IT IS PRACTICALLY SPRINGTIME! THE WORST IS OVER!
Except, of course, spring doesn’t technically start in the UK for another three weeks – and lol! The worst is very much yet to come! But, well, let’s not dwell on these HARD TRUTHS – instead join me in staring out of the window at that mysterious yellow sky orb and celebrating the fact that, for the first time in what feels like approximately nine months, nothing appears to be damp!
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should probably close this and go outside and find something better to do with your life before everything becomes even more irredeemably terrible and the Earth a burnt-out, irradiated shell bereft of life.
By Andy Dixon
THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT’S QUITE ENOUGH REPELLENT SYCOPHANCY THANKYOU VERY MUCH INDEED, PT.1:
- The Museum of All Things: Ok, I need to be upfront here – this is something which is very much desktop-only, you will need to DOWNLOAD and INSTALL and which requires marginally (but only marginally, I promise) more effort than the standard Curios link, but I promise you that it is 100%, unquestionably worth it. No, really, it is, I WOULD NOT LIE TO YOU (about the quality of the links, at least – everything else in here should be taken with the requisite skipful of salt and in the knowledge that Authorial Pose Is Real). The Museum of All Things is possibly one of the most wonderful, brilliant things I have ever experienced – digitally, obvs, my meatspace life is, I promise, less bereft than that – and I think it should possibly form part of the national curriculum or come preloaded on every computer sold between now and the inevitable climate-induced collapse of civilisation (current ETA: 2052). “YES OK YOU VERBOSE CNUT, WHAT THE FCUK IS IT???”, I imagine you screaming at me (you’d be amazed at how often I imagine you doing this as I type, as an aside, it’s a strangely-effective motivator); ok, FINE, let me explain (after 200 words of needless, unwanted preamble). The Museum of All Things is basically Wikipedia – ALL of Wikipedia, or at least as much of it as makes no odds – presented as an explorable, slightly-bowdlerised gallery experience which you can explore in first person. Download the file, fire it up, set it to fullscreen and enjoy what is honestly a DIZZYING experience which lets you wander through pleasingly-anonymous (and VERY liminal, should you be a Backrooms head) gallery corridors with images and texts on the walls culled from Wikipedia – you obviously don’t get the full text (that would be mad), but there’s some sort of code at work behind the scenes that obviously plucks bits of text from various bits of each Wiki entry along with selected, seemingly semi-random, images, and while this makes it a legitimately terrible way to actually learn anything it also makes the experience of walking through the ‘gallery’ a lightweight enough experience that you can just sort of glide through, glancing at various bits of info as they take your fancy rather than getting stuck reading the full 37,000 word hagiography of Buckminster-Fuller (say). What makes this SO good is the way in which the FPS-y, first-person exploration works – because this is (as far as I can tell) largely procgen, you get a different navigation experience each time you enter the gallery, and the way in which you transition from one topic/subject to another is by going through little corridors and side rooms in the gallery space, which often seem to appear out of nowhere (you know how in the film Labyrinth there are various bits where doors suddenly appear out of nowhere as a trompe l’oeil effect is resolved? Like that, basically), which means that there’s a real sense of exploratory uncertainty about where in the MASSIVE LATENT SPACE OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE you will end up. I can’t stress enough how utterly magical this is – on some (ok, fine, very incomplete) level this is a navigable digital space which encompasses the entire span of human knowledge (or at least the bits that nice people have bothered to write Wikipedia entries for), which is, honestly, fcuking astonishing from a conceptual point of view and means that from my perspective this really should win all sorts of prizes. Please please please, even if you are not a ‘computer’ person or a ‘games’ person, do give this a go, I think it is astonishing.
- Witness Statement: I think I’ve made this point a few times now – LOL! Web Curios is by this point so much a caricature of itself, so…trope-y, that it could practically write itself (and, occasionally, I rather wish it would) – but The Machine is demonstrating a stubborn reluctance to get better at prose; whichever iteration of whichever model one uses, it still seems to be the case that shifting it away from the very centre of the stylistic bellcurve is tricky to say the least. Which, in some ways, is why I find this project by the mysterious ‘Jenny’ so interesting – Witness Statement is an ongoing art project whereby the day’s headlines are fed into various LLMs, all of whom are pre-prompted to turn said headlines into poetry; said poems are then posted here each day (I like to think that this is all automated and as such is Machine all the way down). Each day offers new efforts from Google’s Gemini, ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, and it’s so interesting seeing the different ways in which each model both parses the headlines and reflects them in what each considers to be ‘verse’ – interestingly (to me, at least) Gemini is br FAR the best ‘poet’ of the three, with GPT stuck in LinkedInland and Claude being annoyingly reductive, but what I find most interesting is the occasional obliqueness of the interpretation of events reflected in the versified narratives. Honestly, combine a rolling hourly version of this with Matt Web’s GPT clock and it is a PERFECT installation.
- Twitter’s AI Does Bongo: Look, I know you don’t want to listen to this; I don’t really want to link to it. BUT! I also feel it important to keep you, dear reader, at the very bleeding edge of digital innovation and so as such feel it vital that I inform you that Grok, Twitter’s AI model, recently expanded its range of services (or at least it did to those people mad or racist enough to want to actually pay for a Twitter sub) to include a variety of new ‘personality’ modes, which now include the ability to be, er, ‘sexy’. The link, then, takes you to a recording of a user engaging Grok’s voice mode to have a, er, ‘sexy’ interaction with the machine, and, look, you won’t exactly *enjoy* this clip unless you have a very, very particular set of pleasure receptors but it is undeniably fascinating when you take into account a) all of the well-known social issues which currently surround sex and dating; b) the increasing apparent gulf in worldview and ideology between young men and young women; c) the known personality of the world’s richest man who it seems probably personally signed this feature off, smirking all the while. Go on, click the link and LISTEN (you will want to stop after approximately 30s, but FORCE yourself to continue – it gets so much worse, to the point where, honestly, your genitals might in fact just fully disappear). I don’t know which part of this is most upsetting – the tone of the voice, the staccato delivery, or the delivery of lines like ‘I climb up onto the nearest surface’, delivered by a machine with no concept whatsoever of physicality pantomiming ‘sexy’ for the benefit of users who, let’s be honest, have almost certainly never experienced the physical act of love. Have you ever called up a telephone sex line (LOOK, I WAS 13 YEARS OLD FFS)? Well it’s like that, except, potentially, even less erotically-charged. I can’t tell you how utterly, utterly wrong this feels, and how sad I felt when I realised that, as per, this is the worst this stuff is ever going to be, and that this sort of thing is likely going to become part of every young person’s (oh, ok, YOUNG MAN’S) sexual awakening quite soon. Is this…progress?
- The Door of Perception: Sincere thanks to Curios reader Ike who sent me this link along with the following description: “it’s a curated collection of art by a person named Ben Roth. i found them when searching for moebius’s artwork, discovered Kevin Lucbert’s biro art via the sidebar and realized what an enormous aesthetic repository this site is.” FCUKING HELL. The work collected here isn’t, in general, My Type Of Thing, but whoever Ben Roth is (he self-describes as ‘a feral art director’, which, honestly, great!) he has put in a LOT of hours curating this site, which groups seemingly dozens (hundreds?) of painters/illustrators/photographers and their work into a collection which is weirdly-thematically-coherent despite the disparity of artist styles on display. Your mileage will vary depending on your personal taste, but as a one-person curatorial effort this is pretty exceptional.
- The Sutro Tower: Despite having been to SF on multi[ple occasions I confess to never having heard of the Sutro Tower before – nonetheless, it is REAL and A THING, and now you can look at it in your browser window in glorious 3d! This is interesting not because of the subject matter – it is a tall building, it is not in point of fact that exciting – but because of how this quite wonderfully-navigable 3d render was created, to whit from a bunch of still photos using Gaussian Splat (see Curios passim for further evidence that this is a term I only vaguely understand) tech. Per the blurb, “Welcome to my 3D model of San Francisco’s Sutro Tower. Feel free to explore it at your own pace. If you’re on a phone, you can also engage the AR mode by clicking the little cube, it’ll let you explore the scene by walking around and waving your phone. Sutro Tower is a wonderful building, and I hope you enjoy learning a bit about it here. If you want to learn more, check out the much more thorough official digital tour. This scan is made possible by recent advances in Gaussian Splatting. In particular, this scene was shot on drones, aligned in RealityCapture, trained in gsplat, compressed by SOGS, and rendered by PlayCanvas.” There’s something very, very cool about the fact that this sort of thing can basically be spun up from a bunch of photos, and the potential implications for the creation of digital spaces and virtual worlds are rather exciting imho.
- Flashes: FINALLY out of Alpha, Flashes is, basically, ‘a video feed for Bluesky’ – except it’s photos too, so think of it as Insta to Bluesky’s Meta. It’s iOS-only at the moment which means – full disclosure – I haven’t actually personally tried it out yet (also, I could not possibly give less of a fcuk about a photo/video app), but initial feedback I’ve seen from users has been positive (although I am not sure how SFW it is given the occasionally-spicy nature of some corners of Bluesky (you might be getting a lot of c0ck, is what I am saying here)), and if you’re more of a visual person than I am then you might find this a fun addition to your social media 4.0 stack.
- Sausage Dot Com: I am basically including this website solely for the MAJESTIC url, but also because, for reasons I can’t adequately explain, the concept made me laugh a lot. This is, as you might expect from the site name, a website dedicated to information about sausages – per the landing blurb, “Discover the World of Artisanal Sausages! Explore recipes, cooking tips, and join our community of sausage enthusiasts. From classic bratwurst to exotic chorizo, we’ve got everything for sausage lovers” – but it also features a prominent tab on the nav which simply reads ‘COMMUNITY’ and, honestly, DON’T YOU WANT TO JOIN THE SAUSAGE DOT COM COMMUNITY!?!?! Except sadly this site appears to be a hastily-spun-up, possibly-AI-generated, front for a Thai sausage shop and there is, I am regretful to report, no sausage community for you to join. I feel, honestly, that if you’re lucky enough to own something as fundamentally-joyful as sausage dot com you should possibly put a bit more effort in, is all I’m saying, so if the Thai owners happen to see this then, well, pull your fcuking fingers out and build the sausage community.
- Beat Shaper: Obviously all of the standard caveats about my being a cloth-eared cnut with all the musical nous of psoriasis apply here, but, that said, this is REALLY impressive – basically this is a machine-juiced beatmaker which uses THE MAGIC OF AI to, er, somehow spin up fresh beats on demand based on your vague directions – there are a bunch of knobs and sliders that you can adjust to direct the style, along with the ability to determine how ‘dark vs upbeat’ and ‘ambient vs energetic’ you want it to sound, and press ‘generate’ to get your very own bespoke beatloop to fcuk with as you so choose (you can’t do any editing on-site, as far as I can tell, but you can export the generated soundfiles to mess with in the software package of your choosing). I don’t think it’s created anything ‘good’ in the 15 mins or so I’ve spent futzing around with it, but equally everything it spits out is…interesting, and technically-competent, as an idea-starter this feels like a not-terrible tool to try out.
- Inclusive Sans: One of the (many, many) awful things about the web – and indeed any system which affords you the ability to see Us at scale in any way – is that it has to some extent revealed the fact that, at heart, we’re all incredibly similar and generally basic in all the same ways. So it is that once you’ve been online for a while, people clowning on fonts like Papyrus and Comic Sans becomes one of those incredibly painful ‘basic’ opinions that becomes almost physically-painful to see expressed, a bit like the feeling one might get on a dating app after seeing the 2876th person express their unique and human individuality with a sentiment along the lines of ‘can’t get started without my coffee in the morning!!’. Anyway, that’s a pointless and unnecessary (HI, WELCOME TO WEB CURIOS!) preamble to this new font which has been designed as an alternative to Comic Sans and which was created to solve the problem of ‘I need an inclusive, easy-to-read font which doesn’t have the same cultural baggage and visceral negative reaction which Comic Sans now seems to elicit in basically everyone’. Anyway, if you work in an environment where ‘making signage and graphics which are easy to read and which don’t make people’s eyes bleed’ is a requirement you might find this useful.
- Not A Band: A rare, meatspace-focused link here – Not A Band is, er, a band (counterintuitive I know) whose whole, singular schtick is that their repertoire consists entirely of TV theme tunes. Do you want some fcukers to come along and play ‘Mr Brightside’ seventeen times to your guests? NO! Do you instead want some fcukers to turn up and segue seamlessly from a slap-bass-heavy rendition of the A-Team theme into The Littlest Hobo into a pop-punk rendition of the Power Rangers theme? OH YES YOU DO! From what I can tell, Not A Band are UK-based and as such may not be available for international engagements – but if any of you book them for an event via this link, can I ask that you PLEASE invite me, please? Unless you’re booking them for a wake, as that would be weird.
- Yope: An app whose name is so horrible to say out loud – I don’t know why exactly, but it really is – that doing so makes me involuntarily make a proper ‘bulldog licking p1ss off a nettle’ face, Yope (ugh, seriously) is a very-hyped, very-invested and, as far as I can tell, utterly-pointless new app which exists solely to allow ‘photo-sharing between groups of people’. LIKE, I DON’T KNOW, 3000000000 OTHER FCUKING DIGITAL PRODUCTS! I know, I know, doing something better can often be a more viable route to success than doing something new, but, equally, I genuinely struggle to understand what new and exciting and, crucially, product-defining new feature twists it is possible to apply to ‘a system which allows you to share images (and maybe one day video!!) with a closed network of contact’. WHY WOULDN’T PEOPLE JUST USE ONE OF THE SEVENTEEN OTHER FCUKING SOCIAL APPS THEY ARE ALREADY ONBOARDED WITH??? Proof, if ever any more was needed, that the vast majority of VCs are fcuking morons with no fcuking vision whatsoever (I will, of course, happily eat my words when you’re all Yoping images of yourselves to your karass in five years time).
- 1 Bit A Day: Ok, so technically this is a daily challenge game a la Wordle and should, taxonomically-speaking, be at the end of Curios, but, well, it involves drawing and I can’t really do it, and as such I am being petulant and chucking it in mid-list. SO THERE. Anyway, 1 Bit A Day is a potentially-fun daily distraction for those of you with a modicum of artistic vision – each day you’re given a prompt and instructed to draw it to the best of your ability as a bit of pixelart on a 16×16 grid. That’s it. Today’s, for example, is ‘eraser’ – go on, draw that in pixelart. DO IT! Once you’ve submitted your cack-handed (ok, I might be projecting here) attempt you get to see the gallery of other people’s so you can gauge exactly the degree to which you are less artistically able than hundreds of other people around the globe. Do YOU want that sort of devastating daily reducer? OH GOOD!
- Werd’s Sources: Was it last week I featured that Chrome extension which shares all the sites you visit with anyone else using said extension? Christ, only two months in and the year is already flattening to a single point. Anway, this is basically a bit like that, but less madly-intrusive – Ben Werdmuller writes a blog, which you can find here – the page the main link goes to is an automatically-update list of links to all of the new posts from all the sources that Ben reads, meaning that you effectively get to share his infostream if you want. I LOVE this idea – honestly, it’s a bit like getting to live inside someone else’s algo except, well, not anywhere near as intrusive or creepy-feeling, and SO interesting (also, it’s nice to see that, based on this, Ben’s web diet is as…er…obsessionally-excessive as mine is). I honestly think that this is a feature which ought to be included on browsers as standard, really- there’s something so wonderful about being able to leave a breadcrumb trail through one’s browsing for others to follow if they so choose.
- The World Nature Photography Awards Winners: Another year, another selection of LOVELY CRITTERS! You know the drill by now – these are obviously amazing, they are all (to my eye) victims of overzealous filtering, and some of them remind you of the fact that a lot of animals are basically fcuking terrifying if you actually look at them properly. My personal favourite this year is the very, very body-horror image of the fly ensnared, but do please feel free to pick your own (you are wrong).
- Wall of Sounds: I have no idea who made this but I love that it exists. This is a single webpage which hosts a bunch of audio files, each with its own embedded player – you can set as many of them as you like to play simultaneously to create your own, personal, almost-unrepeatable sound sculpture from the fragments, which obviously sounds like the opposite of fun but which, honestly, works far better than it ought to and made me feel, momentarily, like an ACTUAL ARTIST until I realised that all I was actually doing was clicking some buttons on a webpage.
- British Folk Traditions: An 18 video YouTube channel all about THE STRANGE OLD PAGAN WAYS of my homeland, which will appeal to anyone who’s a fan of folk horror or who is planning on spending the summer filming their very own low-budget Wicker Man knockoff and needs some inspiration. There is some GLORIOUSLY-odd stuff in here and if you do nothing else I strongly encourage you to watch the oldest clip on the page, a film of people in 1991 performing the ‘crying the neck’ (no, me neither) ceremony which feels like it might at any point descend into proper, visceral tortureporn horror (SPOILERS: it doesn’t, but it really does have that vibe about it).
By Mark Gleason
THE SECTION WHICH HAS HAD QUITE ENOUGH REPELLENT SYCOPHANCY FOR ONE PRESIDENTIAL TERM THANKYOU VERY MUCH INDEED, PT.2:
- Watch Old Chinese Movies For Free: I mean, look, I’ve pretty much exhausted my descriptive powers with this one. It’s, er, 17 (at the time of writing) old Chinese films (from the 60s as far as I can tell, all available to watch for free on YouTube: “Celestial Pictures has meticulously restored these award-winning films frame-by-frame, ensuring they can be enjoyed by new generations of fans. From martial arts epics to gripping dramas, Shaw Brothers Cinema celebrates the rich legacy of Chinese cinema while continuing to inspire new productions.” I’m going to have to be honest here and say that I haven’t in fact watched any of these, but I am going to assume that this is a) entirely legit and copyright-friendly (LOL LIKE YOU CARE) and b) that these films are in some way worth watching – judging by the title alone, I can’t imagine anyone having a bad time with ‘The Amorous Lotus Pan’ but, as ever, caveat emptor.
- A Great Auction of Film Props: Have YOU got a spare few thousand dollars burning a hole in your pocket (LOL!)? Have YOU got a space on your wall which would be just PERFECT for the actual, framed Western Union letter Marty posts from the past in Back to the Future II (I neither know nor care whether it was in fact Marty who posted it; please do not feel that you have to correct me here)? No, of course you don’t! But! If you fancy trawling through a frankly-astonishing collection of actual film props, all coming up for sale at a US auction at the end of March, then this link will fill you with all of the joy. If nothing else I have briefly amused myself by imagining the sorts of people likely to put down the winning bid on each item – I can’t, for example, think of the person who ends up dropping $60k+ on ‘the actual shield used by Russell Crowe in some of the fight scenes in Gladiator’ as being some sort of terminally-online fedora-owner, but perhaps I’m being unfair. Also, fcuk ME but are there some actual, proper bits of legendary memorabilia here – the original, director-annotated script for Grease, for example, which feels like a STEAL at a guide price of $150k (Jesus Christ).
- Virtual Car Showroom: Every few years I come across one of these sites which let you select from a small roster of sports cars and then experience the, er, unique joy of seeing a very hi-res 3d model of said car appear on your screen so you can look at it from all angles and marvel at how gorgeous it looks in a variety of flaked paint hues – WHY DO THEY EXIST? My only possible explanation – and yes, I know I could probably find this out myself with a bit of curiosity and cursory digging but, well, life is short – is that it’s a ‘look how good we are at in-browser 3d rendering work’ showoff gimmick by a webdev team, but, regardless, if you’re a 13 year old boy then this will be a good hour or so’s ‘fun’ (also, if you’re a 13 year old boy then STOP READING THIS and do something more age-appropriate ffs, you are too young for this level of jaded misanthropy).
- Gulls Eating Stuff: POPULAR SCIENCE! Online crowdsourced data platform CitSci is currency running a datagathering exercise seeking out images from around the world of gulls, er, ‘eating stuff’. Per their explanation, “We want to know what gulls are eating and where! Across the world, gulls have been undergoing a huge demographic shift. We want to know all the weird and wonderful things gulls eat in order to start collecting some data on gull diet” – all they want is a photo of a gull, eating stuff, uploaded to the site. Ideally they’d like you to identify what sort of gull it is and what it is eating, which leads to some wonderfully-captioned photos featuring vital data such as ‘what is it eating? My guess is off-brand paprika-flavoured Pringles’ which, honestly, makes me inordinately happy. If you live somewhere with a population of horrible, aggressive bin-birds then PLEASE get involved, this is God’s work.
- The Birth of Oil: I sometimes wonder what it would be like doing brand comms for a major polluter – like, how does it feel to exist in a parallel reality in which there is no apparent causal connection between your employer’s actions and All Of The Bad Stuff Happening? Is there a feeling of cognitive dissonance, or do you just smooth-brain your way through it? I couldn’t help but wonder that when looking at this website, produced by petrostate plaything Saudi Aramco to…to what end, exactly? WHO IS THIS FOR???? Honestly, this site baffles me – it’s basically a potted history of both oil as a substance (geology! Time! Decay! Dinosaurs!) and as the foundation on which the modern Saudi state is built, a paean to the BRILLIANCE of the company and the country, a hymn of praise to the black stuff and all it brings us…but WHY DOES IT EXIST? Like, it’s very shiny – although also SO BLAND and visually-underwhelming, although they obviously spent on the V/O work – and it’s well made enough, but who is it speaking to? It celebrates the history of the company and the engineering achievements involved in unlocking the desert’s greasy patrimony, but, again…WHY? It is boring and dry and, given the amount of money I can guess has been thrown at this, unimaginative, and it makes me a bit sad if I’m honest. In the unlikely event that anyone from the agency that built this happens to see these words, could you maybe email me to explain what the everliving fcuk the brief was for this and how much you trousered for it? THANKS!
- Marxist ASMR: I might have mentioned by ASMR-susceptibility on here before, I forget – I found myself trying to explain the phenomenon to someone the other day and realised I was labouring the ‘no, it’s not a sex thing, honestly!’ point a bit too hard – but I appreciate that for many people it’s a horrid, creepy scene that makes their skin crawl and so I tend to keep it out of Curios. I will make an exception for this, though, purely because of the odd nicheness of the schtick – while many ASMRtists have a particular furrow they plough (scifi roleplay, weirdly-specific visits to the dermatologist, pretending to be an overly-enthusiastic vampire, that sort of thing) this particular person’s vibe is, er, to attempt to explain the fundamental tenets of marxist theory via the medium of slow, low whispering. I can 100% guarantee you that the first academic publisher to take this idea and run with it from a PR/marketing point of view will do NUMBERS, so could someone from Oxford University Press get in touch with payment in a few weeks please, thankyou.
- WikiRailLine: This is…quite bare-bones, but I absolutely adore the thinking behind it – and, again, this is something that would be SO simple to lift as a nice little in-app Easter egg if you were Trainline or similar. Just plug the ID number of the train you’re travelling on (which I appreciate may be easier said than done – I didn’t know this, but each train has a unique ID number which corresponds to its type, starting destination, its arrival destination and the date of travel, which apparently it’s possible to find out if you’re motivated enough) and the site will pull up a list of Wikipedia articles about places and points of interest you will pass on your journey. Small, simple but such a lovely idea and one which I would honestly love to see a rail provider or transport company run with, because while this website is…not exactly welcoming or user-friendly, it’s fair to say, the idea behind it is just LOVELY.
- Figure Grid: I am going to have to be lazy here and crib the description directly from artist Effie Bowens’ own words here: Figure Grid is “a diagram displaying the various ways the human figure is represented in contemporary art. It’s an attempt to organize my relationship to all these bodies, and track the evolution of that relationship. There is a human (and artistic) obsession with self replication that I wanted this project to confront. Coming up in the experimental dance and performing art scene in New York, I discovered that performance frequently overlapped with the visual art scene by sharing galleries, museums, and other spaces. The tension generated from these two forms sharing spaces created a perverse curiosity around the difference between the live, temporal body and the static, figural representations of the body. When I started working in window displays, a whole new set of reference points emerged regarding mainstream appeal, and the parameters of design and desire. Figure Grid critically engages with the hierarchies of value and works centripetally to link and organize a collection of artistic works.” I do not think like this AT ALL and as such I find this way of conceiving of, and representing, the qualities of objects particularly fascinating (also the collection of things on the grid is…interesting and curious and weird, which I appreciate).
- The 3d Printed Chopsticks Hack: I imagine that the number of people reading this who also own a 3d printer hovers somewhere between 0 and 1, but for YOU, you lucky fraction of a human, Christmas is come early. I honestly fcuking love this – when I was a little kid I went to visit my dad in the US (he ran away there post-divorce, the fcuker – HI DAD!) and he took me to a restaurant in Chinatown in SF where the waiter, seeing my understandable 5 year old struggles with chopsticks, contrived an amazing solution with elastic bands which made them magically-usable even by cack-handed young me, and this is basically the super-future version of that. Pay a couple of quid and get the printable file, which (as you can see from the accompanying imagery and video) turns chopsticks into a FUN, TRIGGER-ENABLED FEEDING GAME!
- Do We Eat Him?: I don’t feature that many YouTube series in here, mainly because, well, I don’t really watch them and most of them are sh1t. Somehow, though, this floated across my radar this week and I watched the first episode and, amazingly, have since checked back and watched the subsequent two, and…this is good! Like, honestly, actually quite good! The setup/premise is simple – our two heroines exist in some sort of vaguely-sketched post-apocalyptic world in which the ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE has finally happened, and as we meet them are debating whether it is in fact ok to consume the corpse they have just found re them being very hungry indeed. There’s not a lot of plot here – by the end of the third episode they are still debating the practicalities of the cooking – but the way in which the scenario is shaped, and the charm of the two performers and the amazingly-not-annoying late-GenZ vibe/tone of the thing really does carry it a long way, and I have done a genuine lol at least once during each short (3mish) clip, and I think this has potential and that the people involved might actually be quite talented. See what you think.
- Geometric Nightmares: Want to meet a whole new community you’re really glad you don’t belong to? OH GOOD! “This is a community for discussion and content relating to “geometric nightmares,” a specific type of dream, often occurring during illness, that involves shapes or objects, themes of infinity, pressure, an overwhelming sense of unease or terror and anxiety, a void and incomprehensibly large or small objects, and/or a crushing silence. Take note, these dreams can come in many different forms, these are just some popular examples.” I can’t say for certain how this will make you feel, but try this representative example on for size and see how you get on: “Im not sure if anyone else has had this type of geometric nightmare because everyone’s seem to be relatively the same, but mine is different. Only happens when I have a fever and fall asleep, then wake up, though I’m not always sure if i am awake or not. It consists of my entire house getting squashed into a sphere, slowly getting larger and larger, until eventually it’s the same size as the house, but still I can see the entire thing forming inside my room. My body is sweating profusely, while the sphere gets microscopic, but again, I can still see it. Extremely tiny things seem to have an effect on me, while not bad, just unnerving. I can hold the sphere in my hand as it slowly gets bigger, once again becoming as big as my house, still in my hand. This is honestly the best way I can put what I see and feel without actually showing you.” I am so, so glad that there is no part of the preceding description that I can relate to.
- Cybertruck Hunters: On the one hand, it has been clear for several years now the sort of person That Fcuking Man is, and the sort of trajectory he’s been on, and as such I think that anyone who has actively chosen to enrich him by buying one of his fcuking cars when there are plenty of cheap, high-quality EVs now available sort of deserves the opprobrium; on the other, obviously vandalising others’ property is a bad thing. Which is why I enjoy this TikTok account so much – its owners are choosing to target Tesla owners not by damaging their vehicles but instead by driving close to them and projecting humiliating messages onto their cars’ outsize, ugly bumpers. Childish? Very much so, but also tell me you don’t laugh seeing ‘Cybertruck: For White Pr1cks’ in block capitals on the rear. This loses points for the fact that the perpetrators are doing all of this from inside a Lamborghini, which stinks of crypto tbqh, but in general I very much approve of this as a childish fcuk you.
- Time Traveller POV: This week’s big breakout TikTok is this account which shares animated, AI-generated point-of-view perspective vids simulating what it might be like to ACTUALLY BE IN THE PAST. Except, obviously, because this is the web and it’s AI-generated, what this in practice means is that you get a bunch of clips featuring standard Midjourney-looking visuals accompanied by some VERY odd animations and strangely-modern expressions; this short clip of ‘hey, let me take you on a tour of my hometown Pompeii!’ is a near-perfect representation, from the weird oil painting tone of the visual to the amazing YouTuber face pulled by our historical guide as he realises that he’s about 3-5m away from being very, very burnt toast. Is this ‘good’ from the point of view of education or instruction? POSSIBLY NOT BUT IT IS ALSO VERY FUNNY, SO WEVS.
- In Case Of Death: I am slightly surprised noone’s done this before – this feels like a MSCHF drop rather than an actual product, but, seemingly, it is an Actual Thing, produced by manufacturer of fancy iPad cases Zugu. Per the blurb, “Introducing The In Case of Death Case. Bricks your iPad when you die, so you can take your secrets to the grave. From the makers of the case for every situation comes a case for the most extreme situation: mortality.” This almost, but not quite, makes me want an iPad (via the excellent Yemi’s Newsletter).
- NextFlick: I saw some DISCOURSE this week around the quantity of ads which filmgoers are forced to sit through as they wait for the feature to start – wasn’t there a time in the past when the trailers were widely considered to be the best bit? Anyway, for those of you who still believe that to be the case, here’s a website which will let you watch nothing but an infinite procession of film trailers from now until the heat death of the universe – a quick play just now gave me promos for Party Girl (no, me neither), Kung Fu Panda 3 and The Guns of Navarone, so, er, something for everyone!
- Flip A Real Coin: Somewhere in the world there is a real coin, inside what I think is a pringles tube, with a camera pointed at it. Press the button on this site and the tube will rotate, flipping the coin IN REAL LIFE – the site will show you which face is showing, giving you a genuine, ENTIRELY RANDOM result. I am so enthused that this exists I can’t quite adequately explain it.
- Dodeku: I normally reject Sudoku out of hand because a) it bores me; and b) if I am honest I am embarrassed to admit how bad I am at it, but, honestly, this is actually fun and accessible even to number refuseniks like me. Every day’s a new puzzle – your task is to fit the numbers into the right places to solve the grid. EASY, RIGHT? No, not at all in fact, but it’s oddly satisfying.
- Cursor Drifter: Oh this is SO fun! From last week’s B3ta (THANKS ROB!) a game which will be immediately aesthetically familiar to anyone who played Micro Machines in the 90s and which asks you to pilot your tiny car through a tiny maze guided by your mouse cursor. Each level is 5-10s of gameplay, meaning you buzz through this at speed and with joy, and it is honestly so so so marvellously enjoyable.
- CSS Puzzlebox: I’ve definitely featured things *like* this in the past, but this specific example is NEW and SHINY and BEAUTIFULLY-CODED, but also a complete fcuking cnut which has utterly banjaxed me about three puzzles in and I am BITTER. Feel free to play with this – all you have to do is click! – but be aware that, if you’re anything like me, it will cause you to swear with increasing vehemence at your screen.
- Bracket City: Ooooooooooh this is VERY nice and tickles a particular wordcel part of my brain very pleasingly indeed. I can’t really explain this – seriously, click the link and get your head around how it works and then think how you might describe it to an audience of strangers in 50ish words…HARD, ISN’T IT? Yeah, YOU try writing this one day you ingrate. Anyway, this is basically a word puzzle, but it’s pleasingly-nested in its conception/execution and there’s something lovely about the way that the overall shape of the solution is revealed incrementally, like so many layers peeling back. There’s something VERY pleasing about this.
- Styscraper: Immensely-generous maker of fun webthings and Friend of Curios Matt Round is back with another of his wonderful, magical and VERY playable webtoys – this time it’s game in which you have to stack pigs (and other objects) to make the tallest tower you can. This is SO GOOD – the physics are spot-on, fun-feeling and JUST real enough to satisfy, the animations are charming, the sounds cute and the general gameplay a perfect amalgam of slow progress, incremental improvement, ‘one more go’-ness and FCUK YOU YOU FCUKING BSTARD ARMCHAIR frustration (you will see what I mean, I promise). Beautifully, large swathes of my corners of the social web this week have been taken over by people posting oblique references to how they are now incapable of seeing the world except through the prism of potential stackability, which I think is testament to how good this is and how much time you are going to spend messing around with it.
By Alyssa Monks
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Punch Cards: Or, to give it its full name, Tristan Davey’s Punch Card Archive. “Punched cards were once a ubiquitous part of accounting, data collection and early computing. At their peak of use, in the 1950s and 60s, hundreds of companies around the world printed millions of punch cards every month. Yet within a few years of their obsolescence they all but disappeared from the public consciousness. This archive captures a small selection of these cards and their ephemera, and aims to document and preserve these pieces of history for the future.” Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT??? Via the world’s most personable stationery retailer.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS IS, ODDLY, EMPTY THIS WEEK!
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Making Media Great Again: We kick off the longreads this week with this profile of Paul Marshall, one of the UK’s growing number of near-billionaires and one of the most prolific philanthropists in the country…and someone who is increasingly using said plutocratic wealth to influence the country’s media and the tenor of public discourse, through his ownership of GB News and, more recently, the Spectator. This is partly interesting as a straight profile, but to me spoke more to the growing, increasingly-insidious sensation that there is a group of about 300 people that basically runs everything and membership of that group is dependent solely on money; turns out there IS a shadowy cabal running everything, but, prosaically, it’s just…really rich people! I appreciate that my surprise at this might strike you as…surprisingly and uncharacteristically-naive, any maybe it is, but equally I haven’t until recently had cause to stop and think about the practical reality of Being Worth $750m And What That Means In Terms of Who You Hang Out With Most Nights – and now that I know a bit more about that world, albeit tangentially, it’s fcuking sickening and I hate it and it makes me quite exceptionally angry! Eat the rich!
- Remodeling The Internet: One for the advermarketingpr folk, this – The Verge recently commissioned a bunch of research into THE FUTURE OF THE WEB, etc etc, and while the audience is North American it felt to me that much of what’s expressed here is probably applicable quite widely across the Western world. This is slides (SORRY) but there’s honestly a lot of interesting/useful data in here which might be useful to anyone working on any FUTURE DIGITAL STRATEGY or campaign planning-type stuff. Aside from anything else, there’s a REALLY interesting series of datapoints in here around the gendered differences in desire for community and connection, and how men are seemingly SIGNIFICANTLY happier to seek that out online whereas women still strongly prefer real-world interaction, which I think is something probably quite deep worth exploring further.
- Watching Luigi: If I’m honest I am including this mainly because of Molly Crabapple’s beautiful watercolour courtroom sketches which are genuinely gorgeous (assisted, of course, by the fact that so is Luigi, the bstard), but there’s also something really interesting about the spectacle of the spectacle, if you see what I mean, and the realtime creation of a folk hero being played out very publicly; I think the closest analogue I can alight on for the Luigi phenomenon is that posthumous air of sainthood that developed around Aaron Shwartz except Luigi’s still with us and, objectively, is possibly less of a worthy candidate that poor Aaron. Anyway, this is very reportage-y, but as a snapshot of Where We Are, as well as a near-perfect reflection of what the society of the spectacle looks like, framed and packaged, this is very good indeed.
- Declaring War on Bo Burnham: It very much feels like 2025 marks the cleaving of eras, and that we’ve collectively decided that, basically, we have decisively moved on from the millennial-coded, flat-branded, vaguely-optimistic (through tears) vibes of the mid-00s to (see pretty much all recent Curios) ‘the 80s all over again, but on weirder drugs’ – this essay feels partly like a reckoning with that, and an examination of what the defining characteristics, and lasting residue, of that era were. It’s very much a pro-Burnham piece, to be clear, just one that has a very clear idea of what his work came to represent and what it says about an era. This gives you a feel for the argument, but it’s very much worth reading the whole piece: “Here is the deranged struggle of someone who keeps getting exactly what he wants and still feels nothing. And Inside makes it clear Burnham believes this disease is an epidemic, that easy access to an audience creates that same gnawing, insatiable hunger in tens of millions of kids who won’t have his charmed life. But there is that other layer that Burnham never acknowledges and may not even be aware of, which is that publicly detailing the contours of his illness is, paradoxically, one of the symptoms of that illness. And that, in my opinion, is the real epidemic of the modern age. Somewhere, right now, a teenage girl just recorded herself crying for a TikTok video but, when she went to edit it, realized her mic wasn’t plugged in and so now she’s making herself cry a second time to get another take. Next door is some dude with a great job, healthy body, a loving partner and lots of friends who, after a long day of fairly easy work and an evening watching Netflix, will tweet, “Another wretched day enduring the horrors, my thoughts are with all of you who know that just surviving this absolute hellscape is an accomplishment all its own.” They all exist within an online subculture in which earnest attempts at positive sincerity and wellness are to be mocked as vapid (as they are in Burnham’s “White Woman’s Instagram”). The practice of not just broadcasting your lowest moments, but intentionally playing up the angst for maximum engagement has to be the world’s worst possible coping mechanism, a form of self-harm with an added layer of performance anxiety (I’m not sure science even has a word for the gut-punch sensation of recording your sobs of despair, only to see the post get zero likes and a single comment from a spambot).”
- The Future of Childless Cat Guys: In another week in which a significant number of column inches have been devoted to the seeming gender disparity in voting intentions in the recent German elections, and specifically ‘WHAT IS DRIVING ALL THESE MEN TO THE RIGHT???’ (odd, isn’t it, how the parallel question of ‘what is making all these young women skew more left?’ isn’t asked. It’s almost as though we still see everything through a man-first lens!), I thought this piece was really interesting (I think it came via Helen’s newsletter, though I can’t be sure) – it basically suggests that the future might involve a LOT of very, very single middle-aged men, which, honestly, feels about right; I can’t tell you the number of guys I know in their 40s who have basically just sort of…stopped, and who don’t quite look like starting ever again, and who I can very much see characterised by this passage. There but for the grace of God, honestly: “I’m sure there are some readers who, like the Manosphere does today toward female loneliness, delight in the idea of this collective of cat men. They think it’s what they deserve. And like with the cat ladies of today, these men will likely serve as some sort of political caricature that isn’t representative of the whole. Some of these men will be once-eligible bachelors for whom life has slipped by. Some of these will be aggressive, misogynistic men who never made any real effort to connect with women on a human level and yet continue to resent them out of entitlement. But a good many will be something else: guys who teetered on the edge of these worlds, guys who felt limited by their shyness or their career or their looks or some other factor that they believed prohibited them from having a shot, guys who frankly just never quite figured it out.”
- Raw Pork Meat Sandwiches: This is an essay in part about contemplating eating a German sandwich which is basically seasoned raw minced pork and raw onions on a roll (I am sorry, Germans, but I do not consider this ‘food’), but it isn’t really about that at all. It seems astonishing that someone need write a vaguely-humorous piece about ‘why basic standards are a good thing actually’ in 2025, but, well, welcome to the moron future!
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Reference Board Final Bosses and The Irony Epidemic: I feel I ought to also reproduce this essay’s subtitle in full: “You are laughing? Everything feels recycled, and you are laughing?” Viktoria Vasileva here writes about the fact that nothing is new anymore and the ‘trend to death to exhumation’ cycle is currently running at an unsustainable pace, and at this rate we’re going to start recycling trends that haven’t even happened yet to feed the ever-ravening content mill. You will presumably have read – or even felt- this argument quite a lot over the past few years, but this is as good an articulation of it from a fashion/aesthetics point of view as I’ve read.
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GenZ and the End of Predictable Progress: I know, I know, GENERATIONAL COHORTS ARE NOT REAL AND ARE IN FACT ARBITRARILY CONSTRUCTED FOR MARKETING PURPOSEZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ…but! I thought this was a surprisingly deep and well-argued essay about the specific challenges facing the generation, the specific relevance of the new US administration’s policies to this specific coterie of people, and the extent to which all of the various vague iniquities of character attributed to The Youth can be encapsulated in the broad-brush phrase (which also, conveniently, can be sung to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles themesong) ‘Collapse Of The Social Contract’ – which, honestly, feels like the best catch-all for everything going on right now and why, possibly, everything feels quite so spiky.
- AI Imagines The Impossible: Or ‘why small businesses fcuking despise you for your AI-generated imageboard inspirations’. The Washington Post here writes about the growing phenomenon of people turning to hairdressers or dressmakers or bakers, brandishing designs that they want to see replicated in real life – but which designs are AI-generated, and as such physically or structurally impossible to recreate. Which, obviously, doesn’t prevent said customers from demanding the thing anyway and, predictably, getting somewhat exercised when said tradespeople are unable to do what’s asked of them – which, honestly, is a whole new ‘real life consequence of AI’ thing that hadn’t even BEGUN to occur to me. Isn’t it wonderful, all the ways in which The Machine is ‘disrupting’ society? Eh? Oh.
- The Illegal Street Racers of YouTube: This is interesting – there’s a bunch of people in NYC doing illegal high-speed street races late at night, filming everything and uploading it to YouTube for a growing number of fans to enjoy. Partly fascinating because, well, FAST CARS AND NEW YORK, but also because of the fact that this sort of thing is becoming more and more accessible thanks to the falling cost of HD dashcams and the advent of high-quality wearable cameras such as Meta’s RayBans. This feels very much like the plotpoint to the new, youth-focused Fast & Furious spinoff franchise coming 2027 (also, feels very much like the sort of thing that will also be happening, possibly less glamorously, all over the world in rural locations – is there a secret street racing online video subculture out there? Can someone show me?).
- Dayglo Pets: Almost everything about this book feels like very obvious foreshadowing for a very specific type of horror story – LA! Genetic engineering! A perfect example of ‘What do you get for the millionaire who has everything?’ product development! RABBITS! This is a piece in WIRED looking at a company called the Los Angeles Project which, basically, is working on fcuking with animal DNA using CRISPR to make glow-in-the-dark bunnies. No, really, The project’s stated mission – one which I can imagine would have pretty much any zoologist or vaguely-religious person borderline-apoplectic – is to make nature “more complex and interesting and beautiful and unique” – BY MAKING GLOW-IN-THE-DARK BUNNIES! Honestly, this is SO deeply-fcuked-up and almost every sentence could be plucked from here and used in the aforementioned horror story with no edits – I mean, really, look: “The crazy thing is, this technology is so advanced, and nobody’s doing sh1t with it,” Zayner says. “That’s kind of our motto: Let’s do stuff with it.”” YES FINE WHAT IS THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN???
- The Singles Ski Trip: I read pretty much all of this piece with my knuckles in my mouth – I can’t pretend that there’s ANY element of this trip that doesn’t sound like absolute hell to me, from the location to the activities to the other guests – but, equally, I also thought ‘this feels like a new TV format waiting to happen’. Did you know that there are tour companies that organise holidays for single people to the ski slopes? Well there are! Does that sound like your idea of fun? The answer to that will almost certainly depend on the answer to the accompanying question “how much do you want to hang out with a bunch of people who all give the overwhelming impression of having attained a 2:2 in Geography at Durham?”, but, well, see what you think!
- Running Pong in 240 Browser Tabs: Tiny Award Winner (SUCH AN ACCOLADE!) Nolen Royalty is back with a new, very silly, project, which basically fcuks with Chrome and favicons to create a VERY complicated game of Pong – this is a technical explanation and so won’t be for everyone, but as an explanation of How To Make A Cool Web Thing it’s rather fun (and, again, this feels like a VERY stealable idea for a brand with a decent dev team and some patience (and quite an elastic strategy)).
- Hot Sauces of the World: I confess to not really understanding people’s obsession with hot sauce (why do you want all your food to taste of fire vinegar?) but I am conscious that there are some people for whom it is practically a religion, and as such that there might be some of you for whom this EXHAUSTIVE guide to the world’s different hot sauce varieties might be a thrilling companion to the rest of your fiery vinegar-flavoured existence. There’s a lifelong ‘try them all!’ project here, should any of you have a the time and inclination.
- London’s Most-Memed Neighbourhoods: Ok, your appetite for this one will depend largely on the extent to which the following pen portrait speaks to you: “You’re sitting in London Fields, a park in east London, on a humid but warm summer’s evening. You see someone sitting on a blanket. A pair of Birkenstock mules next to them. They’re wearing a North Face Nuptse jacket, just in case of a potential cold spell, the kind that British summers bring. Oh, and some mom jeans. On the blanket, there’s a bottle of Chin Chin, a beloved white wine, which was likely bought from Shop Cuvee. Next to it, some Torres crisps and Perello olives. Their partner is wearing Salomons XT6s, an Arc’teryx soft shell, a pair of Dickies carpenter pants, and a fisherman’s beanie whilst smoking a Lost Mary vape. They have a whippet in a raincoat looking really anxious, trembling while sniffing at its fur that’s been washed in Aesop’s Animal Body Wash.” If you live in London, there will be at least ONE person in your life you will feel immediately compelled to send this to upon finishing reading – if you find that multiple people in your life send this to YOU, perhaps take a long, hard look at yourself.
- Painting Myself: Celia Paul writes in the New York Review of Books about the practice of painting herself over a long career as an artist, and how through self-portraiture she reclaimed the concept of herself which had be subsumed by ‘Paul as Muse’ through her association with Lucien Freud and others. This is beautifully-written, and has the peculiar quality of intense self-obsession that is common in so many artists, particularly those whose own form is at the heart of their work, and I enjoyed it significantly more than I tend to enjoy pieces which use the word ‘I’ this often.
- How We Misread Gatsby: I am not by any means a scholar of Fitzgerald or his most famous novel, but I really enjoyed this analysis in the New Statesman, all about how we often misplace the novel in time and, by so doing, end up misreading some of the social cues and messages in the text. “Many of our most recycled, plagiaristic observations about Gatsby miss the point, failing to read between the lines. For example, it is often noted that Benjamin Franklin’s schedule for self-improvement provides Gatsby with a manual for upward social mobility, that he is a representative American who buys into the nation’s founding dreams. But Jimmy Gatz’s plan focuses on physical activity and hard work, omitting the spiritual dimension of Franklin’s schedule, who asked himself every morning, “What good shall I do this day?” Franklin centred morality as well as industry, and Fitzgerald expected his audience to recognise what was missing. The Great Gatsby renders a society that has confused material enterprise with moral achievement. Gatsby, like the country he embodies, forgets that he should be trying not just to be great, but to do good.”
- Inside ARC: A depressing little vignette from the afterparty of this week’s right-wing nutter conference in London, ARC, which saw Jordan Peterson and a bunch of other grifters (not racist, obviously, but…surprisingly popular with racists!!!!) joined by cranks, kooks and aspirant influencers as they celebrated the shifting tides of global discourse in Mayfair. I had, prior to this piece, missed the fact that Danny Rampling, former superstar house DJ, is now a fully-paid-up member of the ‘mad conspiracists’ collective (I briefly imagined the surreal spectacle of him, Matt Le Tissier and Richard Fairbrass all hanging out together discussing 5g brainworms, which was an odd mental segue), but otherwise this is grimly predictable – the 80s vibes, the triumphalism, the ‘extremely rich people cosplaying as being somehow marginalised’ thing, and, of course, the just-under-the-surface bigotry. I don’t know if I can take it if cnuts like this take control, you know. I might just have to stop.
- Something Like Pleasure: This is an essay by Kathleen Quigley on having sex again for the first time after cancer, and after a mastectomy, and, look, it’s moderately explicit and may not be to everyone’s taste, but I found it moving and beautiful and kind and hopeful and I think it’s very much worth reading, as much for its depiction of old lovers turned friends as it is for the sex’n’cance.
- Watching The Clock: You probably know about the video installation ‘The Clock’ by Christian Marclay, which is a 24h film in which every scene shows a different scene from a different film, the only caveat being that the time is visible in-shot; every minute of every hour is visualised with a visible timepiece taken from cinema – this is the account of one person’s experience of spending 24h watching it, which, as you might imagine, becomes surreal and dreamlike very quickly indeed. This is far more entertaining and better-written than I expected it to be, and it made me want to go and spend a day watching this (and, inevitably, going slightly mad).
- A Wonderful Country: I LOVE THIS! Written in 1946 by Mavis Gallant, this is about a Hungarian man arriving in Canada during World War II and it is brilliant and funny and human and STYLISH in a way you don’t automatically expect writing from 1946 to be, and I would like you all to read it please (it’s not long, this one, promise).
- Describe Your Most Challenging Project: I have linked to Alexander Velky’s autobiography on here before a few months ago, but I wanted to highlight the latest chapter because, honestly, I think this is really really good – Alexander here writes about moving to London, indebted and overeducated and very virginal, and about living in a flatshare and having no money and the soul-destroying cycle of ‘looking for work, scrabbling for pennies, getting drunk’ that makes up so much of BIG CITY LIFE in one’s 20s (depending on one’s luck). I think the style here – possibly requiring a Capital S – is excellent, and there’s a certain quotidian relentless misery (but also, it’s funny! Honest!) that reminded me an awful lot of the excellent Pleasant Hell by John Dolan/Gary Brecher (which I also recommend unreservedly) or the writing of the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle.
- An Angel Passed Above Us: Finally this week, a superb story by László Krasznahorkai, timely as we pass three years of war in Ukraine – pretty much entirely told in monologue, this is a brutal (and very funny) bit of satire that made me literally wince in places, but which is well-written enough throughout to both sustain the tone and stick the landing. Very, very good indeed.
By Jenn Mazza
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: