So it turns out that the nation that most of you (or at least the ones who bothered to engage with my shameless engagement-bait last week) find most irritating or least-fun is, er, your own! Yes, that’s right, in a possibly-predictable bout of self-loathing it turns out that Curios readers seem to think that their own nationalities are the WORST OF THE WORST, so, er, shout out all of you for being odd little antinationalist miserygoblins!
Anyway, I am in a slightly-irritable mood right now due to the fact that my washing machine has been knackered for TWO WEEKS and I will need to wait another week for it to be sorted and, honestly, I AM RUNNING OUT OF PANTS, so will leave you with the links and head out to the fcuking launderette like a character from fcuking Eastenders.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can rest assured that I am NOT turning them inside-out.
THE SECTION WHICH HAS JUST FOUND OUT THAT IT IS GOING TO HAVE TO WORK ON NEW YEAR’S EVE AND WHICH IS UNREASONABLY ANNOYED ABOUT IT TBH, PT.1:
- 100 Deep Breaths: Has it been a long week? Has the work been getting to you? Is the relentless grind of ‘being alive’ and ‘being made of meat’ starting to pall? Well TAKE A BREAK then! You’ve earned it! Click this link and RELAX by watching 100 videos, shot in extreme close-up, of other human beings engaging in the timeless pastime that is ‘aerobic respiration’ – hear their breaths! See the pores on their flesh and the small, near-imperceptible hairs on their faces and relax as you slowly adapt to their breathing patterns and sync your rhythms to that of the humans depicted on your monitor! Does that feel better? Does that feel meditative? Does that put you back in touch with the GROUNDED AND SPIRITUAL CORE OF YOUR EXISTENCE (ffs)? Does…does that change if you know that all of the people depicted in these videos, their breaths and their rising and falling chests and the sounds of air passing through them, don’t exist? 100 Deep Breaths “stages the uncanny encounter of watching AI-generated humans breathe. The minimal act of inhalation and exhalation unsettles our sense of the real. Created by creative technologist Tina Tarighian, the project examines the threshold where simulation becomes visceral.” All of the videos were generated by Google’s Veo3, and there’s some light ‘LOOK AT THE BIASES WITHIN THE MACHINE’ stuff here (80%+ of the generated ‘humans’ are white, plus ca change), but, at heart, this is just about the machine people, breathing, and whether we care about the fact that they’re not real when it comes to feeling some sort of relaxy benefit…and I don’t think it does, which is…interesting, on some level, if perhaps a *touch* creepy and depressing if you think about it too hard (as ever, Web Curios’ motto – other than “one day this will stop, thank God” – is “don’t think!”).
- Gleam: I think it’s fair to say that a generalised feeling of social awkwardness is a fundamental part of the human condition (or at least it is for most of us, I don’t doubt that there are sleek and beautiful people out there for whom the idea that the world *won’t* welcome them with open arms and a cheery smile is inconceivable, but, well, I’m pretty sure that those cnuts don’t read this newsletter, so fcuk them and their inherent sense of self-possession and fcuk the world that bends to their arc), and that tools that help people overcome said social awkwardness are…good, in the main. I equally think it’s fair to say that the idea of treating social interactions and the general business of interpersonal interactions as a checklist to be tackled each day and a ‘muscle’ to be ‘trained’…isn’t maybe great, and the idea of ‘gamifying’ said interactions has some quite significant potential negative externalities. AND YET! Gleam is a currently popular app aimed at young men, whose blurb suggests that it’s a “fun, science-backed coach for mastering communication skills and social skills, whether it’s talking to girls on dates, getting better at conversation, or preparing for an interview or networking. Gleam delivers bite-sized, interactive lessons to help you become more confident and charismatic. You can learn to flirt better, ace a job interview, or improve your public speaking.” Now. Now. I am (obviously lol) not an expert on communication or on confidence (also lol!), or indeed on fostering closer relationships with people, but I am not…wholly convinced that treating said interactions as a gamifiable ‘ladder’ that one can scale via the performance of small, daily tasks like ‘go and compliment a stranger on their clothes’ (I am guessing here, but, well, if you take a look at the screenshots it feels like that’s where it probably ends up), and in general, I get quite strong ‘PUA but recast for the modern era’ vibes from this, and, well, we all know where the PUA movement led (it led here. Honestly, EVERYTHING WE ARE EXPERIENCING NOW IS DOWNSTREAM OF NEIL STRAUSS’ BOOK ‘THE GAME’ I WILL DIE ON THIS HILL FFS).
- NotFriend: SATIRE! You will, of course, be aware of the ‘Friend’ AI companion pendant that launched in the US the other week and which was the subject of a massive ad campaign and the subsequent anti-ad-campaign backlash graffiti that followed? Of course you are! I have written about it in Curios and you click ALL of the links and read ALL of the words and none of them go to waste, NONE OF THEM. Ahem. Anyway, if you want you can buy your very own non-smart, non-AI-enabled pendant, called NotFriend, which is guaranteed not to listen to you or talk to you or track anything about you at all, and while this literally a 3d printed disc, on a string, with some googly eyes stuck to it, it is also available to actually purchase for the low, low price of $25.
- Sea Level Rise Map: One of the other anecdotes I heard from the State Dinner at Windsor (but one which I am burying down here a week later as I am not 100% certain I am meant to share it with you – SHH THIS IS ACTUAL GOSSIP!) was a quote from the Chief Executive of a major energy company (which I will not name but which rhymes with ‘Wee See’) which basically involved him saying “the thing is, the world just needs to accept a 6ft rise in sea levels, there’s literally nothing we can do about it at this point’ or words to that effect. WHICH IS NICE, THANKS YOU FCUKING CNUT! Anyway, if you’d like a visual exploration as to how that might affect YOU and YOURS and the planet you presumably love (or at least feel a grudging affection for despite all its myriad flaws) then click this link and let your laptop complainingly render a 3d map of the world along with a slider that lets you determine the sea level rise you’d like to envisage; I got REALLY freaked out by this when I navigated to my house and saw it largely underwater until I realised that the default setting here is to display a 10m rise, which, even with my most pessimistic Cassandra specs on, doesn’t feel quite like an imminent threat. Still, er, 6ft eh! Blimey! Anyone want to join me in my third-act career pivot into sandbag entrepreneurship?
- Astrodither: This is TOTALLY POINTLESS, other than as a bit of a coding experiment pulled together by one Robert Borghesi (THANKYOU ROBERT I LOVE THIS) – click the link, wave your mouse around, enjoy the, er, ‘dithering’ and then, when you are ready, turn the volume up and click and HOLD THE MOUSE BUTTON, and enjoy the feeling of being on a Waltzer with a carny who is slightly-too enthusiastic with the spinning. This would look quite fun on a big screen, I think, particularly with some sort of crowd-based interactive gubbins added in (no, I don’t really know what that means, you work it out).
- The Uncle Juff Show: I don’t, as a rule, recommend YouTube series – not least because the few times that I tend to, then almost-invariably end up disappearing or being discontinued shortly after I do so, thereby neatly demonstrating the unerring pop-cultural instincts that have made Web Curios such a reliable bellwether for ‘stuff that normies really won’t ever be into, ever’ since c.2010 – but I will make an exception for this; even if Uncle Juff never records another episode, he will always have given us ‘Juggalo Twilight’. This is…I don’t know what it is, but it is definitely Juggalo; sort of a small, Wayne’s World-style basement talk show, sort of a self-help advice line (but very much not), sort of a small, surreal comedy show…I am obviously VERY MUCH not the target audience for this, but I found it charming and funny and weirdly big-hearted, and anything that uses greenscreen CGI with such abandon and evident relish deserves applause.
- Gaec Des Etangs: Do people still talk about which bit of TikTok they’re in? Is there still a whole thing around people attempting to jump the algofence into other bits of the app, to see the content that others see and to experience the vibes that others do? No idea, honestly, but in case there is still such a thing then let me invite you to spend a few minutes retraining your algorithm in the pursuit of FRENCH FARMTOK! Gaec Des Etangs is, I think, quite a new channel based on the few videos they have up there but one which I think is demonstrating impeccable vibes. Cabbages! Huge pumpkins! Farm equipment! MASSIVE, BEAUTIFUL RADISHES (seriously, you may not think it is possible to be impressed by a radish but I am telling you, check out these fcukers – also, sincere props to the editor for the PERFECT song choice)! Anyway, look, this is literally just ‘some videos of life on a farm’, but it’s in France and therefore carries with it the vague promise of a different, better life with high-quality Viennoiserie, and as such I commend it to you entirely.
- Fairytale Hunt: Ooh, this is fun! A small digital toy made by Lynn Cherny, this is basically a way to explore fairytales by exploring thematic similarities and commonalities between texts; the webpage presents you with a selection of text drawn from a fairy story, and highlighting a part of said text will cause the engine to search for a similar text elsewhere within the fairytale corpus, and take you to it; there’s a light ludic layer applied to this where you can win points and (not real) prizes for finding specific things – mentions of monsters, say, or fruits or animals – and it’s a really nice way both of exploring tropes and themes that occur and recur in fairytale writing, but also of exploring how text embeddings and relational meaning networks, er, work. BONUS FAIRYTALES! Would you like a link to a huge database of classic folklore and mythology texts, with links to more stories and myths from around the world than you could shake a stick at? YES YOU WOULD!
- Slave Voyages: I confess to having been slightly astonished and appalled by the information contained on this website – obviously I am not…unaware of the inglorious history of the slave trade and the numbers of people shipped from Africa and moved around the globe as chattel to build the relics of empire, but at the same time I can’t pretend to have really had any sort of proper understanding of the human scale of the trade until earlier this week when I came across this website and, well, FCUKING HELL. This presents a visual showing a map of the world which, when you press play, moves through time, visualising the flow of ships carrying human cargo each year from the early-16th to mid-19thC and, honestly, the VOLUME of vessels departing West Africa by the time the trade really gets into its stride is…unconscionable, honestly. I appreciate also that my only realising this in middle age is quite shameful and, well, yes, I am quite ashamed of this. Seriously, click on this and boggle and feel the horror, the scale is utterly mindfcuking (also, as an aside, remember when lots of the ‘classical architecture avatar’ accounts on social media start talking about ‘we don’t build stuff like we used to’ that they are often talking about and harking back to an era when said building was facilitated by, well, stuff like this. MAKES YOU THINK, etc etc).
- AI Signs: No! Wait! Come back! This is the GOOD AI! Not the bad sort what STEALS and POLLUTES! This is AI for POSITIVE ENDS – no, really, it actually is, promise. This is a project which alternately helps to teach you sign language (US sign language, to be clear, so the one-handed stuff) and to build up a dataset of people speaking in ASL so as to better train The Machine to be able to understand it. If you’re doing the learning bit there’s a reasonable bit of in-browser camera work which tracks your hand and your head to make sure you’re doing the moves right, and I was happily signing along with the prompts within seconds, but I think the nicest bit here is the vaguely-hopeful ‘we can build a dataset together!’ bit which, should you be in a position to help out with, I strongly suggest adding to.
- Woke Football Flags: I’ve been slightly bemused by the rise of ‘right-on football ultra’ becoming A Thing in the UK, but thanks to my friend Alex being one of the Dulwich Hamlet Ultras (lol) I am now aware of the fact that there’s a whole coterie of young (and not-so-young) men who are very happy to sink a dozen pints and sing football songs, but who are also keen to ensure that their gak is at the very least Fair Trade and ethically-sourced (lol!) and who are very concerned about the global labour movement and probably have strong opinions about the best ways in which to reinvigorate local democratic movements. Anyway, this is now a THING, and like all THINGS it has memes and jokes and so it was that yesterday a thread did the round on Bluesky showcasing some of the best examples of ‘those flags that travelling supporters bring to football grounds, but woke versions of them’ and, look, while a lot of the gags on these won’t make ANY sense unless you know a bit about UK politics, I think we can all agree that combining a reference to a Free Palestine with a gag about the fact that all football fans are on coke these days (“From The River / To The Key”) is legitimately very funny.
- Collect The Reasons: OH GOD THE INTERNET OF THE PAST! I like the fact that the web is now of an age where when one finds bits of The Old Web one can now pick out specific eras and time periods, from the VERY EARLY pre-cambrian days of MUDs and the like, to Usenet, to ICQ, to forums…all the way through to stuff like this website, whose last updates seem to have come in 2013 and is therefore a WONDERFUL relic of a particular period in time, all EPIC BACON and HECKING DOGGO, and, look, while we can all agree that those times were also DEEPLY ANNOYING and birthed the most irritating generation in human history (it’s true, the votes are in – MILLENNIALS, EVERYONE REALLY DOES THINK YOU’RE FCUKING SHIT, SORRY!), they are also a really interesting period to return to briefly. Oh, and this site has the added benefit of being, er, a collection of self-submissions by random internet strangers about ‘what they live for’ which, obviously, is RIGHT up my street. Special shout-out to the all-time solipsist who wrote ‘I live because if I end it she would follow soon behind’ – Mike, mate, chances are she wouldn’t, honest. Anyway, this is a sort of weird, time travel Hallmark cards emotional universe, and I love it unreservedly.
- Chihuahuaspin: Click the link. CLICK THE LINK. Watch the dog. Enjoy.
By Niklas Asker
OUR NEXT MIX IS ANOTHER SET OF BEATS, BEEPS AND BLOOPS FROM FORMER-EDITOR PAUL!
THE SECTION WHICH , THE SECTION WHICH HAS JUST FOUND OUT THAT IT IS GOING TO HAVE TO WORK ON NEW YEAR’S EVE AND WHICH IS UNREASONABLY ANNOYED ABOUT IT TBH, PT.2:
- Bookfinder: Oh this is a WONDERFUL resource, how had I not seen this before? Bookfinder is a platform which, basically, helps you find physical copies of any books you like, anywhere in the world. Search by title, author or ISBN number, tell it where you want it to look and BANG, it does some sort of magical stuff under the hood (oh, ok, it searches a bunch of different catalogue listings) and pulls you out results showing you where, I don’t know, you can pick up a particular edition of the Count of Monte Cristo in Spain. This is SO good – I tried it on a few authors I like whose early works are out of print and impossible to find in ‘mainstream’ shops and it worked brilliantly, which was on the one hand is good but on the other means that I now run the risk of developing a financially-ruinous old books habit, so. Really, really useful, and, even better than that, a great way of finding people who sell old and obscure and hard-to-find books in your country.
- Virtual Enigma: I have over the years featured a few attempts to present the Enigma Machine in digital form, and each has served to prove to me that I am very much not smart enough to understand or get my head around cryptography AT ALL. This version is no different – I still don’t really understand what the fcuk is going on, or what is happening to the numbers, or why I am being asked to flick this switch or press this button – but it is EVEN PRETTIER than the ones that came before it. Load up the site, click the enter button and MARVEL at the beautiful presentation of a, er, desk, on which sits said Machine; this is all 3d modeled in the style of a mid-00s videogame, so slightly boxy but reasonably clear, and the idea is that you can learn about the workings of The Machine (no, not that one) via seeing the actual, physical, mechanical workings of the kit. It’s all designed to be VERY tactile indeed – you really do have to click and drag to pull switches and move dials and lift covers and plug in…thingies (technical term), and it does a very good job of giving you a feel for how…mechanical this all ways, which is in itself sort-of an interesting way of thinking about early computing and, at heart, what computation is…it still, to be clear, didn’t teach me the first fcuking thing about codebreaking or WW2, but maybe that wasn’t the point.
- The Comedy Wildlife Awards: LOL LOOK AT THE FUNNY CRITTERS! The annual ‘misinterpreting animal behaviour for vaguely-anthropomorphised lols’ awards return! You might have seen some of these in the papers but this is the FULL LIST of finalists and there are some lovely ones in here – you are, of course, at liberty to select your own favourites, but know that if you don’t pick either the hypercharismatic Pixar snow eagle or the duck that looks like it’s having a fag then you are wrong and mistaken and know NOTHING of comedy or animals.
- Trafficvision: Do YOU enjoy the vague sense of schadenfreude of other people being stuck in interminable tailbacks? Would YOU like to be able to access that sense of schadenfreude whenever you like? OH GOOD! Trafficvision is a website granting anyone who wants it access to, apparently, 32,838 different traffic cameras around the world, so that any given moment you could be staring at a tailback in Jakarta before switching seamlessly to the free-flowing late-afternoon cars flowing along the Pacifc highway. Why? I HAVE NO IDEA MINE IS NOT TO REASON WHY. NB – you may be interested to know that, at the time of writing (845am), Junction 15 of the M25 is reasonably clear of traffic. GOD THIS IS THRILLING I FEEL SO ALIVE.
- Sovereign Brain Empire: Ok, so this is a link to an actual game that you would have to pay actual money to download and play, and I am not for a second expecting that any of you are going to want to do that (and, er, if you do, maybe don’t tell me?), but I think this is weird enough to share with you. Sovereign Brain Empire is an example of a particular type of PC game that has apparently been growing in popularity for a while now; to whit, fully-filmed visual novel-style adventures, in which you basically roleplay your way through a story by choosing dialogue options and the like to push forward the narrative; minimal interactivity, lots of ROMANCE, you get the idea. I want to share the premise with you in full, though, because WHAT THE FCUK? “This is a first-person interactive narrative game, set in a new era where humanity is governed by the Sovereign Brain AI. The social hierarchies here is determined by intelligence. Although you possess an adult body, you are classified by SB as a one-year-old baby, and adopted by Xiaoxiao and Lingling. In an era where all accept the system’s arrangements without a shadow of doubt, you’ll relish the supreme privileges of a “Monarch-level” potential baby. How can one be more ecstatic!!!” Ok, dodgy translation aside, WHAT THE FCUK? Also, PLEASE, if you can be persuaded, do click the link and watch the trailer at the top of the page because HOW AMAZING DOES THE ACTING LOOK??? AND THE SETS???? It does also *slightly* look like it might turn into bongo at any second, but I am reasonably certain it’s not That Sort of Experience – seriously, this is a whole genre! I would LOVE to read something explaining what the production process is like – I get the impression that this is the type of product where all the filming gets done in a day or so, leading to some…slightly low-rent-looking end results. Honestly, this is…weird.
- Adopt A Word: A few months ago I featured a grifty ‘adopt a word’ site which had been set up by some fcukers and asked people to pay actual cashmoney to, er, get a digital certificate of ownership – anyway, Erin Mckean writes to tell me that that link “is absolutely a grifter version of the stuff my nonprofit has been doing since 2015! Adopt A Word is at least supporting an online dictionary, rather than the pockets of whoever is behind this site.” SO! If you would like to ‘adopt’ a word and in so doing not only get a certificate and STICKERS but also, by so doing, support people working behind the scenes to maintain a high-quality, accessible, free online dictionary, which feels like A Good Thing, then you can do so at this link with my blessing. If anyone would like to adopt one on my behalf, I would like ‘sorry’ please, thankyou.
- Plinky: A place to save links! Basically this is A N Other ‘way to save and taxonomise and keep a record of all the stuff that you see online’ which is interesting and useful and you might want to come back to later’ which, fine, isn’t revolutionary but which IS useful AND THAT IS WHAT MATTERS (probably). I think this is iOS-only, which is moderately-annoying, but for the iPhone people amongst you then this might be useful.
- 52 Obsessions: Via Dense Discovery, this is a project by one Thomas Moes, who writes: “Each week or two for 52 times, I’ll design a custom page exploring a topic I’m currently obsessed about, giving me a mini design challenge. It should feel like a visual bonbon, a lovely little surprise every week, as a small antidote to the algorithmic curation.” The latest is a selection of hundreds of phots of the Amsterdam skyline, but previous instalments in the project (which is 16 editions in at the time of writing) include collections of old Sony designs, soviet-era timepieces and a bunch of other aesthetic, design-y things curated by someone with a very clear sense of aesthetic taste. Worth subscribing to for occasional doses of Something Nice and Interesting To Look At.
- Novelty Calculators: Do companies still hand our novelty gifts? Are paperweights still a thing? What about stress-relievers (lol, IMAGINE the size one of those things would have to be to touch the sides of 2025!)? I NEED TO KNOW! These questions were inspired by the discovery of this page which collects examples of novelty promotional calculators produced by various brands over the years, from the Coca Cola bottlecap calculator, which vaguely makes some sort of sense, to the Mild Sevens CIGARETTE BOX-SHAPED CALCULATOR(!!!!!) which I want so much I might have some sort of a small, desire-related stroke; in fact, all of these are wonderful and deserve to preserved in some sort of actual, physical, real-world museum somewhere. Hang on, there almost certainly is a museum of these somewhere, isn’t there? In Japan, most likely. WHY ARE THESE THINGS ALWAYS IN JAPAN? Come on Croydon, pull your finger out ffs.
- ESL Bits: I am always surprised and impressed when I hear from people who read Curios in their second language – I am…not-unaware of the fact that the style here doesn’t exactly make it easy reading for the native anglospeakers, let alone for people who might not necessarily be familiar with the full range of idiomatic idiosyncrasies that I choose to inflict upon your poor fcukers. STILL! Should you be in the market for a bunch of resources designed to help people who are learning English to, er, learn English, then you might find this site helpful – it’s seemingly a labour of love collecting all sorts of materials intended for people with a less-than-perfect grasp of the language, from essays to audiobooks, and while I’ve only scratched the surface here it looks like it contains a LOT and could be perfect for the ESL student in your life.
- Use It Travel: I LOVE THIS! “USE-IT provides maps made by young locals, not commercial, free and up-to-date. We are a European network of young map-makers sharing the best of tips to help you act like a local in our cities.” Honestly, this is really, really fun – it’s small, fine, and the selection of destination it covers is perhaps not the most-mainstream (Angers? Er, somewhere in Luxembourg? Nijmegen?), and I obviously haven’t actually tried any of the recommendations on here because, well, I haven’t been to any of these places and tested them out, but the maps are SO nicely-designed, and a cursory look suggests that the things they recommend are small and interesting and unusual and perhaps not quite the standard tourist fodder, and, honestly, if I were a YOUNG PERSON (oh god oh god) then this would make me want to spend whatever it is that an interrail ticket costs in 2025 and get on a train to Brno RIGHT NOW.
- The 2025 Small World Microphotography Competition: The annual celebration of photos of REALLY SMALL THINGS returns (well done Nikon by the way on sewing up the sponsorship of this and the comedy wildlife ones a bit earlier on, commendable bit of brand building there lads) with its regular selection of photos of, er, really small things – gnats! Cellular…things! MEMBRANES! My favourite is the bubbly fungus, but I would also quite enjoy having a large-scale print of this one because it is BEAUTIFUL.
- Risque Tabulations: I think this might be my favourite link of the week, and almost certainly my favourite small business discovery of the year: Risque Tabulations is a husband-and-wife accountancy team that specialises in running the books for people in the adult and adult-adjacent industries; per the blurb, “Running a business in the adult, kink, or alternative wellness space isn’t like running a traditional company. Financial systems aren’t always built with your world in mind, and finding a professional who understands — without judgment — can feel impossible. At Risqué Tabulations, we bridge that gap. Our clients trust us because we combine technical expertise with lived understanding of your industry. We don’t flinch at your business model, your revenue streams, or your creative way of working. Instead, we focus on keeping your books clean, accurate, and ready to support your growth.” Honestly, this is SUCH a good idea, but more than anything I love the combination of ‘serious business’ with ‘camp’ that the whole website embodies; I strongly advise you scroll down to the photo of Mark and Liz at the bottom which, I think, is probably unique in terms of ‘vibe’ when it comes to ‘pictorial representations of accredited finance professionals’. This is entirely SFW and I love it with all my heart.
- The Worst Sex Toy I Have Ever Seen: Sticking with the sex stuff, but I must warn you now that this link really does take you to a male sextoy whose design genuinely weirded me out when I first found it and which hasn’t got any less weird on future viewing/contemplation. WHAT THE ACTUAL FCUK? I don’t want to spoil it for you by explaining or describing it – know only that a) it’s probably nothing that you are thinking of; b) it’s weirdly not particular NSFW; and c) I find its existence conceptually-troubling to a huge extent. See what YOU think. NB – I haven’t clicked around rest of the site and so can’t reassure you that there’s not anything horrific lurking elsewhere on its pages, so, well, caveat emptor and all that.
- Bells & Whistles: A ludic palate-cleanser for you now sent to me by reader Haydn, who made the game and who writes that it “is a daily game where you have to fill a grid with bells or, you guessed it, whistles. The label for each row indicates how many bells should appear in that row and how they are grouped together whilst the column labels indicate the same but for whistles. You win by filling the grid ensuring you have matched all the labels. It’s a little like picross but with two symbols. There is a new game every day plus an easy mode for a quicker challenge.I toyed with a few different pairings such as chip and pin, Morecombe and Wise, but realised the first was very out of date (seems years ago since I last typed in a pin) and I couldn’t find good icons for Eric and Ernie.” I found this, er, a little challenging, but that is very much a ‘me’ issue rather than a game design issue, and I think it’s a really cute mechanic; also, if anyone can help Haydn with the Eric and Ernie thing then, well, get in touch.
- Freeze Trap: There are bouncing balls. You need to trap them by drawing lines. DRAW LINES, TRAP BALLS, EXPERIENCE TRANSITORY PLEASURE.
- The IF 2025 Winners: I featured the full list of entries to the Interactive Fiction contest this year, but the winners have been announced and they are listed here for you to play, and, honestly, if this is as cold and miserable and damp a weekend as I expect it to be then you could do worse than working your way through this list because, as always, there are some WONDERFUL pieces of storytelling in here and some really inventive uses of interactive fiction as a medium; you will need a VPN to access a lot of these if you’re in the UK because of stupid, poorly-drafted legislation, but that oughtn’t be a barrier to you exploring hours and hours of wonderful storytelling.
By Lana
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Asobi Station: Pretty sure that this is now entirely-defunct (RIP THE TUMBLR ECOSYSTEM I MISS YOU WE WILL NEVER SEE YOUR LIKE AGAIN), but I very much appreciate the aesthetic, collecting screenshots and gifs from old, obscure PS1/2-era titles, mostly Japanese, that won’t be familiar to you at all and yet whose aesthetic will speak to you in ways you perhaps won’t fully understand.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Meow Meow AI Art: Have you ever asked yourself ‘what if those utterly-unhinged ads for mobile games that were all the rage a few years back – you know, the ones that inevitably seemed to depict some poor woman and infant child having a series of indiginities being visited on them by a cruel and unfeeling world (while at the same time, in the mother’s case at least, wearing VERY revealing clothing despite seemingly-arctic temperatures) which could only be remedied by the medium of playing match-3 games – were reimagined but with, er, vaguely-sexy anthropomorphised cats as the protagonists?’ HAVE YOU???? Jesus, you sick fcuk. Still, weirdly, that is EXACTLY what this is, so consider your questions at least in part answered (but I have so many others).
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The Ballad of Ricky Hatton: We start this week with a brilliant piece by Tom Usher on the suicide of former boxer Ricky Hatton, which looks at the man’s death through the various lenses of boxing, modern masculinity, nearly two decades of austerity politics and the risible canard of the rise of ‘just talk it out, yeah?’ platitudinous w4nk about depression (particularly male depression). All of this is excellent, but this paragraph in particular struck me and struck with me, particularly in light of the recent rhetoric around ‘illegal asylum seekers’ and the question of who has the right to be part of the ‘deserving’ poor. Think about this the next time your workplace or client suggests some sort of lip service towards how ‘hard’ everything is, or runs a session about the importance of ‘talking about your feelings’, and realise that talk is cheap and what matters is doing something to address the material, social and mental conditions that lead people to this state: “This modern dream of Men’s Mental Health World – a sensitive, empathetic, supportive community – never stood a chance. The society we seem intent on creating is completely at odds with it. The eternal austerity politics of recent decades wants to dismantle it wholeheartedly. Many people have decided that a caring society is a frivolous, free handout. We relentlessly demonise people at the lowest end of society, the most vulnerable minorities, and it bleeds into how we treat each other every day. It leaks into how little we care for those in need, including suicidal men. It is hard and embarrassing to reach out, for fear of being a burden, a scrounger, a liability.”
- From The Frontline of the Battle of Ideas: Another New Statesman piece here, this one by Emily Lawford reporting from the recent ‘Battle of Ideas’ conference (otherwise known as ‘spinning the unsayable for the modern media machine’!) at which a bunch of charming right-wing ‘intellectuals’ gathered to debate the BIG IDEAS of the day, which, oddly enough, all seem to revolve around how everything bad that is going on is because of people who don’t look or sound like us. On the one hand, it feels like we have spent the past 10 years reading pieces like this one, reporting on what were once the fringes and are now very much the mainstream with a vague air of shocked amusement while totally failing to address any of the conditions whereby thinking like this finds a foothold, and maybe we ought, possibly, to be past the point of thinking articles like this do anything other than give bien pensants like me something to lol at; on the other, it includes stuff like this so keep it coming imho: “Coming out of the panel, I spoke to a 22-year-old blond man who said he was ethnonationalist. “Deport foreign criminals, unproductive foreigners, politically subversive foreigners,” he said. “I don’t think all non-British people need to leave the country.” His friend, who said he was of Indian heritage, smiled; “It’s a comforting thought,” he said. The pair thought Downes was “retarded”. They resented his suggestion that young people had a moral duty to get married. “I can barely shag in this city because it takes me 50 minutes to get home. I’m living in Zone 4 with my parents,” one said. “We need a government that’s going to give nice, sensitive young men loads of money.” I asked what he meant by sensitive young men. “You’re disposed towards poetry and philosophy and lofty gestures of true love,” he said. He then began describing the ethnic heritage of his exes. “I would want to marry a woman who has at least 50 per cent European ancestry,” he mused, like a Nazi Romeo.” AMAZING.
- Alive Internet Theory: Despite the popularity of the Dark Forest Theory of the internet over the past few years, I have over the past few months had various conversations with people about the desire for a slightly more hopeful, positive framing of the current ‘small’ web movement, one which doesn’t necessarily take its cues from a metaphor about small, vulnerable animals cowering in fear – Kris articulates it nicely in this essay, I think, as does Spencer Chang in this piece on what he is calling ‘Alive Internet Theory’ – it’s worth reading the whole piece as I like the direction it goes in, but the central question can be framed thusly: “Where can we sit together on the internet? Where do we go for a stroll? Where do we find the digital equivalent of the remote hot spring up in the mountains, or that hidden hike to the waterfall? How do we discover a new neighborhood, shelter under a bodega awning during a summer shower, sit quietly at a cafe and work among the chatter of strangers? We are all so online, yet being online feels so solitary. I can’t feel the people across the feeds from me. Social media is designed for consumption of content, distribution of branding, broadcasting of prestige, not spontaneous encounters or the warm, funny, and weird moments that happen when humans simply exist together. But what if we had the tools to reshape it? We could make our own public parks, cafes, bodegas, waterfalls, and mountains. We could carve out spaces that we inhabit and maintain, becoming active stewards rather than just users.” BONUS ADJACENT ESSAY! This came through just this morning by Sacha Judd, also talking about the need for tools to once again build community spaces online (because social media tools don’t do quite the same job) – this…this feels like a THING imho.
- Using AI Right Now: This is a super-useful guide by Ethan Mollick to what, as of October 2025, are the best-fit usecases for the various AI models out there, and, in general, a pretty useful ‘what can The Machine do’ primer for the normie audience; I think this is an excellent rule of thumb, and a good attitude to have with this stuff, regardless of where you personally sit on the ‘I want to sacrifice my firstborn to AI Cthulhu’ / ‘BURN THE EVIL MACHINE’ spectrum: “pick a system and start with something that actually matters to you, like a report you need to write, a problem you’re trying to solve, or a project you have been putting off. Then try something ridiculous just to see what happens. The goal isn’t to become an AI expert. It’s to build intuition about what these systems can and can’t do, because that intuition is what will matter as these tools keep evolving.”
- Going to the AI Stadium: This one is very much for the haters, though – an account of the reporter’s visit to the BMO Stadium in LA for a sports fixture and what it was like experiencing the layer of AI customer service that had been applied to the whole experience (SPOILER: it was sh1t and none of it worked very well and it was appreciably slower and less-good than the non-AI alternative would have been).
- The Call Centre Cull: I don’t mean to keep on including pieces about how The Machine is taking jobs – I don’t! Honest! – but I think it’s important to keep banging the drum about this, specifically the one that says (not exactly sure how a drum is meant to ‘speak’, fine, but work with me on this) “it does not matter what you think about AI and the opinions of people in the West and indeed the experience of people in the West are not the only ones that count, and it is important to look outside of one’s own borders and at some of the more vulnerable labour markets elsewhere to see how this stuff is going to materially impact the world and economies because OH BOY!”. Anyway, this is a Reuters piece about the entirely-predictable move by Indian companies to replace human call centre workers with AI assistants as soon as possible for the sake of a few crore here and there.
- A Zohran Interview: I have to say that I very much resent the fact that I know so much about a mayoral contest that is happening in a city I do not live in, do not love, and which is half a fcuking world away from me, but such is the lot of being an Online Person on the textual internet; you end up sharing it with a LOT of yanks, lots of whom are New Yorkers and LOTS of whom are big fans of Hot Political Sensation Zohran Mamdani – and so it is that I have finally been coerced into reading a profile of the man, who, yep, ticks all the boxes but whom the most interesting thing about is the fact that he is doing what Polanski here in the UK is doing and speaking of hope rather than fear and ameliorative possibility rather than hedging against the apocalypse and, you know, PEOPLE LIKE THAT!
- Everyone Is A Strategist: On the one hand, I really really liked this piece by Tobias Hess; on the other, I couldn’t help but notice that, er, I felt a BIT seen at times. Still! The central theme of this is that everyone wants to be a STRATEGIC GENIUS, talking about BIG PICTURE stuff and DEAD CATS and how the framing and the marketing of the thing has been the thing that we celebrate and are impressed by rather than engaging with the thing itself. Try disagreeing with this, it’s hard: “I can’t help but wonder if this wider interest in marketing is not a mere change in the quality or nature of ads. Maybe, it’s that in an alienated world mediated by digital platforms, the most interesting topic isn’t policy or culture—it’s attentional dynamics. Attention is the primary commodity that platforms are exploiting, and people know that this valuable resource is being wasted away. Thus it makes some sense that the consuming masses are seemingly giving some deep thought to the nature of that exploitation. The problem is, though, that people aren’t questioning this attentional theft itself (how awful and evil it is), but rather reflecting on its mechanics.”
- Antidepressants as Lifestyle Accessory: I have, I think, written here in the past about how discomfited I was when I realised that my little brother, then aged about 13, was talking about his relationship to ‘his’ depression, treating it like it was some sort of pet, some sort of weird tamagotchi, like Hughes’ black dog taken to an annoying, post-Pullman daemon-style extreme, and how I didn’t necessarily think that that sort of identification or relationship with a condition was necessarily…healthy? I have since been curious to witness the very clear degree to which engagement with medication is worn as some sort of signifier or badge of honour – you can’t fcuking breathe on certain bits of social media (Bluesky, obvs) without people self-consciously referring to their neurodivergence or shouting out their Lexapro girlies and, look, no shame! Normalise the fact that noone is ‘normal’! Etc etc! But, also, maybe don’t treat this sh1t as a badge of cool, because it’s literally no more socially acceptable (or at least SHOULD be no more socially acceptable) than teenagers showing off their ‘across not down’ self-harming scars in a ‘who’s more fcuked up NO I AM I AM SHUT UP I HATE YOU’-off.
- Deep Time: It’s slightly embarrassing how ignorant I am of aboriginal history – this project by ABC News in Australia is an excellent way of rectifying that ignorance, being as it is a wonderfully-detailed timeline of indigenous peoples’ histories going back AGES – seriously, the ‘we have been here 65,000 years’ detail is slightly mindblowing.
- The Human Cost of Gail’s: A note for the non-anglo readers here – ‘Gail’s’ in this context is ‘Gail’s Bakery’, a chain of middle-class bakers which has spread, poxlike, across the gentrified parts of London to the extent to which its arrival in a postcode is perceived as either a visit from God or a genuine harbinger of the apocalypse, depending on one’s personal attitude towards ‘people with children called ‘Bo’ and ‘Thea’ moving into the area’. Anyway, this is all about the way in which the chain’s expansion – and pursuit of profit, spurred by (and this may shock you!) perennial Curios-hate-recipients, the PRIVATE EQUITY VAMPIRES – has fcuked the chain’s staff, and how, as a result of the vicissitudes of politics (cf Brexit) lots of those people are workers from specific parts of India who are over here seeking employment. Super-interesting, partly as a look under the hood at the social economics of the high street, but also as a regular reminder that PRIVATE EQUITY IS EVIL AND ALL PRIVATE EQUITY PEOPLE WILL BE FIRST UP AGAINST THE WALL COME THE REVOLUTION (OR AT THE VERY LEAST SECOND AFTER THE VENTURE CAPITALIST CNUTS).
- How To Build A Medieval Castle: I was having a small moment yesterday as I occasionally do, contemplating what I might conceivably do were I to decide that, actually, spending approximately 13 hours a day attached to screens of various types is not, in fact, the way I wish to live out what I can reasonably expect to be another decade or so of life, that writing Curios is not in fact a sensible or worthwhile endeavour for a man in his mid-40s, and what alternative-shaped lives might be available to someone like me were I to choose to pursue them (the answer: none, sadly this is the shape of life that fits me and I have moulded it to my skeletal carapace and now it is so tight that I can barely breathe and never escape). Sadly a complete lack of any sort of practical skills means that I probably won’t be able to join the team of people described in this article, who are engaged in, er, building a full-scale replica of a medieval castle in France, using only techniques that would have been available to builders of the period. Why? WHY NOT?!?!?! This is SO interesting, but also throws up…quite a few questions about the society that exists around the project, and the circumstances that lead people to choose to dedicate, at the time of writing, ACTUAL DECADES OF THEIR LIVES to a building project that is very much still an ongoing work-in-progress. A warning for a particular type of middle-aged man: this may awaken some URGES within you.
- Test Driving the Flying Car: A decade or so ago I was doing some work for some, er, VCs (yes I am a hypocrite but, well, the money was ASTONISHING and I did literally nothing, so, basically, it was like stealing from the devil, or at least this is what I tell myself) and one of the companies they had invested in was a flying car shop, and I remember the various principles within the firm confidently predicting that these things would have a Vegas taxi license by the end of 2014…and, well, turns out lots of VCs are idiots, because a whole 10 years hence and we’re only now getting to the point where a guy from the WSJ can be insured to have a go on one. This is VERY scifi, and the video of it taking off is both amazing and gently-terrifying (it looks very much like a strong gust of wind and some robust architecture would see the vehicle crumple into a mini-Guggenheim with just minimal contact), but the details in there (about how there’s basically no way in hell that these things are every really going to get licensed, and they are only ever going to be rich person’s toys) did make me think that FCUK ME we have wasted a lot of time and money on a pointless gimmick for plutes. Again.
- Mapping Homs: A really interesting piece about place and memory and collective recollection, exploring the practicalities of running a workshop to try and get a sense of the layout and land usage of the Syrian city of Homs before it was devastated by years of Assad and the associated bombings and bombardments. “In another exercise, my colleagues and I spread out a blank writing surface, larger than one square meter. At the center we placed a drawing of the New Clock Tower. We asked the participants, “Starting from the Clock Tower, what do you remember of Homs? Can you re-draw the city from memory?” This was a difficult question to ask this group; some of the men were children when they left home. We encouraged everyone to draw and write freely, without holding back. The center of the map was a contested place. Some participants argued about the location of features. “No, no, this was here.” “Are you sure?” Others confidently drew the corners of the city they knew best, adding personal memories. “I had my first kiss here.” “My father died with a missile here.” “From here they [the military] dragged me like a dog.”…The strategy of the Assad regime was to prohibit the expression of social identities, and to use urban planning to enforce the domination, control, or marginalization of certain groups, before and during the war. People were allowed to say what sect they belonged to or where they lived, but they did not discuss how their identities impacted urban space and the built environment. So this workshop was the first time many of the participants had compared their experiences or perceptions with others. Nobody had intimate knowledge of the informal settlements that made up the majority of the city’s land, and they left those areas unmapped.”
- The Gypsy Life of Robert Louis Stevenson: This is a review by David Mason of a biography of Stevenson and it is, honestly, one of the best examples of the genre I have read in an age, mixing the author’s own knowledge with fragments of the text being reviewed to craft something that isn’t solely a critical appraisal of the book in question but it’s own, beautiful celebration of Stevenson’s life and those of his loved ones. Seriously, this is WONDERFUL and I previously had neither knowledge of nor interest in Stevenson and his life (philistine that I am). So good.
- The Angelicism Cult: On the one hand, part of me read this and thought ‘why should I give a fcuk about these self-absorbed idiot hipster cnuts?’; on the other, there’s something very ‘DOOMED YOUTH’ about the whole vibe of the piece, in a probably-not-accidental style, and I enjoyed the slowly mounting weirdness of it, the bleeding into irl from digital space and the fact that the central figure’s real name is, apparently, Jonty Tiplady.
- Cardiography: Ben Lerner is an irritatingly-talented writer; I remember reading ‘Leaving Atocha Station’ and regularly putting it down and just thinking ‘you FCUKER, you are so so good’ and feeling annoyed at how starkly reading his prose laid bare my own, er, intellectual…inadequacies. Now, though, I am far more comfortable with my own mediocrity and can read Lerner with nothing but pleasure – although this piece in which he writes typically-eloquently about the experience of having heart surgery, the times before and the times after and even the time during, gave me SUCH intense feelings of personal bodyhorrorfear that I once again had to stop on multiple occasions to get rid of the horrible ‘ohgodiammadeofmeatandboneandinsidethereisdampviscera’-fear that often engulfs me when I read things about THE BODY. Absolutely superb.
- Testosterone: I shared this online yesterday approvingly and someone rightly took me to task for my assessment of the women profiled here as being ‘later in life’ – in fact they’re as young as 40, all talking in the New York Times about how taking testosterone has been ‘transformative’ for them, not least their libidos which are described in WONDERFULLY purple terms; this whole piece is very funny, not always entirely intentionally, in part because of the whole tone which doesn’t seem to know whether to approve or not, to the…weirdly-sexist-coded subtexts about ‘male hormones’ and ‘male characteristics’…most of all, though, I laughed while reading this at the degree of internal cognitive dissonance that will be required of the UK’s famously trans-friendly columnist community when this inevitably hits here and they are forced to write about women taking male hormones as a positive rather than horrific thing for a change.
- The Goon Squad: Look, this is superb. Read it. I don’t care if you think ‘no, Matt, I don’t actually feel in the mood to read several thousand words about extreme masturbation amongst the terminally-online’, it is IMPORTANT and, honestly, perhaps the most ‘THIS IS THE WORLD WE HAVE WROUGHT’ thing I have read all week. You…you don’t need me to explain gooning, do you? I KNOW MY AUDIENCE! Anyway, this is brilliant and important and I commend it to you entirely: “If there is any coherent message to the sprawling folk-art practices of Goonworld, it is this: kill yourself. Not literally, but spiritually. Where mainstream porn invites the straight-male viewer to imagine himself as the man onscreen, gooner porn constantly reminds viewers that they are alone, that they are masturbating to porn because no one would ever deign to sleep with them. “Ruin your mind,” “go deeper,” “give up on life”: these are goon porn’s basic slogans, the movement’s rallying cries. Even NoodleDude—as tame a practitioner as one can find in this space, and whose productions a non-gooner might conceivably find, if not arousing, at least not actively terrifying—has adopted this attitude. In the introduction to his recent video “Follow Me,” a woman’s voice whispers ominously, or perhaps sexily, that “over two hundred ten million people worldwide are addicted to social media. You are one of those people. Keep scrolling. Further. Deeper. Forever. And ever. Submit. To porn. You can’t. Turn back.””
- Boxing As A Job: Our final longread this week is this piece in Defector, by Hamilton Nolan, about a night of Boxing in NYC; I’ve featured writing about this scene before, and this, like the last one, is just superb writing. I’ve long believed the boxing is the sport that gets the best writing done about it, whatever you say about tennis and DFW, and this is what I mean; perfect, practically, in every way: “Danny Garcia, a counterpuncher with thick dark eyebrows and a crazy dad, is one of the best welterweights of his generation. He’s been fighting most of the best guys for the past 15 years, and most of them, he beat. He has a click-clack automatic left hook, perfect 90 degrees off his shoulder, and with it he has knocked the hell out of many men. He smacked Erik Morales with a counter left hook that spun Morales around one way and then back the other way, like an unwinding tether ball. He caught the hapless Rod Salka with a left hook so mean, you suspected that Salka might be dead. It’s a beautiful punch, a signature punch, enough to float a whole career.”
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS !: