explainer of why a small detail from one episode of the new films highlights a slight problem with the Curtis oeuvre (and indeed any sort of work of this scope and scale which seeks to create a unifying narrative thread from so many fragments of culture), to whit that he is occasionally…not wholly accurate when it comes to times and details. Unrelated, but I have met Adam Curtis a couple of times now and each time I have been left with the incredibly strong overriding thought “Wow, you are very much NOT like what I expected famed documentary maker and cultural analyst Adam Curtis to be like” (let me add, in a wholly-positive way).
- AI Counting Calorie Apps Don’t Work: I’ve linked to a few of these over the past few years – you know, those apps that promise to give you a calorific value for the plate of food you’re about to eat, based on only on a photo – and each time have prefaced the link with some variant of ‘this is obviously fcuking bullsh1t, do not whatever you do actually use these things’; now we have a PROPER WRITEUP from someone demonstrating that I WAS RIGHT. Ahem. I’m not, obviously, including this simply so I can type I WAS RIGHT twice, but instead as an illustrative example of the limits of what an LLM can do, and how it pays to think a *little* bit about what exactly you’re being promised when someone’s selling you magic beans, and how plausible that promise is (kind of want to take this piece and show it to everyone currently absorbed in the mission to INJECT AI INTO GOVERNMENT, because I feel there are possibly some Useful Learnings here).
- 250 Photos from the No Kings Protests: Literally that – photos of the protests from around the world, along with an accompanying short essay by Seth Abramson who compiled them. It’s a subscriber-only post, but, well, you can just subscribe and then cancel it as soon as you’ve opened the page, I won’t tell anyone (sorry Seth Abramson, but, per the dril candles tweet I am currently spending what feels like £2k a month on fcuking information and I need to eat occasionally).
- A Day in the Life of a Bottle Collector: I am lucky enough not to have any personal regrets about my life – turns out not really having any ‘wants’ means that, equally, you don’t have any regrets! SEE MUM, BEING UTTERLY DEVOID OF ANY REAL PASSIONS OR AMBITIONS IS GOOD ACTUALLY! – but I do occasionally think that Teenage Matt would be quietly annoyed at Middle-Aged Matt’s failure to ever make it to Roskilde festival in Denmark which was, when I was 15 and at college, THE coolest music festival in the world (it was ABROAD, and Danes are really goodlooking, was the reasoning). Anway, this is a really interesting piece of writing presenting the festival as experienced by the people working throughout to attempt to keep it vaguely clean and tidy – the refuse collectors from around the continent who each year descend on the festival and work for 4-5 days solid to earn as much money as possible, while around them a crowd of international children get their fun on. “Next to the stage, I meet Lars, a twenty-something-year-old who has been attending the festival for several years. When I tell him that I am trying to understand more about the role of the bottle collectors at the festival, it leaves an impression. He says that no one of his friends—no one—thinks about it, though he does. He acknowledges it as an issue but also believes that no one really thinks of it as being one. While the refund system was created to encourage consumers to be mindful of their trash, among some of the young Danes, there seems to be a sense that picking up bottles—eventheir own—and exchanging them is kind of shameful. Ironically, throwing it away becomes a status symbol. It’s an unspoken signal: I don’t need the money.”
- A Massive SciFi Larp: Adrian Hon went on a three-day scifi LARP (Live Action Roleplay, but you knew that, come on) which took place across a bunch of geodesic dome structures in Poland a few months back, and which saw 150 participants dealing with A MASSIVE SCIFI PLANETARY CRISIS EVENT via the medium of 3d printed props and committed, immersive roleplay – this is his (LONG) writeup of his experience. I can say with all confidence that I would HATE doing something like this with a passion – I simply don’t think I could immerse myself to the required degree to get past the very English feelings of intense shame and humiliation I would feel at the fact I was basically playing dress up and make believe (I KNOW, I KNOW, SAD AND JOYLESS) but I am endlessly-fascinated by the mechanics of this stuff and How It Works, and this is really great account of What Happens and How It Happens and What It Is Like, and I am slightly in awe of the participants but most of all the organisers because FCUKING HELL is there a lot going on here.
- Tropical Technologist: Chia Amisola writes about her experience of being a creative technology person in the Philippines, and more generally about existing online from the developing world. I thought this was both super-interesting from the point of view of ‘physical geography as shaping/defining factor in one’s conception of digital space’ and also really beautifully-written in parts; see what you think: “There’s a video of a computer shop in Cainta, Philippines where the floodwaters go up to the thighs. The boys have their headphones on, their polyester shorts hiked up, still playing Crossfire. Empty chairs and wrappers float up, and power cables run from the top of the room (precautions from previous storms). We know all the storms by name. We play with our lives. This is the image of the tropical technologist. If technology is largely characterized by human manipulation of the environment to its ends, then the archipelago’s struggle with technology is one of constant weathering. Air conditioners relentlessly whirr in attempts to regulate heat, winds signal us to shelter, and satellites patternize all beyond our control. At times, nature attempts to reclaim itself, standing against all we’ve done to contain it. We respond in turn: more wires, infrastructural messes, generators, messes our bodies together. Much of nature’s wrath is just natural consequence. Rapid industrialization and urbanization irreversibly alter climate, unruly disaster predictions understate chaos, it rains inside data centers. Environmental inputs don’t just provide suggestions for sustainability, but become the mediators of their possibility. Our command of technologies is inseparable from the climates that it emerges from and is used within: so much that the elemental embodies the technological, and the technological constructs the elemental.”
- The Best Way To Kill A Fish: Both a fascinating profile of a very interesting man, and an essay about how to dispatch a fish in a manner that is both humane and which, as a happy side effect, causes said fish to then be very, very delicious once it’s shuffled (flopped? swum?) off this mortal coil – as you doubtless no, the flavour of meat is negatively affected by the presence of specific hormones within an animals body at the time of death, and as such killing in such a manner that minimises spikes of adrenaline, etc, helps produce meat that tastes better – this applies to fish as much as it does mammals, and as such the Japanese have developed specific techniques to ensure their sushi is perfect. Honestly, though, I think the most interesting part of this piece is the person at the heart of it, Washington DC lawyer, fishing enthusiast and seemingly MOST TYPE-A PERSON EVER Andrew Tsui, who I confess to being in complete awe of by the end of the article.
- Viral Pastry Quest: The rise of the HYPERVIRAL PASTRY – thanks Dominique Ansell, you fcuker! – continues seemingly-inexorably; it is a truth universally acknowledged that every city seeking to cement its status as a must-visit Instadestination needs at least three, but ideally a dozen or so, incredibly-chic bakeries churning out signature concoctions as large as your head, ideally to be shown off in a throwaway reel as some shiny-haired person pouts at it while wearing last season’s Balenciaga. The thing is, though, that none of the people photographing themselves with these status-signifying exercises in prestige lamination ever seem to talk about what the fcuking things taste like, and so I was HUGELY grateful to Tanya Bush in i-d for taking a tour round some of NYC’s current most-viral pastry spots and writing up what she found; this is WONDERFULLY-written, honestly, and is worth a read even if you’re not as into lovely pastries as I am (god I love a good pastry).
- Talking To People Looking For Jobs With ICE: I’m just going to reproduce the intro and let you dive into the rest – this is a very good ‘state of the nation as reported from a single point within it’ piece, and it deserves an extra star for the authors pseudonym: “On Thursday and Friday of last week I attended a Department of Homeland Security job fair at the Dulles Expo Center in Chantilly, Virginia. I learned about the event while browsing the DHS website in order to find the phone number of someone who’d been detained by ICE. A pop-up ad linked to an EventBrite page, with free tickets readily available. Customs and Border Patrol, the Coast Guard, and the Secret Service were all recruiting at the event, but ICE was the main draw. Far more applicants stood in line to submit their resumes for deportation officer than for any other position on offer in the cavernous room. Naturally there were a large number of law enforcement types hanging around the convention—men with military fades, moisture-wicking shirts, and tattoos of the bible and the constitution and eagles and flags distended across their arms. But there were also a handful of women ICE applicants and a lot of men of color. The deportation officer applicant pool was, I felt, shockingly diverse—one might say it looked like America. The whole place looked and felt like America.”
- James Frey’s New Book: I know everyone’s sharing the Ocean Vuong hatchetjob from the LRB right now, but I personally enjoyed this one, eviscerating the latest output of literary ‘bad boy’ James Frey (‘bad’ because he’s a liar and a fabulist, to be clear), rather more – I mean, just enjoy this for some top-quality filleting: “In places, Frey adopts a third-person indirect P.O.V., but his attempts to convey characters’ interiority are unconvincing. When Alex gets fired and struggles to find a new job, “every rejection destroyed him,” Frey writes. “Pierced his heart. Brought on more shame. Shame and fear and guilt and embarrassment, anguish and regret and insecurity and loneliness, anger and sadness, disgust and despair, helplessness and hopelessness.” These are at least more words for feelings than are often bestowed on the female characters, one of whom remembers the day she met her husband: she was “leaping and skipping and frolicking” in the ocean with her “freckles on full display.” There’s tremendous misogyny in “Next to Heaven.” At one point, Katy, the girlfriend of the town’s hot hockey coach, is blackmailed, drugged, and violently raped (by a man elsewhere depicted as “kind and generous and helpful and supportive”) and we know the weeks afterward are bad for her because Frey keeps reiterating that she has “stopped working out.” But Frey’s female characters do eventually concentrate and channel the book’s sensitivity. They are vulnerable in ways that the men, so caught up in asserting their dominance, can’t be. There is real pain in “Next to Heaven”—a sense of loneliness and hurt, the outline of a wound—and it’s the women who express it, often by sobbing uncontrollably over a man’s cruelty or abuse. Katy: “she started to cry and the crying became sobbing and the sobbing became wailing.” Grace: “She put her face in her hands and bent over and sobbed. Her life and dreams, her hopes for the future. On fire. She sobbed.” Devon, too, “started sobbing and Belle held her. For a minute, two, five, ten. Belle holding Devon as she sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.” Incredibly, at the end of this last description, Frey adds, “Real fcking life.”
- Why Should We Hire You?: I’ve featured parts of Alexander Velky’s professional memoir in here before in the past 12 months or so – he’s now finished putting it all online, including this chapter, which is by far and away the best evocation I have EVER read of the particular, peculiar misery of working as a community manager or content strategist on BRANDED SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT; honestly, if you have ever done social or digital at any sort of agency, you will read this and wince so incredibly hard your face may in fact stay like that (so be careful).
- My Poor Parents: An extract from a forthcoming book by Walter Siti, an Italian writer who here writes about his parents – I thought this was beautiful, and in parts so painfully, perfectly evocative of Italy and parts of my childhood that I had to step away from the computer and Take Some Breaths.
- Souvenirs of an Awake Craniotomy: OK, I found this almost unbearably hard to read – not because there’s anything unpleasant in the essay but because it absolutely hits my ‘absolute terror at being made of meat’ square in the centre, and then presses down on it with some force, and, honestly, reading this made me break out into a light sweat. Camille Bégin writes about her experience having her brain operated on while under local anaesthetic, and this is honestly brilliant and interesting and god even thinking about it again is making me feel a little sick if I’m honest: “What do you, a bilingual person, do when a surgeon asks which language you wish to keep as he is about to perform an awake craniotomy to remove your right frontal lobe brain tumour? I decided to keep French. English is for work, rationality, writing. I love how active the language is; how familiar it has become, yet how foreign it remains. I love how it distances me from my experiences, how it gives me space to process them. I love how my intimacy with it has estranged me from ever being able to write in French again. I love how I get to avoid the convoluted sentence structures and tricky grammar of my first language; even though reading the sentences others have sculpted with it remains a voluptuous experience of clauses, commas, pure descriptive stamina that wraps me in words and worlds. French remains my emotional language. The one I cry in, the one I need to communicate with my son, to be silly and caring, to greet him with a ‘Bonjour mon choubidou d’amour’ as he wakes up.”
- James Joyce’s Grandson: The second piece this week in Granta, this one an account by James Scudamore of his meeting with Steven James Joyce, grandson of the novelist and fanmously-irascible man, who was, at one time, searching for someone to write his biography and considered Scudamore for the gig. This is a very funny and slightly-sad portrait of a very bitter, angry and eccentric man, leavened by some excellent writing.
- The Long Goodbye: Finally this week, a beautiful but, I warn you, immensely sad piece of writing by journalist and author Jonn Elledge, who had met the love of his life, Agnes, and who was living happily with her until her sudden, tragic, unexpected and untimely death two years ago. On the two year anniversary of Agnes’ death, Jonn chose to write about her for the first time – the resulting essay is one of the more beautiful love letters to someone who’s no longer there that I have read, and I am welling up just typing this bit again so am going to leave the description here I think.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: