Ok, it has been A WEEK and, honestly, right now what I really want to do most of all is to close my laptop and Stop Internetting for a bit – and so that is what I am going to do.
BUT! Not before I have taken a moment to recommend something to any of living within easy reach of London. I saw a truly spectacular play this week – Guess How Much I Love You? at the Royal Court – which absolutely floored me and which I want to recommend to you all unreservedly (well, almost unreservedly – I would strongly recommend checking the trigger warnings first). I don’t think I have ever experienced a play during which the entire audience pretty much sobbed as one – trust me, this is intended as a huge compliment.
Anyway, buy tickets if you’re able – reviews will be out any moment now and I expect it will sell out quickly.
Right! Enough! I AM TURNING THIS FCUKER OFF FOR A BIT!
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you really should book those tickets, I promise you I am not lying about how good the show is.
THE SECTION WHICH RIGHT NOW WOULDN’T BE HUGELY DISMAYED IF AMERICA JUST CEASED TO EXIST (NO OFFENCE TO ANY OF YOU READING THIS) PT.1:
- Oculart TV: Sometimes if feels like there is a certain coherence to the links I find and the manner in which they end up distributed through Curios, some sort of…I don’t know, THEMATIC VIBE or something which adds – to me, at least, I can’t speak for you, you freak – a note of at least superficial coherence to the mess of words and urls. Other times, though (and this is very much one of them) the links are inchoate and inexplicably diverse, and it’s hard to know where to begin or indeed why, and so it is this week, where we kick off with this…look, I couldn’t even begin to tell you what this is, but I suppose I ought to at least try because otherwise, well, what the fcuk did I get up at 6am for (this is rhetorical, please do not attempt to respond)? Oculart is a website which presents four different…odd little vignette animation things, which you can toggle between using a menu on the left; each has a strange, slightly collage-y aesthetic, like all the different bits have been cut from (strange, perhaps slightly unsettling) magazines, and they have titles like ‘The Last Dream’ (featuring a skeleton lying in a field of petals, next to a dead tree, smoking a…laser pipe? Honestly, no fcuking clue) and Vadeville SETI, in which another, different, oddly-sinister puppet gets buffeted by strange and unknown forces and ragdolls around your browser, and – and this is the main reason I am linking to this site – one called ‘Possession of Chess’, in which two slightly-horrifying…things play an actual, procgen game of chess against each other in your browser, moving the pieces around with their weird, creepy limbs, looking like rejected puppet models from an early prototypical version of Terrahawks, or the sort of things that would get you summarily fired from Jim Henson’s Creature Workshop. Honestly, I have no idea whatsoever who made this or why, but I very much enjoy how…odd, and slightly wrong-feeling each of these scenes is. THIS is what should be on the Outernet by Tottenham Court Road.
- Soup of Life: This is a fun idea – it has the general sort of feel (and, specifically, very much the look) of something that’s been cobbled together with AI, but what’s going on under the hood feels a little more involved than your average vibecoding project. Soup Of Life is basically a lofi evolution simulator – basically the site is constantly running a sort of LIFE SIMULATION MODEL, with different creatures all existing in a virtual ecosystem, all with their own traits and qualities (‘spikiness’, say, or ‘attractiveness’ or ‘camouflage’), and the site’s effectively simulating a rudimentary ecosystem to see which creatures thrive and which die out – the graphics here are…well, look, the ‘creatures’ are just different coloured blobs, fine, and there’s literally nothing to look at here beyond the tracking data around population, dominant traits and the like, but there’s something genuinely interesting (to me at least) about the digital petri dish nature of this, and the way in which you can see species and entire imaginary civilisations of digital creatures rising and falling and living and dying…there’s also a nice touch where you can get an AI-generated overview of ‘what is happening in the ecosystem right now’, should the mess of numbers and small coloured blobs not in fact mean anything to you at all (entirely plausible). I find this more mesmerising than I can quite explain, and would be fascinated to see this running with actual graphics and a bit more fidelity. In the unlikely event that the person who made this sees this writeup, could…could you possibly drop me a line and explain what the fcuk is going on here, please?
- Gradient Horse: You will, of course (OF COURSE) remember that website from last year where you could draw a fish and set it loose to swim in a virtual sea along with all the other fish drawn by strangers with too much time on their hands – TELL ME YOU HAVEN’T FORGOTTEN FFS. Anyway, the fabulously-named Gradient Horse is basically like that, except rather than drawing a fish you have the infinitely more satisfying ability to draw a horse, which you can then set loose to gambol across the infinite digital fields – turns out, though, that drawing a horse is HARD (or at least it is for me), and as a result all of my efforts have very much looked as though they are the result of horrible botched experiments resulting from the hideous, forced union between ‘mare’ and ‘unspeakable eldritch horror’. Anyway, this is pleasing and satisfying – you have to remember to select the different brush types to draw the body, forelegs and hind legs, because otherwise the software gets confused and won’t be able to animate your equine pal properly (and wouldn’t that be a tragedy), but otherwise this is…strangely compelling (I could watch HorseMatt run across the digital sward all day, turns out, which does rather reflect my appetite for continuing to type for another 5 hours or so this morning), and there’s something hypnotic about the procession of everyone else’s horses running across your screen (special shout out to the person whose horse consists of the word ‘horse’, with legs). I would be genuinely grateful if you sent me a screencap of your horses, by the way, no joke.
- AnimeVox: I have a particular soft spot for small synth toys or SFX generators, and this is a particularly wonderful variation on the theme – AnimeVox is a small browsertoy which lets you make, er, anime-type sound effects; ostensibly it’s pretty simple, with only 8 different base level sounds to choose from (they have EVOCATIVE NAMES, like ‘sparkle’ and ‘powerup’, as behooves the anime vibe), but then you realise that there’s a whole load of different sliders which you can mess with to change the pitch and duration and degree of…er…’wobble’ (I am not a sound engineer, stop scoffing at me) applied to each effect, which basically let you create a surprisingly wide-ranging sonic palette from these simple base FX. The developers apparently created this as a tool to help indie game makers develop bespoke sounds for their titles, but, as ever with this stuff, if you ask me the joy is in spending some time creating a signature sound JUST FOR YOU and then using it to punctuate your life. Who doesn’t want an incredibly reverb-y synth tone to punctuate every single gag they make? Who doesn’t want to create bespoke audio stings for their friends, family and colleagues? NO FCUKER, etc!
- URL Dater: Ok, this isn’t hugely FUN (unless you have a very specific, narrow and, honestly, unusual definition of the word) but it is potentially useful – plug in any url you like and this site will tell you how long it has existed, based on when the domain was registered, when it was updated and the like. Useful if you’re trying to determine whether or not a website is attempting to part you from your personal information in nefarious fashion, in the main, but you can, I am sure, think of other uses (seriously, if you can can you let me know what they are, I am fcuking baffled as to what they might be).
- PineDrama: OK, I don’t *think* that you can actually download this if you’re in the UK due to geolocking, but, well, it is an INTERESTING DATAPOINT – PineDrama is a new app developed by TikTok which is intended as a new place to house all the shortform drama cropping up all over the platform. The idea is that this will be your portal to the infinity of poorly-acted fanfiction-esque narrative series that are increasingly a mainstay of TikTok, although how it’s curated, moderated and the like is a complete mystery to me. The app is launching ad-free, although I would imagine that this won’t maintain forever, and I am fascinated to see whether this gains traction or whether everyone, including TikTok, forgets it exists within a year – aside from anything else it’s intriguing to see that shortform vertical soapopera-style formats are now enough of a THING to theoretically sustain an app like this, just a few short years (relatively, at least) since the incredibly costly and immensely embarrassing mistake that was Qubi. Do YOU want to watch what will almost-inevitably be appallingly-acted, massively melodramatic telenovela-style fictions in minute-long episodic bursts? GREAT! VPN yourself to the US or Brazil (the two countries where this has launched) and get involved!
- Links Supply: Many years ago (oh, ok…5-6 years ago, which isn’t quite ‘many’ but which is still a fcuking AGE in internet terms) Friend of Curios Andy Baio made a lovely little website called ‘Belong’ which used the Twitter API to surface interesting links being shared by people on the platform, listing them so that anyone visiting the site could find a neat snapshot of Curious Things People On Twitter Are Linking To Right Now. Belong was a fcuking GODSEND for, well, for me specifically, and I was genuinely devastated when, thanks to That Fcuking Man’s purchase of the platform, the service had to shut down due to Twitter basically fcuking all its APIs with knives. BUT! Travis Street has done a WONDERFUL THING, and basically rebuilt Belong for Bluesky- per his writeup, “We monitor posts from approximately 2,000 accounts on Bluesky — a curated list of interesting people including developers, designers, founders, researchers, journalists, and creators. When these accounts share links in their posts, we extract and analyze them.” There’s a bunch of additional selective work going on under the hood to attempt to get the best links – it prioritises single URLs rather than links that look like they point to articles, for example – and over the past few days it’s provided me with several interesting things to explore, and, basically, this is worth bookmarking should you be the sort of person with an inexplicable need to find NEW LINKS all the time (why? What is missing from your life? ARE YOU ME?).
- CondoComplex London: Ok, so this is the website accompanying an art festival taking place in London RIGHT NOW, but I am pretty sure at least a few of the weirdos reading this live there and as such I feel reasonably comfortable linking to it (YES IT’S PAROCHIAL, FINE). CondoComplex has actually been going for a decade or so, despite my never having heard of it before this year, and is basically a month-long event during which artists and galleries from around the world show in various London venues for a short period; the website presents a map of all the participating galleries, along with information about who and what is on display where, and if you’re interested in spending a few hours between now and mid-February exploring works by 50-odd artists across 23 different venues then, well, you will very much enjoy this. If nothing else I really like the look and feel of the site here – not sure why, but it feels…weighty, which I appreciate is a largely-meaningless thing to say about a webpage, but, well, here we are.
- Asses Masses: OH GOD I WANT TO DO THIS SO MUCH! Asses Masses (a pleasing name) is…oh, look, here: “asses.masses is a custom video game designed to be played from beginning to end by a live audience, one person at a time. It’s the 7+ hour epic story of a herd of unemployed donkeys trying to get their jobs back, all while navigating the perils of a post-Industrial society in which they’ve been made redundant. Cheeky, political, and best described as Animal Farm meets Pokémon meets Final Fantasy, asses.masses puts the control(ler) in its audience’s hands and asks them to discover the space between the work that defines us and the play that frees us.A game controller sits at the front of the stage. Brave spectators take turns each night stepping forward from the herd to seize the means of production (the controller) and become the player. There are no instructions. It is up to the audience and their self-elected leaders to make decisions and play out their version of the game.” Basically a sort of ludic, collaborative…what, artwork? Theatrical performance? Anyway, this is a thing that happens in metaspace, in a cinema or theatre, and which you need to physically attend – but the website helpfully lists places where it’s being ‘performed’ over the coming months, one of which is Nottingham in the UK, so if anyone wants to go along to this and tell me what it’s like then that would be great thanks, because this sounds SO interesting.
- VueTV: It’s still January and yet this is the second ‘music television like what we used to have in the past reimagined for the internet era!’-type link of the year – WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? Vue is, basically, a slightly shonkier and less polished version of the MTV link from the other week, but it’s no less fun for its lack of bells and whistles and fancy GUI – as with the MTV project, this is basically ‘music video television’ with all the videos pulled from YouTube, with you able to pick the decade you want to experience, or the genre you want to focus on…the fact that you can’t skip videos is, to my mind, quite a nice touch – after all, you couldn’t do that on Actual Music Video Telly either, and there’s a certain retro fidelity to the fact that if, I don’t know, ‘My Heart Will Go On’ comes on then you’re forced to suffer through it if you want to get to ‘Africa’ by Toto.
- IPTV Garden: Another link which is, basically, a variation on a theme – this is very similar to the, er, similarly-named TV Garden, a site which I featured years ago and which lets you watch free streaming TV from around the world in your browser, and which, based on my checking just now, has been taken over by what looks like a VERY IFFY domainsquatter, making it a somewhat risky browse. IPTV Garden, by contrast, appears to be ENTIRELY BENIGN, and, based on my cursory exploration, seems to work perfectly well – you can either search by country, or browse by category of programming so, should you choose, you can while away the day watching sports TV from Mauritania or, er, a channel called ‘24 Hour Free Movies’ from the US, which at the time of writing is showing a…very budget film called ‘Divorce Invitation’. Basically if you feel you have come to the end of Netflix then this will scratch the ‘I need to focus my eyes on some moving pictures’ itch (and if nothing else it is ENDLESSLY fascinating to watch news bulletins from around the world, although I can’t pretend it’s not somewhat dispiriting to see the President of the fcuking US on all of them).
- Re:Solution: Did you make a new year’s resolution? Are you trying to IMPROVE YOURSELF? Are you struggling with motivation in the face of a January that is seemingly hell-bent on reminding us that we are powerless in the face of international events, that we are all set to watch things get worse as we age into senescence? Do you need a resolution pick-me-up? Well Re:Solution might prove useful, in that case – sent to me by Luke Somasundran, who writes: “A creative technologist called Nico Tangara made a daily crossword puzzle that generates based on the NYE resolution you plug in. The thinking is by doing it every day it keeps your resolution top of mind to help you stick to it. It’s all based on the fact that this week – the week of 19 January is statistically when most people give up on their NYE resolutions.” This is a cute idea, nicely executed, although I am fcuked if I have the first idea as to whether it works. Still, if you manage to give up smoking or something thanks to this then you probably owe me (and Nico Tangara, and Luke).
- Make Your Own Colourblindness Test: Ok, so the site refers to them as ‘Ishihara Plates’, which I presume is the technical term for those colourblindness tests where you’re presented with a selection of coloured dots, some of which spell out a word which is only visible to those without colour blindness – but, well ‘Ishihara Plates’ means nothing to me, and I am going to assume you were as ignorant as I was about the term until about two seconds ago. Anyway, this site lets you make your own versions of those, featuring whatever text you like – I can’t think of a single purpose for this (beyond, you know, testing for colour blindness) other than perhaps taunting your colourblind friends or colleagues with profane messages they can never read, but maybe you’re a better and more inventive person than me and can come up with a less cruel usecase (if so, do tell me what the fcuk it is).
- The Startup Graveyard: A website tracking failed startups, and specifically taking a cumulative read of the amount of money invested into them which has been…oh, look, ‘wasted’ feels unfair – after all, it’s entirely possible for a business to have positive outcomes even if it doesn’t move the capitalist needle – but at the same time it’s quite hard not to look at the total figure (nearly $45bn! THAT’S A LOT OF MONEY!) spunked on companies with names like ‘Stayzilla’ (“an online platform designed to facilitate the booking of homestays and alternative lodging options”, apparently) and think that perhaps we might all have been better served using it for literally anything fcuking else. OH VENTURE CAPITALISTS YOU FCUKING MORONS!
- The Turbulence Map: Do you find the experience of turbulence during a flight unsettling, that sudden feeling of falling several hundred feet whilst being held aloft in a massive metal tube the physics of which, let’s be honest, you are utterly baffled by? Would you like access to a map which will tell you where current areas of high turbulence are so that you can ascertain exactly how bumpy your flight’s going to be, safe in the knowledge that there’s fcuk all you can to to mitigate or avoid it? GREAT!
- Capturing Ecology: The British Ecological Society has an annual photography contest, which was honestly news to me – still, the selection of images they have picked as their best of 2025 is rather lovely (the formatting of the webpage is not, though; you have to go through some rather user-unfriendly carousels to browse the images), and there is one particular picture (specifically the one of the sparked-out ape on the operating table with the strange electrode thing attached to its junk – trust me on this, that really is what the photo is of) which is worth the click all on its own.
- The Chinese Embassy in the US: There’s something quite odd about living in an era in which you can parse the geopolitical mood as much by the social media outputs of various government-aligned institutions as by Actual Political Statements – this is the TikTok account belonging to the Chinese Embassy to the US, and which as such can be read as a pretty official mouthpiece of the Chinese state, and if you want a read of where Sino-US relations are at at the moment I would strongly suggest you click the link and scroll through the videos – lots of gentle, soft propaganda shorts showcasing life in China and the nation’s culture, interspersed with, er, some VERY WEIRD AI-generated animations showing a CG Uncle Sam setting fire to his own country and, my personal favourite, a cartoon American Eagle singing a song about how much better and more advanced China is than the US. WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE!
THE SECTION WHICH RIGHT NOW WOULDN’T BE HUGELY DISMAYED IF AMERICA JUST CEASED TO EXIST (NO OFFENCE TO ANY OF YOU READING THIS) PT.2:
- Listen to the Whales: Have you ever thought ‘God, I really wish there were a website via which I could spend a significant amount of time listening the clicky communications of sperm whales and attempting to decipher them as part of a wider attempt to work out what the fuck these gigantic mammals are going on about as they slowly traverse the oceans’? No, I don’t imagine you have, but, thanks to this website, HERE IS YOUR CHANCE! “For generations, sperm whales have captured our curiosity through echoing clicks and codas. But their voices have remained a mystery – until now. Thanks to new technology, we’re tuning into the secret language of sperm whales and uncovering the original soundtrack of the sea…Project CETI and the National Geographic Society have embarked on an epic odyssey to translate the language of sperm whales using advanced machine learning and gentle robotics; providing the first-ever blueprint of another species’ language. This collaboration advances groundbreaking research while inspiring public understanding to build a healthier planet through joint efforts across storytelling, new technologies, education and empowering the next generation of leaders.” I confess to being…somewhat confused here as to how you might go about meaningfully ‘translating’ these clicks into human, even with the POWER OF MACHINE LEARNING (and to be clear the website is…equally vague in this regard; I might be missing something obvious, but there doesn’t appear to be a Whale-To-Human dictionary anywhere on the page), but, regardless, there is something unquestionably satisfying about listening to cetacean clicks.
- Rhian Johnson’s Scripts: Other than the fact that they star Daniel Craig doing what I understand to be A Silly Accent, I know next to nothing about Rhian Johnson’s recent murder mystery films – still, I hear they are popular (FINGER ON THE PULSE!) and as such it’s plausible that some of you might appreciate this website which hosts PDFs of the scripts for Knives Out, Glass Onion, Wake Up Dead Man and a few of his other works too. For fans and anyone who’s interested in screenwriting in general – also, I didn’t realise that he wrote Brick, which is a genuinely fun and weird little film which I now quite want to watch again (this is a very rare occurrence, trust me).
- Links To Actual, Full Documentaries on Vimeo: It does rather feel like linking to X in 2026 is, well, a bit like p1ssing in public or something similarly gauche; still, on occasion the Muskian horrorsite can still deliver the goods (if, er, by ‘goods’, you mean ‘literally millions of AI-generated bikini shots!), and this is a genuinely great thread of recommendations of actual, full-length documentaries (and actually some animations, and obscure fictions, and all sorts of other things besides) available to stream RIGHT NOW on Vimeo. I haven’t checked through all of them, but a cursory glance suggests there are some fun-sounding films in here, not least one called, er, ‘The Car Fcuking Movie’ and so I feel justified in recommending this unreservedly.
- STFU: Ooh, I like this – a LOVELY petty bit of coding designed to help you fight back against those irritating cnuts who insist on playing stuff out loud in public on their phone speakers. Load up this site and hit the button (don’t worry, there is only one and it is VERY BIG, you can’t miss it) and it will take whatever is coming through your speakers and play it back with a ~3s delay, thereby creating a hugely-annoying effect which, the idea is, will RUIN their listening experience and cause them to turn off the offending racked. Now obviously there are a LOT of assumptions going on here – that the person in question is bothered by the delay, that they don’t decide to react by smacking you repeatedly in the face with their device until your nose is hamburger, that you won’t make everyone else in your vicinity even more annoyed than they already were – but, in general, I am a BIG FAN of this idea, built by Pankaj Tanwar, who writes: “i was at bombay airport. some dude was watching reels on full volume and laughing loudly. asking nicely doesn’t work anymore. me being me, didn’t have the courage to speak up. so i built a tiny app that plays back the same audio it hears, delayed by ~2 seconds. asked claude, it spat out a working version in one prompt. surprisingly WORKS.” WHO SAYS THAT AI IS ALL SH1T?
- Splatter: Via Lynn’s excellent newsletter, this is a site collecting various examples of GUASSIAN SPLATS, a term which, look, I only vaguely understand but whose form and general sound and mouthfeel I absolutely adore. Let me try and explain what these are without recourse to any sort of official explanation…OK, you know those weird 3d scenes that you can generate from a few static images, which then become vaguely-navigable and explorable and which you can sort of wander through a bit (until they all fall apart and become incoherent at the edges)? OF COURSE YOU DO! Well this is a site which collects a whole load of those, a range of different examples of what you can do with the tech, letting you walk into and around images as though they were real, and, look, this is all obviously quite limited but I can’t pretend that there isn’t something magical to me about the idea of being able to use code to go inside a picture like this. IT IS WITCHCRAFT! Or, according to Wikipedia, it is in fact a technique which “can convert multiple images into a representation of 3D space, then use the representation to create images as seen from new angles”, but it feels like witchcraft to me.
- Internet Plays Music: Ooh, this is a fun idea – basically one of those collaborative webpage toy things of the ‘everyone gets to draw a pixel’ ilk, except rather than drawing you instead get to map out notes on a synth – over course of the week it’s gone from being empty to being largely full, but anyone can still go on and toggle notes on or off and change the composition, and there’s something really rather lovely about both the ethos of collaborative composition here and the fact that the resulting mess of notes doesn’t sound entirely-atonal; I would really like to see a version of this deployed with a little more thought about how it works, as I think with a bit of tweaking you could make a really fun /r/Place-type experience, maybe letting people only add/edit one note per day or something. Anyway, click the link and experience the SOUND OF COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE!
- One Dot: Have you ever thought that what you REALLY need is a continual reminder of the fleeting nature of life? Would you like to inject a little more awareness of your own mortality into your daily routine? How do you feel about being reminded of how the sands of time are slipping even now through your fingers every time you pick up your phone? No! Of course you wouldn’t! And yet, One Dot exists! This is basically a digital…what, wallpaper app? Screensaver? Anyway, install it and it will create a graphic on your phone’s homescreen, tracking the passage of time as a series of accumulating dots, marking each day’s passage and showing you on a day-by-day basis that TIME MOVES ON and there is nothing whatsoever you can do to arrest its progress. Cheery, right? RIGHT!
- Listmonk: Ok, this is quite technical but it could be useful – if you want to run a newsletter or mailing list project but don’t want to sign up to Subs***k or any of the less-evil platforms out there, whether for reasons of cost or independence, then you might like the sound of Listmonk which is apparently a free, open source newsletter and mailing list manager, seemingly INFINITELY (not infinitely, obvs) SCALEABLE. No idea how good this is or how well it works, so caveat emptor and all that, but in theory it could be useful for any of you with the technical chops to run it. Oh, and if any of you are considering newslettering and don’t have the technical chops to run your own mailing software, can I take a moment to plug the services of Lovely Kris who maintains the mailing platform that Curios (and B3ta) runs on? Great!
- The Journal Of Decadence Studies: Look, I have to confess that I have given this only the most cursory of glances and to the best of my knowledge this is an Actual Academic Journal and so as such your mileage will vary dependent on your appetite for Serious Discussion and the vocabulary of academe – but, equally, DECADENCE STUDIES!!! What the fcuk?! “Volupté is an MLA-indexed online journal of decadence from antiquity to the present. It appears each year in Spring and Autumn, and brings together in themed issues creative and critical approaches to the fast-growing field of decadence studies. The aim of Volupté is to enhance and broaden the scope of decadence studies and stimulate discussion in relation to literary decadence and other forms of discourse, including Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, and Science. Peer-reviewed essays and book reviews will be published alongside new translations, poetry, short fiction, and visual art. Based at Goldsmiths, University of London, Volupté is dedicated to promoting cutting-edge work by creative writers and artists and publishing the best research on decadence by early career and established scholars.” Maybe I’ll get bang into decadence in 2026.
- Muzli: One for the designers or the design-curious, this – Muzli is basically a Chrome plugin that, when installed, will present you with a whole load of DESIGN INSPIRATION MATERIALS every time you open a new browser tab. Per the blurb, “Muzli instantly delivers cutting-edge design projects and news each time a new tab is open in your browser. Discover the best web design inspiration, best websites, best logos, web trends, best mobiles sites and applications, minimalist websites, brutalist websites, innovative illustrations, design features, unique websites, photography projects, and visual art, as well as opinions and articles from design experts across the web and around the world.” This is free and, generally, seems like a Useful And Good Thing.
- Tastebuds NYC: According to something I saw this week from, I believe, Conde Naste Traveller, London is OFFICIALLY the best place to eat in the world (if money is no object and you have access to some sort of magical skeleton key that lets you somehow acquire tables at Sushi Tetsu) – that said, I am not sure it would be possible for this TikTok account to exist in London as I don’t know that we quite have the culinary diversity to match up to NYC. Anyway, this is CHARMING – a project which I think started this year in which the two presenter-types attempt to try restaurants representing all of the world’s 195 officially-recognised nations without leaving the Five Boroughs, and which is just good-hearted and FUN. This is totally going to get ripped off by people in all of the world’s major metropolises, but that’s no bad thing – anyone want to see if it IS possible to do in London? And, should that be YOU, do let me know if you want someone to come with you to experience Turkmeni barbecue.
- The Mandelbulb Tracker: OK, I don’t *really* understand what is happening here but, well, it’s maths-y – as fair as I can tell it’s basically a tool that lets you explore a 3d representation of a fractal space, but that’s about as far as I have gotten as my laptop basically seizes up if I try and get more than about 40 pixels into the model. Could someone running slightly less antediluvian kit please explain what the fcuk this is, please?
- Switch Angel: I think this is one of the most impressive things I have seen in AGES. Algoraves have been around as a concept for a few years now but the concept seems to be having a weird resurgence – there’s been a load taking place over the past 12 months in London, and interest in the whole ‘coding live music and visuals on the fly’ scene has been growing for a while now, and, if you’re curious as to what that means exactly then you will be ENTRANCED by the videos on this channel. Per the YouTube blurb, “Switch Angel is an experimental electronic artist from the East Coast. She has a fascination with the evolution of electronic dance music, and weaves genres together with her personal stories” – the videos are basically her demonstrating how you go about coding dance music on the fly, in the command terminal, and it is, honestly, MAGIC – the degree of understanding on display here of music and code (and, fundamentally, MATHS) is really quite astonishing (or at least it is to me, someone who doesn’t really understand ANY of those three concepts at a level beyond the superficial, and the skill in crafting tracks that are actually GOOD, out of nothing, coding them out of the void, is honestly mesmerising to me; I could watch and listen to these for DAYS, honestly.
- EZ Tree: Another link from Lynn, this – have you ever wanted to code yourself a little in-browser tree? OF COURSE YOU HAVE AND NOW YOUR DREAMS CAN COME TRUE! This is beautifully rendered – fiddle with the parameters on the right side of the screen and you can create anything from a stumpy, near-dead bonsai to a MAGNIFICENT OAK and everything inbetween, all drawn in lovely 3d. Made by one Dan Greenheck, to whom infinite thanks. Oh, and the pastoral soundscape accompanying your tree creation is a lovely touch too – this is just REALLY NICE, particularly in mid-January when it feels like leaves may never grow again (so cold, so grey, so DAMP).
- Anaiis World: I really like this – a portfolio site for musician Anaiis, which presents a bunch of different videos from what I presume is a recent EP, all via this beautifully designed web portal; there’s minimal explanation of what the fcuk is going on here, which I rather like; no framing, no real writeup of What This Is All About, just some really beautiful visuals, slickly-presented. Click around and explore.
- Kitchencels: A subReddit featuring the meals made by sad, lonely men – or at least people cosplaying as sad, lonely men – accompanied with a caption designed to give a small taste of their incelmisery. “bc of my “incidents”, i had to get a new job in a totally different industry than the one i spent 10 years in school for & the last 7 years in. beans & yogurt”, reads one representative caption; “New years she held my hand and it told me it was our year. Last week she didn’t want a relationship. This week she just wants to be alone. 2 day old left over Panda Express”, reads another. I am…reasonably-certain that most of these are playing up to a stereotype, or at least that’s what I am choosing to believe lest the tragedy of it otherwise overwhelm me and prevent me from typing any more due to an overwhelming sense of species-grief.
- Guard Simulator:Via B3ta, a very silly but FULLY-COMMITTED little game in which you ‘play’ as a security guard. ONCE a day, there will be an incursion which you have to spot – WILL YOU MANAGE IT??? You’ll have to sit and watch for a long time (potentially), as this all happens in realtime; but, well, what the fcuk else are you going to do with your weekend (please god do something else with your weekend)?
- Uncrossy: This is GREAT, but I cannot for the life of me work out how to explain it so you will just have to take my word for it, click the link and play – it’s a daily word game, but, I promise, it has a PLEASINGLY NOVEL CROSSWORD-Y TWIST which I find very pleasing indeed.
- Globs: Ooh, this is fun – sent to me by creator Zack, who describes it thusly: “It’s called Globs, it’s like Connections from the nytimes, but you are given way more tiles to start with and you can find the groups one by one. It comes in several sizes, mini, big and mega. And I’m very happy to say that I was able to get the AI to try to think Britishly on this one and generate a game meant for people in the UK.” A pleasing addition to the morning timewasting round, and it’s really nice to play something that’s not using American fcuking English for a change.
- Escheresque: A simple little puzzle game which has a WONDERFUL aesthetic to it which, as you might possibly have gleaned from the name, is vaguely-Escher-esque; I think this is rather beautiful.
- Iso City: BOOKMARK THIS. Seriously. This is basically a reasonably-feature-complete Sim City knockoff, playable in your browser, and it is SO GOOD and SO MUCH FUN and SO MUCH BETTER than whatever you are pretending to give a fcuk about for work right now, I promise you.
OUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS VAGUELY-ACID-INFLECTED DISCO SET BY TER CO!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Starkey Comics: Not a Tumblr! But you don’t care and honestly neither do I anymore! Anyway, I really like this – all the work on this little site is by a guy called Ryan, an English bloke in Hanoi, who makes diagrams and visual representations of things he’s interested in. Why? WHY NOT???? Have you, for example, ever wanted a colourful diagrammatic rendering of all of the different words for ‘two’ present in Austronesian? NO OF COURSE YOU HAVEN’T BUT RYAN, IN HIS MUNIFICENCE, NONETHELESS PROVIDES! Thankyou Ryan.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Frosted Glass From Japan: Would you like an Insta account which does nothing but share images of frosted glass from Japan (I mean, they SAY it’s from Japan but I would have no idea if they are lying – let’s presume, though, that they are not)? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! Via the world’s most personable stationery retailers Present & Correct.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The Mark Carney Speech: In a year in which every single week has already felt A LITTLE BIT PACKED, the past seven days really have been quite, er, pregnant with incident, and if I’m honest I was reasonably-inclined to leave off the Proper News this week because, honestly, sometimes it’s ok just to switch off because THERE IS FCUK ALL WE CAN DO ABOUT ANY OF THIS AND MAYBE WE SHOULD JUST GO SMOOTH-BRAINED IN RESPONSE! But! My friend Alexander was insistent that Mark Carney’s speech at Davos this week was worth reading in full and he was entirely right – this is both an excellent example of speechwriting and statesmanlike rhetoric, and a reasonable-seeming precis of Where We All Are Now; one could, I think, make an argument that the ‘actual’ 20thC ran from 1914 and ended only this week, bookended one one side by the first World War and the other by the demise of the consensus approach to global security forged in the end of the second. What I thought was striking about the speech in particular was its honesty – you rarely, if ever, hear world leaders speaking this unambiguously about the collective fictions which are in the main bandied about when talking about geopolitics, and it’s hard not to read sentences like this without nodding (if sadly): “Stop invoking “rules-based international order” as though it still functions as advertised. Call it what it is: a system of intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as a weapon of coercion.” The sad thing, of course, is that despite this clear-eyed assessment it’s not really clear what the fcuk we are meant to do about it – I think I have said this before over the past few years, but it’s striking the extent to which the past decade really has just sort of proven that, actually, the bullies DO win, they DO get what they want, and that if you have the biggest stick you can basically threaten everyone else with it and get away with no consequences, and that’s…pretty fcuking miserable, ngl.
- The Collapse of the Form: An excellent essay by Dan Hon, always reliably smart, which sort-of feels adjacent to the ‘platform terroirs’ piece from last week; this is about how the form of a medium defines, to an extent, its content, and how our changing familiarity with different forms of media is altering in occasionally-unexpected ways our relationship to the information that media encodes; Hon asks some really interesting questions here about what new forms MEAN and how we parse them, and there’s something hugely interesting to me about the general thrust of this argument, both from a Mcluhan-ish standpoint (MEDIUM AND MESSAGE KIDS!) and also from a media literacy and general communications point of view: “another example: what is a podcast? What is the form of a podcast? Is it a piece of audio, accessible by an RSS feed? Is it two or more people discussing something? Is it two or more people discussing something on video? is it two or more people discussing something on video that can only be accessed on Spotify and not in a podcast app? Is it something that can only be played back through a Podcast app? Is it audio visual content that can be accessed on Netflix, and Netflix only, but still retains. conversational format? Is it allowed to include editing? Is it allowed to include indoor locations as well as outdoor locations? And then what does it mean if some content comes from a podcast? Does that mean it was cheap to produce? Does that mean it was produce independently? What does it mean to be produced independently? When I say I learned or heard of something from a podcast, how trustable do you think that information is? Do you need to know who hosted it? Could you guess at how trustable or accurate the information was from just the name alone and the fact that I listened to a podcast? That’s to say nothing of the branding of form, either. What’s a newsletter? What is a Substack? One intent of branding is to create an emotional connection and to set some sort of definition and expectation. How is a Substack [sic] different from a newsletter, and if I tell you I read something from a Substack as opposed to a newsletter, what does that mean to you?”
- Velocity is the New Authority: Elder statesman of the web Om Malik is always interesting, and this essay, on how speed is the signal that trumps all others in an algomediated age, is typically thought-provoking. Nothing Malik says here is surprising per se, but I hadn’t thought about any of the points he makes here in quite this way before seeing them articulated as such. “The system rewards whoever speaks first, not whoever lives with it long enough to understand it. The “review” at launch outperforms the review written two months later by orders of magnitude. The second, longer, more in-depth, more honest review might as well not exist. It’s not that people are less honest by nature. It’s that the structure pays a premium for compliance and levies a tax on independence. The result is a soft capture where creators don’t have to be told what to say. The incentives do the talking. People do what the network rewards. Writers write for the feed. Photographers shoot for the scroll. Newsrooms frame stories as conflict because conflict travels faster than nuance. Even our emotional lives adapt to latency and refresh cycles. The design of the network becomes the choreography of daily life.”
- Clavicular and ContentMaxxing: I saw two posts this week that slightly broke my brain, linguistically-speaking – in particular, I think the phrase “Clavicular was left STUNNED after Tristan Tate MOGGED him to DEATH” is one of the most terrifyingly NOW sentences I have ever read, comparable to the all-time classic of ‘oh god the internet has just fcuked us hasn’t it’ prose that was “Baby Grok just rizzed up Livvy Dunn”. Anyway, this is an essay about the recent nightmare night out enjoyed by a variety of dreadful online men, including looksmaxxing incelgod Clavicular (look, if have to know who these people are then I see no reason why you should escape) and, specifically, about the very peculiar existence one must lead when everything, but everything, is content. This is incredibly, miserably awful, and also very very funny – but, mainly, miserably awful: “When everything is content, everything is measurement first and meaning second. “Hitler” is primarily a keyword denoting reliable engagement, not a name denoting immense evil. Hitting yourself in the face with a hammer is rational because it makes more people watch your Kick stream. Meaning is dependent on who you ask, but measurement is dependent on what you do, or are. Rather than navigating weird, tangled, and unfair systems of human meaning-making, people like Clavicular choose to optimize for metrics. Instead of learning to talk to women, you simply do steroids because a person’s attractiveness can’t be a basket of mostly-intangible qualities, it must be a battery of measurable quantities — canthal tilt, facial width-to-height ratio, maxillary recession. And your only logical task in life is to “maxx” those metrics.” BONUS AWFUL MEN OFF THE INTERNET CONTENT! This is a piece about where a certain type of masculine culture – or at least a caricatured version of it, performed for clicks – has stemmed from, and in particular its links to certain aspects of mid-20thC Black culture, and is a good read if you want some context to how we got ‘here’.
- John Higgs on Counterculture: I think I have read enough thinkpieces on ‘the death of counterculture’ to last me a lifetime; thankfully, this essay by John Higgs is significantly more interesting than that, arguing that the next true counterculture is antialgorithmic, that when the dominant trends in the mainstream are determined by very sophisticated maths, then the most radical act one can undertake, culturally-speaking, is to reject and resist the algorithm and to make and create in ways that ignore, or at least don’t prioritise, algorithmic performance. “Today’s counterculture, in contrast, has no interest in the online world’s controlling metrics. This comes at a cost – or at least, what appears to be a cost if you accept the mainstream worldview. It means that this counterculture is intentionally invisible to the online world. The fact that you can’t see it in your online bubble is a feature, not a bug. It takes place in the real world, with people getting together and having the sort of experiences you don’t get online. It takes place in pubs and halls and fields, and involves community and relationships. The subjective experiences at the heart of it can’t be measured. Their value is judged not by metrics, but by how they make you feel.” I have a lot of time for this, not least because by this token Curios is at the CUTTING FCUKING EDGE of this new counterculture (a sentence so preposterous I literally laughed out loud while typing it, should you want reassurance that I haven’t lost my final shreds of self-awareness).
- An Interview With Me About The Web And Stuff: Given the fact that we’re about 8k words into Curios at this point I can’t for a second imagine you have any desire whatsoever to read any more from me – that said, allow me a brief moment of hubris as I link to Sacha Judd’s newsletter, in which she and I talk about curation, the web, Why I Do This Fcuking Newsletter and a few other things besides. Sacha is lovely and a generous interviewer, and was kind enough to leave out at least two things I said over the course of our chat which were so toe-curlingly pretentious that I shudder to remember them; nonetheless, I still sound like a tw4t.
- Dystopia Bait: On the reasonably-recent phenomenon of brands leaning into dystopian vibes for viral clout – you will, no doubt, have seen ads promising an end to humans in the workplace, say, or for financial products that will help you afford the numbing salves required to cope with The Horrors of the Now; this piece explores examples of this sort of marketing and the way in which it leans into the idea of the real world being a staging post for the real, meaningful marketing that happens in your feed, itself a dismally dystopian reading.
- A Metabolic Workspace: A very particular essay, this, and one which will primarily be of use/interest to those of you who like to use knowledge and information management systems to organise your thinking and track your ideas and to collate EVERY SCRAP OF INFORMATION YOU FIND into some sort of usable framework – so if you’re the sort of person who fell in love with Evernote back in the day, or who now uses Are.na as a personal logbook/scrapbook, then you might find this interesting – effectively this is Joan Westenberg arguing that, in fact, these sorts of systems rarely add value or insight, and that instead one might be better served thinking more in terms of…well, in terms of digestion. This is really interesting, even if it bears no relations whatsoever to the way in which I personally work or think: “information should be treated like food, not furniture. I don’t keep every meal I’ve ever eaten stored in my basement. That’s a disgusting notion. I eat, extract the nutrients, and let the rest go. Ideas have a half-life, and clinging to them past their expiration date actually poisons my ability to think clearly. Unlike a Second Brain – which functions as a storage unit – the Metabolic Workspace functions as a digestive system. It assumes that information has nutritional value that expires. If I don’t use the idea, it becomes waste and must be expelled to keep my actual brain healthy.”
- Chinese Robotaxis: Rest of World writes about the continued soft power expansion of China, this time specifically looking at the way its robotaxi manufacturers are insinuating themselves into the Middle East, a region which, per the article, is perfect for self-driving vehicles what with the relatively predictable weather conditions, the largely-gridlike road systems and a population who run the risk of having one or more parts of their body separated from the rest should they accrue one point too many on their license (NB – please do not feel the need to correct me on this last point; I know that you can’t have a hand lopped off for driving infractions! They only reserve that for truly reprehensible crimes like, er, being gay!). Anyway, I think this is interesting as yet another datapoint along the ‘THE FUTURE DOES NOT BELONG TO US’ best-fit line that has been pretty clear to me for a few years now.
- YouTube Men: This has done the rounds this week, but in case you’ve not seen it it’s an interesting read, on the phenomenon of young men who are addicted to YouTube and watch it ALL THE TIME. Why? There are various theories posited in the piece, but I am torn between a) the relentless drive for self-improvement that has infected certain sections of male lifestyle media, positing that you must ALWAYS be improving yourself through learning (even if that just means reading self-help books, apparently); b) the inability to exist without stimulus, ever; c) a deep, crushing sense of loneliness that can in part be alleviated by a small voice talking to you from your laptop at all times. Is this…is this good?
- Letters Are Coming Back: To be clear, I don’t actually believe this is really true, but, fcuk it, let’s pretend because it FEELS NICE. According to this piece in Dazed, writing actual letters and sending things in the post is making a comeback amongst kids who JUST WANT TO FEEL SOMETHING IN ANALOGUE; whether through correspondence or mailouts of physical zines or monthly art drops or whatever, there’s a desire to reconnect with the physical and enjoy media that feels less ephemeral than, well, email newsletters. I am very much a fan of the concept even if I doubt the actual extent to which this is really true – still, maybe this will be the prompt you need to start a small monthly magazine or a physical newsletter project, and if you do would you mind telling me about it please? Thanks!
- Ten Writing Prompts: This has also been shared quite widely this week, but I enjoyed it and figured some of you might too – these are, per the title 10 writing prompts designed to inspire and spark your imagination, excerpted from a book by Lucy Ives: “The novelist and critic Lucy Ives began composing writing prompts, sometimes spontaneously in classes she was teaching. These prompts grew to a collection of three hundred and sixty-five, which will be published as a book this year. We wanted to share some of them with you here. They are unusually precise prompts, many of which aim to activate your memory or descriptive faculty; they’re appropriate for writers of all ages and levels of experience. You’ll need a writing implement and a surface and occasionally a smartphone or computer, but the majority of the work will actually happen in your head. Ives writes, “These prompts won’t solve all your problems or even any of your problems. They might make something happen.”” These are both interesting and occasionally curious, and all are thought-provoking, like this one: “Write a detailed description of the process of drinking a glass of water, eating an apple, or the act of ingesting some other small meal. Renovate your conception of what constitutes an event.” God I love that last line.
- Boxing, Celebrity and the Death of Mastery: A slightly elegiac piece written by Tam Hussein about the rise of ‘gimmick’ boxing (Misfits and the like) and what you lose when expertise ceases to be the draw, replaced by spectacle and celebrity. There’s something very poignant about the tone of this – you very much sense that Hussein is writing as someone who believes that something has been lost forever. “I must admit, I did tune in to watch both fights. I was curious to see how good Tate actually was, given his boasts, and I wanted to see Paul get knocked out. I don’t usually watch boxing for the latter. I much prefer two masters finding chinks in each other’s armor. But in this case, I wanted Joshua to finish Paul. Joshua, to my mind, represented mastery, and Paul represented entertainment. I wanted Joshua to restore the natural order, with mastery taking precedence over spectacle — because somewhere along the line, show business and selling tickets had somehow become more valued.”
- Don’t Like It, Don’t Fcuk It: The anonymous, pseudonymous author of the Girl on the Net blog writes about bodies, attractiveness, sex and respect – I really, really enjoyed this, not least about the clear anger that comes through. The central thesis is summed up in the first paragraph, but I recommend you reading the whole thing, it is BRACING: “For some reason, when you become intimate with people, they often feel like they have a right to say critical things about the way you look. Men have often felt this way about my body over the years: making comments about my weight, the various places in which hair grows and whether I remove it, the way I dress or carry myself, my use (or rejection) of make up. As if our intimacy constitutes a contract which grants them the right to correct me. Or perhaps, more kindly, like they believe I will welcome the opportunity for self-improvement that they’ve so thoughtfully opened up. Please, for the love of infinite fcuk, understand this: I will never welcome these comments. You should never say these things. Your negative comment on my body is never welcome. My body is my body. If you don’t like it, don’t fcuk it: that’s the deal.” Honestly, though, who the fcuk talks to people like this? I despair.
- The Dilbert Afterlife: The extent of your knowledge of Scott Adams will likely depend on how online you are – if most people know him at all they will know him as the creator of the ‘Dilbert’ cartoon strip which made him both famous and fabulously wealthy; if you’re a bit more online, though, you might also be familiar with his pivot towards being a pretty open racist and proper brainwormed weirdo. This is an interesting essay by Scott Alexander, the rationalists’ favourite, about the man’s life and the very particular type of man he was (and he was a ‘type’). This is VERY long – your mileage will vary depending on the extent to which you are curious about Adams, but it’s interesting and funny throughout (and I say that as someone who has very limited tolerance for Scott Alexander as a rule), although it also made me feel…slightly uncomfortably seen at times, if I’m wholly honest with you (I will leave it to you to speculate as to which bits in particular I felt…affinity with).
- Japanese Death Poems: No, wait, come back! Honestly, these are small and beautiful and occasionally devastating. “Although the consciousness of death is in most cultures very much a part of life, this is perhaps nowhere more true than in Japan, where the approach of death has given rise to a centuries-old tradition of writing jisei, or “death poems.” Such poems are often written in the very last moments of the poet’s life. Hundreds of Japanese death poems, many with a commentary describing the circumstances of the poet’s death, are translated into English here, the great majority of them for the first time.” This is the third post in a series – the others are linked to at the top – and, honestly, some of these poems are just gorgeous. For some reason this one in particular ruined me slightly: “Now that my storehouse / has burned down, nothing / conceals the moon.”
- Fruits of the Labour: You may have read accounts of ‘what it’s like being a nanny in a very rich family’-type pieces before (it’s not exactly an untapped genre), but I very much enjoyed this particular variant on the theme by K Chiucarello, not least because it feels like the prose is a cut above the style I normally associate with this sort of piece: “The strawberries were small, bite-sized, and they popped with a juice that never tired. They were near figments. My employer made comments every time we huddled around a batch. “They taste like candy!” she exclaimed. The warmth of the strawberries’ skin, a temperature only replicated by the Mediterranean sun. The lilac patio umbrella we ate under, sea draped in the background, Ajaccio and its short glittering buildings in the distance. Everything added up to make the strawberries more decadent every year I returned. In Corsica, it seemed as though I always needed less. Meals were cooked and served with balance in mind, with miles-long swims on the horizon. Fruit from the garden was picked as a delicacy, made into sauces or tarts the following day—baking projects the children would embark on with their great-grandmother. When we gathered around our strawberries we took our time. When we gathered around our strawberries I felt for once in my life what family should feel like. It was slow. There was no dire stress of making ends meet, no parents yelling, no slamming doors or things being thrown. No pair of siblings hiding in the closet, no dry meatloaf for the third day in the row. How easy it was here on the island with our fruit.”
- The China That Deng Built: I appreciate that three Curios into 2026 I’ve already featured a LOT about China but, well, it feels kind of important and, as I like to stress, IT’S MY FCUKING NEWSLETTERBLOGTYPETHING AND I WILL LINK TO WHAT I WANT. Ahem. Anyway, this is a brilliant essay on, er, China, specifically to Shanxi province in the North of the country, which cuts across personal narrative, Chinese history, politics, class and ‘face’, and it is a pleasure to read throughout.
- The Wada Test: Our final longread this week is this absolutely stunning piece of nonfiction writing; winner of the 2025 Annie Dillard award for creative nonfiction, Linda Button writes about her daughter’s neurological condition and waiting for test results, but, honestly, this is SO much more than this, so much better, a formally astonishing piece of writing and as much poetry as it is prose; my first must-read of the year, this, without question, please do click and take the time, it is gorgeous.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS !: