Got to be honest, it has been a genuinely HORRIBLE week in Discourse Land, specifically the UK bit of it, and I have had quite enough of the web for the moment. I am off to do Good Works (and eat jerk chicken) in Catford – you amuse yourself with this week’s links, which are a cracking batch, and I will be back in a week, hopefully less exhausted and enervated by Events and The Reaction To Them.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are part of the problem too, whatever you might like to believe.
THE SECTION WHICH COULD HAVE DONE WITHOUT BEING TOLD THAT NEXT YEAR IS GOING TO BE EVEN HOTTER, PT.1:
- Place Oddities: It’s always pleasing to kick Curios off with a link about which I am forced to say ‘I have literally no fcuking clue what is going on here’, and so it is with this week’s opener. Place Oddities is…see, this is the difficulty, though, because I still feel honour-bound to try and offer a vague explanation as to what the site is and so you’re going to have to put up with my vague textual flailings as I attempt to communicate the weirdness. Place Oddities will, when you click the link, take you to a page showing a map of the UK, on which are arranged a series of icons; click the icons, and you’ll get…I don’t know, a link to an old forum post about the fact that the band Blur were once a band called Seymour, or a small video filmed from a train and showing a rather beautiful sunset over some fields, or some photographs of random places in Northampton. WHY?? Literally no idea. Click on the menu tab entitled ‘local history section’ at the top of the page and you’re taken to a 3d representation of a local library’s microfiche viewer, which you can use to, er, browse some really obscure information about various places in the UK. Click the ‘sacred well’ button and get taken to a CG wishing well, into which you can toss a CG coin and be taken to a random fact on the map…GOD I LOVE THIS, it is batsh1t and a wonderfully-baffling and maddeningly-inefficient way of browsing information, and the fact that it exists with absolutely no sort of coherent explanation as to what it is and why it has been made and by whom is basically PERFECT CATNIP for me. Should the person behind this happen to see this slightly-baffled writeup, PLEASE get in touch and explain to me what the fcuk this is and what the fcuk you were thinking when you made it because you have a beautiful mind.
- Tilt: Another link where I am basically just throwing in my hands in the air and going ‘literally no idea, sorry’. Click the link, click the button that appears in the middle of the page, and be transported to a, er, living room (or an image of one) in which stands a woman on a skateboard surrounded by a bunch of random objects; there’s a joystick which you can click on to tilt (DO YOU SEE???) the room left or right, and watch the woman and all the objects roll to one side of the screen or the other. Click the objects and the screen will triumphantly display each one’s weight to you while playing some excitable techno. WHAT THE FCUK IS THIS WHY DOES IT EXIST WHAT ARE THE OBJECTS WHO IS THE WOMAN WHY AM I TILTING THE SCREEN? Again, I have no idea whatsoever what is happening or why, but I am very much a fan – but, also, it is far too early for the day to be this confusing and I would quite like things to reacquire a semblance of coherence soon because I don’t think I can keep this up for the next five hours of typing.
- Moon Rover: Would you like to pilot a CG moon rover buggy across an apparently-accurately-modeled representation of the lunar landscape? OH GOOD! This is actually a vaguely-gamelike thing – there are tasks, you have to, I don’t know, complete some sort of lunar rescue mission or something, but, personally, I couldn’t give anything resembling a fcuk about that and just enjoyed wandering about the rocky surface of the distant satellite. This is very nicely-done, with decent graphics and a nice ‘feel’ to the buggy, and if you can be bothered to engage with the ludic mechanics could be a decent way to pass 10 minutes or so.
- Shibb Sampler: I featured A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya a while back – it’s a creative studio project type thing which is building a fun selection of small digital music toys, and this is the latest one, a site which lets you play around with YouTube videos, letting you effectively use them as samples; this is actually deceptively fun and flexible, letting you tweak the playback speed of whatever vid you feed it (or one of the preselected ones), jump to specific bits of the track, etc, making it easy to finally create that breakcore version of ‘My Heart Will Go On’ that you have always longed to hear but always been too lazy and cowardly to create. MAKE SOME (horrible) NOISE!
- The Living Record: The past 4 years have seen Gaza flattened and reduced largely to rubble, accompanied by the deaths of far, far too many entirely-blameless people – some of whom have been journalists attempting to report on the escalating horrors. This site is a memorial to the (so far) over 260 members of the Gazan press corps who’ve lost their lives during the conflict, containing memorials to the dead and testimonials from those who survive them. “The Living Record is an oral archive, an interactive memorial, and a testament to the collective will of Gaza’s journalists, who chose the path of truth despite being marked for death by the Israeli occupation and the complicit American media. It is also a record of service. One year ago, Anas al-Sharif was martyred. He was assassinated alongside five of his colleagues — Mohammed Qraiqea, Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal, Mohammed al-Khalidi, and Moamen Aliwa — in an Israeli strike on the journalists’ tent outside Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Grieving like so many others, like the millions around the world who knew Anas as Gaza’s voice, the New York War Crimes editorial collective set out to gather a small collection of eulogies from those who knew him. The responses transformed the project. Anas, his colleagues told us, would not have wanted to be remembered as a singular hero, but as a servant of the Palestinian cause. So, over the course of the following year, we gathered spoken testimonies from fellow journalists, photographers, cameramen, journalism professors, students, and workers across the media sector in Gaza. Each contributor was asked to record a personal remembrance of one or more martyrs, to tell a small part of the history that, as Samira Nassar says, should be written in gold.”
- Satyress: When I first saw this this week I was convinced it was a joke, but some cursory digging suggests that it is, in fact, an entirely real product. Just…just click the link and take a look and then come back here. ISN’T IT FCUKING MENTAL???? Yes, you’re right, that *is* some sort of weird robot goat, apparently designed to be remote-operated by people undertaking difficult or dangerous work in the great outdoors. It’s basically designed so that you can attach a bunch of different tools and mechanical bits and pieces to it, making it a bit like a sort of swiss army knife for Doing Stuff In The Great Outdoors (but an inexplicably-caprine one). YOU CAN ATTACH A CHAINSAW TO IT! IT IS APPARENTLY BULLETPROOF! Honestly, this is SO mad and SO weird – WHY THE FCUK IS IT SHAPED LIKE A FCUKING GOAT, WHY???? – and so, so silly; I particularly like the disclaimer near the bottom of the page that explains that the thing won’t be able to easily pass through standard US doorframes because of its completely-unnecessary horns. This is so, so dumb, but, equally, we won’t be laughing when an army of these, teleoperated by some sort of terrifying racist militia, start enacting a white supremacist coup in Texas.
- CRSH: It’s been sort of fun watching the evolution of gambling in the US, moving from ‘tightly–regulated industry’ to ‘insane free-for-all where anyone can bet on anything and there don’t seem to be any checks and balances anymore and noone cares’, and this new app is my new high-watermark for ‘what the actual fcuk are you doing you mad septic cnuts?’ bafflement. CRSH (sorry, but it’s not my name; insert your own vowels, whichever you prefer!) is an app which advertises itself as allowing anyone to bet on the outcome of any livestream as it’s taking place – will she say yes to the rizzstreamer asking her out on a date? Will this person shoot 10 baskets in a row? Will the idiot livestreamer have their hand bitten off by the alligator they’re taunting for a handful of donations from a rapt audience of morons on KICK? Etc etc etc. You may be thinking ‘hang on Matt, this is literally set up to enable fixing and fraud and there is literally no way that this isn’t a nested series of scams waiting to happen’, and I AGREE WITH YOU; I saw something somewhere which suggested that there were ‘SYSTEMS’ in place to prevent this stuff being massively gamed, but, equally, I have no fcuking clue how and there is literally no explanation as to safeguards or similar on the homepage so fcuk knows. Anyway, this appears to be mostly being used by kids betting on gamers’ in-stream performance rather than anything too awful, but it can only be a matter of time before we’re being invited to speculate Actual Cashmoney on whether Clavicular overdoses live (WHAT a sentence to type!).
- Norecognition: A Kickstarter! Just like it’s 2018 or something! This is a MASSIVELY-overfunded crowdfunder for adversarial clothing – that is, tshirts that are printed with designs that are intended to confuse the fcuk out of cameras and prevent them from recognising the wearer, effectively rendering you invisible to the surveillance panopticon. This isn’t the first ‘adversarial’ range of garments to be flogged, but the person behind them maintains that many of the ones who’ve gone before haven’t in fact been tested in the wild and that this range will be a more effective means of hiding yourself from the prying gaze of The Evil Surveillance State Apparatus. Get in early, back the project and get access to a garment which will, if you’re lucky, enable you to commit MASSIVE CRIMES – or, er, get mown down by the first Waymo that fails to identify you as person as you cross the street in front of it.
- Photocopy Yourself: Well, not quite, but ALMOST – this site takes a photo of you with your webcam and then lets you create increasingly degraded, deep-fried versions of said photo by running it through a ‘photocopy’ effect repeatedly. Why not run all your dating app pics through this a few times and see whether the grainy, fanzine aesthetic improves your chances of getting laid? I really, really like this – the effects you get out of it are very cool indeed, in a grimily-analogue sort of way.
- The British Library Image Search: This is cool – a frontend which allows you to search ALL of the images from the British Library’s digitised collection of books, with a degree of natural language operation and a few little parameter tools to help you narrow your enquiries. This has a LOT of content to work with – per the blurb, it fearures “1,080,814 illustrations cut from digitised books, 1510–1946, from biglam/british-library-book-images. Wonderfully, I just asked it for ‘a dog wearing a hat’ and MY GOD is there a lot of canine millinery in the archives – SO MUCH TO EXPLORE! This is via Lynn’s excellent newsletter btw, which is always worth checking out.
- The London Guildhall in 3d: Would you like the opportunity to explore a 3d model of the interior of the Guildhall in the City of London, made with Gaussian splats? GREAT! Would you like me to explain to you what the fcuk a Gaussian splat actually is? TOUGH LUCK I COULDN’T EVEN BEGIN TO TRY! Still, this is very cool and there’s something oddly-compelling about zooming around the eaves of the historic building and checking out all the stained glass.
- Persova: It’s been interesting seeing Spotify finally acknowledging that, yes, it has…something of a problem with AI-generated ‘music’ clogging up its platform and now beginning the too-late process of requiring that it all be labeled – FFS GUYS YOU COULD HAVE DONE THIS TWO YEARS AGO WHAT THE FCUK WERE YOU DOING? Anyway, Persova is one of the reasons why this sort of thing is eminently necessary – it’s a platform which offers anyone who wants the ability to create an AI-generated musician, a coherent, er, ‘persova’ which you can use to front up your entirely-AI-generated tunes. As the blurb explains, “You’re not creating content.
You’re building an artist. A voice that stays the same across every release. A face people recognise. A catalogue that grows into a body of work. Persova is where that artist lives — and keeps living, long after the first song.” Pricing goes up to $300 a month, which seems insanely-steep but I suppose is predicated on people’s (almost certainly false) belief that you can just create 20 of these things and have them churn out an album a day and then RAKE IN THE STREAMING REVENUE – a theory which neatly falls apart when you take a moment to listen to some of the output of one of Persova’s flagship ‘artists’, an AI-generated scandi hunk called ‘Nico Francker’, which is entirely, miserably, blandly-unlistenable and which no actual human could conceivably EVER actively choose to listen to. Surely noone’s going to be dumb enough to use this stuff?
- Isometric San Francisco: Remember that massive isometric copy of New York that someone built using AI a little while back? YES YOU DO FFS I REFUSE TO BELIEVE THAT I AM THE ONLY PERSON WHO CAN’T FORGET THIS STUFF. Ahem. Anyway, this is that, but for San Francisco – as with the last one, there’s something incredibly-pleasing about seeing a cityscape rendered in this vaguely-Sim City-esque style. If you’re curious about the ‘how’ behind it, there’s a reasonably-detailed writeup of the process behind making the site here, which is (to my mind at least) an interesting look at the mechanics behind making something with AI which is actually decent.
- The Mexican Lexicon: APOLOGIES FOR THE CLAUDESLOP I AM SORRY! But! If you ignore the vomit-inducing banality of this site’s look and feel there’s actually something kind-of cute in here. It was sent to me by its creator, one Steven Vickers, who explains: “You might know the name Johnny Vaughan [NOTE TO YOUNGER READERS OR ANY OF YOU WHO HAVE THE TEMERITY NOT TO BE ENGLISH – JOHNNY VAUGHAN WAS A POPULAR TV PERSONALITY OF THE 1990s]. He did not disappear off the face of the earth after the Big Breakfast ended, he’s moved to radio. He’s been doing the Radio X weekday drive time show “the 4 til 7 thang”, and a Saturday show called the Kickabout. They’ve run a feature for the best part of the last decade called “Mexican Handbags”. Long story short: he saw a load of identical handbags on a beach in Mexico which all had different brands/logos on them, so “The old Mexican Handbag” is something that’s obviously fake. Observations of everyday life, expressed as “the old”, then a place and an action or thing.” This website collects all the examples of this gag structure featured on the show in one place – so, for example, one entry is for ‘The Old Sicilian Waterfall’, defined as “When you’re moved to tears by the speeches at a wedding of someone you barely know after hitting the complimentary vino a little too hard”…you get the idea. I really like this, despite having literally never listened to the radio show in question – there’s something really nice about the personal, vaguely-obsessional nature of the project. The thing is, though, that I nearly discounted it immediately because of the fact it LOOKS LIKE FCUKING CLAUDESLOP – the lesson, to anyone reading this, is ‘by all means use AI to make things, but please for the love of God can you make some efforts to distinguish it from every other fcuking thing built by some cnut with a £20-a-month Anthropic sub for the love of God’.
- TTyl: Ooh, this is cool – a platform which lets you record a voice message to your future self which will send at a specific point in the future that you determine. There are MANY potential uses for this, but I would personally advocate you using it every time you start a new project or endeavour – why not consider sending your future self a congratulatory message for having achieved or completed your goal, so that you get a really upsettingly-shaming reminder of your inevitable capitulation or failure a few years hence? Fun for all the family!
- Ocean Photographer of the Year: Typically-amazing snaps of some of the best undersea critters you’re ever likely to see – my personal favourite is the one of the seal in New Zealand just going absolutely feral on a skate (seriously, it’s ragdolling the thing like you wouldn’t believe, amazing scenes), but, as ever, you will find a lot to love in here (special shout out too to the Very Toothy Dolphin).
THE SECTION WHICH COULD HAVE DONE WITHOUT BEING TOLD THAT NEXT YEAR IS GOING TO BE EVEN HOTTER, PT.2:
- Santioni Spirits: This is GORGEOUS – utterly pointless and very silly and totally unnecessary and TERRIBLY written, fine, but also SO SO PRETTY. It’s the website for a drinks brand called Santioni which makes, as far as I can tell, drinks that can best be described as ‘fancy Baileys’ which, honestly, sounds like vomit in a glass as far as I’m concerned but perhaps you are more enticed by the concept of a cream-based liqueur concoction flavoured with marshmallow (are…are you nine? What the fcuk is wrong with you) than I am. Anyway, that’s not important – what IS important is that the site features some sort of bullsh1t narrative about a monk or something, accompanied by some genuinely-gorgeous animation and illustration; honestly, this looks sort of like woodcuts or something, it is SO pleasing, and the scrolling and animation is beautifully done, and it feels more like a digital adaptation of a graphic novel than it does a (very, very silly) attempt to flog you disgusting booze. Honestly, this is so well-made and the artist and devs deserve all sorts of flowers – none, though, to whoever wrote the accompanying copy because it is total tripe.
- Folding Globes: Are you at a loose end this weekend? Would you like a PROJECT? OH GOOD, why not check out this website which lets you print out designs for foldable 3d globes? I have literally no clue AT ALL how the fcuk you’re meant to turn a sheet of paper into a globe solely via the medium of clever manipulation, but apparently you can and this site will show you how. If any of you try one of these can you please send me a photo of the finished article, because I am really struggling to conceive of what the fcuk it might look like.
- The Bre Pettis Collection of Computer Art: Oh wow, WHAT a collection; Bre Pettis is an artist who also collects computer art from over the years, and this is the site they have built to show it all off. This is SUCH an interesting and varied set of works which span the period from the mid-20thC to the NFT boom of a few years ago, and there’s some really interesting stuff in here; per Bre, “The Bre Pettis Collection of Computer Art is my personal collection of artworks made with computers, algorithms, plotters, and creative machines. This site is its catalog: the works, the artists who made them, and the library of books and records that surrounds them.” If you have any interest in the interface between code and art, and how artists have worked with and alongside with code over the past 80-odd years, then this is basically a near-perfect timesink – I want SO MANY of these pieces and would plaster my walls with them were I immoderately rich (if anyone would like to contribute to my pursuit of immoderate wealth, by the way, do get in touch!).
- MapSplit: A clever tool/toy by Friend of Curios Giuseppe Sollazzo, who’s made this site which lets you basically feed in any mapped dataset from the UK and work out how said data splits across geographical lines (which I promise will make much more sense when you click the link and stop reading my tortured explanation). Per the ‘about’ page, “draw a movable straight line across the UK and reports a statistic for each side. Select a dataset from the drop down or upload your own file (see below how to). Where its numbers came from is listed under Sources, just below the drop down. Drag the line across the country; rotate the handle to any angle. Use ↔ Horizontal and ↕ Vertical to snap back to a level line. Check the totals and the partial breakdown in What’s being counted. When a line runs roughly north–south the split is labelled West/East instead of North/South. Hover a point to see more a data tooltip.” Useful!
- Coop: This is an interesting idea which feels like a series of lawsuits waiting to happen – the premise behind Coop, a seemingly US-only app/website, is to connect ‘local food sellers’ with local customers, allowing small-scale producers to create a sales network in their immediate vicinity. Everything about this suggests that it’s designed explicitly for non-pros, the sort of people who decide they are going to set up a small garden allotment and who want to sell their surplus, or who like baking and want to sell the odd cake from their kitchen…which is all well and good until someone decides to flog their home preserves and ends up giving botulism to a bunch of unsuspecting buyers. Basically I have a LOT of questions about the extent to which anyone needs to be a certified business to be on here – the app is…unclear about the requirements to register as a seller, and very much gives me the impression that anyone can in theory create a profile and start selling, I don’t know, backyard kombucha to anyone brave enough to buy it, which feels like a series of large-scale lawsuits waiting to happen.
- Japanese Webcams: Would you like a website collating webcam feeds from all over Japan? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! This is WONDERFUL; you can navigate around a map of the country and pick cams by location, and there are over 1,000 currently live on the site; it’s all I can do not to abandon this stupid newsletter right here and just stare at a stream of a shrine in the middle of a field somewhere in Iwata prefecture.
- AI Watermark Remover: NB WEB CURIOS DOES NOT ENDORSE THE REMOVAL OF WATERMARKS ON AI CONTENT OR ANY ATTEMPT TO FURTHER FCUK WITH PEOPLE’S ABILITY TO WORK OUT WHAT IS REAL AND WHAT ISN’T! That said, I think it’s important that we know what is and isn’t possible, and remember that there is no such thing as foolproof watermarking of AI content. This is a github repo and will require you to be able to run a Python script to use it; if you’re able to muster the basic technical chops, though, this promises to let you strip all watermarking from images, video and text (it says it will work on the new Claude watermarking too), and I think it claims to be able to get rid of Google’s best-in-class SynthID watermark too, which I had previously thought was pretty much foolproof. Basically the point of linking to this is to remind you that you can’t trust anything you see on the web anymore, ever, even if an AI detector tells you it’s real. HAVE FUN OUT THERE EVERYONE!
- The Library of Leaks: Ooh, this is interesting and potentially useful for any journalists or researchers amongst you; “The Library of Leaks is a project of Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), a non-profit that specializes in publishing, archiving and analyzing leaked and hacked datasets. The Library of Leaks is the world’s largest public collection of previously secret information. More data is imported here and made searchable every day.” This is DIZZYING – there is so, so much in here, from leaked accountancy memos to the Hunter Biden email records to Wikileaks stuff, all searchable…you could lose DAYS if you were so inclined.
- Moe P Wellington: Another personal portfolio site, this one for the work of a certain Moe P Wellington – this is a very odd little setup, and I think it’s best experienced cold; just click around and see what you find and what happens.
- The Annual Report Gallery: Ooh, this is interesting, both from a design point of view but also in the sense of general corporate history (no, wait, come back!) – this site contains a frankly staggering number of corporate annual reports from over the years, spanning all sorts of sectors, and taking you from the 40s to the present, all browsable and explorable. “For the better part of the last century, annual reports were things that companies put lots of effort into, hiring graphic designers, illustrators, and artists. Graphic design work was pricey either way, and so companies took advantage of this sunk cost to turn everyday reports into things with true meaning, rallying their teams around the flag. When the personal computer became popular and layout and graphic design was “democratized,” the amount companies expected to pay for things went down. And so, while they continued to invest in branding and marketing, they stopped investing in aesthetics. As the production of graphics gets further mechanized via AI tools, I do worry about what we’re about to lose this time. I thought it might be interesting to take a look through what we lost before, and see if maybe we can give some of these great ideas new life.” Aside from anything else there is some ICONIC graphic design in here – just have a browse through the 70s and 80s and enjoy some really nice cover design for some ASTONISHINGLY boring documents.
- Full Talktime: A website which for some reason serves to replicate the experience of writing and sending text messages on an old-style flipphone; dear CHRIST the Proustian nostalgiahit this gave me, along with the realisation that oldschool phones were BETTER because you could literally type messages to people without looking at the screen, while walking along, thanks to the magic of ACTUAL PHYSICAL BUTTONS. Touchscreens are rubbish. Anyway, you can write texts, send them to people via the medium of urls, and generally indulge in some light nostalgia for 20 years ago when you were young and still had a vague sense of hope for the future (LOL SORRY!).
- Snowflake: This is an interesting idea – Snowflake is an app which effectively gives people in other countries access to the Tor browser (used to access the darkweb): “Snowflake allows people to connect to the Tor network in places where Tor is blocked by routing your connection through volunteer proxies located in uncensored countries. Similar to VPNs, which help users bypass Internet censorship, Snowflake disguises your Internet activity as though they’re making a video or voice call, making you less detectable to Internet censors. Snowflake uses a technology called WebRTC, which is commonly employed by videoconferencing software. This helps mask your use of Tor from censors by making it appear as though you’re on an audio or video call instead.” You can read more about it here should you be curious – on balance, this feels like A Good Thing.
- The Helmet Time Machine: This is a cool little project which will appeal to any American Football fans out there – the site collates the helmet designs of NFL teams through the years, rendered as pixel art in pleasing, cute fashion. This goes all the way back to 1960 – it’s an interesting way of tracking now the designs evolved over the decades, and taught me that the Cincinatti Bengals didn’t get their iconic tiger-striped helmets until 1981 (ok, fine, it was interesting to ME).
- Pole Abstract: I wouldn’t ordinarily feature pole dancing in Curios – not really my vibe – but I will make an exception for this TikTok account belonging to (what I think is) a troupe of performers from (I think) China who, inexplicably, do mad dance and acrobatics routines while, er, dressed up as velociraptors. You do sort of have to see this to believe and understand it (and even then, ‘understand’ is perhaps a stretch). What a wonderful world.
- Fish Families: Do YOU like fish? Would YOU like a massive, searchable gallery of images of ALL OF THE FISH IN THE KNOWN WORLD EVER? Oh my god you are going to be SO HAPPY! Ok, fine, it’s only 320 images, and so very much not ALL OF THE FISH, but it has taught me that there is a particular species known as the Warty Seadevil and so my Friday has been improved immoderately as a result of this site’s existence. Maybe yours will be too.
- Shade Map: London has, at least for the moment, been released from the cruel grip of the sun’s evil deathrays, meaning that within 24h or temperatures returning towards vaguely-normal I heard my first instance of someone complaining about how cold and miserable it was. FFS MAKE UP YOUR MINDS WHAT DO YOU WANT. Anyway, the absence of sun in the city this week makes this link somewhat otiose (shout out to the Curios FAQ enjoyers, there) but it’s a useful one to bookmark for future heat-based horrors to come (and, er, it works worldwide so might be useful to any of you who have the temerity to not live in the same city as me). I’ve featured tools which show shaded areas on a map before, but this is I think the nicest-looking one I’ve yet seen, with a really nice sense of threedimensionality that you don’t always see with this sort of thing.
- Ordinary Abundance: This has done the rounds a lot this week – I personally don’t love it, and I find it curious that despite the fact that it’s obviously Claude-d it hasn’t seemed to attract anti-AI ire, possibly because the interface is nice and the copy isn’t machine-generated and it taps into a growing sense that we are currently living in an increasingly-scifi future; the gimmick is that, as you scroll, the site takes you through various rooms in a house, highlighting elements in each one and accompanying them with quotes from the past which illustrate how unimaginable this degree of comfort, convenience and luxury was to past generations who were busy worrying about not dying of TB and didn’t have access to, say, every single song ever recorded at the tap of a screen. Anyway, while this leaves me cold there’s definitely something in the way in which it tells a story, and I would expect to see the general feel/technique appropriated in quite a few places in the next year or so.
- The Cryptid Crossword: A collab between Friend of Curios Matt Round and constantly-online internet clown Guy Kelly (he of the strangle a horse game from a little while back), this is a cryptic crossword where all the answers are related to cryptids. You will have to both understand how cryptics work AND know a lot about mythical monsters, but I have a strange feeling that some of you freaks will be found right at the venn diagram intersection of these two things.
- Way of the Ninja: Oh my god I lost SO MANY HOURS to this game back in the early-00s – and my then-employer, Citigate Public Affairs, paid me for every single one of them, so, er, thanks guys! This is an olschool browser platform game with BEAUTIFUL physics (honestly, the jumping and inertia are an absolute joy) and some truly-fiendish level design once it takes the training wheels off.
- PZL Games: Would you like a website featuring a selection of (mostly) word-based puzzle games which you can play on the daily? OH GOOD! I haven’t tried all of these, but the ones I’ve tested are light, pleasing fun for all the family (or at least those members who like word-based puzzle play).
- RPG Sketches: Ooh, I love this project – game designer Sraëka Lillian is releasing one little experimental RPG game a week, based on half-thoughts and napkin sketches and riffs on specific, traditional RPG mechanics, and while none of these are full ‘games’ by any stretch, they ARE really curious and fun explorations of the RPG genre and what you can do with it and how certain conventions and tropes might be explored and interpreted (you can read more about the project here at Rock, Paper, Shotgun if you’re interested).
- The Rhyme Game: This is a fun idea, sent to me by its creator, Deng Yi, and while it’s imperfect I think there’s something quite cool in here which is worth checking out. Basically it’s a game that asks you to rhyme on-beat; let it access your mic, and you can play at being a rapper, scored on how accurately your flow keeps the time. It’s not super-intuitive and you’ll need to scroll down the page to grant it mic access, but it’s worth a go because it is surprisingly fun (I am a fcuking TERRIBLE rapper, turns out).
- Turn Left: A racing game that mimics the UNIQUE THRILL of the Indy 500, a race in which participants do 500 laps of an oval track and so spend several hours doing nothing more than turning left; this is basically like that, except it’s a top-down pixel game and a lot more fun than actually watching the Indy 500.
- Hit The Dot: Ooh, this is fun too – also sent to me by its creator, Aditya Tickoo, this is a very simple game which tests how good you are at measuring time; the timer starts, and you’re tasked with clicking a button after a set number of seconds have passed based on nothing more than your own internal intuition. Per the last game, FCUK ME do I have no sense of timing whatsoever, this was utterly humiliating for me.
- Isle: Also via Lynn, this is SUCH a relaxing little webtoy – click the link and wander around a procedurally-generated landscape with animals and a day/night cycle and generally just appreciate some digital countryside. There’s nothing to do, but, sometimes, that is entirely ok.
OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS AN EXCELLENT HOUSEYDISCO NUMBER BY WEEKEND AFFAIR!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Fieri Frames: I have never seen a Guy Fieri TV show. I have never been to Flavortown. Guy Fieri exists to me solely in the form of memes, an idea of frosted tips vaguely suggesting itself across the Atlantic. This is a GLORIOUS collection of shots from his shows with overlaid captions and I am not exaggerating when I say that a good 65% of this is ART.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Mr Goodbar 21: This is is the Insta feed of one Greg Westlake, who delivers ‘blue’ jokes into camera with an almost psychotic degree of detachment; I can’t stress enough how odd this is, there are VERY STRONG Dracula Flow vibes here (and if you aren’t familiar with Dracula Flow then GO AND FCUKING LEARN).
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The Carrion Eaters: I’m starting the longreads this week with a bunch of pieces about Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor who died last week after having resigned his position as a result of persistent questions of plagiarism and other academic irregularities in his record; this first link takes you to a typically-overwritten but also very good piece by Sam Kriss (although imho it sort of falls apart when he starts talking about universities because, well, Cambridge is not a polytechnic and the challenges facing the sector probably don’t apply quite so much to one of the world’s best-regarded and richest institutions); this one is by Hugh Muir, one of the journalists who penned pieces about Arday in the lead-up to his death; and this one is a typically-long and VERY angry one by Will Self. I have to declare a degree of professional and personal interest here – I happened to be on a podcast for work a couple of weeks ago, where the final segment was a discussion of the Arday story and the media’s coverage of it, recorded 4 days prior to his death, and as such I am, even in a small way, part of the media machine which, I can’t help but agree, contributed to the man’s death. Each of the pieces I link to make different points – Self is particularly convinced of the media’s culpability (and I thought his line that “you don’t have to be innocent to possess a right not to be collectively destroyed” was particularly good), Muir writes excellently about the tension in being a black journalist covering the story – but this paragraph in Kriss’s essay is the one that stuck with me and which I keep coming back to: “If a lot of people seem to have suddenly started making very different noises in the last few days, it’s not because any of the substance has changed. Everything they said is still true. The allegations against Arday are the same, and the evidence is still overwhelming. The only difference is that it’s not fun any more. The victim can’t run or hide, but if they’re desperate and vicious enough they can choose to ruin the fun. You destroy yourself in the process, brutalise your family and everyone who ever loved you—but for all the people in the great giggling mob, it’s like a bucket of ice water to the face. Suddenly they all stop hooting and honking and sticking out their tongues. A few blinks. Sober, sheepish expression, as it dawns on them that they appear to have just been torturing a man to death for their own sick amusement. Ah. Well, in this particular case it looks like the evidence might have actually been overblown. What a tragedy. What a senseless waste. Ideologically motivated, obviously. Wouldn’t have happened if he were white. We should think about introducing more controls on the press. We should make it mandatory to be nice. But it never lasts very long. You’re not really sorry, just momentarily embarrassed. A few weeks later someone else is being paraded for your amusement, and you’re whooping like a gibbon as their skin starts to fissure in the light.” This has been a horrible story in every single possible sense, from the fact that it was all kicked off by an Actual Racist, to the mad feeding frenzy that ensued, to Arday’s death, to the way in which it’s being turned into more monetisable content by the same machine in the wake of his passing, to the weird attempts to ignore the realities of the plagiarism and fabulism now that he’s dead, to the fact that reactions to it are being mapped against various culture war faultlines and the whole…noone comes out of this well and, honestly, I feel slightly grubby even writing about it here.
- The Water Century: Sorry, this one’s not a hugely-cheering read either (but it’s really interesting, and the scrollytelling’s nice!) – this is a piece all about the current state of the water system, mainly in the UK, and, basically, how fcuked it is. I was talking to a friend of mine who works in the industry a couple of weeks ago and OH BOY did I have no idea quite what sort of Significant Compromises are currently being made when it comes to keeping the taps on, and how they might come to bite us in a few years, and quite how hairy some of the food scarcity issues are likely to get in the next decade or so. Still, this is clear and interesting and well-designed, and generally a good piece of work by its author Matt Hampsey (it’s worth checking out the rest of his website too, which is just a cool bit of design overall).
- The Vibe Shift Was A Buyout: One of the (many, many) things I have been completely wrong about in recent years was the likely trajectory of Twitter post-Musk; I was personally convinced that the fcuker would never buy it (SO WRONG), and then, when he did, that the whole thing would fall apart within 18 months because the fcuker had no idea how to run a social network (SO WRONG). Instead, as this piece argues, what has ACTUALLY happened is that it has allowed the fcuker to reshape the global discourse to match his Twitter-poisoned obsessions (to whit; a bunch of racist bullsh1t), and that, without the purchase, we wouldn’t be in a position where the Daily Telegraph is running a piece on The Great Replacement Theory, a position espoused by literal white supremacists and Nazis. Vincent Bevins’ article is a good, if incredibly depressing, account of How We Got Here: “Whether x.com still matters in 2026, or will matter at all in 2030, he did solve the problem I identified in 2018. He destroyed a part of the public sphere where his enemies used to thrive. Along the way, he made racist and reactionary positions feel more normal to journalists. The “marketplace of ideas” is a myth, but the dialectic is real. Given conditions of widespread and equal participation in public discourse, some ideas will win out through argumentation. If the media landscape were a simple reflection of economic power, there would be no point for us to do much of anything. Of course, it is not. The press has been a powerful revolutionary force over the last five centuries. But it is also possible to simply buy a newspaper or a website and make it illegal to make fun of the owner or oppose his business interests. That is why control of the press has been a vital political struggle over the last five centuries. It is folly to think that Musk was going to be made a fool on his own property, or that Jeff Bezos would buy Washington Post and allow the paper to get in the way of his larger business goals.”
- Zoomers Don’t Know Usenet: Ok, this ostensibly about the fact that a whole new generation of kids are discovering that Gerard Way of MCR posted quite openly about having a vomit fetish on old messageboards back in the day, but is ACTUALLY about one of my hobbyhorses, specifically ‘the fact that we haven’t in any way produced a coherent record or history or meaningful, cogent archive of the past 30-40 years of internet culture is an act of at best negligence and at worst suicidal cultural vandalism that we are going to come to regret in increasingly-complex and fractal ways the longer we fail to do so’. This piece doesn’t share my sense of the importance of this cultural memory, but, well, it SHOULD.
- The Teens Spying for Russia: This is SUCH a good essay by Adrian Hon, about the growing trend in kids being coopted to engage in state-mandated terrorism thanks to escalating online engagement, and the extent to which this is mirroring techniques deployed in ARGs and similar communities; we saw this in the UK earlier this year, with some of the people who attacked Jewish ambulances in North London having been apparently recruited online to do small acts of vandalism which escalated to actual, proper crimes as they became more hooked in to the network. Honestly, this is fascinating both for the stories of how this is being done by Russia and for the stuff about how you can manipulate and direct people at scale, and the ways in which this maps onto ludic mechanics in interesting and (to me at least) unexpected ways, and how this might evolve as technology does.
- My AI Lover Passed Away: Another one of Jeffrey Ding’s translated dispatches from China, this one a piece about the reactions of various people to their AI ‘lovers’ being shut down as part of the Chinese state’s recent crackdown on AI companions; this is, obviously, VERY DEPRESSING in all the predictable ways, but I found it particularly interesting in terms of the fact that ALL of the case studies here are women, and the fairly reasons they provide for why they turned to AI for companionship, and the crippling degree of loneliness and isolation that lurks just under the surface of all of these stories.
- The Mascot Resurgence: US brands are, by all accounts, getting back in to the mascot game, and this piece in the WSJ looks at some of the recent additions to the Cuddly Corporate Friend pantheon and what might be driving it; file this one alongside Jay Springett’s ‘little guys’ trend.
- The Mend Trend: On the one hand, I broadly approve of the idea of shifting towards a ‘fix it, don’t replace it’ mentality when it comes to clothing and the like, pushing back against fast fashion and disposability; on the other, the idea of this being packaged and sold to use by brands as part of their marketing makes me feel icky as all fcuk. OH WELL. This is an interesting piece about how various brands are pushing ‘mending’ as a thing; for example, “Levi’s created a handstitching course for high school students after determining that many members of Gen Z lacked the sewing skills to match their interest in thrift store shopping and sustainability. Employees spend 90 minutes instructing teenagers on four tasks: sewing on a button, hemming, patching a hole and fixing a tear.” I’m grudgingly forced to admit that this is very smart on several levels (environmentalist positioning, GenZ loves doing activities, deepened brand affinity and some SWEET SWEET DATACAPTURE, to name but three), but man do I wish brands would fcuk off also.
- Brand Newspapers: Despite, per a few links back, being consistently wrong in almost ALL of my predictions for the future, I do occasionally get some things right, so I am going to lightly pat myself on the back for consistently saying that printed media is going to have a resurgence; the latest datapoint to back this up is the apparent vogueish thing of brands printing newspapers as both a marketing and comms exercise and also as a slight ‘prestige’ marker. Honestly, I can’t stress enough how much I would be pitching ‘make a good quarterly magazine laser-targeted at your target consumer and distribute it to them directly’ were I still working in agencyland: “As a direct-to-consumer business, “so much of the world that we build is digital,” Maev’s senior director of brand Maddy Tank says. That’s why her team wanted to use something she calls more “real and tactile” to announce the limited-edition formula to customers. They gravitated toward the newspaper concept in particular because it both felt nostalgic and would allow Maev to showcase a close-up of the ingredients. Plus, Tank says: “A launch at its core is news.” It took the Austin, Texas-based brand—which ranked No. 38 on Inc.’s list of the fastest-growing private American companies in 2024—about a month to draft the newspaper. While the Maev team primarily created it to serve as a social media teaser, they also included copies in PR mailers, handed them out in New York City dog parks, and dropped them off at local doggy daycares and Nordic cafes.”
- Emoji Generations: We got some new intel about who uses which emoji this month, and this is a piece in the NYT looking at how their deployment varies between generations. I don’t have enough GenA/Z interlocutors to have noticed the ‘wilting rose’ cropping up, but I am always curious to see trends in linguistic usage (and, much as 2011 Matt would have been horrified by this, emoji are very much language now).
- 40 First Dates and Still Searching: One of those great New York Times pieces that you read and realise that fcuking hell are the lives of a certain class of rich New Yorker just…different to ours. This is a profile of a matchmaking service in NYC, Agape Match, which charges $25,000(!!!!) for a six-month engagement and which promises to source potential partners to their clients’ exacting specifications; the piece introduces a few of the firm’s clients as well as the woman who’s at the heart of the matchmaking and, Jesus, everything and everyone is mad. It’s actually a refreshingly-sensitive piece (only one of the men in it comes across as a sociopath, amazingly) but it made me feel…quite sad for the main featured bachelor, Joseph Pascaretta. “Eventually, the team turned to Pascaretta. “He’s a 50-year-old man in a 30-year-old man’s body, and the kind of woman that’s going to be with him is the kind of woman who envisions herself being the wife of a congressman,” Avgitidis said. “She needs to be someone who is extroverted, or understands how to work a room. Because he is the person that works the room…Chrisoula and I feel very frustrated by some of the women, because we cannot comprehend why they don’t want a second date with him,” she continued. They say, “‘He’s lovely, I just don’t envision him as my husband,’” her sister piped in. “I’m like, ‘Why are you thinking about that on a first date?’” Avgitidis said, waving her hands in the air again, a small cursive “love” sculpture behind her, across from a copy of her book, “Ask a Matchmaker.”“The purpose of a first date,” she continued, “is to go on a second date.””
- The 00s Emo Skatepunk Nostalgia Revival: This piece is basically a bunch of interviews with people at this summer’s anniversary Warped tour in the US, but I am including it because it contains some AMAZING lines which, once again, demonstrate with unerring accuracy how every generation of young people thinks that it is the FIRST EVER to experience anything; witness the sweet summer child quoted in here who suggests that the reason people are getting nostalgic for the 00s now is because “Now that things are online, we’re the first generation to have this long-stage cultural memory.” LOL I LOVE YOU YOU TINY MORON!
- The 50 Most Under-Appreciated TV Shows of the 21stC: This is in Time Magazine and so is US-centric (and VERY English language-centric), but does contain a few UK shows too – I don’t really do telly and so have no idea AT ALL as to the quality of the list or the programmes contained in it, but if you’re in the market for something to gaze blankly at while you wait for your cells to start mutating in novel and eventually-fatal ways then this might be of use.
- The Supplier That Writes London’s Menus: I think this is paywalled – but, look, it’s Substack, so you can literally just sign up and then cancel your subscription after you’ve read it (NOT THAT I AM ADVOCATING THIS I JUST KNOW TIMES ARE HARD BUT PLEASE PAY IF YOU CAN AFFORD IT). Anyway, this is a fascinating piece in Vittles about wholesale supplier to the high-end restaurant trade Natoora, which seemingly provides fruit and veg and other bits and pieces to a swathe of reasonably-fancy London establishments and, in so doing, gently dictates what ends up on menus and what is ‘trending’. This is SO interesting, especially if you’ve any interest in either the London restaurant scene or the economics/industry of eating out. “When it comes to romantic and flexible storytelling, it is with the concept of ‘hyper-seasonality’ that Natoora has found the most fertile ground for strategic reinvention (one of Natoora’s taglines is ‘Radical Seasonality’). Rather than thinking in terms of winter, spring, summer and autumn, Fubini and Natoora now emphasise ‘seasonality as a 365-day continuum’, with produce on a rolling basis of early, peak and late ripeness. Even ripeness has been reconceptualised, with the invention of ‘green citrus’ (formerly ‘unripe citrus’) as a marketable Natoora product. ‘A spark of pure inspiration,’ Fubini says, relaying the story (again, as told in his book) of how the idea ‘came in the summer months as I wandered under the canopy of a citrus orchard on the Amalfi coast.’ Thus, in the Natoora calendar, ‘green citrus season’ replaces the season previously known as autumn. When limited by location, seasonality can be an enabling constraint for the cook, encouraging creativity and ingenuity and sometimes generating boredom. Its opposite is the year-round seasonless abundance promised by the supermarket. Natoora has managed to unhitch seasonality from its limitations, turning it into something both much more and much less than what it once was. In London, thanks to Natoora, in-season Indian Alphonso mangoes now sit alongside in-season English spring asparagus, in-season Italian winter Camone tomatoes and in-season Bulgarian wild morels. I’m reminded of a comment by Harry Dyer, co-founder of the Brighton-based wholesaler Shrub Provisions: ‘Everything is in season somewhere, like a broken clock is right twice a day.’”
- LARPing America: This is a great read; Danielle Paquette writes in the Washington Post about going to Poland to participate in a Live Action Roleplaying game in which all the participants spend several days pretending to be part of trash America; the whole thing is set on a fictitious trailer park, there are guns and drug dealers and SEEDY GOINGS ON, and the author offers an interesting series of perspectives and observations not only of the ‘game’ but of the vision of her country being presented in the fiction. As ever, while I can’t think of anything I would like to do less than participate in a multi-day piece of roleplay improv with strangers (or indeed with friends!), I will absolutely lap up any journalism about this sort of thing. “The organizers sent me Delilah’s seven-page backstory. Secretly cooking meth was a reprieve from her frosty home life. Following a traumatic childbirth, she’d never managed to connect with her grown daughter, Charlene, and could no longer stand her husband, Roger. I’d have to ooze standoffish. Not a bad option for a gal who dreads the spotlight. Nailing the meth, however, would take practice, Bruski advised me. So in late June, the day before flying to Warsaw, I stirred a mix of granulated sugar, water and corn syrup into a pot and watched it boil to 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Then I added blue food dye, poured the glop onto a baking sheet and waited for it to cool into the consistency of a Jolly Rancher.”
- The Last Great Butterfly Collector: I have always found collections of butterflies – something I saw a weirdly large number of as a kid growing up, fcuk knows why – to be incredibly, deeply macabre and unsettling; I think it’s the fact that they preserve perfectly and so look so creepy when pinned, live but very much not. Anyway, perhaps unsurprisingly given current more enlightened attitudes to the relationship between us and the natural world, even insects, the pastime is seemingly dying out; this is a wonderful piece of writing profiling one of the last of the great enthusiasts, one Steve Collins. There’s so much interesting stuff in this piece, not least the odd nugget of weird colonial history that gets thrown into the mix, and even if you don’t think you have any interest in sticking pins through the bodies of rare lepidoptera I promise this is worth your time: “If Collins is, then, to be the final great butterfly collector, he will be the last of an illustrious cast of adventurers and eccentrics. Not very long ago, chasing and collecting butterflies was a fairly common and respectable activity, notably widely practiced by the middle classes, women, and virtually anyone who had access to nature and time to spare. The history of butterfly collectors also boasts many familiar faces, such as Winston Churchill, Neville Chamberlain, Vladimir Nabokov, Tsar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria, and the son of Nikita Khrushchev. Certain personalities loom particularly large in the lepidopterology world. The magnificent Margaret Fountaine, said to be the most well-traveled lepidopterist in history, was a Victorian femme fatale who crossed the Syrian desert, trekked the Himalayas, dived out of crashing trains, flew in some of the earliest airplanes ever built, survived earthquakes in Cuba and cholera in Beirut, flirted with barons and outlaws alike, and was, for a brief spell, kidnapped by a gang of Circassian highwaymen. The legend goes that Fountaine, refusing to be intimidated, told them off so thoroughly that they blushingly released her and sent her on her way. A more recent figure of note was Torben Bjørn Larsen, sometimes known as “the Indiana Jones” of lepidopterology, a drunkard from Denmark who, in his never-ending hunt for butterflies, jumped out of helicopters and faced firing squads in Nigeria and interrogations by the Syrian secret police.”
- New Worlds: A sort of textual counterpoint to the ‘Ordinary Abundance’ link all the way back up there, I like this a LOT more; Ray Newman compiles a bunch of headlines and news fragments which speak to the scifi, Ballardian vibe of the now – this is excellent, and very well done indeed.
- Numbers: A blogpost by Ali Dirik, owner of East London restaurant Mangal 2, about the numbers behind his business; I’ve linked to Dirik’s writing before and this is another great piece of writing, emotional and personal and interesting and illuminating and weirdly hopeful despite the stark and not-particularly-hopeful realities it describes. This is, honestly, lovely: “Can you quantify success? Is it based on what a screen reveals – its numbers? Profits. Dividends. Growth. Expansion. I think for most restaurants, yes, this applies. Me? I don’t know. I’ve never really been money-orientated, and never chased it. I grew up working class and without much luxury. My first holiday was when I was 11. I finally had my own bedroom at 17. We never went out for dinner as a family. KFC takeaways were as indulgent as it got. And yet, I loved my childhood. The freedom. Being on my bike with my friends and riding around town. Playing football. Watching WWE. Reading. Fancying the girls from my school. Eating terribly fizzy sweets. The only thing I knew about money growing up was the debt my parents incurred. The random business partners my dad would bring in to keep the restaurant afloat, then inevitably fall out with and try and buy out by re-mortgaging the family home (twice). It meant I had a natural distrust of finances from a young age, witnessing how precarious it all was month-to-month throughout my childhood and adolescence. And yet, I still feel like I had a fortunate upbringing, because it can always be worse. I feel lucky.”
- Earthly Delights: The final longread of the week is this short story by Sheila Heti, about sex and desire and memory and and and…Heti is simply a superb writer and I will read anything and everything she writes, and you should too: “She had wanted only the simplest, smallest things: she kept a box of maxi pads hopefully in the back of her sock drawer for years before she ever got her first period. There were little squiggles on the packaging, teal and pink, in the flamboyant yet cool style of the day. Then, later, with her childhood friend, their plan was to lose their virginity together, on the same bed, holding hands, one boy having sex with her, the other boy having sex with her friend. They agreed and made the pact and looked forward to it. In a way, it would be like losing their virginity to each other. That would be good, for they didn’t mean each other any harm. With a boy, you couldn’t know.”
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!