While I imagine that most of you delete this email unthinkingly every time it crops up in your inbox – no, really, I don’t mind, I know you’re busy and this is only the textual expression of my very soul you’re ignoring, don’t worry about it! – I like to imagine that there are at least one or two sickos who spend Fridays sweating anticipatorily as they eagerly await a freshly-culled selection of links to land in their laps. And so it is for them and them alone that I apologise for this atypical delivery time – I AM SORRY FOR FCUKING WITH YOUR ROUTINE, SICKOS!
Thing is, some very good friends of mine are getting hitched today and I need to leave the house in *checks* oh Jesus, an hour, fcuk, and as such I did the unthinkable and wrote the below on Thursday afternoon rather than getting up at 6am on Friday morning as is good and proper and traditional. If you note any difference in the general vibe, well, I am sorry – I did *try* and channel ‘hungover and reluctant’ to make it feel authentic, but I am uncertain as to whether it worked.
Anyway, I need to iron a shirt. Enjoy the links and see you in a couple of weeks – I am taking next week off because I have no intention of spending any time online this weekend.
Oh, and one last thing – VOTING IN THE TINY AWARDS SHUTS LATER TODAY (FRIDAY 25TH SEPTEMBER) SO IF YOU ARE YET TO JOIN THE LITERALLY THOUSANDS OF OTHERS IN CHOOSING THE BEST WEBSITE OF THE YEAR DO IT RIGHT NOW!
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can join me in wishing Luke and Andrew a very happy special day.
By Igor Moritz
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD PROBABLY BE OK WITH AI KILLING US ALL IF IT MEANT IT NEVER HAD TO HEAR ANY MORE INANE, ILL-INFORMED CHAT ABOUT THE LIKELIHOOD OF AI KILLING US ALL, PT.1:
- Truman World: One of the more interesting variants from the recent wave of AI-generated video experiments (yes, this is an AI link, you can skip it if you want but know that I think less of you for being INCURIOUS AND DOGMATIC) is this ongoing webtvseriesparticipatorygamething (I am hoping that this catches on as a universal category designation, so do feel free to use it yourselves whenever it feels appropriate to do so) which basically asks the question ‘if you start from the premise of the film The Truman Show but you, the audience, were able to direct what happened in the programme, do you think you would be able to engineer things so that Truman realised what was going on?’ – to which the answer is, obviously, ‘of course I fcuking would’, but this AI-generated version of Truman is…resistant to the truth, or so it seems from my having spent a good 10-15 minutes watching this interactive stream, in which anyone who logs on can submit prompts to the ‘director’, dictating what happens next in the video and then seeing how Truman responds. This is effectively just ‘collaborative madlibs TV’, which isn’t hugely different from some of the other infinite AI telly toys I featured the other week, but there are some interesting wrinkles here which I think point to some fun potential ideas and usecases for this; there’s a running tracker of Truman’s ‘suspicion’ level, and a feed of his internal thought processes that you can read – ok, fine, none of this stuff *really* seems to work properly, but the central concept is quite interesting imho, the idea of being able to construct gamified realities and narratives with a central character or cast whose emotional states you can see and react to and attempt to manipulate…which, also, now that I write it down does sound nakedly psychopathic. Still, it’s quite fun to fcuk with Virtual Truman and watch an uncanny valley simulacrum of a young Jim Carrey mug helplessly to camera as, I don’t know, “Liam Neeson appears to welcome Truman to Ireland” (a real prompt from just now). This isn’t in any way ‘good’, but it is very much a Curio.
- A Weird Little Room: Oh this is SO SO COOL. Click the link and it opens a small, pixelart room in what looks like…what, a submarine? There’s a porthole you can knock on, a record player you can play music on, some spaces for posters you can customise to select the art on the walls, a strange, scratched series of symbols on the desk in front of you which when you try and interact with them make it very clear that…someone doesn’t want you doing that AT ALL. If you pay attention you’ll notice there are arrows on either side of the screen which allow you to look around the space – do so and you will find…other things. I don’t want to explain this too much as the slow discovery is part of the fun, but if you’re one of those weirdos who has two (or, heaven forfend, MORE – what the fuck are you doing with your computers, you weirdos?) monitors then keep this open in your spare for a while, interact with it every now and again, and, well, just enjoy. This is BEAUTIFULLY done – honestly, the little fish in the aquarium is just adorable – and there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye. Spend some time with this, it’s rather beautiful I think.
- Ceramic Beats: Yes, I know, you have seen ALL OF THE INTERNET and as such an in-browser beatmaker is not NEW or COOL or EXCITING enough for you – leaving aside the fact that you’re reading an internet newsletter about websites and that as such the word ‘cool’ should never again pass your lips (as ever, I wonder to myself why it is that I feel the need to argue with an entirely-invented reader while I write this; a more psychologically healthy man than me might bring it up in therapy, but, well, this IS my therapy) – but this one is, I promise, really fun. It takes objects from the ceramics collection of (I think) the Met in New York and lets you make beat patterns using the sounds that they would make if struck with an object – OK, fine, there’s limited detail about where the sounds come from (I am…reasonably certain that there is no sound library in existence which features the sounds of ancient pottery being dinger with a ballpeen hammer) and I don’t think it’s an ‘official’ site, but, in common with the best and most fun versions of these things, it’s actually quite difficult to create something that doesn’t sound…pretty good, and the tone of the resulting beats is pleasingly distinct from the standard ‘doof-dum-doof-doof’ (yes, that is what ‘beats’ now sound like, canonically) that you get from these drummachines. Someone make the Terracotta Mixtape using this, please.
- Private Social Media: I have seen a few variants on this over the years, and my response has always been ‘no, noone needs this, what is it for and why?’, and while I still broadly feel like this it also feels like the general ‘no, I don’t post anything anymore because why would I, it is pointless and makes me sad’ position has grown to a point where maybe there’s now a market for something small, personalisable and Just For You And Your Mates. This platform’s called ‘A-Side’, and as far as I can tell it basically lets you spin up a small, invite-only mashup of Insta and X, letting you post photos and updates, comment and ‘like’, with a chronological feed and no ads and no algo and JUST YOUR MATES’ POSTS – which, ok, fine, you could probably do 90% of this in WhatsApp or Signal or Telegram or a Discord channel but WhatsApp is Meta, Signal and Telegram and Discord are very much ‘platforms that will make normies feel weird’ (I am assuming here that you’re all elder-millennials at least and so therefore, like me, find Discord to be too unspeakable to contemplate), and so if you want something for friends and family to bring back the Good Old Days of Social (they were never that good! You were just younger!) then this might be of interest.
- La Revoltosa: Ordinarily I wouldn’t care to feature the website of a soft drinks manufacturer from Spain, but MY WORD is this a lovely and cheering and charming and generally just sort of happymaking piece of webwork. Seriously, click the link and scroll and try not to be charmed by all the cute little touches and flourishes – the supercool mascot lady! The completely pointless bubbles floating up the page! The really beautiful way it integrates video! The little animation where the mascot shows you her phone! – and you will FAIL because it is all just incredibly cute and beautifully put together and, generally, a lot of fun. Still have no desire to drink their carbonated sugarwater, but I concede that that is a ‘me’ thing and probably nothing to do with the efficacy of their branding.
- Secure British Future: Over the past few years I have sort of assumed that the British tend to confine their Periods Of Massive, Hysterical Racism and Obsessional Hatred of Migrants(™) to the Summer months when the weather is high – it seems, though, that we’re now pivoting to making it an all-year-round pursuit (congratulations to the UK media, couldn’t have done it without you!). In that spirit, then, let me present to you a genuinely mad, massively racist website which is devoted to attempting to persuade white people from the UK to move to Northern Ireland to, er, preserve Britishness. There is, as anyone with even a cursory understanding of the history of Northern Ireland will grasp, Quite A Lot Going On Here, not much of it wholly coherent – but if you take a moment to read the FAQ you will quickly understand that the only real motivation behind this genuinely-fcuking-batsh1t website is MASSIVE RACISM; seriously, it literally says: “We’d far rather have English than leave space for Africans!” just in case you were in any doubt as to what sort of people they are trying to appeal to here. Beautifully, one of the questions also asks ‘will we be safe in Northern Ireland when the UK Government introduces conscription?’ and, honestly, I don’t even know where to start with that one. Honestly, I wouldn’t ordinarily bother making you aware of this sort of racist bilge, but this was sent to me by a mate who found it on the football365 discussion forums, and, well, I think it’s worth being aware of the sort of mad, hateful sh1t that is being openly discussed this days because FEELS FCUKING BAD MAN.
- Curses and Blessings: Via the wonderful Kris, this is a lovely little site where anyone can submit a curse or a blessing they wish to bestow; visitors can see all the curses and blessings and upvote those they think most worthy of being enacted. “A spell does not rely on the infrastructures that have already failed us. A spell makes desire real, fulfills it, not through the depletion of money or gas, but through the most elemental of currencies — a gesture. The accumulation of gestures, a physical insistence, is what empowers the spell. This site is a crowdfunding platform for such repetition, and in turn, for magic. Here, you will see a range of curses and blessings, from the premodern era to present day. Sources include Greco-Roman curse tablets, Chinese spirit tablets, the Akkadian Maqlû incantation text — and potentially, you.” The blessings are cute, as you would expect, but the curses are where the real gold lives – WOW people are inventive. Some of these are beautiful, some are silly, some are…very, very pointed, and I could read them for hours. This, for example, is a powerful collection of words: “I hope you become transparent. To yourself and everyone around you. I hope you bear the consequences. I hope your neglect comes back to you two-fold. I hope your art turns to dust and that dust settles in the stagnant and narrow crevices of your life. I hope life teaches you the lessons you need to learn.”
- All The Katamari Models: Would you like an online archive of all the 3d models from famed, beloved, “ingest everything in the world into your gigantic ball of accumulated mass”-simulator Katamari Damacy (and its sequel)? OF COURSE YOU WOULD, YOU ARE NOT MADE OF STONE! Thankfully someone’s seen fit to make such a thing accessible to everyone – and all the 3d models downloadable, so if you’ve ever had an incredible creative idea that has been stymied by your inability to access thousands of detailed 3d models of objects as diverse as christmas trees, bridges and the entire continent of North America then REJOICE FOR YOUR PAIN IS OVER.
- Playboy’s Teenage Sex Survey: I feel it important to point out here that it would be unseemly for me, a middle-aged guy in the UK, to take a particular interest in the sexual habits of North American teenagers, and that the reason I am including this link is because I thought the presentation of the data and the design of the webpage interesting – is…is this me protesting too much? Hm. Anyway, this is a nice bit of dataviz and presentation by Playboy – I quite like the way it invites viewers to speculate as to the results for particular questions before revealing the data, for example – although some of the framing struck me as…a bit odd. Is there something noteworthy about the fact that 73% of the surveyed teens had “no anal sex, in the last three months”? Is that noticeably different from the non-GenZ-population? Anyway, if you want some sadmaking topline stats then how about “34% of young men say porn completely satisfies their sexual desire” – CHEERING, EH?
- Jack McNamara: You may recall Jack’s name from a Curio from earlier in the year, in which he made a full VHS video (and a website to host it online) to try and secure sponsorship for the Sydney Marathon from clothing brand Pit Viper – Jack has now updated his personal portfolio website and it is charming, all 8-bit game-themed and generally a nice example of creativity that doesn’t take itself (or its subject) too seriously. It’s worth looking at the Pit Viper case study too, as the rest of the story is really quite cute.
- What Is Jev?: This week’s BIG BUZZY HYPETRAIN in the AI world has been Jev. “What is Jev and why should I give a fcuk?”, I hear everyone with more of a life than me shout in unison. Well, per my friend Martin who is smart and a lot more technical than I am, Jev is, basically, “your standard LLM, but instead of walls of text, it generates a “decision” from a set you give it. if the set is “options a) through i)“, it will pick one and attribute the confidence in that decision, and the others it didn’t pick. if the output options are “this is the legal set of moves you can make in doom” and the input “this is the current state of doom”, it will pick the next move for doom.the main reason why folks are excited about it is: 1. it’s cheap, and 2. it’s fast.” SO THERE YOU GO! The main link here takes you to a list of resources, posts and the like that show you what the kit can do – this is interesting less from the point of view of this as a specific technology than it is as another indication of ‘ways to think about how you can use this stuff’ – Jev doesn’t let people do anything new per se, it just helped focus people’s thinking in specific directions. Anyway, this is how you get AI to manage live systems based on a set number of available actions and a variety of input datasets, should you have ever wondered how you might go about doing such a thing.
- Straw Page: Oh this is nice – ok, fine, ‘simple, retro webpage builders’ are not a new thing and Neocities has been around for a while now, but Straw Page, sent to me by its creator Osman, is a cute variant on the theme and seems to be particularly easy to use; per his email, “It’s a site maker, fully drag and drop with no AI, and more than 2 million personal sites have been made on it. Mostly gen z. A pretty typical example: https://ahona.straw.page. The vibe is very early-internet maximalism. Diary pages, shrines for favourite artists, that kind of thing. Feels like a reaction to years of clean link-in-bio pages.” If you’re in the market for a personalised homepage and you find Neocities a bit fiddly and Squarespace a bit too sad, maybe this will suit you?
- Metamorphosis: It’s been a long time coming, but New York richkid INTERNET ART PROJECT PRANKSTERS MSCHF (see Curios passim, ad nauseam) have finally evolved into their final form – very expensive creative agency available for hire by the world’s biggest brands! Here, they’ve been engaged by Toyota to make two custom versions of their Lexus brand cars, neither drivable, which are being displayed at a gallery in New York Friday-Saturday and which I imagine will be auctioned afterwards. I think this is probably the last time I will feature a MSCHF project in here – they will be DEVASTATED! – as they have now crossed the advermarketingpr rubicon, but it was fun while it lasted and, credit where it’s due, they really have been some of the most successful viral marketers of the past decade (if by ‘successful’ you mean ‘good at getting into the feed of appalling advermarketingpr hipsters and ‘tastemakers’ and, er, webmongs).
- Book Corners: Would you like a website which helps you find booksharing initiatives and small public libraries around the world? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! You can browse a world map or search by address, and having just tried the latter it threw up half a dozen within half a mile of my house and as such you can consider this Curios Endorsed.
- Sequence: Simple, but super-easy to use, this is a little digital comics/zines maker which lets you upload a series of images, add captions to them and then publish them as a sort of minimalist panel-by-panel sequential art…thing. I think there’s something very cool about the way in which the simplicity of the interface and the resulting lofi visual style of the outputs encourages you to think hard about the images and accompanying words, and the sequence you put them in, and I think you could make something quietly rather beautiful with this were you, er, more creative and talented than I am.
- Posty: I think this was also via Kris – THANKS KRIS! – but wherever it’s from it’s a lovely project. Upload a photo, add a caption, add a message, add an email address you want to send it to and then hit send; your message will arrive at its destination between 7-14 days hence, depending on when the server decides to send it. Utterly pointless, fine, but I think there’s something lovely about the delay inherent in the medium, and this is significantly more homebrew and lofi about this than other variants on the theme I have seen recently. I would really like to receive images like this – postcards from someone else’s past that say, simply, “I was thinking of you at this place and time” – and maybe you know people who would like that too. Worth saving on your phone imho.
- The Skybrary: What is The Skybrary (other than a really great name)? LET ME EXPLAIN: “SKYbrary is an electronic repository of safety knowledge related to flight operations, air traffic management (ATM) and aviation safety in general. It is also a portal, a common entry point, that enables users to access the safety data made available on the websites of various aviation organisations – regulators, service providers, industry.” Absolutely perfect for anyone who has ‘planes’ as their special interest, or indeed anyone with an almost-fetishistic fascination with plane crashes and associated events (you weirdos, you PERVERTS).
- Ptree: Have you ever thought to yourself, “you know what I want? I want an independent tree of life reference connecting scientific classifications, organism traits and ecological relationships” then click this link and bask in the knowledge that you can finally die fulfilled. Honestly, I don’t really understand what is going on here other than it seems to be some sort of taxonomy of every single species ever in the world and if you are someone who’s always wanted to explore the exciting world of ‘mollusc variants’ then it is entirely possible that you may never leave this website.
- Street Photography Awards 2026: I have, apparently, featured these awards once before (in 2021, as you obviously ALL remember), but for some reason I had no recollection of them at all – still, there are some corking images on here and while the winners featured on the landing page are all ace I would encourage you to take the time to look at the wider ‘shortlist’ pages for each of the categories as there are some wonderful images and a really interesting series of interpretations of what ‘street’ photography can and should be.
By Ivan Lozano
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD PROBABLY BE OK WITH AI KILLING US ALL IF IT MEANT IT NEVER HAD TO HEAR ANY MORE INANE, ILL-INFORMED CHAT ABOUT THE LIKELIHOOD OF AI KILLING US ALL, PT.2:
- Solitaire Alone Together: Longterm maker of fun, frivolous and conceptually ace multiplayer website toys Nolen Royalty (he of ‘1 Million Checkboxes’ fame, amongst other things) is BACK, with another perfectly-realised little experiment into how it feels to exist alongside other people on the web. Solitaire Alone Together is a simple premise – play a game of solitaire, in your browser. The only gimmick is that while you play you will also be able to see windows in which other, anonymous people somewhere online are playing the game alongside you RIGHT NOW, creating a shared, ephemeral moment from a traditionally, er, solitaire-y (sorry) pursuit. This is simple-but-lovely, 100% ART and, I promise, it feels…different playing Solitaire alongside others vs entirely on your own, for reasons I can’t wholly explain. I love this, put it in a gallery you cowards.
- Three Body Orbits: Ok, so this site is a *touch* Claudeslop-y, for which apologies, but the central conceit is quite cool and some of the visualisations rather beautiful, so I will give it a pass. You will, of course, be INTIMATELY familiar with the concept of the ‘three body problem’ in physics, whether by dint of being a massive numbers nerd or a massive scifi nerd – this is a collection of visualisations of possible orbits in a three-body planetary configuration (presuming objects of identical mass, etc), which you can see as animations. “Three point masses attracting each other under Newtonian gravity have no general closed-form solution. Almost every starting arrangement ends in a chaotic dance and, eventually, an escape. Hidden in that chaos are periodic solutions: arrangements where all three bodies return, after one period, to exactly the positions and velocities they started with. This site collects the ones that have been found and published, and lets you watch each of them run.” Some of these are BEAUTIFUL, in that very specific maths-y way you get with a particularly-pleasing spirograph; were this 2021, each of these would have been available to buy as an NFT and why don’t we all breathe a collective sigh of relief that whatever else might be going on we’re not trying THAT sh1t any more.
- Plethora: Hm, I’m not quite sure what the *point* of this is, if I’m honest; effectively, Plethora functions as a website that effectively works as a portal where people can explore/upload AI-generated works, described on the platform as ‘Bits’ – per its creator, who emailed me with the link, “The product has some insane games, art, interactive music, educational material, etc. I think you and the readers might really enjoy.” I can’t speak for you, but in theory the idea of an environment in which I can explore other people’s AI experiments is not-unappealing to me (not least as it means I can stop spending time on X where I otherwise have to trawl to find these things), but I question whether there’s enough good stuff being made to create a viable and vibrant enough ecosystem around which a community or audience can form…still, if you’re curious and want to keep an eye on what people are building with The Machine then this could be worth a look.
- Scrolled: Does the sentence “reading reinvented for the scrolling generation” fill you with joy? No, I can’t imagine it does, but that’s where we are with Scrolled, a product which describes itself thusly: “the world’s first AI smart-scrolling platform that transforms books into scrollable, bite-sized learning feeds. We make reading feel like social media – but smarter.” AHAHAHAHAHA *cries* AHAHAHAHAHA *cries some more* dear God we are going to stupid ourselves into extinction, aren’t we? WHY ARE WE REINVENTING SOCIETY TO CATER FOR THE LAZIEST AND STUPIDEST PEOPLE ALIVE??? Look, I get the idea that democratising access to information is good, but I also fundamentally reject the idea that you can make, I don’t know, the Nichomachean Ethics easily digestible by turning it into a selection of six-second vertical videos. Does this make me a terrible snob? Gah, sorry, I don’t care. Anyway, the deal is that you can upload any text you like – PDFs, docfiles, whatever – and this will turn it into bitesize, scrollable chunks that you consume like TikToks or reels…because, famously, these are media formats that people concentrate REALLY REALLY HARD on. Sometimes I think we deserve to die.
- Northmail:I am aware that I am in a minority in not finding email an annoying, painful, lifesucking timesink; most people, I know, hate it with a passion, hence the rise of a seemingly-infinite number of platforms and services which aim to do away with it, literally none of which have ever worked and which have only served to add additional, annoying layers to the communications millefeuille (yes, that’s right, THE COMMUNICATIONS MILLEFEUILLE!!! What of it?). If you find email RUBBISH and ANNOYING, you might be interested in this spin on it, which is basically a layer on top of Gmail which will let you effectively filter your inbound into five thematically-distinct inboxes, based around the following content ‘verticals’ – newsletters, conversations, orders, receipts and plans. Which, in theory, sounds genuinely useful, although as ever with stuff like this a cursory minute spent thinking about the practicalities of this stuff reveals a lot of fuzz and grey at the intersections between the categories; it will be how the system deals with said fuzziness that determines how useful it is, but I can see this being appealing for a Certain Type of Inbox Owner.
- Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2026: BEAUTIFUL PHOTOS OF THINGS IN SPACE! My pick of the pics is the slightly-terrifying Unicron-esque (iykyk) image of the sun, but browse the selection of gorgeous shots, feel INCREDIBLY small and insignificant in the face of all of this galactic splendour and, as ever, pick your own!
- Every Neuron: You know how they have mapped the brain of a fruit fly? Well this is a really nicely done visualisation-cum-explainer (important to hyphenate that correctly) by one Federico Guardabrazo which talks you through What It All Means and how they managed to ENCODE A LIVING CREATURE’S BRAIN, talking you through each bit of the brain and telling you what it does and how it works – a feat which the more I think about it becomes more and more terrifying, but which I am going to try not to dwell on because otherwise this edition of Curios would remain unfinished while I gibbered futurephobically in the corner of my kitchen.
- Poster Prompts: Before you get the pitchforks out, by the way, can I just confirm that my including this isn’t meant to suggest that I encourage the use of AI for posters, etc, nor that I HATE graphic designers – it’s just that I found it interesting, promise. Anyway, given the growth in prevalence of both AI-generated posters (there are – I counted yesterday – some 7-10 in the 200 metres between the tube and my flat, just to give you an idea) and articles about the prevalence of AI-generated posters, I found this post by one John Hartnup really interesting; in it, he explores all the different sorts of art styles and design templates that are accessible using AI with only a little bit of thought and effort – some of the examples here look genuinely great, and if you think you’d IMMEDIATELY be able to tell a machine-created bit of flyer design based on the stuff here then, well, I think you’re lying. What’s also interesting is that he’s shared prompting instructions for each of the different examples he showcases here, which makes this a really useful resource should you be someone who needs to make a bunch of posters, can’t afford a designer and is too personally Helen Keller-ish when it comes to design to get busy with Canva or Photoshop yourself. LOOK I AM NOT ENDORSING THIS I AM MERELY ACKNOWLEDGING THAT NOT EVERYONE CAN AFFORD TO PAY SOMEONE TO DESIGN POSTERS AND NOT EVERYONE CAN MAKE GOOD STUFF WITH DESIGN SOFTWARE FFS, PUT DOWN THE PITCHFORKS.
- WellWorn: A subReddit showcasing physical objects which are displaying extreme signs of wear-and-tear. These are all golden, but some of the chopping blocks are INSANE (also, I love the fact that there is a pinned post at the top of the sub saying, politely but firmly, “do not attempt to approach anyone posting on here about buying their old shoes, etc, for your weird fetish purposes”).
- Five Dollars: Fine, this is only applicable to the US – or at least the specifics of it are – but as a quick and easy ‘this is why everything feels expensive now’ explainer it’s very effective. The site does one thing – shows you how much $5 was worth in terms of purchasing power at various points in time, going back to 1971 – and it’s genuinely slightly horrifying scrolling down and getting to the ‘equivalent purchasing power’ section of the site and realising that five bucks could once buy you over 60 eggs. Fine, you wouldn’t have wanted to use it to buy over 60 eggs, but you *could* have done. Can someone make this for the UK please, I would like to spend some time crying and wishing that I hadn’t fcuked my career so spectacularly over the past 15 years.
- 10pm: We are, everyone appears to have decided, in a CRISIS OF SEX! Noone is fcuking enough, or they are fcuking the wrong way, or the wrong people, or they are not enjoying it enough, or enjoying it too much (sorry, it’s hard to keep up), and now, thank GOD, someone has worked out that the way to fix this situation and get us all boning like beautiful teenagers again is…A CARD GAME FOR COUPLES!!!! Honestly, while I wouldn’t ordinarily include a link just to rag on it (well, not that often anyway), this made me laugh a LOT – from the slightly-AI nature of the website copy (“The best relationships are not the ones where the spark stays the same; they’re the ones where you keep choosing to explore it” – can you explore a spark? I am…unsure), this one made me laugh a lot – partly because the idea that a sexual rut can be addressed simply via the medium of some lightly-spicy prompt cards, but in the main because of the chutzpah of trying to flog a ‘these cards will FIX your fcuking!’ deck while at the same time giving not one clue – NOT ONE! – about the sort of things that will be on the cards. Look, maybe this works! Maybe! Equally, though, if a solid 30% of the cards advocate trying urolagnia as a means of ‘finding the spark again’ then I feel it important that potential buyers be told because, well, not everyone’s into p1ssplay (NB – I am not suggesting that this is all about p1ssplay, more using it as a potentially-illustrative example…I probably could have used one that wasn’t about p1ss, on reflection, but here we are).
- 442 Goals: Can you pick a full 11-a-side football team from the entire history of everyone who’s ever played in the Premier League and have their combined career topflight goals tally add up to 442? No, of course you can’t, you would need to be some sort of crazy savant – but if you’d like to try then here is a game that will let you do JUST THAT.
- Factmap: Can YOU match the facts to the geographical location they occurred? I have no fcuking clue, obviously, but if you want to find out then try this game, sent to me by its creator Rémi Andrivet – I rather like this, it’s a cute idea and just compelling enough to be a potential addition to your daily puzzle diet.
- Lobster: Ooh, this is really cute and I like the fact that it doesn’t really look like any other similar trivia-type games out there. Per its maker, Eduardo Menezes, “the goal is to figure out as many languages as possible, one word at a time, by looking at their translations. As someone who’s worked in advertising, whenever I needed to name a product or service, I had this habit of going to Google Translate and checking how that word looked in a bunch of different languages – partly for inspiration, partly to avoid picking something harmless in my language but problematic in another. Then I thought: what if that were a game? So, with some help from friends and a bit of vibe coding, I created Lobster is Lobster…The idea is for it to be a genuinely hard game, because it’s a tricky subject. But I did everything I could to make it accessible to as many people as possible.” This is really rather fun, nicely-designed and potentially genuinely quite useful from the point of view of broadening your international vocab a bit – THANKYOU EDUARDO FOR SENDING IT TO ME!
- Wok Hei: our final miscellaneous link this week is, yes, pure Claudeslop – BUT! It’s genuinely fun, works properly on mobile and is a Real Game that actually sort-of functions from a ludic perspective. You are a chef – your job is to CHOP THINGS and STIR THINGS and the like (if you’ve ever played Cooking Mama or similar titles this will be…familiar), and you do this by tapping and swiping rhythmically while the not-unpleasing graphics depict your successes and failures in the kitchen. While this is ENTIRELY derivative, it’s the first one of these that I feel has been entirely-vibecoded which actually works as a game…which, ok, fine, you might think that this is the coming apocalypse and you may be right, but it’s also worth being aware of What Is Possible and What Is Coming, and it turns out that The Machine can do ‘fun’ now, so, er, make of that what you will.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Offscript Oud: Would YOU like a selection of facts about the fragrance Oud, accompanied by almost-entirely-unrelated imagery, all presented like a sort of aesthetic moodboard meme page? YES YOU WOULD! No, I didn’t expect to either, but for some reason this charmed me to an unusual degree.
- Dance of Death: NOT A TUMBLR! In fact, an INCREDIBLY deep and comprehensive website investigating the historical concept of the ‘dance of death’ which began in the 15th Century but then spread throughout Europe – look, this may not be a Tumblr but it has SUCH Tumblr vibes – THE SCROLL BAR IS A FCUKING BONE FFS – that it deserves its place in this section.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Vijay Sarathy: Sarathy is a photographer from India, who captures some genuinely glorious shades and colour gradients in their pics; the feed is a delight, and a world away from what is usually presented as ‘Indian Photography’.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Authoritarian Nationalism in Birmingham: No, wait, come back! I promise this is a lot more interesting than the (admittedly very dry) headline makes it sound – this is a really comprehensive analysis by David Stark of the ‘Raise the Flags’ movement in Birmingham over the past year or so; how it grew, how it mobilised and how it was countered by effective action on the ground by local residents who were determined not to let ethnonationalism take hold in their city. The parallels with the past few weeks and the Patriot Platform stuff is hard to ignore – not least some of the stuff about the police and its response to ‘protests’ (“This police’s non-intervention – or, at times, active co-operation – contributed to the movement’s claim to legitimacy. Repeated ‘operations’ without significant state sanction or interference have allowed the participants to reinforce the legitimacy of their claims to be lawful representatives of ordinary public sentiment. This was invaluable PR for a movement simultaneously portraying itself as persecuted outsiders and as authentic representatives of ‘the people’”) – but there’s a hopeful tone to the analysis in terms of the effectiveness of on-the-ground mobilisation by residents to push back against both the confected narrative and its physical manifestation (flags, etc); it is, though, slightly astonishing that this sort of analysis can be delivered by Some Bloke (apologies to David, but you know what I mean) while seemingly being beyond the wit of government, law enforcement or Big Media.
- Muse: While you may not like it, the download numbers for Meta’s ‘Muse’ AI agent from the US (it’s been top of the download charts on iOS and Android since launch, on and off) suggests that agentic AI might be about to become mainstream; aside from how incredibly fcuking annoying this is set to make everything (no, really – just take a moment to think about a) how bad most people are at running relatively constrained IT systems; and b) how annoying most people are. Now combine a with b and multiply it by ‘a system that is very unconstrained and which noone really understands properly’, and enjoy how rubbish everything is going to get very soon), it’s also worth thinking about some of the potential positives from a consumer point of view. The ‘this is going to be GREAT!’ viewpoint can be found at the main link, in which Eli Tan at the NYT writes about his experience using Muse and how genuinely game-changing he found it; for a contrarian point of view, and one which chimes significantly more with my own personal (limited) exploration of agentic systems, we turn to Ryan at Garbage Day, whose main argument I am going to reproduce in full because, well, PREACH: “When I booted up Muse for the first time, however, I suddenly had no idea what I was meant to do with it. This is actually not a common feeling when it comes to using a new app. In fact, I’d argue, the continued existence of Silicon Valley is predicated on making sure that a new user never feels that way. So I asked Muse what it could do. It immediately asked for read/write permissions on my Google Suite, offering to sort my email inboxes, add things to my calendar, or organize my Google Drive. If I wasn’t interested in that, it told me it could shop for me, book dinner reservations, or, if I gave it read/write access to my computer, even do tasks on my laptop. But I didn’t need to do any of those things yesterday. And I definitely didn’t need to do any of them so badly that I was willing to risk it deleting something important, hallucinating an email to someone, or buying me something I didn’t want. So I sat at my computer, clicking around to find something for it to do, and eventually just gave up. Make no mistake, I am a busy person lol. I’m the CEO of a small business and that business primarily runs on email. I have two inboxes that both regularly receive around 100 emails a day. I live in a big city and go out to eat a lot. And I like to think I have a pretty robust social life. But I don’t mind the minor inconveniences of 21st century life and, in some cases, actually enjoy them. I like grocery shopping and picking out restaurants and, if you can believe it, booking my own travel.” BUT! I appreciate that I am definitely not ‘normal’, and, having met Ryan and gone for a beer with him, he probably isn’t either, so who the fcuk knows who’s going to be right here.
- Public Positions: I am very bored of hearing people talk about Ed Sheeran and Macklemore and That Fcuking Tour, but I thought this piece in the LRB was a decent precis of the issues at play and why, basically, the framing of the debate is bullsh1t: “The incident fits a broader pattern in the discourse around ‘free speech’ and ‘cancel culture’: whatever comes from the top down is freedom; whatever comes from the bottom up is bullying and censorship. When Macklemore is dropped at the behest of the billionaire stadium owner Robert Kraft, it’s an exercise of the freedom of businesses to ‘demonstrate their values’ by deciding whom to platform. But when Ed Sheeran’s fans decide not to buy tickets to his performances, or even demand refunds, it’s bullying, mob behaviour. Since most people are not billionaires and do not own stadiums, they can exercise meaningful power only collectively. The collective exercise of power must therefore be demonised.” Two additional points here, if I may; a) I do not give a fcuk what Ed Sheeran thinks about Gaza; I do, though, think that his capitulation to a billionaire about who can be on his tour shows that he sucks; and b) the piece opens by quoting (unfavourably) the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, asking “Is it for people who are singers, songwriters, artists to be taking public positions on very, very controversial, difficult, complicated issues?” – a question, oddly, NEVER asked of ‘artist’ JK Rowling who has spent the past five years or more taking VERY public positions on a very very difficult and complicated issue indeed.
- AI and the Gambling Industry: Or, “how the gambling industry uses machine learning and other techniques to basically laser-target offers at those gamblers who they can statistically determine are more likely to make losing bets”, which even by the standards of the gambling industry and even by the standards of the US gambling industry is such a spectacularly-awful thing to do…and yet! This is a VERY depressing read, and if you want to feel worse then you can compound your misery by following it with this cracking little piece which gently explains all the ways in which AI and algos are working RIGHT NOW to screw you out of money and make your life marginally worse as a consumer (and, by extension, to gouge you for greater profit for huge companies who are making more margin than ever before).
- The Thoughtfluencer Epidemic: On the plague that is ‘explainer videos delivered by people holding small mics against greenscreen backdrops via the medium of shortform video’ and how it’s just another facet of the cReAt0R 3c0NoMy!!!1111zzzzzzzz, and why it is happening – and why, fundamentally, it’s junkfood knowledge: “All of this explainer content still exists on platforms where becoming the “face” of a fact, concept or opinion is often rewarded over citing sources, acknowledging past work or building transparently on the ideas of other authors, researchers and thinkers. My For You page, for example, has recently been feeding me explainer videos where the creator, tiny mic and all, flashes up a screenshot from an AI chatbot to substantiate an engagement-grabbing claim. Sometimes I recognise the article or research the chatbot appears to be drawing from; most of the time, I’m left completely in the dark about the years of work behind the idea. In the comments, meanwhile, people praise the shiny new messenger: “You’ve unlocked something in my brain”.”
- What Is LinkedIn?: I know that in 2026 you do not need to read something that says ‘linkedin is a horrible, empty place where the very worst people in the world go to commune with each other’ (am I trying to make myself feel better about my now-decade-long performance art project of attempting to make myself entirely-unemployable via the medium of LinkedIn posts? WHO CAN SAY???), but I am linking to this because it contains a couple of rather lovely observations about the prevalent posting style on that godforsaken platform, specifically that: “it’s a style of writing that reaches so hard for meaning, that it ends up as a set of free-floating signifiers, which refuse all interpretation. You can’t misunderstand something that evades understanding altogether. The lack of conflict, the lack of humour, the lack of any tangible referents, creates the feel of a new kind of cyborg that seeks an eerie peace, honesty and consensus. If you asked the author (wherever they may sit on the human-LLM continuum) what they meant by any of it, they would be able to do little else than simply repeat themselves with even greater sincerity.”
- The Bitcoin True Believers: Occasionally, in my darker moments (the ones where I take a long, hard look at my likely earning potential over the next 10 years, and then my bank balance, and then at inflation, and start crying and rending my skin) I like to torture myself by thinking how different my life might be had I bought Bitcoin when I first wrote about it in the very early 2010s; still, at least I’m not like the mooks depicted in this excellent Slate piece, in which Nathanial Moore visits a Bitcion convention in Vegas to commune with the true believers about why they are Diamond Hands-ing their way towards the apocalypse while being dogwalked by a handful of whales who control both the market for crypto and the secondary and tertiary grifting layers that exist below it. This starts funny but then gets quite sad towards the end, as is often the case with pieces about The Desperation Underpinning Crypto (which, basically, is every piece): “Saylor never specified whose generational wealth will be transferred to whom, but the hope he was offering proved too much for most attendees to resist. After all, wasn’t American life saturated with rich men who seemed to get richer without doing any real work? Obviously such financial freedom was possible—but only if you were a guy who knew how the crooked game was played. Saylor made clear that he knew the game perfectly well as he asked these people, whose trust had been routinely abused, to trust him with their money. It is possible that Saylor is right about the future price of Bitcoin; it’s amazing that the price has climbed as high as it has. Faux, who has been covering the currency much longer than I have, told me he has “given up predicting what’s going to happen to Bitcoin’s price.” But in order for Saylor to be right, new money has to keep entering the system—and that money has to come from someone. As I looked around at the hopeful, orange-clad men filling the convention hall, eager to give their dollars to Saylor, it seemed that Strategy’s real asset was not its crypto holdings but the faith of these men.”
- Emily Gould Needs A Good Cry: Emily Gould is very much a doyenne of the ‘too much information, I-centric” personal essay genre and this is a reliably-entertaining and enjoyably-voicey read about her struggles to regain her ability to shed tears and to find out why they were evading her in the first place, but I confess to finding a lot of the register here…a bit exhausting. As with much of this strain of writing of late – Metropolitan, coastal, North American, middle-class (ie rich, especially to anyone not North American) – so much of what is described in here (the conversations, the therapy, the insane-sounding meds regimen, the internal monologues) sounds…awful, honestly, just sad and miserable and empty, and while I know that the point of these pieces is always in part to make you hate-love the narrator I wonder whether we are (ok, ok, *I* am) getting to a point where stuff like this just sounds more like the symptoms of a very sick society than something to lol at while admiring the well-turned sentences. I don’t know, what do YOU think?
- The Cult of Mussolini: As someone who regularly (tediously) makes the point that Italy never really did the whole ‘coming to terms with what it did in WWII and what side it was on and what ‘fascism’ means in that context’ thing, I really enjoyed this piece in the LRB, by Daniel Giacopelli, in which he visits the Mussolini family burial vault and writes about the village it rests in and some of the charming people you can find making pilgrimages to the site today. Reading this, and specifically some of the quotes, was eerily like listening to my (entirely-fascist) grandfather talk fondly about Il Duce back in the day – not a wholly pleasant feeling: “Valentino was sitting alone in a nearby park. This was his second visit to Predappio. His first had been in early April, after he turned 75, the age his father had been when he died. His father had served during the war in North Africa, Albania and Greece, and had been taken prisoner by the Germans after Italy’s surrender. He continued to admire Mussolini, and Valentino had come to Predappio to honour his memory. I realised then that the ‘I love you’ in the visitors’ book, with the informal pronoun ti, must have been addressed to his father. But what did Valentino think? ‘Mussolini did good things and bad things,’ he said. ‘Italy was weak and he was strong, but we were not prepared for war – that was a mistake.’ His opinions were not so different from those I had heard from dozens of Italians. ‘Mussolini created jobs,’ they claimed. ‘He drained the marshes.’ ‘He brought a humiliated Italy international respect.’ ‘It was only when he allied himself with Hitler that it all started to go wrong.’”
- Do I Enjoy Climbing?: This is not about climbing so much as it is about the joy of watching someone interrogate their own thinking via the medium of writing and words; Gina Schouten here writes 1500-odd words as she tries to work out whether she ACTUALLY enjoys the act of climbing or not, and in the process offers an object lesson in how you might go about thinking about your own thinking. If you have ever studied philosophy you will very much enjoy this, I think, but even if you haven’t it’s a really enjoyable yomp around the contours of someone else’s brain.
- Pain and Language: I have been interested in the language used to describe physical pain for about 15 years, since I led strategy on a pitch for some painkilling drug and hooked the whole thing on the lack of common vocabulary to describe physical discomfort (I used the term ‘Wittgenstinian’, I was *SUCH* a cnut, honestly) – this is a really interesting and accessible piece on exactly that issue: ““Whereof one cannot speak,” the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his Tractatus, “thereof one must be silent,” and though he was making an argument about the status of metaphysical claims, it’s applicable to the failures of description when facing pain as well, though admittedly literal silence is frequently not the result. Rather there can be screaming and shrieking, gasping and gritting, the abstract poetry of pain, what Scarry describes as an “immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.” Maybe because of this there are precious few great literary works about the topic. Virginia Woolf said of literature that it can “express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, [but it] has no words for the shiver or the headache.””
- Sportswashing and the Nomad Games: You may have seen your timeline full of WHOLESOME MOMENTS from the recent Nomad Games – athletic competition for the nomadic peoples of Asia, featuring all sorts of traditional pursuits and costumes and generally being seen as A Good Thing by the online world. This piece offers a really interesting and nuanced view of the whole thing through the lens of China using it as a sportswashing tool to present itself as perhaps more tolerant and accepting of certain peoples than its historic treatment of, say, the Uighur’s might suggest. “I am glad that (some of) China’s practitioners of traditional sports have the opportunity to compete at an international tournament like this. But when the handlers act like the ethnic minorities on their team are loose cannons in possession of terrible secrets, it undermines their message about how wonderful it is to be a minority in China. This is the distinction between sports diplomacy and sportswashing that Chinese cadres don’t appear to recognize. At the 2022 Olympics in Beijing, Uyghur athlete Dilnigar Ilhamjan was chosen as one of the torchbearers. This was the same year the UN’s OHCHR released its assessment of the human rights situation in Xinjiang. As far as I can tell, Ilhamjan has never done an interview with an international media outlet. This is a story of KPIs, as is the case for many things in China. The goal is to minimize risk to China’s image, not to build a positive narrative. If a colorful quote makes its way to the international media, someone’s job is on the line, so the system ends up forfeiting soft-power layups like these.”
- Spinning: This has done the rounds a bit over the past couple of weeks, and so you might have seen it (particularly if you’re a specific type of nerd (non-judgemental!)), but, if not, this is a VERY artfully done bit of storytelling; it’s creator, Isabelle, described it to me thusly: “It is a story written as a web forum. With all the visual doodads that entails. The story is about a woman who discovers a video captured from inside a recurring dream. In this dream her house is spinning with her inside. She visits a web forum for a defunct paranormal podcast for help debunking it, sharing (what remains) of the video, and things devolve from there. It takes a non-linear turn at the end, so don’t forget to read the “What’s new – September 2026” section when you reach the end. It is about an hour of reading, and I wrote it entirely without the use of AI. All the code and images are my own work, or they were adapted from public domain or creative commons sources.” This is very nicely done indeed, and I say that as someone who doesn’t really ‘do’ creepypasta-type stuff.
- In Memory of My Wife: I wouldn’t ordinarily include an in memoriam post in Curios, but this – by mathematician Stephen Wolfram, on the death of his wife Elise Cawley, is one of the most beautiful, loving and devastating things I have ever read, ever. I cannot stress enough how much it fcuked me in half – I am practically in tears writing this just remembering the piece – and how beautiful it is, and I encourage every one of you to click the link and read this and then aspire to have the sort of positive impact on someone’s life that Elise evidently had on the author’s. Honestly, this is…gah, just read it.
- Girls: We close the longreads this week with this piece from Sophie Kemp, in which she interviews a selection of teenage girls from across the US about What It Is To Be A Teen Girl Right Now, and it is funny and wise and sad and knowing and poignant and and and and: “On the road, I keep thinking about walking into my childhood bedroom. But I am inside my adult body, and it’s not really my bedroom. It is a set in the black box of a theatre and teenage me is sitting on my bed. I want to tell her about what happens when you get older. How it is better but also worse. I start to tell her about my breakup. That I had fallen in love with someone who would make me feel like either a dancing circus monkey or a blow-up anime sex doll. There are so many things that will happen to you that you won’t believe! I’d tell her. You will get wiser, but it will not get easier. But she doesn’t care, she’s not listening.”
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!