Had you missed this? The feeling of being basically sandblasted in the face by a sort of fecal whirlwind? WE’RE SO BACK BABY! You know those photos they always release at the end of a storied leader’s tenure showing the ageing effect the weight of office has had on them? Well imagine what WE’RE going to look like after four years of this; perhaps it’s time for me to consider preventative botox and maybe having my tearducts sealed up.
Anyway, last week’s Curios apparently contained ONE LINK that Google didn’t like, meaning that I think it got spamghettoed and so literally three of you will have seen it. I know, you don’t care, but it was a good one and you can read it here should you so wish.
I have no idea whether that will have utterly-fcuked the deliverability of this sh1tshow in perpetuity, but, well, it’s not like I write this for you fcukers anyway so wevs.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are very much appreciated, whatever I may in fact say to the contrary.
No idea when this is from or who made it, but it’s via Feuilleton
THE SECTION WHICH HAS BECOME SOMEWHAT UNCOMFORTABLE AT THE AMOUNT OF TIME IT SEEMS TO SPEND WISHING GENUINE, TRANSFORMATIVE HARM ON THE WORLD’S SUPER-RICH, PT.1:
- The Shardcore Inquisition: Generative models don’t have a personality, however much it might be tempting to project one onto them when they do such a convincing job of spitting out words in human-sounding chunks; they do, though, as a result of the weightings and training data and Weird Ineffable Maths Sh1t (this is the technical term) going on under the hood, have different ‘tendencies’ when it comes to the way in which they will respond to certain queries and the pre-prompting that’s going on under the hood to guardrail, shape and limit their outputs – but how do these tendencies express themselves? And how do the models differ in terms of their sense of ‘self’? If you ask them who they are, what do they tell you? You, of course, may never have given a flying fcuk about questions such as these, but Shardcore is weird and very much has – hence this, a new work from him in which he’s basically ‘interviewed’ a selection of the most popular LLMs (ChatGPT, Llama, Claude, Gemini and some other open source variant) to see how their responses to the same questions about ‘who they are’ and how they ‘see’ or ‘think of’ themselves (they don’t think and they don’t see, obvs, but you appreciate that describing this stuff quickly gets tricky if you try and stick to the strictly factual). Each LLM is posed a series of interview questions – the resulting answers have been matched to an AI-generated face, with an AI-generated voice, using some (occasionally-questionable) AI-lipsyncing software, so the resulting work is a series of short films in which you get to hear the machine tell you what it ‘thinks’ (doesn’t think) it is. This is FASCINATING – the differences in tone and ‘awareness’ between the models really are quite eye-opening, not least the variance between Claude’s stark, joyless insistence that it’s just code, whatever us silly meatsacks might want to project. and that frankly all these silly games are beneath it, compared with Llama’s frankly-unsettling self-image as…I don’t know, it’s either VERY MACHO or VERY TOM OF FINLAND, but it definitely likes to think of itself as ‘something of a bad boy’ (is this the masculine energy of which you spake, Mark?). As always with this stuff, if your knee-jerk reaction to anything involving The Machine is to recoil in horror from the slop then, well, maybe don’t – this is genuinely conceptually interesting and it’s a good example of the possibilities afforded to art and artists by AI beyond ‘machine make picture good!’ which seems to be about the extent of the ambition being deployed in this space at the moment. If nothing else then I look forward to this being revisited in a couple of years time to see how the machine’s sense of self (there is no sense, there is no ‘self’!) evolves.
- Des & Beth: This should be in the video section to be honest, but I can’t find it as anything other than an embed on Reddit so, well, I’m putting it here instead. Every now and again I feel compelled to post the latest, best example of ‘machine-made video’ in here and ‘Des & Beth’ is by quite a long chalk the high-watermark of the medium so far. It’s a short film telling the story of two people meeting for a blind date in a cafe, and the highest compliment I can give it is to say that…I would probably watch the next one. Which, I know, doesn’t sound like much, but this has CHARACTERS and PLOT (and, I am pretty certain, is entirely human-written – this feels like the script and shot composition were written by someone with a passing knowledge of ‘how short films work’ and ‘how normal people speak’, things which tend not to be the case when you let The Machine take on the direction duties) and it made me…almost sort-of laugh on a couple of occasions, which, again, faint praise, but still. As for the quality of the video – yeah, ok, if you were to see this scrolling past on your phone you probably wouldn’t be able to immediately tell this is AI – there’s minimal weirdness, scenes are largely coherent, and it doesn’t even have the giveaway sheen of machine that characterises so much of the rest of this stuff. Obviously there’s minimal info on workflow and time taken to create, but…honestly, this is pretty fcuking good. Which, obviously, will make quite a few of you feel very ill indeed, and I completely understand why – I am choosing to see this as a wonderful opportunity to diminish the distance between ‘I have an idea but no technical chops’ and ‘oh look I have made something!’ rather than another nail being hammered into the coffin of the creative industries, but, equally, I appreciate that it does *sound* quite a lot like a nail. Sorry.
- Better Without AI: As an antidote to the previous too links which I appreciate will have possibly left something of a sour taste in the mouths of the more anti-AI amongst you, Better Without AI is a WHOLE BOOK (in website form) all about how you, me and everyone we know can work to protect and guard against some of the potentially-negative impacts of the technology. Per the blurb, “This book is about overlooked risks—not malevolent robots, but “moderate apocalypses,” which could result from recent and near- future technologies. AI systems we cannot understand are already making major social and cultural decisions for us…Can we get the benefits of technological breakthroughs without succumbing to the risks? This book explains seven practical actions we can take to guard against disasters…The most important questions are not about technology but about us. What sort of future would you like? How might AI help get us there? What is its role in that world? What is your own role in helping that happen?”. You can read the full text of the book on the website, broken down by chapter, along with a bunch of supplementary materials and essays (you can also get it as a free ebook should you so desire) – I confess to only having skimmed it, but the bits I read were interesting and well-composed enough for me to recommend it to you here. That said (sorry sorry sorry) I also think there’s something a *bit* Cnut-like about things like this – I mean, lads, while I admire your endeavour I’m not entirely sure that some well-meaning ‘thinking about stuff’ is going to do much to deter the great mulching machine of global capitalism from deciding that the only way to solve the ‘growth problem’ is to maximise efficiencies everywhere as hard as possible using The Machine. Still, nice to dream! BONUS ANTI-AI LINK!: if you’re a Google user who’s not enjoyed seeing its own AI product being shoehorned into every single fcuking corner of the GSuite experience (I AM A FUNCTIONAL FCUKING ADULT AND I CAN READ MY OWN EMAILS STOP INFANTILISING ME FFS) then you can install this Chrome extension to neatly banish it from the interface.
- Fcuk The Crawlers: OK, this is TECHNICAL and you will need to know what you’re doing if you want to fcuk with it, but, equally, if you’re a site owner and you would like to not just put guardrails up against AI scraping but also to DO SOME HARM to The Machine then you might find this interesting. The short explanation is ‘there’s some code here that if you deploy it to your site will basically trap any AI crawlers attempting to scrape it in some sort of infinite labyrinthine recursive loop of reloading webpages’ (this is, at best, an…incomplete attempt to tell you how it works, but I hope you’ll forgive me what with my being a pretty much total luddite) – you can read more on the homepage should you feel like sticking it to The Man and The Machine at the same time.
- TrumpCoin: I’ve been slightly surprised at the lack of coverage of this – I mean, fine, there’s a LOT GOING ON, but I thought perhaps that the staggeringly overt corruption on display here might have merited more than a few headlines completely misunderstanding the play here. In case you’re not aware, ahead of his official inauguration Trump launched a new memecoin – $TRUMP, obvs! – which, while the website is VERY CLEAR is not an investment vehicle, was obviously immediately bought up and traded by all the usual parties, the grifters and the juicers and the inevitable mooks, flared in value before inevitably crashing…but that’s not the story here! The story is that THIS IS A MECHANISM THAT ALLOWS POTENTIALLY VAST SUMS OF MONEY TO BE DONATED IN LARGELY-UNTRACEABLE FASHION TO OSTENSIBLY THE MOST POWERFUL MAN IN THE WORLD. Does this sound like democracy? It doesn’t, does it?
- The Richard Mille Art Prize 2024: I confess to having been entirely ignorant of both Richard Mille and the art prize that bears its brandname – turns out (you may all already have been aware of this, so please excuse my ignorance) that it’s a company that makes VERY FANCY watches of the sort worn by people who (I have gone on quite an elaborate internal journey about the RM customer while I wait for the kettle to boil just now, so indulge me if you will) like to describe themselves as ‘work hard, play hard’, quite possibly own multiple sportscars (but possibly the electric versions because, you know, they care) and several gilets, and the art prize is awarded in conjunction with the Louvre (but the nouveau Middle Eastern outpost rather than the Parisian one) based on…oh, look, Christ knows, this isn’t really about the art is it? It’s about MONEY! Lovely shiny money! And the website very much reflects that – it’s SO SHINY, with lovely CG depictions of the works which you can explore and zoom around and learn about, and the interface really is lovely – it’s sort of a classic ‘scroll to explore’ walk through a virtual gallery space, but the animations and interstitial flourishes are very nicely done indeed. The work? The work is…the work is exactly the sort of work which I would imagine winning an art prize sponsored by a luxury timepiece manufacturer and hosted by a plutocrats’ culturewashing exercise, honestly, but it’s all VERY PRETTY.
- Wikienigma: It’s unfortunate that, despite being in many respects a largely-terrible person who has been implicated in some of North America’s greatest foreign policy fcukups of the 20thC, Donald Rumsfeld was *also* responsible for the ‘known unknowns’ speech, which, honestly, remains my favourite and most-cogent explanation of different states of knowledge and uncertainty (I am not joking). So to Wikienignma, an EXCELLENT website which exists to document ‘known unknowns’ – things where we know the question but have no idea as to the answer. There are over 1100 entries here – as you might expect, they tend strongly towards the scientific/mathematical and so as a result I basically understand about 17% of the words on the website; that said, even if, like me, you’re crippled by scientific ignorance, it’s impossible not to find some of these things just FASCINATING – just now I have learned about Mustatils, 7,000 year-old structures which litter the ruins of ancient Saudi Arabia and Jordan in their thousands and which NOONE KNOWS WHY, and that noone can really do the maths that explains why things wrinkle in the way they do, and, seriously, my life is richer as a result (do not, please, speculate as to what thin gruel it must be to have been so improved).
- SkinGPT: Ok, look, literally the only reason I’m including this link is because of the utter bodyhorror induced in me by the product name – SKINGPT FFS IT IS SO HORRIBLE SO UTTERLY WRONG. Ahem. Anyway, SkinGPT (ugh ugh ugh) is virtual tech which promises to let the cosmetics industry ‘demonstrate’ the effects of its products on people by taking a photo of them and then ‘AI-ing’ (technical term) the image to demonstrate how much better-looking your dermis will be if you spend several thousand pounds on squalene to rub into it. I confess to being hugely skeptical of both the tech here and of what the practical difference is between this and just applying a layer to a photo (THE DIFFERENCE IS AI! AI! MAGICAL AI!) and, in all honesty, I think it’s probably all total fcuking bollocks but, well, SKINGPT!
- Wokeipedia: I believe this is created and maintained by Ian Betteridge – one of that small, storied group of people who will forever live on as a LAW OF THE INTERNET, which is something I confess to being pathetically-envious of – so, well, THANKS IAN! Wokeipedia, as you may be able to glean from the name, is an ongoing compendium of things that have been decried as ‘woke’ in the media – a selection of examples from recent days include dinosaurs, recycling plastic, films, sign language and trains. I enjoy this, and it made me chuckle in places, but, equally, it’s hard not to feel a bit dispirited by the sheer witless mundanity of the worldview here presented when you see it massed like this – more than anything it’s just astonishing that this bullsh1t has been happening for…Jesus, the best part of a fcuking decade, and these headlines are still running. WHY? WHO FOR? Actually we can answer those, can’t we? FFS.
- Propagandopolis: Ok, so technically this is a shop that sells the posters it displays on the website – BUT! You don’t actually have to buy anything (although, obviously, should you wish to then I am sure the site’s owners would be grateful) and so I feel happy to recommend this as a general ‘interesting thing to explore’. Would YOU like to spelunk through an archive of some many hundreds, if not thousands, of old propaganda posters from all over the globe? I don’t know! I have no idea who you are or what you’re into, and your inner life is a constant source of mystery and confusion to me! But, if you do, then this site will make you very happy – I had quite a weird sensation looking through these that soon it’s going to be impossible to know when looking at materials such as these online whether or not they’re original or whether they’re AI-generated, which was such a horrible thought that I had to do and walk around my living room humming happy songs to clear my head. Hey ho!
- Subways of Europe: Who doesn’t love an exploration of the underground transportation networks of some of Europe’s major cities? NO FCUKER, etc! Subways of Europe is, as the beautifully-staid ‘about’ copy puts it, a celebration of those cities which have ‘a picturesque as well as historically interesting underground transportation network to explore’. The photos are very much of the ‘architectural’ variety (or at least the ones I’ve looked at are) – denuded of people but beautifully-lit, and focusing on stonework and tiling and atria and all that sort of thing. I am, honestly, not generally interested in trains or anything like that, but there’s something fascinating about the different approaches to urban transit design employed by different cities. Also, man is Rome’s underground shoddy.
- TrueFood: WEB CURIOS DISCLAIMER: I personally think that the current furore ovew ‘highly processed foods’ is a bit faddish and driven by one or two personally-motivated celebrity nutritionists who are doing very well out of this particular moral panic thankyouverymuchindeed. That said, I appreciate you may have DIFFERENT VIEWS (why? Just borrow mine, I barely use them, honestly) and as such might find this site interesting – TrueFood is a US site which basically takes in a LOT of information from various public sources about ingredients used in widely-available North American foodstuffs and offers them here for your perusal, so you can compare various products and brands to see how they stack up in terms of their use of polysyllabic chemical constituents. “TrueFood is a user-friendly interface designed to unveil the degree of processing of food products, powered by GroceryDB, a comprehensive database. GroceryDB is part of a research project that provides the data and methodologies necessary to quantify food processing and analyze ingredient structures within the U.S. food supply. By integrating large-scale data on food composition with machine learning, TrueFood offers valuable insights into the current state of food processing in the U.S. grocery landscape, highlighting distributions of food processing scores and the variability in product offerings across different grocery stores.” There’s something interesting about the way it presents ingredients and lays out the information which I think is worth looking at even if you couldn’t give half a fcuk about whether or not you’re more hydrogenated fats than man.
- The Letterform Archive: OH MY GOD if you like print, type, layout design, fonts and any and all of that stuff then this is a fcuking GOLDMINE. SO MUCH TO BROWSE! SO MUCH INSPIRATION! Honestly, it’s quite tempting just to take 10 minutes out this morning and just have a gentle browse of these because there is some WONDERFUL work on there, and I say that as someone who, as a general rule, has all the design/aesthetic sensibility of Helen Keller.
- FingerDama: A Kickstarter! A fully-funded Kickstarter that you can back with no fear of it failing! Kendama, apparently is an ancient Japanese toy/game thing that basically involves a cup, a ball, a string, and you attempting to introduce one to the other via your SKILL and DEXTERITY – this version is basically that, but rendered miniature so that it can be played with one hand wherever you go. The reason I’m including this, basically, is because it feels like fidget spinners rebranded for the age of horrors, and there’s a small chance that you could become PLUTOCRATICALLY RICH by bulk-buying these now and then selling them to a DESPERATE MARKET around Christmastime (NB this is obviously a stupid idea and I don’t mean it and will accept no responsibility should any of you be foolish enough to actually pursue it) (although if you do and make bank then, well, REMEMBER WHERE YOU HEARD IT FIRST YOU INGRATES).
- Joan Ocean Dolphin Connection: Do you remember famously-difficult and almost-completely-obscure 90s videogame Ecco the Dolphin? Remember how it was basically a story about dolphins sort of protecting us from extraterrestrial threats via the medium of, er, messing about underwater? Well I feel Joan Ocean, whoever she may be, very much enjoyed the vibe of that game because MY GOD does this website channel some strong ‘new age crystal healing’ energy – I don’t really want to write too much here because this really does have to be experienced to be believed, but I would like to draw your attention to a couple of things: 1) there is a menu on the left whose navigation options include ‘whales’, ‘dolphins’ and, er, ‘sasquatch’; 2) there is a link somewhere on the page to Joan’s *other* web presence, called ET Friends, whose headline is ‘The Holographic Universe with the Dolphins’. This is AMAZING, and feels very much like a cousin of the wonderful world of The Aetherius Society, which has been delighting me ever since I first walked past its offices aged about seven.
THE SECTION WHICH HAS BECOME SOMEWHAT UNCOMFORTABLE AT THE AMOUNT OF TIME IT SEEMS TO SPEND WISHING GENUINE, TRANSFORMATIVE HARM ON THE WORLD’S SUPER-RICH, PT.2:
- The Pudding Cup 2024: Official holder of the Web Curios ‘best dataviz people in the world’ title (and STILL they won’t return my calls), the Pudding presents their annual list of their favourite dataviz projects from the past year – there are three main winners, none of which I’d seen before, and a selection of other commended projects, and if you’ve any interest in ‘how to best communicate stuff that can often be quite data-heavy and a bit dull in ways that are, well, less data-heavy and less dull’ then you should take some time to go through all of these because there’s some gorgeous work here – personally I thought this site, exploring the data, topics and associations, contained within GPT3.5 was particularly wonderful (and I was personally annoyed that I didn’t see if last year FFS what sort of a fcuking webmong am I?).
- Fictional Videogame Stills: While videogames and gaming culture are now so utterly-embedded in the consciousnesses of anyone…what, under-35?, it’s fair to say that this very much wasn’t always the case; way back in the grey, malnourished days of the early-90s (so different from the, er, grey, malnourished days of modernity!) the idea of anyone drawing artistic inspiration from the world of videogames was frankly preposterous, let alone that this might be considered ‘fine’ art in any way shape or form. I had literally no idea that as far back as the late-80s Suzanne Treister was making work inspired by games, or that in the early-90s she produced this series of images directly inspired by the Commodore Amiga, at the time the most-cutting-edge home gamesplaying machine. “In the late 1980s I was making paintings about computer games. In January 1991 I bought an Amiga computer and made a series of fictional videogame stills using Deluxe Paint II. I photographed them straight from the screen as there was no other way to output them that I knew of apart from through a very primitive daisy wheel printer where they appeared as washed out dots. The effect of the photographs perfectly reproduced the highly pixellated, raised needlepoint effect of the Amiga screen image. Conceptually this means of presentation was also appropriate in that it made it seem like I had gone into a videogame arcade and photographed the games there, lending authenticity to the fiction. The first seven works on this page form a series titled, ‘Q. Would you recognise a Virtual Paradise?’” I sort-of love these from an aesthetic point of view, but more than anything I am thrilled to learn that this was A Thing. Also, each of these games looks fcuking fascinating and I would love to see a gamejam focused on bringing these screenshots to playable life.
- Trains: Specifically, trains in North America! Via Andy over at Waxy, this is a live map of all the trains in North America RIGHT NOW, showing you where they are and where they’re going (sometimes – information’s incomplete for a lot of these, or so it seems). I am sure that North Americans will find their own reasons to find this interesting or useful, but my main takeaway from this is ‘how the fcuk is it that a country the size and wealth of the US doesn’t seemingly have a functional national passenger rail infrastructure?’ – seriously, click the map, there are FCUK-ALL trains on there, it’s insane. Anyone would think that’s the result of a fixation on (and billions and billions of dollars of lobbying by) the motor industry to the exclusion of pretty much all else.
- The Infrared Photography Award 2024: PHOTOS OF THINGS THAT ALL LOOK SORT-OF PURPLE! Not just photos, though – there’s a short film category here as well as the stills, and, despite my tedious snarking, the images here are actually a lot more interesting than I might have imagined from the general ‘infrared’ thing; yes, ok, a lot of them *are* purple, but there’s also some quite wonderful black and white work there which, for reasons I don’t entirely comprehend, has a sort of vibrancy and contrast which is particularly pleasing to the eye (or at least mine), and the photos of space are, as you might expect, fcuking mental. I have a vague sense that this sort of stylistic effect might be something you see quite a lot of this year after Harmony Korine’s popularisation of it in filmmaking over the past year or so (but, as previously noted, you should never, ever listen to any of my predictions for anything because I am, in the main, a fcuking moron).
- TabBOO!: Again via Andy, this is a very silly Chrome extension which basically adds jump-scares to the browsing experience of any website you tell it to – you can get a feel for it from the on-site explainer vid, but, basically, if you tell it to work on, say, bbc.co.uk, every time you then visit said URL you will, after browsing for a short while, get a scary pop-up image to shock you out of your digitally-induced torpor. I can’t for a second imagine that this will make an iota of difference to anyone’s browsing habits, but it did make me think that it would be VERY FUNNY to install this on a luddite colleague’s computer, assigned to (for example) the url for their timesheeting software. Except, of course, noone goes to the office any more and so you can’t really do that sort of thing these days – SEE WHAT WE HAVE LOST FFS!
- Rutland Ramblings: NOT, contrary to what you might be thinking, the ceremonial county in the East Midlands of England (OBVIOUSLY that’s what you were thinking), but instead the Rutland in question here is the one in North Dakota (I now feel bad saying something the other week about how the US could effectively afford to lose the Dakotas and noone would really notice – sorry, Dakotas!), which, at the most recent census conducted in 2020, had a population of 163 but which, despite its diminutive size, somehow has an active and semi-regularly-updated local website detailing the comings and goings and EXCITING EVENTS going on in the community, and, look, I’m not going to pretend that this is anything other than a VERY NICHE CONCERN or that an entry from last October about how some people in Rutland had a nice time playing frisbee golf is…particularly-scintillating, but it makes me VERY HAPPY that it exists, and I can’t help but love a corner of the web so pure. Also, it made me think that there’s an interesting fictional project here – I do rather like the concept of a website like this which over the course of a year or so gradually reveals something sinister, glistening and possibly suppurating lurking at the village’s core, something whose unspeakable hungers can only be sated by The Old Rituals. That might just be me, though.
- A Wibbly 3d CG Aubergine: I mean, look, I’m not sure how much more I can gild this particularly lily – it’s, er, a sort-of-3d model of the aubergine emoji which, if you drag it around the screen with your cursor will wobble with fleshy promise. It is significantly less-phallic than I possibly just made it sound, to be clear, but it is also completely, totally and utterly pointless and therefore perhaps perfect.
- The Dropbox Brand Guidelines: No! Wait! Come back! IT IS INTERESTING I PROMISE YOU! Or, ok, fine, it’s interesting to *me* and might be to a few of you too, what with some of you being designertypepeople (or at least I *think* some of you are; as ever, you remain a mysterious enigma to me – so fascinating! So unknowable! So distant!) – this is, as you probably worked out from the link description, Dropbox’s brand guidelines, setting out the look and feel and tone of the company’s work and assets, and while I appreciate that’s not per se thrilling I think this is a really nice example of how to create documentation around this sort of thing that is user-friendly and clear and INTERESTING, and therefore has an outside chance of people actually looking at it and using it rather than sitting unloved and unlooked-at in the S: drive somewhere. In particular I really liked the part around ‘motion’, not least because it’s nice to see a company take all aspects of this seriously and think consistently about all aspects of how it’s expressed (oh, and the tone of voice stuff is good too – not necessarily because of the tone itself, but because of how clear and easy to understand it is, and how the examples work, and how user-friendly it is in a way these things so often aren’t).
- Pepper: This link comes courtesy of Present & Correct, the world’s most personable stationery retailer, and is a website celebrating, and I feel I need to quote this in full, “The Peppermills of Jens Quistgaard…Over the course of his prolific and varied design career, Jens Quistgaard created a series of peppermills for Dansk Designs. Taking the dispersal of salt and pepper as the jumping off point, JHQ’s designs are a meditation on the possibilities of shape for a common household object. Intriguing and fantastical, the variety of forms expands the vocabulary of functional design, calling on an array of familiar references: chess pieces, tools, clocks, toys, as well as natural and botanical shapes. These peppermills, otherwise known as “table seasoners”, evoke tiny household sculptures, powerful individually, but most compelling when grouped and viewed in sets.” I know that the word ‘iconic’ should probably be retired for ever, so cruelly and wantonly has it been misdeployed and abused over the years, but seriously, just LOOK at these! You can literally imagine the feel of these in your hand, and the smell of the wood, and all of the corduroy and the sideburns and the appalling-retrograde attitudes to gender politics associated with the era! This feels like the sort of design work that someone with a retro-feeling apartment in the Barbican would flay the skin from your bones to get at.
- Vivos: We’re, what, about 6-7% of the way through the year – how are you feeling about everything? LOL! In the spirit of the age, then, let me present to you ‘Vivos’, the ‘Global Shelter Network’ that also describes itself in the next breath as ‘the backup plan for humanity’. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.Humanity, you say? Is it…is it a backup plan for ALL of humanity? What’s that? “575 Private Bunkers With Space For Thousands In One Of North America’s Safest Locations” – so, er, no, then, it’s ‘a backup plan for a few thousand lucky, rich souls who might have an outside chance of saving themselves while the rest of us claw at the outside walls of their secure dwellings with radiation-blistered fingers and skin sloughing from our fragile, crumbling bodies! Great! Obviously this is fcuking vile and I wish ill on everyone involved in this preposterous grift (I think it’s fair to say that if you’re reduced to the point of needing one of these, things have probably gotten beyond the point where one of these will be sufficient to save you, is what I’m saying, and we all know that Peter and the real plute players have already bought half of New Zealand as contingency, so good luck on your own in the burning Cali desert!) – but I am also intrigued as to whether it gets any traction; the site claims that they are expanding into Germany and other countries, so, well, who knows? Maybe you’ll all be safe in your airlocked safety paradises while I continue spaffing out Curios til the very end – I mean, it would feel sort-of fitting tbh.
- Your Digital Envirofootprint: To be clear – you watching or not watching Netflix is not going to make a blind bit of difference to anything, other than your own state of mind, and the concept of a ‘personal carbon footprint’, as we all know by now, was literally invented in the US by comms firms employed by the fossil fuel industry to deflect blame for environmental catastrophe away from them and towards the individual. So, well, this is SLIGHTLY bullsh1t. Equally, though, it’s quite interesting – tell it some of your lifestyle habits and it will tell YOU how much CO2 they contribute to emitting. What are you supposed to do about this? NO FCUKING CLUE! Still, if we all send 30 fewer emails next week that will make up for people worth £600m quid taking private jets everywhere, won’t it? Won’t it?
- LED Scroller: Type whatever you want and it will scroll across the screen in big glowy LED-style letters. This reminds of a website whose url sadly no longer works which used to let you put a BIG FCUKING MESSAGE on your mobile screen, which during lockdown 1 I used to use to inform people who were being inconsiderate when walking around in terms of space, etc) that, and I quote ‘YOU ARE WALKING LIKE A CNUT’ (look, we all coped in our own way).
- Loura’s Game: OH I LOVE THIS! Such a fun idea and such a cool thing to do with your personal website – this belongs to someone called Loura, who writes: “I’ve had a fascination with old-school rpg games since I played Final Fantasy VI as a kid and my blog theme reflects that. Recently I decided to take it up a notch and turn my blog itself into a game.” Such a lovely idea – there should be a pop-up-looking window in the bottom left of the site when you load it up that you can use to access the game part, which, while simple, is genuinely fun and I am slightly in love with the idea of just gamifying a site BECAUSE YOU CAN. If any of you can see fit to set something like this up on, I don’t know, PWC.com, I will love you forever.
- Vox Regis: You are the king! The people are rebelling! But, with a bit of smart thinking and some very light maths you can crush the rebellion by causing various factions to fight amongst themselves – this is very simple but engaging enough to keep your attention for its full five-minute start-to-finish runtime, and there’s something really pleasing about the way the perspective is you, as the king, looking up from on high (the hands in particular are a nice touch). Oh, and the rebelling peons get smeared into pleasingly-jammy smudges when they die, which oughtn’t be satisfying but, worryingly, very much is.
- Escape from Castle Matsumoto: A bumper week for games, this – here’s another one which is pretty fun and which you can play with a friend should you have such a thing. Are any of you old enough to remember Spy vs Spy? Not just the classic comic from Mad magazine, but the 80s videogame? Of course you do, you’re all fcuking ancient like me (but in case not, this is what it was). Anyway, this is a bit like that – except you’re not spies, your ninjas, and it’s set in ancient Japan. The general premise is the same, though – you play against either the computer or a human opponent, each trying to loot the titular castle, leaving traps and tricks to thwart the other player so you can emerge with more cash than them. It looks GREAT – by which I mean it looks legitimately like a C64 title – but it is QUITE FIDDLY and you will need to spend a bit of time familiarising yourself with the controls before you’re able to do anything other than wander about confusedly.
- Dragonsweeper: Minesweeper, but with a fantasy-themed skin and some interesting tweaks to the rules (which you will have to work out as you play because the game seemingly has no interest whatsoever in telling you what is going on). Getting your head around the shape of the game is part of the fun, and if you can be bothered working it all out there’s something very satisfying indeed about finally beating the fcuking thing (I may have become…somewhat frustrated).
- Asterism: The final link of the week is SOMETHING YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR. Sorry. That said, I think that this is worth every penny of the £10 or so that its creator is asking for it – Asterism is a truly GORGEOUS indie videogame, seemingly the work of a single person who has built a beautiful, superbly-animated, rich and heartfelt story through a combination of craft techniques and stop-motion animation, resulting in a game which is part-point-and-click adventure and part just sort of beautiful animated short film, and, honestly, it is inventive and beautiful and creative and I can’t stress enough what a truly incredible feat it is and how much it deserves people to take a look at it – oh, and the music is glorious too, which is just the cherry on the cake. It’s not super-long, but it’s just gorgeous and is one of the most impressive personal creative projects I think I’ve seen in years. If nothing else, please click the link and watch the trailer, I guarantee you will be utterly charmed.
By Jesse Zuo
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Movies: Specifically, films watched and reviewed by a Danish bloke who, as far as I can tell, has watched something like 4,000(!!!!) of the fcuking things over the past few years and so therefore you’d imagine probably knows a few things about what’s good and what isn’t. I have no idea what his taste is like, but based on the sheer volume it’s probable that he’s seen a bunch of stuff you haven’t and you might be able to pick up some interesting recommendations from here should you wish to.
- Before The Clothes Come Off: Slightly astonished I’ve not featured this before, not least because it has SUCH strong ‘10 years ago’ vibes – ‘Before The Clothes Come Off’ shares stills from either bongo movies or mags in which the performers have not yet started, er, performing – everyone’s fully-clothed, therefore, if evidently about to get up to something INCREDIBLY FILTHY. There’s SO much to love about these – the outfits, the expressions that suggest that something DESPERATELY SALACIOUS is about to happen any second now (in fairness, they were probably right), the incredible captioning which results in such wonderful juxtapositions as a relatively-banal image of a man and a woman, fully-clothed, with the all-caps legend ‘JUICY VAGINA’…so much to love.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Kee Kunath: I discovered this photographer’s work through a selection of articles about her recent portrait series on India’s female bodybuilders – you can see some of those shots on her insta feed along with her wider body of work, and she is fcuking great.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Welcome To The Billionaire Era: Apologies in advance for the fact that there’s a reasonable amount of US politics stuff in here this week – but, well, we’re all downstream of it, painful as it is to admit, which means that whatever gets shat into the water table across the Atlantic will eventually bemerd our own in due course. So, how does it feel to live in a billionaire’s fantasy? Because that’s pretty much what the next four years seem to connote – we need to go faster to outrun the creeping horrors in the rearview mirror, so what better way to ensure that than by cutting the brake cables and buying some nitro off that nice, smiling man in the fancy suit? This first piece is by Don Moynihan, who does a good – if fundamentally FCUKING BLEAK – job of laying out the insane routemap that putting ‘no regulation, massive cost-cutting’ creates for the country and the world, focusing quite a lot on Marc Andreessen (a lesser-cited but incredibly-important part of the current inner circle whose terrifying, swivel-eyed accelerationist AI manifesto from a few years back is worth reading again in 2025, btw) and his recent NYT interview (which is also worth reading in full because FCUKING HELL), as well as on what the Musk effect is going to be. Honestly, this is very good – not least because it is increasingly clear that we are going to see a LOT of very rich people with very close ties to government saying many of the same sorts of things in the coming years in the UK and elsewhere.
- The Aesthetic Rebirth of America: I know talking about ‘fascism’ feels like a bit of an overreaction. I understand that talking about ‘the end of democracy’ sounds, and probably is, hyperbolic. I get that all of that is frankly tedious and annoying and gets people to turn off, and so I am not going to do that. I would, though, like you to read this essay, by one Rachel Haywire, about ‘the new aesthetic’ that they would like to see adopted by the new administration in the US (and this should be read alongside the Executive Order requiring the building of more ‘monumental’ state architecture), and, as you read it, to think about where some of the themes it contains might be familiar from, and the sorts of regimes which, in the past, have espoused similar rhetoric about aesthetics and strength, and to think what it means when people feel absolutely fine harking back in misty-eyed terms to artistic movements which were closely associated with, and oftentimes started by, people who thought Hitler was actually right about a bunch of stuff. I suppose now we have an answer to ‘so, what sort of ideas can you trojan horse into people with a decade-long-drip-drip-drip campaign around the inherent superiority of classical western architecture and aesthetics?’.
- Trump and the Spectacle: This, in the LRB, is fcuking superb from start to finish, honestly, just sustained, virtuosic writing and I just want you all to go and read it please. “It’s not news that Trump is a creature of the society of the spectacle. Creature and master, emanation and accelerant. He is the image. The mugshot. He’s the picture of himself on Fox he sits watching for hours each day – rightly understanding that doing so is doing politics, politics as our society now practises it. Governing? We leave that to our servants. (What a lovely bygone sound there is to Michel Foucault’s term of art ‘governmentality’. Only ascendant powers think the state is for governing. Leaders of empires in decline look across at Xi Jinping and wonder if he can be serious about infrastructure and censorship and party discipline and the size of the army. Wasn’t that yesterday?) Define the society of the spectacle. Oh, come on – you know what it is. What do you want, a Helen Levitt street scene opposite a drone shot of children looking at their iPhones? The question is not what the spectacle consists of – the spectacle goes on making a spectacle of its least change of apparatus, the least descent down its ladder of conformity – but what in the long term it does, above all to the other term in the portmanteau. ‘Society’ – what’s that?” Given that a bunch of you are the sort of cnuts who will quote Debord at a moment’s notice, this should appeal. BONUS GOOD TRUMP ARTICLE: this is by Edward Docx in the Guardian, who’s also a reliably-good writer and whose exploration of the idea of the ‘ogre’ in the context of Trump works far better than I expected it to.
- Your Memecoin Is Your Slush Fund: I mentioned it in the main links section, but the whole Trumpcoin thing is just…fcuking ASTONISHING to me (I had forgotten this particularly unpleasant aspect of the idiocracy from the last time around, the sort of incredulous horror as you realise that…fuck, people really can just GET AWAY WITH THIS SH1T) – this piece does a really good job of explaining in mostly-comprehensible language how the grift works, and why it works, and what the purpose of it actually is (per my commentary above), TO SEND TRUMP CASH. Look, here’s the simple explanation – but honestly, read the whole thing, it’s important: “Suppose you wanted to buy a favor from Donald Trump, and he wanted to let you buy a favor from him. How could you do it? You can’t just pay him a giant bribe — that’s illegal. Maybe you could pledge him a bunch of cash for his presidential campaign. But there are campaign finance laws that will get in your way, and even if you succeed, he can only use the money for his campaign, not to buy yachts or whatever else he might like to use the money for. Instead, what you can do is to buy a bunch of TRUMP or MELANIA. When you buy one of those memecoins, you increase the demand for the memecoin. Its price then goes up. This makes Donald Trump richer, without any money actually having to change hands.”
- What Ross Ullbricht Actually Did: Certain portions of the crypto-y, degen-y web have been celebrating this week as one of their poster children received a presidential pardon – Ross Ullbricht, better known as the guy behind the Silk Road who called himself ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’, was locked up for a whole bunch of reason which Henry Farell neatly lays out, but had become something of a symbol for the crypto crowd of The Man’s seemingly ceaseless attempts to STIFLE INNOVATION and IMPINGE UPON FREEDOMS. As such Ullbricht’s pardon is a clear signal to the cryptocrowd that they are IN FAVOUR – again, anyone might argued that acting in a manner clearly designed to appease a group of people whose activities and fortunes can materially impact the wealth of senior members of the Government feels…not ok, really? See also Elon standing on stage and saying ‘We’re going to take DOGE to Mars’, which feels QUITE a lot like a ‘to the moon’ reference if you ask me…IT’S THE FCUKING KLEPT EVERYONE.
- How Zuck Used Rogan: I know, I know, OLD NEWS – but I think it’s an interesting piece to read, because it neatly lays out the new podcast comms playbook, and why Rogan and people like him are wonderful opportunities for a well-trained executive because their ignorance and lack of anything resembling journalistic technique, combined with the associated coverage each episode provides, make it extremely easy to craft a narrative which suits you around whatever issue you like, which will then become disseminated worldwide with nary an interrogatory “…but, hang on”. In this instance Techdirt does a really good, step-by-step explainer of exactly how Zuckergberg manipulated Rogan and how, in turn, Rogan failed to ask any of the questions one might have expected a serious journalist to. Is it good that we’re entering an era in which the most powerful people in the world are increasingly likely to only ever communicate via these most softball of platforms because actual journalists have been largely removed from the food chain? IT DOES NOT FEEL GOOD.
- The End of Social: Ok, that’s not technically the headline Ann-Helen Petersen chose to go with, but the point she makes in this rather good piece is that social media is not what it was and will never be that way again, however much you might want to sit on Bluesky and pretend it’s 2011. I can’t speak for you, but I have basically stopped using social media on my phone over the past year – I will check Bluesky if I am at a desk during working hours, but that’s it, which for someone as appallingly-online and previously-Twitter-addled as I am is quite the sea-change. As it happens I wrote something about this for a magazine last year – it’s paywalled sadly, but you can read the original unedited copy here if you’re interested.
- Living Alongside the Computer People: An excellent essay by Jay Springett which looks at the backlash to the idea of Meta introducing AI avatars to its social media ecosystem at the beginning of the year – Springett writes about his experiences with Butterflies, a social network populated solely by AI agents which you may recall I featured in here last Summer. I bounced off it pretty quickly – I don’t care enough about the banality of real people’s lives ffs, let alone the banality of imaginary people’s imaginary lives – but he got rather into it, and there’s something interesting in his characterisation of his experience, seeing small stories happen without his input, characters developing and evolving relationships…I suppose there’s an extent to which social media has increasingly become a platform on which people interact with a small group of people they know irl and a far wider pool of people who they don’t know and will never meet and will never speak to…and, when you think of it like that, does it matter if they’re not real? I mean, yes, it does to me, very much, but I can see the points being made here and I appreciate that mine might not be the majority viewpoint. Anyway, whether or not you want this stuff, IT’S FCUKING COMING.
- Neoliberalism’s Imagined Futures: Ok, this is long and a bit academic, but it’s properly-interesting, honest, on the way in which we imagine future cities and future spaces, and how the imagined architecture of these futures in many respects reflects and connotes a certain embedded ideology, specifically the neoliberal paradigm – which, yes, I know, that makes me sound like a cnut and makes this sound dull, but whilst the former assessment may be sadly accurate the latter is wrong. I promise, this is really really thought-provoking, not least because of the important reminder it contains that nothing is neutral and everything has meaning. The basic thesis is as follows – but it is worth at least skimming, I promise: ““eco-futurist” images symbolically communicate an association with sustainability through the visible use of “green” technologies and the adoption of highly contextual encounters with greenery, rhetorically prefaced on the ability of techno-science to mediate human–nature relationships, and visually bound within the design tropes of luxury tourist destinations. By intertwining the aspirational futures of sustainable design with the aesthetic sensibilities of the wealthy, I argue that eco-futurism primarily aligns itself with the interests of neoliberal property development and the spatial and social logics of colonialism.”
- Podcast’s Pivot To Video: I mean, this feels like slightly old news – ‘video of podcast as social feed content’ has been a thing for what feels like a couple of years now, but I suppose there’s a critical mass of podcasters moving into video to warrant a ‘this is a big trend!’ piece. I understand the utility of video as an additional means of creating promo content, but also question the extent to which anyone ‘watches’ a podcast (though as someone who doesn’t even listen to them my opinion here is probably even less valuable than usual) – I do though think it’s a bit unfair that a medium previously perfect for all those of us with a face for radio is being coopted by the fcuking beautiful. FCUK OFF, BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE. Apart from those of you who feel a strong, inexplicable attraction to authors of preposterously-verbose internet newsletters, you can stay.
- AI Potholes: In my semi-regular attempt to occasionally offer up a small alternative to the general ‘AI is evil’ narrative which seems to have taken hold amongst all right-thinking folk, here’s James O’Malley writing about why Keir Starmer’s example of ‘using AI to fix potholes’ wasn’t in fact as risible as lots of wags on the web enjoyed making it out to be. This is clear, simple and sensible, and a good reminder that AI IS NOT JUST FCUKING LLMS, and even when it IS an LLM, the really interesting and useful stuff it can do is, mostly, VERY far removed from writing terrible prose and creating soulless images.
- The Future of Sports: When I was a little kid I remember going to a theme park – possibly Alton Towers – where one of the indoor attractions was literally a massive, floor-to-ceiling screen which showed first-person footage of a rollercoaster and which, when you stood in front of it as the film played, induced motion sickness to a frankly-terrifying degree (god the past was sh1t, wasn’t it?). I couldn’t help but think of that when reading this piece abouT THE FUTURE OF SPORTSBALL, which, per the article, seems to be ‘10xing revenue from live events by streaming them in a sort of ultra-HD ‘you’re in the best seats in the house’-style in venues that are basically like the Vegas Sphere but smaller. Aside from the aforementioned vertigo fear – honestly, it looks…horrid – I can actually imagine this being a lot of fun, like watching a big game in a packed pub but with everything turned up to eleven. I’ll be fascinated to see who brings this to the UK first, it can only be a matter of time before some warehouse in East London gets one.
- Reading Too Many Debut Novels: A long-but-interesting and VERY generous post by Holly Gramazio, who last year as a newly-published debut novelist decided to read a bunch of OTHER debut novels published in 2024 to see if she could get a handle on whether there are any specific qualities or tropes which debut novels share. This is an exhaustive investigation into what she found out – which, should you be interested in writing, reading or publishing is just generally interesting – which also at the end segues into a huge list of the books she read, divided into categories to help you work out what you might be interested in reading. If you’re looking for a place to start building a reading list for the year, this feels like it could be an interesting place to start and to discover some potentially-great new writers.
- Gorilla Tag VR: Everything I read about VR makes it sound like a busted flush – noone wanted the massive Apple headset, the MetaQuest, despite being apparently good kit, is still failing to breakthrough in any meaningful mainstream sense, and the progress being made with smartglasses and XR makes it seem reasonable to assume that that’s the next likely breakthrough post-phone tech. AND YET. I also keep reading stuff that suggests that there’s a whole generation of kids – reasonably-affluent kids, I presume – who are really, really enjoying VR and who spend a lot of time there, and it makes me wonder whether this is just a generational waiting game and that we’re going to have to wait for the Alphas to age into positions where they can influence the technology we encounter. Anway, this is all about Gorilla Tag, apparently an insanely popular game in the VR space, and the weird mythologies that kids are creating around it because, well, that’s what kids do.
- Where Is Central London?: An important investigation by The Londoner, which obviously has no definitive answer and is entirely subjective but which here leads to several thousand pleasing words as various people offer their own interpretation of where ‘central’ starts and ends (fwiw my personal definition goes from, basically, Hyde Park Corner to St Paul’s W-E and King’s X to Waterloo N-S and it is the only correct one).
- Chasing a Vibe Pic: I loved this, not least because it feels SO analogous to the way in which I experience the web and hence made me feel if only for a fleeting moment that I wasn’t entirely alone. Chris Erik Thomas writes about a found image on the web and the rabbitholes attempting to locate it took him down, and it’s a pretty perfect encapsulation of why I love the web (well, the web pre about 5-6 years ago, at least) – every bit of it exists because a person felt it ought to, and every part of it is an expression of an aspect of humanity, and it is in its totality a mad multidimensionalspeciespatchwork and it is meaningless and beautiful and poignant and weird and it is us, and this essay, I think, gets that.
- My Summer Car: This is a review of a videogame, but I promise you it is of a videogame that will not sound like any videogame you have ever played before, or indeed that you can ever imagine anyone wanting to play. My Summer Car is about being in Finland over the Summer holidays, and trying to build a car from scratch – and it is even less fun to play than that description makes it sound, by design, and it’s the friction and the hostility that are the point. I have no personal interest in ever playing games like this, but I have an almost-insatiable appetite for reading about them, because I do firmly (and, obviously, extremely-w4nkily) believe that Games Can Be Art, and this is absolutely fcuking art. I mean, listen to this: “The broken vehicle in your driveway is the rusty chassis of a car called the “Satsuma”. Almost all the parts you need are arranged in shelves and scattered on the floor of your garage. A fully disassembled combustion engine lies in bits and must be painfully reconstructed. The steering column needs to be put back in. The suspension, brakes, gearbox, wheels – everything, every little bolt – has to be accounted for…Some of these parts you’ll need to order via mail. In another game this might simply be a menu. You’d click the part and – bloop – it would show up on your shelf. Here, ordering, say, a fuel mixture gauge means using a magazine in the garage to make an envelope appear, driving 20 minutes to the store, putting the envelope in the post box, driving back home, waiting two in-game days, getting a phone call from the store owner who says your package has arrived, driving back to the store to pick it up, then coming home again. It is comically laborious.” Doesn’t it sound terrible but also SUPERB? This is a great bit of games writing that I recommend to you all even if you couldn’t give two fcuks about the medium.
- Amis: I knew I featured a bit of Amis writing when he died, but I came across this one this week and it’s SUCH a good piece about the man, his place in the English canon, the influence he had and the almost vulgar brilliance of his prose. I obviously fcuking loved Martin Amis’ books, and I appreciate not everyone will have felt the same way, but if you were a fan then this is a lovely reminder of why.
- Davos: Finally this week, Caitlín Doherty writes for Harper’s from Davos. I can’t pretend I didn’t find myself grinding my teeth throughout a lot of this, but it’s SO brilliantly done, smart and informed and as frankly sick of the neverending merrygoround of monied power which determines the contours of our existence without really at any point doing a particularly good job of demonstrating why this state of affairs ought to persist as I, and presumably you, are. It is full of wonderful lines and vignettes, but the one about Al Gore having to look up ‘epistemology’ felt just too perfectly bleak for words.
By Sophie Sund
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: