Webcurios 28/11/25

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Reading Time: 39 minutes

 

Now that everyone in UK politics and media has stopped going on about the budget, could we maybe all just be quiet for the next month?

I AM TIRED, WEBMONGS. I got a scant five hours sleep last night – look, I know by now that you don’t care about this stuff, and that a significant proportion of you skip all this bit and go straight to the bottom for the longreads which all the real connoisseurs know is where the gold is, I SEE YOU YOU FCUKS – and I was doing fine until about 11ish, at which point basically all the energy left my body and my eyes started leaking what I hope are just tears but which, honestly, might actually be blood at this point. Anyway, see if you can spot the point at which I have to really start making an effort to type – bet you can’t! Er, this doesn’t actually reflect well on me, does it?

Fcuk it, look, I’ve written it now, it’s done, make of it what you will.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you deserve better than this, I know, but sadly I have no more to give.

By Kyle J Thompson

WE START THIS WEEK WITH THE RECENTLY-RELEASED NEW ALBUM BY IONA ZAJC WHO HAS BEEN ONE OF MY FAVOURITE MUSICAL DISCOVERIES OF THE YEAR AND WHICH IS JUST A BEAUTIFUL RECORD AND ALSO TONALLY PERFECT FOR WINTER IMHO! 

THE SECTION WHICH  THINKS NIGEL FARAGE, BASED ON THE EVIDENCE, PROBABLY IS A RACIST ACTUALLY, PT.1:

  • The Nicest Place on the Internet: Leaving aside the hubris of the url here (the nicest place on the internet is surely a subjective assessment – after all, one person’s ‘welcoming and supportive community of urolagnia enthusiasts’ is another’s ‘terrifying ghetto of wrong’!), and leaving aside that I think this is several years old and a COVID-era resurrection of a site that goes back YEARS and which I have somehow never come across before, I think this is a nice place to start. Look, it’s late-November at the fag-end of a year which, broadly speaking, has continued the recent trajectory of ‘wow, things really don’t seem to be improving much, do they?’ of recent times – the weather is cold, I had to pay a frankly terrifying gas bill recently, the much-trailed budget did not, surprisingly, contain a fun series of surprises designed to lighten the hearts of the people, and we’ve still got FCUKING CHRISTMAS to get through before things start maybe, hopefully looking up in the spring (don’t worry, I promise the tone here is going to get cheerier, I’m just setting up the link, honest) and, well, we could probably all use a SMALL MOMENT OF COMFORT! And so, that is exactly what this site offers – click the link, click ‘Enter’ and enjoy the slightly melancholic melody that plays as a variety of anonymous strangers give you a hug. Yes, ok, fine, what that means is that you get served a rolling selection of footage of first-person footage of people offering a hug to their webcams and then uploading the result which, objectively, is a bit strange and possibly-dystopian if you think too hard about it, but, well, don’t! Enjoy the hugs! Maybe upload footage of yourself pretending to hug your computer so that one day someone might be comforted by your anonymous succour! Anyway, I liked this a lot more than I was expecting to and I think there’s something…sort-of lovely about it, in an admittedly QUITE ODD way.
  • Andrew Lloyd Website: This has justifiably done the rounds this week – it is a WONDERFUL bit of silly, playful and surprisingly-deep webwork, by (amongst others) internet favourite and Serious Artist Jim’ll Paint It, and it presents you to you what is purportedly a like-for-like remake of the original, early-web internet presence of famed composer and SURPRISING LOTHARIO Andrew Lloyd Webber…except, well, it’s quite a bit stranger than that when you start to scratch below the surface. This is one of those sites which really does reward you scrabbling around it in its corners and nooks – click all the links, make sure you look for all the clickable bits on the pages, and, above all else, SOLVE THE RIDDLES. This is brilliant, and in many ways a perfect piece of digital artfun, but it does require you to spend a lot of time looking at Andrew Lloyd Webber’s face, which I appreciate is not for everyone..
  • Z Image Turbo: So the current buzz in CUTTING EDGE AI MODEL CHAT is the latest version of Google’s imagegen tech, accessible via Gemini, which raises the bar again in terms of producing pics which are photorealistic and VERY HARD to spot as AI – this, though, is the latest small, whizzy, open-source model from China, which isn’t quite as good but which is blisteringly fast and is small enough that you can run it locally on your own rig if you have a good enough tech setup, and which, while not as good as the Google stuff, is pretty fcuking amazing and raises the bar yet again when it comes to quick, cheap deployment of sophisticated image AI. The link here takes you to a hosted instance which you can play around with a little – you only get a few free credits, but it’s worth dropping a couple of prompts just to see how good it is (within limits – oddly enough ‘produce an annotated medical diagram of a human penis for use in a medical textbook’ still produces some Geiger-esque horror).
  • Age hh: There are two reasons for my including this online shop for…designer? brand? whatever it is: the first is that the way you transition between pages is genuinely wonderful and something I have never seen before from a visual point of view, and I think it is really clever and novel and just aesthetically very cool indeed (seriously, click the link and then click on, well, anything really, and see what happens – see? Small-but-delightful); the second is because…look, even my closest friends and staunchest defenders would describe my sartorial style as…unbothered, I think is a charitable way to describe it (I spent time with someone earlier this year who literally told me ‘you know, you really dress terribly’ which was a sobering if possibly fair assessment), and so I appreciate that my choosing to cast shade on anyone else’s choice of garms is…perhaps not coming from a position of strength, but, look, some of the items of clothing on show here are honestly some of the most incredibly ugly-looking things I have ever seen, the sort of stuff that you can imagine Kanye looking at and going ‘yes, this is the sober look I am after’ in one of his…frothier periods. If anyone wants to take a moment to explain to me why I am wrong and these articles of clothing are in fact BEAUTIFUL then I am all ears (or indeed if anyone at Age hh happens to read this and wants to send some sample items to a reasonably-ugly middle-aged anorexic to trial).
  • Time’s Top Photos of 2025: The first of the big annual ‘the year in pictures’ roundups has dropped (or at least the first I’ve seen), and Time’s selection is obviously a collection of amazing, sad, shocking, enervating, beautiful images which are, to this observer, annoyingly and myopically US-centric (I know Time’s a US mag, but this does feel a bit navelgazey given, even given the particularly febrile nature of the first full year of Trump). Still, on a purely-technical level all of these are remarkable images – if I had to pick one, I think the image of Jimmy Carter’s coffin lying in state probably wins, though I have a soft spot for the shot of the guys working the titanium mine. Pick your own!
  • Boy Throb: Boy Throb is a ‘new boyband’ which has exploded onto TikTok this week – the story is that these guys have pooled their savings and bought rented a house in LA to try and ‘make it’ as the world’s next big boyband – there are four of them, except one of their number, Darshan, is, ‘stuck in India with visa issues’, and the group have been informed by their legal counsel that getting a million TikTok followers will really help them make a case to immigration that he should be allowed into the US…Boy Throb are not the most beautiful boys you have ever seen, they are not the best singers or the best dancers, and, look, this is clearly an extended skit, but it’s weirdly-charming and I watched more of their videos yesterday than I care to admit, and there’s something interesting (in a tedious ‘how marketing works in 2025!’ way) about the whole kayfabe of it and the way it’s simultaneously very sincere and very arch, and, look, I think I have watched this particular vid about six times now and keep finding new things in it to love, and I now quite want an official Boy Throb tshirt is the upshot here (but I live in Vauxhall and so, to avoid sending erroneous and misleading signals, I am not going to get one).
  • Epstein’s Gmail: I have no particular desire to rake over the horrible, grubby ashes of the Epstein emails for two successive Curios and so I will keep this short, but I think this is such a clever project –  Luke Igel and Riley Walz took the cache of Epsteinmails from the huge datadump and coded them up so as to make them look as though you’re reading them inside Paedo Jeff’s Gmail account, which has the dual effect of a) making them a lot easier to read, should you be so minded, and to group correspondence to specific individuals; but also b) making you realise, chillingly, that THIS WAS JUST HIS DAY TO DAY LIFE. The banality and familiarity of the interface oddly has a real impact (or at least did to me) on the way the material lands, and there’s something horrifyingly mundane about it which makes the contents so much more chilling. There are LESSONS here about form and function, for anyone who can be bothered to take them, but should you not give two fcuks about that then it also makes it really easy to read Paedo Jeff’s correspondence. Oh, and should you somehow have more appetite for this stuff, this piece by Anand Giridharadas in the NYT, on what this tells us about how the people who actually run the world think and work and live, is very very good indeed.
  • Loops: Do YOU live in NYC? Do YOU have easy access to Brooklyn’s Prospect Park? WELL BULLY FOR YOU! Also, this link is very much all for you, as unless you happen to be proximate to said location there’s not actually anything you can do with this, but I like the idea enough to include it as an example of A Good Idea. Basically this is a bit of site-specific storytelling; get to the right area of the park as indicated on the on-site map, hit ‘start listening’ and, well, ENJOY THE TALE. I honestly think that stuff like this continues to be massively underexplored and exploited – I genuinely believe that location-specific storytelling can be hugely evocative and that, while it’s hard to do a low-tech, non-geotagged version that works for people of all walking paces, I think that there are lots of tweaks you can make to the format and, in general, I rather like a world in which it’s encouraged to create stories that take place in our largest public parks and spaces, narratives you can listen to in-ear to transport you or change the way you see what’s around you. I want an infinity of Hyde Parks delivered to me via stories, fictive layers accreting over the top of meatspace, so if anyone fancies taking this and running with it that would be ace thanks. Oh, and in the unlikely event that any of you reading this DO actually live in Brooklyn and give this a try, would you mind telling me what it’s like? Thanks!
  • The Creative Web Manual: One for the web builders now, this site is a really useful set of principles and resources prepared by design studio ‘a studios’, partly as a ‘we’re really clever’ calling card but also as a repository of ideas for others to draw on. Per the about page, “this project is dedicated to the methodology behind crafting websites that pushes boundaries. Our process values curiosity iteration, and experimentation. View some of our techniques on creating projects that leave a lasting impression.” This feels like a really generous little project, with the added benefit that the site itself is a beautiful piece of web work in its own right (the little transition animation when you click in and out of the ‘about’ section is a small work of art imho).
  • Ambience Antartica: This is GREAT – a website streaming a 24/7 radio station designed, per their description on the landing page, ‘for people in antarctica, whether physically or otherwise’. Ambient (at the time of writing, slightly-drone-y) music, random quotes, old footage of the snowy wastes…this, per so many of my favourite links in Curios, would work perfectly on a very big screen in a dark area of a gallery for anyone to dip in and out of and sit before for as long as they wished, and I think it is BEAUTIFUL and now that it is open in the tab next to this one and I am writing it up I really, really want to just zone out and listen to it but it is 801am and there are LINKS TO WRANGLE and so onwards we go (if reluctantly).
  • The Drone Photo Awards 2025: Photographs! Taken from tiny, flying robocoptors! You know what these are going to look like, and there’s a slightly-numbing effect to so much aerial, top-down imagery in one place (though as ever there are a few shots that try and do something marginally more interesting with the kit), but there’s also something undeniably-beautiful about the geometries that are revealed by the perspectives offered by drones, and the ways in which they show messy, massed lumps of humanity in a new light. Should you be interested, my favourite is this one, mainly because it looks like it could and should have been a painting.
  • Desk Stops: Would you feel comfortable showing your laptop’s desktop to another human being? We curate our phone’s homepages and icons to a certain degree, in part for ease of use but also because it’s not uncommon for others to see them, and as such there’s a (small, but definitely real) degree to which they offer social signals and Define Our Selves, but your laptop? The grubby little work-and-bongo station you hunch over each day? It feels probable that it’s somewhat less curated and polished, a little more chaotic, a little more feral. Anyway, this is an excellent project (via Kris) which asks several digital creatives to share a screencap of their desktop so you can feel superior/inferior/confused (your mileage in each case will vary, but should you look through all of them you will definitely see at least one which makes you think ‘HOW THE FCUK DO YOU WORK LIKE THIS YOU SOCIOPATH?’, which is exactly as it should be.
  • How Did I Get Here: Nice bit of technical webwonkery to help explain to you HOW THE PIPES WORK – click the link and it will tell you how you got there, in the ‘this is all the routes that the data has taken to connect you at your computer with this website being hosted on a server somewhere’. Not, admittedly, the most THRILLING webpage in Curios this week, but it’s interesting if you’ve ever been curious about how all the fcuk this internet stuff actually works (RITUAL SACRIFICE AND BLOOD).
  • Dryxio GTA: A TikTok account dedicated to wandering around LA and getting footage of locations from GTA San Andreas that still exist in real life. Why? HE REALLY LIKES SAN ANDREAS WHAT OF IT?
  • Should I Bring A Jacket?: Tell this website where you are and it will tell you, based on available weather data, whether you ought in fact to bring a jacket. Admittedly, for anyone in the UK the answer to this question is, until March or April at least, ‘yes, Jesus, what the fcuk is wrong with you it is fcuking FREEZING out there’ and that this probably isn’t wholly necessary; still, I am pleased it exists.
  • Comaps: SUCH a good idea, this – maps on your phone which don’t require an internet connection to work, making them perfect for off-grid hikes or bike rides or whatever. “CoMaps is a community-focused privacy navigation app for travelers – drivers, hikers, and cyclists. It uses the crowd-sourced OpenStreetMap data with contributors from all over the globe. It offers navigation with privacy – no identifying people and no data collection. CoMaps features can operate without an active internet connection for offline navigation at urban or distant locations, where cellular service is not available. CoMaps is an open-source project, and prioritizes community development.” Just a really useful thing which you might want to bookmark for next year when the thought of ‘being outside’ isn’t quite so horrid (can you tell that I am once again remembering how miserable being skeletal is in winter? WHERE IS MY WARMING LAYER OF SUBCUTANEOUS FAT FFS???).
  • Everyone Who Wrote For Chris Carter: Via Giuseppe, this is a beautiful bit of datavizzing. Have YOU ever wanted a really detailed breakdown of every single person who has ever written on The X-Files, Millennium, Harsh Realm, The Lone Gunmen, and The After (all of which, I am told, are TV shows created by Chris Carter – I, er, don’t know who that is, but am going to assume that this might mean something to some of you)? No, I can’t imagine you have, unless you are one of said people and have been waiting for your nicely-designed flowers, but still, one exists, and it’s a really nice piece of visualisation work – “It features a comprehensive list of all screenwriters who contributed to these series, allowing to explore their involvement across different stages of the shows’ production, trace collaborations with other authors, and examine episode ratings”, and it’s an eminently-stealable example of how you might consider communicating information of this type (or you can just learn about who wrote that X-Files episode you loved, that is fine too).

By Greg Keenlight

NEXT, WHY NOT ENJOY SOME LIVE-CODED CLUB SOUNDS FROM THIS WEEK’S ALGORAVE NIGHT AT THE SOON-TO-BE-DEFUNCT CORSICA STUDIOS IN LONDON? 

THE SECTION WHICH  THINKS NIGEL FARAGE, BASED ON THE EVIDENCE, PROBABLY IS A RACIST ACTUALLY, PT.2:

  • Essentiality of Beauty: Yes, I know that ‘essentiality’ is a horrible word (one of those that feels like it’s wetly falling from your lips as you say it; go on, try it out loud, you’ll see what I mean) but L’Oreal have seen fit to use it here and who am I to countermand them? NO FCUKER, etc! The Essentiality of Beauty sounds like a VERY bad and VERY pretentious film, to my mind, but is instead a POINTLESS BEAUTY WEBSITE, designed to…oh, I don’t know, flog pastes and powders and stuff I guess, but via the slightly-oblique method of brand-building via a surprisingly-dense website (usually these things are paper-thin, contentwise, once you scratch beneath the admittedly-pretty dermis to the meat underneath) designed to…oh, look, just have the opening words: “Since the dawn of time, beauty has been more than just a pursuit. It is a universal language, a driver of progress, and a testament to human evolution. Explore the story of beauty through the ages.” Even more! “An immersive experience inspired by an exceptional book celebrating the fundamental role of beauty in the history of humanity. This journey reveals universal beauty, at the crossroads of culture, art, and heritage, as an essential force for well-being and human identity.” Don’t worry though, once you get past all of the ‘is truth beauty? Is beauty truth?’ 3am undergraduate w4nk you can then get down to the important stuff – a partnership with The Louvre, exploring the relationship between art and beauty via a bunch of pieces from the museum’s collection, with daily explorations of particular works and weekly short documentaries featuring some of the museum’s curators waxing lyrical about specific paintings, etc. OR you can ‘read the book’, which is a multi-part interactive section all about the centrality of BEAUTY to commerce, science and all sorts of other areas of human endeavour. This is, basically, very weird indeed – like, there’s a lot of work here, and a surprising amount of not-totally-moronic words and pictures, and yet it also feels like something that will be seen by a few thousand people at most because, well, WHO IS IT FOR? Anyway, I suppose when you’re L’Oreal you can still just about afford to spaff  budget on stuff like this, and we should celebrate people who are still willing to just make stuff because they can, so a cautious thumbs up (despite the fact that it says things like ‘beauty represents genuine soft power’ with an apparently-straight face).
  • All of the 2026 Trend Documents: It’s that time of year again! Every single agency of every single stripe under the sun, racing to put out weighty, predictive documents which will be read, in the main, by OTHER agencies who have also put out weighty, predictive documents, in some sort of scrying circlejerk of mediocre Nostradamus-ing! Thankfully there is literally no part of my professional life that really requires me to engage with any of this stuff any more (I say ‘thankfully’ – while I obviously don’t miss having to pretend to care (and largely failing) about this stuff, I DO miss the money that went along with working a couple of days a week in an agency, so if anyone has a c.£1000 pcm budgetary excess for 2026 and thinks ‘you know what, we really need a couple of days of angry misanthropy’ then, well, YOU KNOW WHERE TO FIND ME!), but I appreciate that there will still be quite a few of you who do, and for whom this might prove useful. As per last year, the SMART way of using these is to download them all and feed them to NotebookLM so you can interrogate them and get meta-trends out of them – or, alternatively, wait for someone else to do that in a public-facing way. See, this is the sort of SMART THINKING you could be buying, you fcuking cnuts (and that is why you won’t be buying it).
  • Papiers AI: Seeing as we’re talking about ‘interrogating complex documents via The Machine’ (SEAMLESS!), this is an interesting idea – a portal that allows you to basically interrogate any paper on academic portal Arxiv via an LLM interface. This is a really interesting idea, and I like the way that it automatically provides you with section summaries and a ‘mind map’ of the concepts contained within the paper, alongside the ability to ask questions of the document. Obviously your mileage with this sort of thing will depend on your own personal reading/learning style, but as an approach I quite like it – although obviously your ability to determine whether The Machine is a Reliable Interpreter will also obviously depend on you having a reasonable degree of knowledge about whatever an individual paper is about.
  • News Flow: This doesn’t REALLY work, and the interface is horrible (THANKS FOR THE GREAT LINKS MATT FFS), but I think there’s the kernel of a really good idea here; you used to be able to do stuff like this using monitoring tools and the rest, and I assume you still can to a degree, but they are all expensive subscription products and I think it’s the sort of thing you should be able to find out about without spending money. WHAT THE FCUK IS IT THOUGH MATT JESUS. Ah, yes, sorry. So News Flow purports to take breaking news stories from around the web and show you how the ‘flow’ of news worked – who first reported it, and then the chronology cadence of who else picked it up, and when. This is SO interesting from the point of view of determining influence networks, and getting to the bottom of whether a headline ought to be trusted, or whether a story comes from a reasonable or VERY MOTIVATED source, and generally is A Good Thing. Except, as discussed, this doesn’t really work properly, so if someone wants to build a version that does that would be great thanks.
  • Pattern Collider: I don’t *really* understand what’s going on with this little patternmaking toy, but if you would like to spend a few minutes making sort of vaguely-kaleidescope-y-snowflake-type images then this will literally be the PERFECT website. Move the sliders around, see what happens, maybe come up with a REALLY difficult tattoo design!
  • Vinylly: I was discussing with a friend this week all the things that are probably good but are slightly ruined by the people who like them A BIT TOO MUCH: coffee, say, or wine, or cycling (don’t look at me like that, you all know what I am talking about) – I sort of put vinyl in that category, something that is lovely and wonderful but which also attracts a Very Specific Type of Enthusiast who can, in my experience, also be a Tedious Fcuking Snob. So it is, then, that I think we should treat the arrival of Vinylly with cautious applause, for it is a dating app SPECIFICALLY for people who really, really like vinyl (ok, so it says ‘music’ but the vibe they are cultivating here feels quite specific) a LOT, and are keen to ONLY date other people who make it a load-bearing element of their personality. On the plus side, it potentially removes a very annoying set of people from the mainstream dating pool; on the other, I have a…slight suspicion that the gender balance on this is going to fcuk it from the off. Maybe I’m wrong! Maybe I am just being a sexist pig and ignoring all the women who are obsessively scouring record fairs and arguing about the provenance of an original 1974 pressing of…no, it’s DEFINITELY mostly going to be men.
  • Zoom Timothee: You will, of course, have seen the HILARIOUS (your mileage may vary) spoof zoom call released as part of the marketing effort for Timmy C’s latest cinematic venture about table tennis (you can tell I’m enthused, can’t you?); this is a neat little reworking which allows you to insert yourself into the call, with a few neat interactive elements like asking you to introduce yourself to Tim and a bit of (spoofed, but neatly) chat with the other participants, and this felt oddly reminiscent of one of those throwback ‘film promo that creates a personalised trailer by scraping a bunch of info from your Facebook profile’ things that were all the rage in 2010. Anyway, this is apparently a fan project by a bloke called ‘Loz’ and is all the more impressive for it, well done that man.
  • The Emoji Museum: Not, in fact, really a museum, just a webpage put together by emoji search engine EmojiTime to commemorate all the different versions of emoji that have previously existed (ok, fine, not ALL, but lots of them). Emoticons! The mad Japanese ones! ICQ! Yahoo! AOL! Depending on your age and the country you grew up in and the sort of kid you were (but, look, let’s be honest, if you’re reading this then you were definitely That Type of Kid – it’s ok! It’s a safe space!) this is a powerful hit of Proustian nostalgia (emojis as madeleines is now a concept that I am weirdly invested in, fcuk knows why my brain has chosen to latch onto this at 914am) – weirdly the BBM ones sent me back IMMEDIATELY to c.2011 when everyone in London was seemingly selling drugs/fomenting civil unrest on the platform. GOOD TIMES!
  • Hacklore: It does rather feel that the general fact of ‘everything is built on the same few platforms, digitally-speaking’ and ‘everything is now IT’ is resulting in an era in which hacking and subsequent extortion by BAD ACTORS is now just going to be a fact of life for any organisation that holds data of any sort of potential value. As such, this feels like a potentially-timely and useful resource for any of you who might in any way be responsible for data, etc, at smallish organisations to bookmark JUST IN CASE. “Hacklore.org exists to separate myth from reality. Our goal is to help everyday people and small organizations focus on the simple, fact-based steps that truly protect their data and devices—keeping software up to date, using strong passwords and passkeys, using a password manager, and enabling multi-factor authentication. By replacing fear with facts, we can make digital safety advice more accurate, actionable, and effective for everyone.” A good idea, and A Good Thing.
  • The Lighthouse Directory: Do you want a PROJECT to fill in all those interminable hours between birth and death? How about visiting EVERY LIGHTHOUSE IN THE WORLD? Obviously that would be quite a mad undertaking, but, should you wish to get a measure of the task, you could do worse than taking a look at this site, which contains information and links for more than 24,600 of the world’s lighthouses. 24,600! SO MANY LIGHTHOUSES! For ease of use, the lighthouses are broken down by territory, so if you are WEAK and PISSANT you can choose to ‘just’ visit all the ones in the British Isles (though, er, I feel the Caribbean might be a more pleasant region to explore, just saying).
  • Is Dubai Worth It?: I maintain that ‘you look like you would enjoy holidaying in Dubai’ is perhaps the greatest insult of the modern age, and that the answer to the linked question is ‘no’ in almost all cases. BUT! I appreciate that not everyone shares my worldview or my politics, and that for many people moving to somewhere like Dubai is less of a choice and more of a follow-the-money necessity. This is a (vibecoded, almost certainly) calculator site designed to help people thinking of moving there work out whether the package they are being offered is worth it or whether they’re basically signing up to a life of indentured servitude – what I think is interesting here is the fact that this is, I am pretty sure, made by someone in India or the wider region and is squarely aimed at people who might be being offered labouring or construction contracts and are worried about whether they can make it work without having a really horrible time, which is such a fascinating window into modern flows of capital and labour and also, if you pause to think about it a very bleak one indeed (“using the AI to check whether you’re effectively walking into a slave-level contract situation” doesn’t feel GREAT as a concept).
  • Forty News: A shame that this is an American project and therefore so utterly navelgazing – no fault of anyone involved, just the nature of the thing. The idea here is lovely – the site will each day present the news on this day from 40 years ago – that’s it. Daily time travel via events is such a nice idea, but also such a wonderful way of delivering a bit pf perspective to the very real sense that now is THE WORST AND MOST FRIGHTENING TIME EVER – clicking across to the tab RIGHT NOW, I find (hold on) ‘59 Die In Egyptian Air Hijack’, some grumbling about the impossibility of nuclear non-proliferation, and an article that opens with the lines “A 5-year-old girl remains barred from kindergarten after her AIDS diagnosis triggered mass hysteria throughout Plainfield. Children now fear contracting the virus from doorknobs as parents prepare to march on the Statehouse Wednesday.” See? IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN TERRIBLE AND WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN DREADFUL! IT IS NOT A MODERN PHENOMENON? Is this…is this reassuring? Great!
  • The Best Four-Minute Video You Will See All Day: I don’t want to spoil this for you – it really is best you go in cold – but I can guarantee that you will not anticipate where this goes or where it ends up, and that it will make you VERY HAPPY. Honestly, trust me, when do I EVER steer you wrong?
  • Arya: Until this week, I confess to having been ignorant of the concept of the ‘intimacy concierge’ – now, though, thanks to Arya, I am ALL-IN. Arya is an app that is designed to help you and a partner explore your sexualities together – per the blurb, “The Arya Concierge is your personal, confidential companion…They guide you on your journey by making it easier for you and your partner to explore your desires and deepen your intimate connection.” What this practically means, seemingly, is that you and whoever you’re currently exchanging fluids with answer some questions in the app, and  then get, over the course of a week or so, some SEXY VIDEOS and suggestions of games to play together, and then a BOX OF STUFF to enable you to act out said games: “every month you’ll receive a new Scene curated by your concierge guiding you on an erotic adventure, based on your personal desires and journey.” So what this is, basically, is SENSUALITY AS A SERVICE (the sexy side of SaaS!), sex-on-subscription, and a clever way of exploiting people’s growing insecurities about the fact that the sex they are having is somehow NOT ENOUGH, whether for them or for their partner, that they are not FRONTIER or exploratory and are missing out. You perhaps can tell that I think that this is a VERY cynical offering, but, well, should you and your partner sign up to this via Curios and suddenly feel your krause’s corpuscles lighting up in new and exciting ways then, well…good, but please don’t feel the need to tell me, in my head you all have smooth places like Barbie and Ken.
  • France Books: To be clear, clicking this link will take you to a page featuring the covers of smutty books from the 70s, so caveat emptor and all that. This is curated by Paul Tobin, a truly legendary collector of Old Smut, and is a full rundown of all the titles published by France Books, an erotic imprint from the US in the 20thC. The real draw here for me is the titles, which, honestly, are just ASTONISHING in some cases – I know that 50 years is a long time, but it’s hard not to do a very big double take at the idea you could happily market a book called ‘Door To Door Rape’ as recently as even that. Most of these, though, are thankfully more ‘wtf’ than ‘call the police’ – personally-speaking I would LOVE to know the plot of ‘Lion Lover’, say, and I can’t help admire the no-frills ‘Lesbos in Panama’. Joyous, if obviously not really ok by any modern standards whatsoever.
  • Tiled Words: A daily word game! Arrange the tiles to make words! This is really hard and annoyed me, but you might be less thick than I am.
  • Command & Conquer Red Alert: I haven’t tried this because this isn’t a huge nostalgia hook for me and, honestly, life is too short, but should you be someone for whom Red Alert holds a special place in your heart then you will LOVE this. Requires some minor technical fiddling (you need to download and install some files), but by all accounts this works really well.
  • Threemojis: This was sent to me by its creator, whose message I will reproduce here in full: “It takes the seven letters with a central letter concept from Spelling Bee and then challenges you to find not just some but all the words you can make with those letters. Three Emojis gives you a blanked out word list up front, and as you find shorter words those words show up in the longer words, like a crossword. The name of the game comes from the three emojis that are generated and displayed as a hint for each word. Three Emojis is also, as far as I know, the first daily word game that is available in multiple languages as well as for speakers of multiple languages. What I mean, is that it’s a great game for American English speakers. But it’s also a great game for Spanish speakers who want to play in English as a way of expanding their English vocabulary. For every word, an in depth definition is given in the player’s language, solving a personal pet peeve of mine, no more tabbing away over to Google to look up definitions. Right now, the game is available for English, German, Spanish and Chinese speakers to play with English and German word lists. I’ve got a todo list to expand it to a British/Commonwealth word list and hope to get to that soon.” I think this is lovely, and as a way of helping someone improve their English (or other languages) I think it could be hugely useful.
  • Ruin: Our final link this week is a real treat – Ruin is a browsergame which presents as a ‘forgotten ZX Spectrum’ title. Per the site, “Explore the Experience of RUIN! The first chapter of the legendary IP owned and distributed by ubiquitous Super-Corp, Official Electric. As a celebration of the 35th anniversary of the original release, we’ve faithfully recreated the Original RUIN so you can experience the experience on Your Device, Your Way… “ Except, of course, RUIN was never a real game, Official Electric is not a real company (despite the website and the merch), and the game is…honestly, again I don’t want to tell you too much about it, but this quite quickly becomes a surreal and quite deep riff on all sorts of different types of game and game design, and is far, far smarter and deeper than I expected, and I think it really is quite wonderful and definitely worth 15 minutes of your time. TRY IT.

By Leah Gardner

WE CLOSE OUT THE MIXES THIS WEEK WITH THIS UNSEASONABLY-SUNSHINEY 80s-INFLECTED SET BY TOP TECHNIQUE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Transatlantic: A VERY oldschool Tumblr, this, collating old photos of famouses, old photos, old bits of visual ephemera…no idea what the curatorial theme here is, but I like the VIBE.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Disco Bambino: Images from the heyday of disco, via the weekly newsletter of Rob Wickings.
  • Pervy The Clown: I mean, yes, this is exactly what you think it is, but it’s Insta so it’s not TOO NSFW. But, er, it’s very much the Insta account of a clown who also doubles as a bongo performer. I found this accompanied by a post which read ‘Pervy the Clown is the most horrifying clown pornstar I have ever seen’ which, honestly, I had a LOT of questions about, but I will just leave this link here and leave you all to it. The feed is sadly defunct, but looking back through it I couldn’t help but think that, well, maybe it didn’t all end so well for Pervy.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • Democracy Is Fcuked: To be clear, this isn’t ACTUALLY the title of the linked piece here – the link here will take you to an academic paper (COME BACK IT IS VERY READABLE) called ‘Debilitated democracy: When the legs get ripped off’ which is, basically, about all the reasons why democracy is no longer able to deliver the things which traditionally we have associated with it. There’s quite a lot of this that made me raise a slight eyebrow – lot of big assertions, guys! – but, also, I found the central thesis reasonably compelling and it’s an interesting, and different, lens through which to look at the ‘whither, well, everything?’ question we are all grappling with in the face of the fact that we seem to have rather fcuked things. “this paper argues that modernisation and democracy have become opposed. Drawing on the work of Michael Th. Greven and Hartmut Rosa, it argues that as modernisation intensifies, it erodes the preconditions necessary for democracy to credibly make the promises long associated with it. This process of debilitation involves ‘ratchet effects’, such that it becomes steadily less possible to restore lost capacities. The regime that remains is like a marathon runner who has been subjected to an amputation – it continues on in a minimalist sense, but its horizons of possibility are irrevocably altered. Because this debilitated democracy is unable to check or manage modernisation, it will remain subject to the process that has debilitated it, further reducing its horizons in the years to come.”
  • Odd Ones Out: This is a very long, quite involved and very data-y post by Ben Ansell all about demographic groupings within voter blocks, and how party affiliation maps against certain issues here in the UK – and while I appreciate that for many of you that will mean an instant skip here (I SEE YOU), for those who can be bothered (and I promise I am awful with data and this makes it painless, honest) I think it presents an interesting way of looking at the current electoral landscape and, in particular, the mythical ‘Reform voter’ which is seemingly the only type of person the country’s major parties seem interested in appealing to. As the article shows, turns out that there is almost no way in which it’s possible to present Reform supporters as anything other than massive outliers on most socioeconomic issues, which makes it even more confusing and dispiriting that they are constantly being held up as The Voice Of Real Britain rather than slightly fringey idiots (and yes, I appreciate that calling people who disagree with your politics as ‘idiots’ is generally unhelpful discourse, but, well, I can pretty much guarantee that noone reading this is likely to be voting in that direction given the general VIBE of this newsletter and, also, sometimes some people really are just fcuking morons.
  • The Private Asset Economy: This is a few weeks old now, but I saw it this week and was appalled at the figures here. Long-term readers (who bother to pay attention to what I say, which, look, I get that most of you don’t because why would you) will know that I have long believed Private Equity and private finance in general to be one of the great scourges of the modern age, and a significant cause of Many Of Our Ills, and the news reported in this piece that the so-called Private Asset Economy is worth $22 TRILLION, and would be the second-largest economy in the world were it a nation, filled me with no little horror and trepidation. Is it good that such a violent sum of capital can and will be deployed with minimal scrutiny and oversight to further the aims and interests and bank balances of what remains a relatively-small class of people? I would posit that it is not! And yet! Here we are!
  • The Job: I know it feels like it’s impossible to feel much outrage at ALL OF THIS anymore, particular That Fcuking Man in the White House, but sometimes you will read something and remember that, oh yes, this is a genuinely terrible human being doing terrible things in service of lots of other terrible human beings and that maybe things shouldn’t be this way. So it was with this piece in the LRB, looking at Trump’s recent visit to Israel and his speech to the Knesset, which I hadn’t previously seen reported but contains some lines of truly jaw-dropping blatancy – DONALD YOUR VENALITY IS SHOWING (again!)! I am going to reproduce the opening quote here because, honestly, just fcuking hell, but it really is worth reading the whole piece, not least because author TJ Clarke does an excellent job of conveying the simultaneous exhaustion and horror and disgust that you feel when world leaders say things like this: “‘We make the best weapons in the world, and we’ve got a lot of them,’ Trump told the Knesset on 13 October. “And we’ve given a lot to Israel, frankly. Bibi would call me so many times, ‘Can you get me this weapon, that weapon, that weapon?’ Some of ’em I never heard of, Bibi, and I made ’em! [Laughter] But we’d get ’em here, wouldn’t we, huh? And they’re the best. They are the best. And you used them well. It also takes people that know how to use them, and you obviously used them very well. What a job! What a job you’ve done … Those are just a few of the reasons why I am proud to be the best friend that Israel has ever had.”
  • A Wasted Trillion: A good essay, this, by long-term LLM sceptic Gary Marcus, who writes about the growing consensus – referenced several times over the past few years in Curios, fwiw – that LLMs might in fact be a dead end in the search for AGI, and that if that is in fact the case then what has just happened is the spunking of a trillion dollars on tech which is not going to deliver the Hail Mary that we as a species seem to have decided it needs to. I broadly agree with Marcus on all of this – I also think, as previously discussed here, that even when the bubble bursts, presuming it does, the tech IS NOT GOING ANYWHERE and we will be left with the debt, the fcuked finances, and the continued attempts by business owners to further reduce staffing overheads by replacing people with whatever the best version of The Machine we get to is, and all the informational and epistemological uncertainty of the post-LLM era. The sad part, of course, is that it won’t deliver the big changes we actually need in terms of solving, you know, ‘physics’, which does rather leave us scratching our heads again as we stare at the looming apocalpysetrain getting ever closer. Er, sorry, that was a bit bleak, wasn’t it? Apologies.
  • The Slop Tax: The word ‘slop’ should be banned, but nonetheless I rather enjoyed this proposal for a tax on AI companies, whose proceeds would be used to fund and support the actual arts and creative industries. Sadly this will never happen, based as it is on the false premise that we as a society actually value culture enough to understand that WE NEED TO PAY FOR IT – if anyone has spent any time looking at How Arts Funding Works, in the UK or otherwise, you will know that that is, politely, a risible belief to hold. Still, nice bit of thinking, utopian as it may be to my cynical old eyes.
  • News Daddy: An excellent piece in The Verge on some of the places that younger people in the US are getting their news from rather than the fusty old mainstream media (‘News Daddy’ is one such provider, apparently). Pleasingly non-judgemental – after all, it’s not like the Old Media is doing a particularly good job at the moment of making the case for its superiority – and it covers all the bases, from the very now-ish sensation of being constantly smashed in the face by the infinite newtsunami (never, ever using that term again, it is HORRIBLE, sorry), although personally I think there’s an angle here that’s underexplored, specifically the oddity of a generation that decries media organisations as inherently ‘biased’ but doesn’t apply that consideration to information being filtered through the prism of a single creator – it does rather feel like we might need to revisit ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’ at some point as they don’t quite seem to be working for us at the moment (DID THEY EVERZzzzzzzzzzz).
  • Buy A Printer: A very funny, but objectively *slightly* depressing, piece by Nilay Patel in The Verge, on which printer to buy – but also about AI and optimisation and the digital publishing business model in 2025, and the way that everything is just a series of broken pipes all the way down, and, look, it won’t make you feel better but it will make you laugh (albeit in a slightly hollow manner) and that’s what counts.
  • The Doordash Problem: ANOTHER Verge piece (last one), this time a really smart and in-depth discussion of how the promise of any sort of meaningful ‘agentic’ or shopping layer to AI does rather fcuk the business models of your Just Eats in half – this is a clear, cogent explanation which works even if, like me, you have all the general business, commercial and economic sense of a dachshund.
  • Roblox and Child Safety: It’s been interesting to watch Roblox’s journey from ‘platform that broadly-speaking feels like it has at least a reasonable approach to child safety’ about ~10y ago to ‘place which if I had kids I would have some serious reservations about letting them hang unsupervised’ – this is a proper carcrash of an interview between the company’s CEO (who just a few months prior to this made some…ill-advised comments on a podcast about the possible introduction of dating to the platform, which FCUKING HELL MAN) and the NYT’s Hard Fork podcast – it’s worth reading the whole thing, particularly if you have a comms background as you will WINCE repeatedly, but the main takeaway here is, honestly, ‘this man does not give anywhere near enough of a fcuk about keeping his VERY YOUNG userbase safe’. I continue to be amazed at the fact that the Roblox Moral Panic hasn’t happened yet, but maybe pencil that in for 2026.
  • Why Interstellar Travel Is Impossible Actually: Your inner child will perhaps be saddened by this – and maybe don’t tell your kids that the spaceship fantasy may not in fact be coming true – but I liked this very science-y series of explanations as to why the (eg) Muskian vision of INTERSTELLAR HUMAN DOMINANCE does rather fall apart slightly when you look at the actual size of space and how long it would take us to get anywhere and how, without some sort of genuinely physics-busting innovations (see previous point about the LLM dead end, though), this simply isn’t going to happen. The indignance is a joy throughout – for example, “See, this is what drives me crazy about this subject, we keep mistaking slapdash tropes invented by sci-fi writers for actual plausible science. I mean, think about what we’re saying here: “Crews could survive the long trip if we just invent human immortality.” You’re talking about a pod that can just magically halt the aging process. And as depicted, it is magic; these people are emerging from their years-long comas (during which they were not eating or drinking) with no wrinkles, brain damage, muscle atrophy, or bedsores. Their hair doesn’t even grow. The only way that could happen is if the pods literally freeze time, like goddamned Zack Morris on Saved by the Bell. It’s as scientific as showing the astronauts drinking a magic potion that grants eternal youth, brewed from unicorn tears.”
  • Fran Sans: A blogpost explaining the process that Emily Sneddon went through when designing a font inspired by the tram lights of San Francisco. This is SO interesting – it’s rare that you get someone talking you through their thinking and the inspiration behind various elements of design with such clarity and minimal w4nk, and I honestly felt I understood marginally more about design after reading this, which for someone as visually deficient as I am is no mean feat.
  • The Best Comedy Movies of All Time: A masterful piece of listbuilding, this, by Vanity Fair, who managed to compile a list of the 100 greatest comic films EVER and in so doing manage to unite the web in the shared opinion that the people who put it together are know-nothing bozos who have perhaps never laughed. I honestly don’t care anywhere near enough about films to have strong opinions on this, but I would say that the inclusion of Austin Powers, a film which was not, never has been funny and never will be funny, was my personal ‘nope’ point.
  • Vegas: Vegas, it seems, is in decline; Luke Winkie spends some days there for Slate exploring why that might be (clue: everyone is poorer and Americans can now lose vast sums of money betting on stupid things from the comfort of their phones and don’t need to schlep to Nevada). Your interest in this will probably be proportionate to your familiarity with and affection for Vegas as a place – I enjoyed it very much, while also thinking how little desire I ever have to go back to the place (unless I do so as a VERY RICH person, because high-roller Vegas must be fcuking great if sort-of morally abhorrent).
  • The Nuzzi Thing: Look, I didn’t *want* to include anything about this story; I managed to avoid linking it last week, and I figured that anyone who cared about this would have indulged themselves to the point of biliousness by now, such is the volume of MEDIA DISCOURSE it has generated in the US, but this nose-to-tail explainer piece by Brian Phillips in The Ringer is, honestly, superb – it is VERY comprehensive and VERY funny and eviscerates each of the principal subjects with precision, and if you feel you HAVE to learn more about what is, at heart, a very inside baseball story about US media and politics then this is the piece via which to do it. Can I just point out, though, to any Americans reading this, that the fact that I know who these people are through forced cultural osmosis is one of the reasons we all find your country very tiring? Sorry, but it’s true. STOP POLLUTING EVERYTHING WITH YOUR MESSES WE HAVE OUR OWN THANKS.
  • Mallrats At 30: If the film ‘Mallrats’ holds any place in your heart, you need to read this piece, an extended interview with Kevin Smith alongside a look back at the film, its (terrible) initial reception and its eventual successful second life as a cult hit on VHS (honestly, watching this on a pirated video while very stoned in 1996 was a truly formative experience). If, on the other hand, my promising to ‘screw your girlfriend in a very uncomfortable place’ means nothing to you then feel free to move on (but you should watch Mallrats).
  • Gay-for-Pay Bongo: Ok, so the technical title of this piece in The Fence is the far more clever-clever ‘Summa Cum Laude’ (WE KNOW YOU WENT TO PRIVATE SCHOOL LADS), but the story is basically about a guy who teaches aspirant male pornstars how to get over their initial, er, qualms and learn to perform man-on-man for the cameras (and the dollar). This is territory first mined by Louis Theroux back in the day (there is a very old episode of Weird Weekends where he visits a similar place in the US back in the 90s, which I recommend unreservedly), but it’s never not-interesting to explore the world of guys who will happily maintain their het status while getting reamed seven ways to Sunday on-camera by a man called ‘Tony The Spunk Daddy’ (this is a flight of fancy, but broadly representative). Pleasingly this is a generally good-hearted piece with none of the subtextual sadness that often accompanies this type of reporting, although there’s something complex and uncomfortable about the differential earning rates for gay vs ‘gay for pay’ and why this might be.
  • The Realities of Being a Pop Star: When she launched it last month I wasn’t expecting to EVER link to the CharliXCX newsletter, but this piece really is good – I figure many of you will have read it what with her being one of the most famous popstars on the planet, but in case not it’s a really well-written perspective on what it feels like to be, well, one of the most famous popstars on the planet. I always get the impression with Ms XCX that the authenticity is its own artifice and as such I am not taking the ‘real’ too seriously here, but she can write well and it’s interesting to hear an ostensibly-personal account of such a fundamentally singular experience.
  • John Darnielle: Again, this is probably one for the heads, but if you’re a Mountain Goats fan, or if you’ve enjoyed any of Darnielle’s excellent novels, this profile of the band’s frontman is a SUPERB read, not least because its subject is a genuinely interesting person with genuinely interesting stories and perspectives, and because the author has some personal history with the artist which makes the piece more intimate and more generally-personal than you might ordinarily get with a profile of this sort. If you’re not familiar with the man and his work, by the way, he really is one of the most interesting creative voices to have emerged from North America in the 20th/21stC, no hyperbole.
  • County Sligo’s Normal People: A great piece in The Dispatch by Jack Burke, in which he goes to Sligo and spends a day hanging out with a guy who hand-draws maps of the area. Ordinarily my tolerance for ‘oh Ireland, how do I love thee and the craic and the blarney!!!!!’ stuff is less than zero, but this communicates, well, Irishness, without at any point descending into ‘paint the rivers green!’ cliche, and the central character in the piece is, well, a proper character. As it happens I bumped into the author of this piece in a bar on Tuesday evening and he was very nice, so I feel doubly justified in linking to it.
  • Fcuk or Fight: On being young and drunk and angry and bellicose, and on the sorts of people I think everyone probably remembers one of from their youth, constantly picking pieces of other people’s teeth out of their knuckles and whose Friday nights tended to end in the bouncer’s headlock (Michael ‘Laney’ Lane, it is vanishingly unlikely that you ever learned to read well enough to come across these words, but know that I think of you and your frankly-psychopathic demeanour more often than I would ever have predicted). This is a very good short story by David Preizler.
  • Romantasy at the End of the World: I know, I know, NO MORE ROMANTASY THINKPIECES! This, though, is REALLY good, partly because the writing is stellar (Daniel Yadin is a poet and this reads like it) but also because, in contrast to lots of pieces on the romantasy boom, this doesn’t pull its punches when talking about the fcuking – it quotes, it dissects, it DWELLS, and it’s all the better for now bowdlerising the appeal of the texts. It also does a really interesting job in attempting to unpack some of the wider social context around the genre’s popularity (although I have additional personal theory about sex toy design and the increased preponderance of fiction in which protagonists have, er, non-standard genitalia), as exemplified by this personal favourite section: “overdetermination by external forces combined with apocalyptic premonitions: there’s something so American about it all. Here in our Primary World, the end is always coming, whether it’s climate change or chat bots or Q or a coup. The air of tragedy and paralysis that overhangs so much of American life is, perhaps more than declining rates of marriage or property ownership, the real source of strength for the particular type of fairy-tale narrative that has come to dominate our literature. Because what are you supposed to do with your time between now and the end of the world? What should you do with your one adult life?  Romantasy suggests that you may as well suck off a dragon or two.” WELL QUITE.
  • After Dad Died We Found The Love Letters: This is part two of a three part series exploring the author’s feelings after the death of their father; this particular essay is, I think, absolutely beautiful and very sad but also, oddly, emotionally sustaining, in part I think due to the style (informal, personal, journal-ish) it’s written in; I have thought about it a lot all week, and maybe it will stay with you too.
  • My Dead Uncle’s Phone: Tied contender for best thing I read this week – this is a very long essay which, were I perhaps being a BIT overcritical I might accuse of leaning too hard into some slight self-congratulation around certain gonzo-ish habits, but given the wider context you can, I think, forgive the author the indulgence. Kiki Dy writes about going through her dead uncle’s phone – an uncle who, by all accounts, lived a quite extraordinary life but who was clearly a massive drug addicted ar$ehole and who also clearly fcuked up the author in all sorts of ways, ways in which have left her with her own very obvious…substance issues. In the piece, Dy seeks to piece together the shape of her uncle’s life by tracking down names in his phone, talking to strangers in bars, drinking and drugging and attempting to make some sort of sense of a chaotic and inchoate existence through the breadcrumb trail of digital ghosts that live within a dead person’s mobile. I thought this was SPECTACULAR.
  • Fights: Piece of the week and THE FINAL LINK accolade this week goes to this story, by Scott Mclanahan in the Paris Review. It is brilliant, and you should all read it. “A few weeks before, she’d gone out with friends in New York, and they decided to get new tattoos. She asked me in a text, “What should I get?” I jokingly texted her, “My initials.” We weren’t even together yet, but a few minutes later, she sent me a picture of a pyramid on her arm and beneath it were the letters SM. I’d only known Julia for a few months, so I was shocked. I thought, This woman’s nuts. But somehow, she’d voodooed herself to love me too. Now I turned my face, and Julia stabbed my arm. The fat part was tender, and she poked and pierced the skin. Blood bubbled to the surface, and she kept poking until it was done. And when I finally looked down, I saw the two letters I now wear on my skin. I saw her initials like upside down fishhooks. JJ. And it was true. I had desecrated my flesh for someone now. And if you ever discover my body one day and have to identify it, this tattoo will tell you who I was.”

By Anandika Primawan

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS !: