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Webcurios 23/10/26

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I went to Thorpe Park on Monday with a godchild of mine – Thorpe Park is great, rollercoasters are ace, etc etc, but my main takeaway from the day was ‘wow are there an awful lot of young people in 2026 who have taken early-00s ‘Fred Durst’ as their fashion inspiration’ (that and “I refuse to believe System Of A Down are as popular as all these hoodies would suggest”).

Anyway, today’s Web Curios is going to be light on introduction because I am once again Catford bound (seriously, Catford on a wet Friday afternoon in October really is a particular and unique joy, you should all try and experience it at least once in your lives), so I am going to fcuk off and leave you with the links while we all wait for the rest of the internet to fall apart.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you will doubtless be relieved to hear that all my PHP patches are up-to-date (thanks Shardcore) – are yours?

By Andrew Miksys

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK BY ONCE AGAIN TAKING A JOURNEY THROUGH THE RECORD COLLECTION OF CREPUSCULAR INTERNET ODDITY SADEAGLE! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS REALLY ENJOY THING THIS WEEK’S ‘SPEEDRUN APOCALYPSE’ VIBES, PT.1: 

  • What Everyone Read on Wikipedia Yesterday: OK, fine, not *everyone* and not *yesterday* (stop being so demanding!), but you can forgive a tiny bit of artistic license, I hope – this is a very simple but SO interesting little webproject which displays country-level data about the most-read Wikipedia entries on a map, so you can quickly and easily see what exactly people all over the world have been looking up to get a sort of top-level feel for what the seething, frightened mass of humanity is curious about RIGHT NOW (ish). So it is that, at the time of writing (yes, ok, fine, not QUITE the time of writing, the page is currently displaying info for the 15th October so it’s lagging by just over a week but STOP COMPLAINING IT IS STILL INTERESTING) you can see that the UK was looking up Hannah Fry, presumably because of The Traitors, while Iceland was for some reason pretending it is 2017 all over again and thinking about the Curious Girl statue, while in Sweden they had Pablio Picasso on their mind and in El Salvador they’ve had a brief (and to me inexplicable) need to find out more about German professional footballer Antonio Rudiger. WHY??? Anyway, this is endlessly curious and fascinating and I really hope that it hasn’t stopped working just as I’ve discovered it.
  • Reverse Engineer Everything: While the world is slowly waking up to the realisation that the web is basically held together with string, yellowing sellotape and the accumulated knowledge of a bunch of volunteer code enthusiasts who could drop dead at any second, and that AI now means that it’s quite possible that large swathes of it might be kicked to pieces at any second, there’s a quiet secondary mad and slightly-terrifying AI thing going on elsewhere – to whit, the fact that all of the software moats seem to be eroding…quite…quickly. You will of course recall that vibecoded alternative to the Adobe Creative suite from a few weeks ago – well, the main link here is to a github repo called Reverse Engineer Everything, which simply put, lets anyone do that to anything (sort-of). Per the blurb, “See a feature in an app that you want in your own product? Ask your agent to investigate it with REA. It can inspect the app without its source code, explain how the feature works, show the evidence, and build a version for your project.” Couple this with the whole ‘you can now basically decompile any videogame and run it anywhere you like’ thing from the past month or so and you start to get a vague inkling that an awful lot of software-based industries are set for some…big changes in the not-too-distant future. How does all this impact little things like, ooh, the global economy? WHO KNOWS???? Oh this is all going to be so exciting.
  • Walercolour Playground: That last link was both *quite* boring and *quite* unsettling (a truly cursed combination), so why not take a moment to decompress with some LOVELY ART – this is a nicely-made little in-browser painting toy which does a reasonable job of recreating the experience of painting with watercolours (or I think it does, I don’t think I have picked up a paintbrush or used watercolours since I was approximately 14), and while I haven’t managed to make anything other than an horrendous mess with it I have been pleased by the way that the whole ‘ink bleeding into paper’ effect works (the bar, it turns out, is low this morning).
  • A Walkable History of Art: Gah, SUCH a frustrating site, this one, and another example of a genuinely great idea which could have been SO much better if it weren’t for the horrible AI-generated UX/UI stuff around it. The premise of the site is simple and smart – you can basically pick from a variety of different styles and eras of art and then generate a walkable 3d gallery of said era(s), letting you wander through a bespoke exhibition which presents the selected period(s) of art history in pleasing, ambulatory fashion – which, to be clear, is fun and interesting and A Nice Thing To Be Able To Do! Except the whole interface is horrible and cluttered and messy, there are far too many buttons and options and there are basically about three layers of menu more than their need to be, and, as with so many of the sites thrown up by the current generation of models, it very much feels like a website designed by something which has never used a mouse or sworn at a browser.  Still, if you would like an object lesson in ‘how poor design can really fcuk up a great idea’, this is a TEACHABLE MOMENT.
  • You Only Look Once: Do you have any idea how computers ‘see’ things in images? Do you? BE HONEST. No, you don’t, but now is your chance to LEARN SOMETHING, thanks to this rather nice explainer site which patiently takes you through how YOLO (You Only Look Once) technology works, and how every time your laptop or phone does image recognition it’s actually doing some really rather clever parallel processing stuff under the hood. Which, I appreciate, you may not care about AT ALL, but this is still worth looking at because it’s a nicely-made explainer, I quite like the slightly-discordant colourscheme AND the site talks to you. I did say the bar was low.
  • The Duck Pond: OH I LOVE THIS. Would you like to experience the placid beauty of a simulated duck pond, complete with quacking avian friends? OH GOOD. This is, graphically, not going to blow you’re mind – it is a…rudimentary simulation when it comes to the visuals – but the nice bit is the way that the audio renders; the pond features a number of different birds, all moving around and doing their own thing and quacking and capering, and their sounds are rendered based on their position on the pond relative to you, the listener, standing on the (simulated) shore. YOU CAN THROW AND HANDFUL OF VIRTUAL PEAS TO ATTRACT THE DUCKS FFS, THIS IS WONDERFUL.
  • The Prague Metro: Or, er, Metroskop in Czech! Have you ever wanted to explore the majesty of the Prague subway system, rendered in glorious 3d? Have you ever yearned to explore its history via an interactive explainer which takes you through its construction and expansion over time? OF COURSE YOU HAVE, YOU ARE NOT MADE OF STONE! “Metroskop shows the Prague metro as it really is underground: the depth of all 61 stations, escalators, stairs, vestibules and tunnels at true heights above lidar terrain. Plus station ridership, surroundings and the story of its construction from the first dreams in 1898 to line D.” You can even follow a train along its route to experience a strangely-meditative journey through the tunnels under the Czech capital while soothing music plays, which, frankly, I would 100% do right now if I didn’t have all these links to tell you about.
  • Attie: This is interesting; Bluesky has recently launched Attie, its own AI-powered creative playground which lets users who don’t mind dealing with the EVIL MACHINE DEVIL connect their account and then build things using The Machine; the idea here is that people can build small games and webtoys leveraging the At Protocol (the open-source architecture on which Bluesky and a bunch of other things are built), much in the same way as similar efforts from Meta and Google – obviously because it’s Bluesky the reaction to this has, in the main, been indifference and bile, but’s it’s worth taking a quick look and having a prod, just to see how this sort of thing theoretically functions. They’re very much trying to pitch it as ‘baby’s first vibecoding toy’, with a ‘what would you like to build today?’ prompt and a selection of other ‘popular’ builds to inspire you – the thing is, though, as with other versions of this sort of thing I’ve seen, it doesn’t always work particularly well and the results aren’t that impressive, and, basically, if you’re yet to be impressed by the creative power of The Machine when it comes to building things with code then this is unlikely to prove your Damascene moment.
  • Stagnant Pond: Ignore the cookie-cutter Claudeslop look and feel of this for a second and enjoy the fact that this vibecoded simulation of a pondlife ecosystem, found via Lynn, lets you zoom all the way down to the cellular level so that you can hang out with microbial lifeforms. Still, not a patch on the ducks a few links ago.
  • Tiny London: Regular readers who actually pay attention to what I write here (…anyone? Fcuk’s sake) will know that I often find projects which are focused on North America, most often New York, and bemoan the fact that they don’t exist for London, and plaintively ask whether someone will see fit to think of us poor, unloved Brits and make a version JUST FOR US…and , finally, SOME FCUKER HAS LISTENED! I mean, look, I don’t for a second believe that the person who made this did so because I asked for it, but maybe this is one of those rare instances of The Universe bending to my will. Do you remember those giant, pixelart versions of New York and San Francisco that people built earlier this year with the assistance of The Machine? OF COURSE YOU DO! Well, now someone’s done the same for London, creating a glorious and PERFECTLY-RENDERED vision of my city in pretty, pixel-perfect art style. This is done using the same technique as the other cities I’ve previously featured, I think, breaking the city into a grid and rendering each square separately before stitching them together, and because it’s been AI’d from photos the visual fidelity is pretty astonishing – go and find where you live and check out how accurate the architecture, etc, is, you will be impressed (it’s even rendered the massive, ugly building at the end of my road with staggering fidelity, for example). SO cool, seriously, have a play.
  • Colour Names In 3d: Would you like a searchable, graphical representation of EVERY SINGLE COLOUR KNOWN TO MAN (oh, ok, fine, maybe not *quite* every single one, but practically), all mapped onto a sort of 3d zoomable cube? Do those words even make any sense? I HAVE NO IDEA BUT HAVE THE LINK ANYWAY!
  • Catch A Bird: I wouldn’t ordinarily feature this site – it’s basically just A N Other ‘anyone in the world can leave a message for future visitors to find’ sites, which, you know, I have seen a LOT of over the years, but there’s something oddly-pleasing about the way in which this one presents the messages people leave as individual birds which sort of fly around the branches of this virtual tree; anyone is invited to leave a note about ‘something that made you happy today’, which does mean that the birds all represent…largely tedious and slightly-bromidic things like ‘my boyfriend’ and ‘the love of my family’, but if you can ignore the fact that we are all basic as fcuk and that, fundamentally, happiness isn’t that interesting, there’s something sort-of cute about the whole thing.
  • Weather Ribbons: Annual temperature and rainfall date from cities around the world, visualised as coloured ribbons – you know, the sort of graphic that it was vogueish to knit as a scarf a few years back, before the idea of ‘wearing the climate apocalypse around your neck’ became too terrifying to be funny anymore.
  • Reverse Engineering Apps: Apologies for the X link, but this is SO interesting – this is the account of a kid called Ayo in the US, who makes short videos in which he explains the things he’s found while deconstructing various apps; specifically, all the ‘fun’ different little tricks hidden in the code, designed to entrap and exploit you. A recent one, for example, looks at how Tinder rates users based on, effectively, their relative dating market ‘value’ and how that then determines things like ad load, etc; an earlier clip shows how mobile games like Candy Crush dynamically alter their difficulty to maximise player retention and, again, determine ad delivery. This is really, really interesting and, of course, QUITE BLEAK REALLY.
  • Match Eradication: Another interesting idea which is let down by AI-ish copy, Match Eradication is a site which asks you to whittle down a pool of potential romantic partners via a series of questions about what you look for in a mate, what you will accept and what you will never put up with, using a sort of Guess Who?-type elimination mechanic to let you filter…the gimmick, of course, is that by doing this you eventually eliminate EVERYONE and so you should learn to compromizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. There’s the kernel of an interesting idea here, and some satisfying bits of design – the way in which the eliminated profiles fall to the floor of the screen and get swept up, for example, is really nice, and I quite like the slicing of the cohort – and it’s worth a look imho.
  • The Real Kevin Bacon: Dataviz superstars The Pudding are BACK with their latest statistical dataviz toy, talking you through the stats to show you who is REALLY the most-connected actor in Hollywood based on their centrality to the movie industry. No, I’m not telling you, you can click and scroll and do the work like I did ffs. Honestly, the animations and transitions here are SO nicely done.
  • Dynamic Creatures: You know Boston Dynamics, right? The people who make the increasingly-terrifying all-terrain robot dog things which we’re all increasingly convinced will end up chasing the few scattered remnants of humanity around the irradiated shell of civilisation? YEAH YOU DO! You might not, though, know that they have a separate subdivision of the business which is devoted to developing FUN, FRIENDLY, CUDDLY ROBOT MASCOTS! This is the website for ‘Dynamic Creatures’, which recently announced its first product, a purple-haired ‘Where The Wild Things Are’-style monster…thing, which is equipped with AI (obviously) and is designed not only to be able to move freely (DON’T THINK ABOUT THE TERRIFYING SKELETON WITHIN) but also to be able to react to movements and facial expressions of those around it, presumably so it can back off and stand still when the terrified crying of children begins. This is squarely aimed at theme parks and the like, so expect to see dozens of grubby, sad-looking versions of this at Alton Towers come 2029.
  • The Original GTA Driving Physics: While you wait the final few weeks ahead of GTAVI coming out – pathetically I have actually had to block out time in my calendar with ‘PLAY GTA’, albeit for professional reasons (no, really!), which feels…pathetic, honestly, given my age – why not spend a bit of time enjoying this little in-browser simulation of the original, top-down GTA’s driving physics? You can’t run over any pedestrians, true, but you’ll be committing SO much virtual murder in a few short weeks so maybe just keep the bloodlust in check til then.
  • Manga Any Map: Plug in any address in the world and this will render a 3d view of it in a black and white style reminiscent of Manga illustrations. IT’S PRETTY, TRY IT!
  • Free Non-AI Gig Poster Templates: Thanks to Lilian Baker who sent me this – per their email, “I recently came across a really interesting web tool to create DIY Show posters for local bands. I found it listed in a local band zine, Tumbling Rock, here in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota.It’s very explicitly anti-AI. Their aim is to push back against the use of AI art content in the DIY band space. It’s not just a poster creator but also a poster library. You can select a poster, edit the information, and you’re done. You can also just look at the existing poster and get an idea of how to make your own. Very cool concept to encourage bands and promoters to create their own posters and to just look at what has been made in the past. When you export your own poster, it displays the original artist’s information so you can shout them out.” This is a lovely idea, and a nice resource, and, generally, A Good Thing. THANKYOU LILIAN BAKER!
  • Little Drip: I know that you already have all the weather apps you could possibly need – and, also, the weather forecast for the next 5 months is, basically, ‘sh1t’ if you live in the UK – BUT! Do you have one where all the graphics are sculpted out of LITERAL PLASTICINE, all lovely and handmade? NO YOU DO NOT DON’T LIE TO ME! This is SO pretty and so totally unnecessary and I rather love it.

By David Van Der Leeuw

OUR NEXT MUSICAL INTERLUDE COMES IN THE FORM OF 4 HOURS OF HOUSEY TUNES MIXED BY LANE8!

THE SECTION WHICH IS REALLY ENJOY THING THIS WEEK’S ‘SPEEDRUN APOCALYPSE’ VIBES, PT.2:

  • Terrarium Simulator: I AM SORRY ANOTHER AI WEBSITE I AM SORRY. But! While this one has all the hallmarks of AN Other Claude build – the graphics! The menus! The fonts! The slightly-tooth-grinding copy! The fact it hasn’t been optimised for sh1t and as such runs like a crippled slug! – it’s also…quite interesting and fun, and surprisingly deep and full-featured. Basically this lets you create and simulate your very own digital terrarium, picking your vessel and your soil substrates and your mulch and then your plants and even insects, enabling you to build your very own tiny vegetal ecosystem which you can then simulate to see if it would actually survive; it acts both as a neat (and quite pretty) toy and a sort of sandbox for aspirant gardeners to map out grow projects they might want to undertake in future. There are a bunch of pre-made terraria for you to explore and fiddle with should you not want to start from scratch, and, generally, there’s something pleasingly-Simish about the whole experience if you can hold your nose and get past the Machine-ness of it all.
  • The EU Database of Political Advertising: Yes, ok, I know it doesn’t *sound* interesting – and who knows, maybe it isn’t? Maybe I can’t even tell any more! – but I think this is A Good And Important Thing and another nice example of how if you’re a large and powerful economic bloc you can actually make meaningful changes that significantly improve things (wouldn’t that be nice? FCUK’S SAKE!). The European Commission has required all digital political adverts to be entered into this pan-continental database so that it’s possible for researchers, media and others to keep track of what is being shown where – what is being said, what claims are being made, (inevitably) what lies are being told…wouldn’t it be nice if we had something like this in the UK rather than having to rely exclusively on hacked-together solutions from the less-than-effectual Meta and Google ad libraries? YES IT WOULD FFS.
  • Web Map: A map! Of the whole internet! Oh, fine, NOT actually the whole internet – only the million most-visited websites per available traffic data, which is obviously a vanishingly small part of the whole web but is still a reasonable and curious slice. “Web Map shows one million popular website domains as stars in a spiral galaxy. Larger circles represent higher-ranked websites, and the most popular domains sit closest to the center. Colors identify domain extensions, such as .com, .org and .net. The map combines different open sources: Tranco, Cloudflare Radar, Majestic GlobalRank, Common Crawl Harmonic Centrality and Common Crawl PageRank, and others. Together, they provide a broad view of website popularity across the web.” My main takeaway from this is that the top million websites in the world are, mainly, no fcuking fun at all (also, INEXPLICABLY, Web Curios doesn’t make the cut, I am DEVASTATED).
  • Kipple: Oh, this is a cute idea for an app – utterly pointless, but pleasing nonetheless (forgive it the slopcopy, please). Kipple is basically a photochallenge app – per the blurb, “Kipple is a collecting game for people who notice things. Every day it gives you one prompt. Photograph something that has clearly given up. Photograph something held together with tape. Photograph something that should not be on a roof. Then you go out and look. When you find it, you photograph it. Kipple cuts it out into a sticker, has a go at working out what it is, and writes it a small card, the sort you’d read next to an exhibit in a county museum. The sticker goes into your cabinet with the date and the place.” There’s obviously some Machine at work here – not least in the whole ‘works out what the photo is of and writes a description’, but I like the basic premise, forcing you to look at the world slightly anew and preserving the daily vignettes as a record of that looking.
  • Maparium: Such a nice project, this, particularly for the datawonks and analysts amongst you; this is the work of one Mateusz Jochimiak, who writes: “I built Maparium as an independent side project to combine cartography, data processing, and web development into one playful product. There is something fascinating about how much of our world is represented in OpenStreetMap, and I wanted to create a tool that makes it easy to explore and appreciate this incredible dataset…Maparium was created for experimentation, learning, and visual discovery. Instead of showing everything at once, it curates feature categories such as power, transport, history, and geology into dedicated layers. The goal is simple: open the map, select a feature type that interests you, and immediately discover patterns that are hard to notice on a typical map.” Click the ‘layers’ button in the bottom-left corner to explore the data. GO ON!
  • German Stunter: I really want to believe that there is going to be one person out there whose life will be rendered complete by the discovery of this link – I have no idea who you might be, or indeed what strange and potentially-lonely existence you might be leading, but know that this is for YOU. This is a link to German Stunter, a fantastically-named YouTube channel which exists to collect action scenes from old German films and TV shows – there are some 2,700(!!!!) clips on here of car chases and explosions and gunfights and, basically, if you’re been waiting your whole life for someone to dig out that jetski scene from Helicops which proved…strangely formative in your sexual awakening (look, I’m just guessing, no judgement!) then OH MY WORD is this going to make you happy. The thumbnails alone here are a work of art – there is definitely an, er, ‘aesthetic’ happening here.
  • ASCII Rest: A website full of little ASCII animated landscapes and vistas and images, from castles to cityscapes to the cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon – there are some WONDERFUL examples of the technique here.
  • The Panoramic Photo Awards 2026: For all you fans of VERY WIDE IMAGES comes this year’s selection of garlanded entries in the panoramic photo awards irritatingly this is yet another photo competition website which makes it annoyingly hard to actually see all the photos (WHY ARE THEY SO OFTEN LIKE THIS FFS), but if you persevere and click through to the various longlists you can see some GLORIOUS shots; there’s a particularly lovely one of some rhinos facing off against some birds (ok, fine, they’re probably not shaping for a ruck, but it *looks* like they are) which I rather enjoy.
  • Paper China: Ooh, this is a lovely effect – I *think* it’s AI-coded (something about the…feel of it), but don’t let that put you off. It is VERY hard to describe exactly what is going on here – no, really, it is, don’t look at me like that! – but basically it’s a clever little visualisation of the population or the elevation of various parts of China and the US, presented as pages in a notebook, with a sort of cut-out aesthetic…no, sorry, it turns out that the traditional mid-Curios explicatory slump has very much hit me at 922am and I simply CANNOT find the words to communicate the visual gimmick here, just click the link and TRUST ME, it is very pretty indeed and quite clever to boot.
  • Back on Repeat: A neat little webtoy which lets you set individual YouTube videos to infinitely repeat, but even more excitingly lets you isolate and loop any segment of any video you feed it – so, for example, you can create your own looping break from a specific part of a song’s drumtrack, say, or a looped vocal sample; you can also change the playback speed, meaning you can do some quite fun stuff, and I think this could be quite useful for any musicians wanting some quick and dirty sampling fun (I say this as someone with literally no musical talent whatsoever, so apologies if I am totally wrong about this).
  • An Excellent Baker’s Website: Oddly enough this is the second bakery website I’ve featured in Curios in the past few years – YES, BAKERS! Should any of you want to reciprocate the admiration by sending me a box of pastries each week, that would be great! – and this time we’re in France, with the Union Bakery which has two branches and a third apparently opening soon; the site doesn’t do anything spectacular, but a) I really like the design; and b) it includes a FUN GAME, where visitors are encouraged to collect various illustrations of baking ingredients hidden around the page and, should they complete this onerous task, get a recipe emailed to them (which is a nice datacapture exploit to boot). Not flashy, but very pleasing.
  • Ride Tales: An in-browser driving game-toy-thing which lets you choose your vehicle, input any real-world location you like and then plonks you into a 3d representation of the actual streets that you can drive around! Which sounds AMAZING and sort-of is…but, also, this is VERY shonky and doesn’t quite work properly, and while all the street layouts are accurate (I presume this is using OpenStreetMap data or something) almost none of the actual architecture is, leading to the surreal experience of driving along very familiar thoroughfares while feeling that everything is somehow very, very wrong indeed. Seriously, it may not sound odd but I promise you that there is a very real sense of intense cognitive dissonance in driving around (in my case) Vauxhall and knowing EXACTLY where I am but everything looking somehow…different and wrong – click and have a play, I promise you will understand.
  • Oh La La Ride: Would YOU like to play the part of a gamine young Frenchwoman, a collection of cliches and stereotypes rendered digital, all beret and baguette and oh-so-chic trenchcoat, careening through a CG rendition of Paris on a bicycle as she races against some unnamed antagonists for reasons that are never made clear to us (what is going on? Why is she in such a hurry? Who are the people she’s racing against? I would appreciate this a lot more were there some sort of French-appropriate backstory – maybe she’s rushing to get back to her flat before her husband comes home and discovers her affair! – but, in general, this is pretty and fun and a neat way of spending 5 minutes if you’re bored.
  • Saltacol: This is…quite strange, but a fun game nonetheless. Have you ever wanted to play a small platformer in which you embody a single-legged leaping mollusc creature? WHY??? “Thousands of years ago, the grasslands of Siberia were teeming with Saltacols, an extremely rare species of insect-mollusc. Today, only one male remains, frantically trying to find a mate. Luckily, he has learned that a female still survives, trapped in the infamous Badmilk Caves. You must rescue her! The Saltacol is on the brink of extinction, mostly because it is rather clumsy. Help it cross six treacherous caves by jumping, swimming and rolling, so it can reunite with its beloved and save the species. Click and hold the Saltacol, drag to aim, then release. Pause for a moment while aiming to preview its trajectory. Falls will not kill you, but enemies will. You have unlimited lives. Each cave contains a lever that opens the exit. At the end of every stage you will receive a code. Enter it the next time you play to return directly to that stage.” This was originally made in 2003 – 23 years old! FCUKING HELL – and it is, honestly, SO addictive.
  • Beside The Point: Gah! I really didn’t want to feature this – it really is the purest Claudeslop, from the font to the design to the horrible, horrible copy – but I am going to have to because it’s actually a pretty fun game, despite the fact that the website makes me recoil slightly. It’s a daily word puzzle – every day you get given three groups of three words, and, in each case, are asked to come up with a term that links them; the AI then analyses your answers, passing or failing you based on whether it thinks the connection is valid. At the end you’re invited to come up with another concept which links all three previous answers, and are then shown what everyone else who’s played that day’s clues submitted as their responses. Honestly, this really is fun and interesting and I resent the fact it’s so horribly AI-ish in tone and voice.
  • Battle Drones: An interesting AI-generated version of Command & Conquer (oh, ok, fine, a VERY stripped back variant, but still) by Simon Willison, who was, per his explanatory blogpost, experimenting with whether AI can not only make a game but also make one that is fun to play – this is neat, nicely-designed, doesn’t crash my machine and I’d say it’s probably the first fancy-looking 3d-type title spun up by The Machine that I could imagine actually coming back to based on gameplay rather than curiosity. Still won’t replace Bioware – ffs EA, you cnuts! – but, well, this is what we’re going to have instead of actual videogames, it seems.
  • EA Sports Cricket 2007: Do you like cricket? Do you LOVE it? OH WOW WILL THIS LINK MAKE YOU HAPPY! This is a full, in-browser rip of EA’s cricket sim from two decades ago – play the Ashes! Play…some other cricket! Look, the sport is a total mystery to me and I simply don’t get the appeal, but if you’re the sort of person for whom the soft thwack of leather on willow is almost erotic in its appeal then you are going to lose DAYS to this link.
  • Lost Marbles: This, the final ludic link of the week, is the SECOND ‘actually fun’ 3d browsergame built by the machine; it’s a marble run race, where you take control of a marble and have to navigate an obstacle course as quickly as possible, all the while careening off the OTHER 49 marbles also attempting to do the same; you start with 50, and each run whittles the numbers down in classic Battle Royale style, until only one marble remains. There are powerups you can choose for each run, multiple courses, and you can play against bots or people – I really like the idea that at some point today a few of you are all going to click this link around the same time and find yourself facing off in a 3d marble race TO THE DEATH (not to the death) against other too-online weirdos who also inexplicably choose to read this sh1t. WELCOME TO THE WEB CURIOS COMMUNITY!

By Thomas Schneider

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS 100 MINUTES OF EXCELLENT HOUSE-Y TUNES WHICH VAGUELY PUT ME IN MIND OF DJ SPOOKY COLLATED BY MR BEATNIK!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • California is a Postcard: This has been dormant for 14 years now, but there are some lovely photographs of California here along with the occasional note and reminiscence; it feels very much like stumbling across an old photo album in a charity shop, but in a good way.
  • Kemp Folds: MY GOD THIS IS A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE! Apologies for the rare double post – I have DEFINITELY featured this link before, but in my defence it was back in about 2011-12 when Curios was a corporate blog and I hadn’t yet destroyed all my professional bridges in favour of…er…hang on, why *did* I burn all my professional bridges?! Anyway, I was reminded of the existence of this EXCELLENT website – spiritually, if not literally, a Tumblr- by Daniel Benneworth-Gray, who I presume himself was reminded of it by Kemp’s appearance on The Traitors; would you like to see lots of photos of Ross Kemp, folded in such a way as to make him look weird? YES YOU WOULD DON’T LIE TO ME!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Jenny’s Cafe: AH, MODERNITY! A coffeeshop in Goa using a SEXY AI-GENERATED LADY to advertise its wares! Jenny’s Cafe is a real place, with a real shop (which is apparently shortly to open another) – whether there is a ‘real’ Jenny is less certain, because the ‘woman’ being presented as Jenny in the cafe’s Insta feed is very definitely not a real human (there are various tells, but perhaps the most obvious is the manner in which her breasts appear to have grown significantly since she first appeared). This is being used as a thirst trap to boost engagement and thus visibility, I presume, which makes a sort of sense, but I look forward to the first stories of a hopeful grandfather making the pilgrimage to Goa to pledge his troth only to be crushed by disappointment at Jenny’s less-than-corporeal nature.
  • Rich Anthill: A guy on Insta who’s decided to spend some time ‘treating’ some ants by depositing vast quantities of sugar by their anthill and seeing what happens. It feels like this is perhaps a foreshadowing element in a 60s scifi B-Movie, so don’t come crying to me when they grow to the size of labradors and start eating people across the Pacific Midwest.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  •  Oh FFS Everything Is Going To Fall Over: Fine, this is my headline rather than the original, but the sentiment maintains. As the world forces itself to learn what ‘PHP’ is and the patches continue to be rolled out, we also have to accept that we’re probably going to see a LOT more of this sort of thing over the coming months and years, and that, in all likelihood, some of the future incidents are going to be a lot more serious in terms of their real-world impact. The main link here takes you to a good explainer in 404 Media which takes you through what happened, why it was serious and why it’s likely to keep happening – YOU will of course know all about this as a longstanding Curios reader who has heard me wang on about how the web is basically cobbled together by hobbyists and kept online with old, outdated codebases that noone has bothered to patch properly because, well, it’s desperately-unsexy, and that huge swathes of really important IT is running on old systems with less-than-up-to-date security protocols because, again, noone ever wants to pay to fix the roof when the sun is shining. Turns out, though, it is about to absolutely FCUK it down, metaphorically-speaking. FUN TIMES AHEAD! Oh, and if you’re interested, this is a really good interview with one of the world’s leading PHP experts who is literally Just Some Guy, who helps maintain it because he’s a helpful geek and without whom we’d all have been significantly more screwed than we actually were.
  • GenZ, Riots, Etc: Thankfully France appears to have stopped burning – at least for a few months, but, were I you, I probably wouldn’t book any holidays there in the immediate aftermath of next year’s elections because OH BOY are those likely to result in some Spicy Feelings! – but, in the aftermath, I thought that this was an interesting piece of analysis by Aiden over at How To Do Things With Memes, which does a good job of outlining some of the reasons why it feels rather like we’re reaching a tipping point when it comes to people (in this instance the young, but, honestly, I think this is probably going to become pan-generational) Putting Up With Sh1t. “In both France and India, the spark for this latest movement is the state’s inability to transition people from childhood to dignified adulthood. In each country, graduating high school seniors go through a process involving a big national exam that sorts them into university or professional training programs. Since each society is structured such that the outcome of this exam essentially determines the lives of most of the students taking it, people commit themselves to studying often at great personal and familial expense. In India, the answers to this big test are routinely leaked and it’s obvious to everyone that rich kids get to cheat their way through. In France, a new Kafkaesque algorithm-driven platform called Parcoursup determines entry into universities, confuses everybody, burdens instructors, and gives students no agency. Last year, a white French girl famously got into a psychology undergrad program by replacing her cover letter on Parcoursup with a recipe for brownies because the platform does not actually care about students.”
  • The Peter Thiel Antichrist Lectures: I have previously written about lovely, cuddly plute Peter Thiel’s antichrist obsession, as articulated in a series of lectures delivered in San Francisco earlier this year, but now The Verge has got some of the details and, in this piece, lays out some of the Big Thinking behind the world’s worst billionaire’s (stiff competition, fine, but he just edges out Elon at the moment) theological musing. The greater your familiarity with Christian doctrine the more you will get out of this – otherwise, honestly, it’s all just mad esoteric bullsh1t – but what personally struck me about this was how…boring it is, how much it’s just Another Middle-Aged Guy boring on about his own obsession, and how much of it is a very weird attempt to square Evangelical theology with Catholic theology in ways that really don’t make any sense at all. Could it be…could it be that Peter doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about? You will, though, be pleased to learn that he doesn’t *actually* think Greta Thunberg is the actual devil, though, so that’s nice.
  • The Evolution of the Yahoo Boys: As previously discussed here, the era in which scammers were something of an online figure of fun – “Why yes, Congolese billionaire in exile, of course you can have my bank details to wire me £3million unbidden!” – is rapidly coming to an end thanks to AI and all the fun (not fun) new tricks that anyone wanting to part you from your hard-earned cash can now deploy. This is a good piece by Open Measures on some of the different, novel techniques being deployed by ‘Yahoo Boys’ in Nigeria and beyond, including voice spoofing and live deepfakes – the slightly-depressing thing about this is that beyond ‘keeping an eye out’ there’s basically fcuk-all you can do to stop this stuff, so that’s another fun wrinkle in the glorious future to ‘enjoy’ ffs. BONUS SCAM CONTENT: Seeing as we’re doing scams (SEAMLESS!), this is an interesting piece in The Dial about the mechanics of the wave of scams targeting authors (actual or aspirant), and how they work, and who is undertaking them.
  • The Boomer Slop Problem: It feels like 2026 is the year in which a lot of people have started to wise up to the fact that, while it’s reasonably clear that social media hasn’t been an unalloyed boon to younger generations, it would be silly to ignore the negative impact of the tech on older people for whom a platform like Facebook might constitute their only regular window onto the rest of the world and humanity, which for many has become pretty much the whole of their internet, and how the rise of AI-generated bullsh1t, and rage-inducing engagement bait has turned previously-benign-seeming places where you would go to speak to old friends and check out photos of the grandkids into theatres of hate populated by racist lies and countless busty young women who are surprisingly horny for old, lonely guys. “Most adult children seem to know instinctively that their parents’ social-media use has long since outstripped whatever cognitive good it once served. They have watched their parents surrender ever-larger portions of their lives to their phones, triggering a kind of grief and, occasionally, anger. Every hour handed over to the feed can feel like a choice on their parents’ part to willingly accelerate their own deterioration. Anne, a 55-year-old writer living in New York, regularly travels out of state to visit her mother, Rosa, who is in her 80s. She often arrives to an unsettling scene: Rosa on the couch, “hunched over” her phone, “slack-jawed.” Over the years, Anne says she has watched her mother abandon crossword puzzles, newspapers, and books in favor of the feed. “I don’t think a younger version of her would have recognized that behavior as something she had as a goal for herself later in life,” she tells me.”
  • Ban MBAs: I CANNOT AGREE WITH THIS HARD ENOUGH – a *great* article arguing that the fetishisation of the MBA as a qualification and its increasing proliferation among the managerial class has been actively bad for many aspects of both business and society, and that we should stop handing them out and we should probably sack anyone in any position of power who has one (ok, fine, this last one is my own invention). “Complexity is systematically shaved away, and dissenting voices often go unheard. Real organizations don’t move in clearly delineated phases toward a decision point, but business school teaching materials often do — compressing timelines, dropping messy subplots and smoothing over contradictions to produce clean narrative arcs and satisfying problems to debate. The result is a curriculum built around false narratives. Some of the most celebrated ideas in management have not been the ones that survived peer review or replication, but the ones that could be turned into TED Talks, consulting frameworks or airport best sellers. Faculty members are rewarded not for knowledge but for performance — selling a big idea with a memorable label that promises “success” or “disruption.”” Can we also apply this to PPE, while we’re at it? Thanks!
  • Is AI Face The New Instagram Face?: I mean, Betteridge’s Law would suggest the answer to this is ‘no’ – but I thought this was an interesting look at the growing phenomenon, in LA at least, of people going to the plastic surgeon clutching AI-optimised images of themselves and asking to be made to look like that irl, regardless of whether so doing would require some…quite big changes to basic human physiognomy: “The challenge now facing aesthetic doctors is twofold: patients are arriving with digitally perfected versions of their own faces that appear more photorealistic and attainable than traditional celebrity reference photos, yet may depict changes that are anatomically impossible to achieve through surgery. Where traditional Instagram filters usually modify an existing photograph, generative AI can reconstruct facial features without respecting the biological limitations of the original face.”
  • Considering an OnlyFans: More dispatches from The Creator Economy now – this is a really interesting piece about someone who, along with their partner, runs an OnlyFans account, about the mechanics and how much they earn.  What I thought was interesting about this was how honest it was about the difficulties, summed up thusly: “Adult content is not easy money. Everyone jokes that it is like, ”damn, maybe I should start taking feet pics and post them on OnlyFans.” You assume that if you make good content and put it behind a paywall, people would eventually find it and pay for it. What a lot of people don’t realize is how much of the job is actually marketing. You can spend hours creating content and still make very little if you don’t know how to build an audience and convince people to pay when there’s so much free content available. But my biggest piece of advice? Pick a specific niche, kink, or fetish and go all-in on it. We have close friends who create giantess content and they average around $10K/month. Honestly, though, I wouldn’t recommend someone who just lost their job look at this as an immediate replacement for a paycheck. Again, it takes time to build an audience, and there’s no guarantee it will ever become substantial income. It only worked for us because we were already creating adult content when I got laid off. The last thing is that once your content is out there, you have to assume you may eventually lose control of it. Even if you’re careful about privacy, your content can potentially be connected back to you. So before starting, you really need to ask yourself whether you could live with the possibility of friends, family, coworkers, clients, or your employer someday finding out.”
  • London’s Bum Chutney: If there’s any justice, this piece is going to win awards. Jim Waterson of London Centric embarked upon a truly exceptional bit of hands-on investigative journalism, journeying along London’s River Thames to find the unexpected patches of wild produce growing along its banks; the result of seeds being carried in human fecal matter which has ended up in the estuary system due to London’s fcuked-up plumbing, and which has managed to take root and fruit. Waterson talks to experts about how and why this is happening, picks some of the resulting fruit and veg, and MAKES CHUTNEY WITH IT, an astonishing and brilliant feat which imho ought to win a Pulitzer.
  • Warhammer is Cool: I’m going to gently disagree with this – ‘increasingly popular’ and ‘won’t immediately get you beaten up’ is not the same as ‘cool’, whatever Henry Cavill might tell you – but it is true that Warhammer’s visibility has skyrocketed over the past decade, in no small part thanks to Games Workshop’s status as the UK’s only remaining successful business (or at least that’s what it feels like). I don’t particularly care about it, or the lore, or the act of painstakingly painting small lead figures of massive deathmongering futureb4stards, but I found this writeup of some of the ‘why’ behind its recent popularity interesting, not least in terms of ints understand of what makes worldbuilding and lore work, and how to create a narrative ecosystem which can support so much flexibility and breadth of storytelling.
  • A Day in the Age of AI: Mimi Jiang writes in the LRB about the state of AI and its use by normal people and Where The Discourse Is At from the point of view of China and its citizens; you might be bored of AI chat (and DEAR GOD I feel you, you try writing about this stuff for a living ffs) but I promise you that the difference in perspective makes this an interesting read, even if a…somewhat depressing one. “In​ the evening, I decided to go out for dinner with my human friends. As usual, we had a fierce debate about something trivial; this time, it was tipping. One of them complained about the ridiculous tips in the US and praised the relaxed attitude towards tipping in Europe. I was surprised to learn that my friends never tip when travelling in Europe, not even taxi drivers or hotel bellboys. When I first travelled to Europe, the locals constantly reminded me that it was rude not to leave a tip. They told me always to keep small notes in my wallet, just in case. I even learned to slip a five-euro bill into a waiter’s hand. At some point in the evening, the inevitable happened: one of the group asked DeepSeek whether you should tip in Europe. DeepSeek said it’s not mandatory. I hate being told by an AI that I am wrong despite my human experience.”
  • How To Cope With Daylight Savings Time: The answer, according to Holly Gramazio, is to, er, just ignore it and pretend it’s not happening. Honestly, I read this with mounting astonishment – this is both borderline-psychopathic and SUCH a power move, and I am in slight awe of Holly’s fortitude (and also a bit scared of her, I think).
  • Benchmarking: I absolutely adore this – James ‘New Aesthetic’ Bridle writes about asking AI to design a chair, and then trying to build said chair based on the instructions provided, and this is SO SO INTERESTING, on design theory and questions of embodiment and what it means to ‘know’ something vs to understand it, and I would love to see a whole exhibition that riffs on this central idea and takes it and runs with it, so if someone would like to sort that out I would be really grateful ta.
  • The Chocolate Conspiracy: Every European who’s ever visited the US and eaten the chocolate that they sell there will know that it is, objectively, disgusting, texturally and flavourally repellent to the point that it doesn’t really feel like they ought to be able to use the ‘c’ word to describe it. Well, apparently it’s gotten EVEN WORSE in recent years – this exhaustive piece by Rachel Handler in New York Magazine investigates the changes in manufacturing that have resulted in Hershey’s bars becoming even less palatable than they once were, and in so doing uncovers a predictable immiseration of all sorts of other things along the way.
  • Queuing for Paris: Patrick Boxall writes about his experience of spending several hours queueing to meet Paris Hilton at a promotional event. You may not *think* you want to read about a man in a queue, but I promise you this is very funny and VERY Australian and so worth every word.
  • Queuing for Bayeux: The White Pube takes on the Bayeux Tapestry, or at least the queue you experience while waiting to see the Bayeux Tapestry, and in so doing talks about access and institutions and privilege and and and: “The queue is a system for focusing resentment. No one in a queue is happy to be in the queue. Queues are a means to an end, its the end-destination everyone’s after. I mean, the queue’s mere existence acknowledges: we all want to be over there, but we can’t, so let’s go over here and take turns one at a time. The queue is regulated by the need (imagined or real) for order. Order requires us to repress our needs-wants-desires and submit to the logic of a higher power. We submit to the higher power because order is fair, transgressing the order would be unfair, even though we OBVIOUSLY ALL WANT to transgress the order and get over there as soon as we can. For it to work, our desires must remain repressed. Repressing desire forbids desire, which only amplifies desire. When we can’t fulfil a desire, it comes out sideways in a different form. Freud called this sublimation: we convert our unfulfillable forbidden desires into more socially acceptable forms that are fulfillable. Transgressing order/fairness is unacceptable, because it’s like admitting out loud that you think your needs-wants-desires are more important and deserving of being met than anyone else’s. That’s quite arrogant and also a hard-sell in terms of convincing other people to agree with you. Resentment is obviously more acceptable than that, because at least we can all agree on it.”
  • The Uncanny Catharsis of the AI Emomercial: Jean Garnett writes in the Paris Review about the experience of being served AI-generated adverts as a woman in middle-age, the aesthetic of them, and what is being both sold and erased in the presentation of feminine ageing marketed via social media slop ads. Superb. “The new kind of skincare ad that is suddenly appearing every time I swipe through Instagram Reels is a subgenre in a rampant category that I have come to think of as “Purification Slop,” clearly AI-generated marketing content appealing to and visualizing my fantasy that what ails me, including age, can be rendered isolable and extricable from me. The Intelligence knows that I thrill to depictions of anything “built up” inside me finally coming out. Am I aware that if, standing in a kitchen sunbeam, I take one sip of this mushroom beverage, cute little probiotics will go tra-la-la chimney sweeping through my intestines like Dick Van Dyke, making me positively glow with inner cleanness? Have I used this jade roller to drain my lymphatic fluid lately, or am I cool with hosting putrid waste in my corpus? The Intelligence may also know that I’m single, that mirrors have become complicated for me—that it depends on the light, it depends on my mood. These ads are infomercials, fake-science-wise, limited-time-offer-wise. But they feel more like mini soap operas (I just timed one at over ten minutes); they are extremely emo. Each Aging Woman Emomercial (AWE) tells a songified story, most often reminiscent of Taylor Swift or Olivia Rodrigo, building from confiding, conversational grief to a pleadingly triumphal chorus. It begins with a tearfully juicy hook: “This is the story of the day he walked away.” Or “My ex-husband walked in with the woman he left me for, young enough to be our daughter.” Or, in one case where the woman is Black, “I ran into my baby daddy at daycare drop-off with the bitch he left me for.””
  • No Good Reason: The final longread of the week is by Robin Pickering, and it’s about an old relationship and memory and all sorts of other things, and it’s written in the second-person which I fcuking adore, and there are some GORGEOUS passages in this even if it’s perhaps a touch uneven – give it a try: “At work, it’s like the stuck-there-on-the-edge feeling has come with you, and you sit at your desk, the filth from the tunnel black on your black jeans. Two different shades, the shine of the oily innards of the MTA greased across thinning denim, like smeared handprints. You pour coffee from the industrial brewer on the counter in the side hall which—according to clipart tacked to the wall—is now called the “Cozy Cafe.” You can’t get the new half and half open and are afraid to put your nasty, subway-crud fingernails in the gable top. You wash your hands and stare at yourself in the bathroom mirror and think I am a remnant of not-death, I am a figment released from a close call. That of course is extra dramatic, but at your desk your feet don’t know where to go in all the nothing-space under there, and you smother your hands in Purell and wipe it on the black layers of your jeans. You go to wash your hands again and refuse to look at your face in the mirror. When you pee, there are the bruises, as if what blackened your jeans bled through to your body.”

By Lydia Pettit

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

 

Webcurios 16/10/26

Uncategorized No Comments
Reading Time: 37 minutes

 

While I appreciate you are all REELING from the latest revelations suggesting that Reform UK’s membership might in fact comprise SOME ACTUAL RACISTS, I had quite a weird experience this week which I am going to share with you instead of Doing Commentary (you’re welcome!).

So as a result of Google’s slightly odd mechanics, I occasionally get emails meant for Other Matt Muirs around the world – this is how I have learned that there are lots of Muirs in New Zealand, for example, or how I discovered that there is a version of me who is a filmmaker and yet another who is a tattoo artist (truly, Matt Muirs are a RICH TAPESTRY). It’s also how I discovered that there’s a Matt Muir in the US who has been a BAD BOY and is up on a DUI charge in Duchesne County, Utah.

Now ordinarily this wouldn’t concern me – you do the crime, you should do the time, Other Matt Muir! – but I realised that I was receiving ALL of the correspondence about my namesake’s upcoming court hearings and the like, and become somewhat concerned that they weren’t and as such that they would miss their appointed hearing and get into more trouble, which would have been unfair and unfortunate – sadly all the emails were coming via noreply addresses, which meant I had only one available course of action, which was (obviously) to join Other Matt Muir’s court session via the link they sent me so I could make sure Other Matt Muir knew what was going on and inform the court of their mixup.

So on Wednesday afternoon I log on and WOW do I get an interesting snapshot picture of the state of the US justice system in the state of Utah – my main takeaways is that a) state attorneys are phoning it in HARD; b) Utah has…quite a serious meth issue; c) there is nothing more dispiriting than sitting watching a bunch of people who for various reasons have fallen foul of the law get mulched by the process machine on their way to County; and d) you really can’t guess the charge someone’s up on from their face, turns out.

Anyway, I sit on this call for an hour or so waiting for Other Matt Muir’s case to be called – it is, I turn my camera on and explain to the somewhat-bemused Judge that I am probably not the Matt Muir they were expecting but that I had been receiving the emails and wanted to confirm that Other Matt Muir was aware of what was going on. At which point the judge reassured me that Other Matt Muir was in fact on the call, at which point I realised that I was probably breaking quite a few law by being being there too; I raised a fist in solidarity, shouted ‘I BELIEVE IN YOU, OTHER MATT MUIR’ and logged off.

Anyway, because they have not fixed the email issue I later learned that Other Matt Muir got off with a suspended sentence and a fine, and should avoid custody as long as he keeps his nose clean, so please can you all keep your fingers crossed that he manages to stay off the meth long enough to pass probation.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should probably check in on YOUR namesakes lest they need ‘rescuing’ from some sort of legal bind.

By Hendrik & Paula Kerstens

CLEAR THE COBWEBS FROM THE INSIDE OF YOUR HEAD WITH THIS BRISK MIX OF CRACKING JUNGLE TRACKS BY FORMER EDITOR PAUL!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS WE SHOULD REALLY HAVE SEEN THROUGH THE WHOLE ‘ELON DOES TECH DEMO, MAKES US FORGET ALL PREVIOUS BROKEN PROMISES AND LIES’ THING BUT WHICH IS INCREASINGLY WEARY OF DISCOVERING WE HAVE NOT, PT.1: 

  • SynthID Detector: We begin with an *incredibly* tedious link – yes, I’m sorry too, but it can’t all be fun internet all the time, EAT YOUR FCUKING ROUGHAGE, etc etc – but one which is sadly quite important. This is the website for Google’s SynthID AI checking tool – with this, you can see if any image or video you come across online has been generated with Google’s (or OpenAI’s – they’ve certainly signed up to this, though I’m uncertain whether they have fully implemented the tech yet; still, it will work…soon) tech. Yes, yes, I *know* you can tell AI video immediately – you’re clever! You’re smart! You’re (god I hate this word with an overriding passion) SAVVY! – but there may be times in your life when it’s good to just, er, doublecheck every now and again. It is, incontrovertibly, A Good Thing that there’s now a reliable way of ascertaining whether media is machine-made, and in particular a way which (unlike previous AI watermarking standards) can’t be circumvented by the ingenious medium of, er, just screencapping the content, but it does feel…suboptimal that there are now about three (minimum) competing standards here – you have SynthID for (some) images and video (this won’t work with stuff made with XAi or Meta’s tools), you have Anthropic’s text watermarking, you have OpenAI’s newly-announced text watermarking (which afaict is only active if you use it within the EU)…Would it be beyond the wit of man to institute single, interoperable standards for this stuff? WOULD IT? Anyway, given we’re now on the cusp of everything being rendered significantly weirder and more uncertain and more scammy (AGAIN! Wow, what an incredible series of milestones we’re speedrunning through this decade!) thanks to agents, etc, it’s worth bookmarking this and maybe telling your more credulous family members about it. Not YOU, though, you don’t need it! You’re SPECIAL!
  • The Best of British Design: There was a period around the turn of the millennium when there was a vogue for POLLS and VOTES – we were yet to be scarred by referenda and the horrors of things like ‘boaty mcfuckingboatface’ – to determine the BEST things (novels, historical figures, etc – it’s worth going back to check some of the popular picks, by the way, because WOW were those different times), but to the best of my recollection we never had a formal contest to determine the best EVER piece of British design. Thankfully, one Aris C has seen fit to change that – click the link and enjoy a bracketed selection of design classics which you can winnow down until you have picked the one which you think represents the absolute acme. The Angel of the North or, er, the harrier jump jet? The ZX Spectrum or the massive building near Liverpool Street, colloquially known as ‘The Gherkin’? Does it make any meaningful sense to compare a small home computer from the early-1980s with a massive building? WHO CARES, FEEL THE DESIGN? I confess to being somewhat dismayed at the slightly Paddington-ish, twee feel to the nation’s current favourite (you can click the ‘see everyone’s votes’ button to get a breakdown of all the voting). but then again this is a selection which includes Brompton Bikes so there’s a certain audience profile here imho. Anyway, go through, pick your favourites and, if you’re me, spend longer than is probably healthy wishing harm on anyone who chose the ‘keep calm and carry on’ poster.
  • The KV Archive: This is WONDERFUL. It was sent to me by Leighton Jones, whose email I am going to reproduce (in part, at least), because he tells the story of what this is rather nicely: “My MP3 blog turned 20 the other week, and I’ve archived the lot (well, still missing a few hundred but i’m adding them slowly). The MP3 blog era was such a fertile time for discovering new music, sharing it with like minded people and basically having a great time in and around music and on the internet. The advent of streaming certainly put paid to MP3 blogs, some went legit, sharing SoundCloud snippets in exchange for promos, most gave up… but not me! After years of dead links and lost music, I thought it’d be a nice idea to archive all of the 3,000 or so MP3s I ever posted, to listen to at random or browse by date posted or genre (and download the MP3 if your conscience allows). I remember Lovefingers (http://lovefingers.org) when they stopped blogging at the end of 2009, having all those juicy MP3s as a big list to download was an absolute treasure trove of wonderful music for me at the time. I started Keytars & Violins after using The Hype Machine to find new music and thinking “Hey, I could start a blog!”. So I did, with moderate success (for this then much younger rural Welshman!). My musical taste can be seen evolving over 20 years to the point I’m at now, mostly leftfield electronic stuff, always with the intention of sharing tracks that others might not have heard (at the time). There are some truly terrible songs in here (bloghouse), but I like to think a lot have held up, and they spark nostalgia, linking those sounds to moments in my life.” Honestly, I can’t tell you how joyous this is – Leighton is basically making a huge trove of music that he’s curated over two decades available to anyone; you can filter by genre or year, but I would strongly recommend just opening this in a tab and letting it play, the range and eclecticism is part of the fun, and I’ve had this on in the background for much of the week and it’s been such an interesting selection of tunes, and, honestly, THANKYOU LEIGHTON THIS IS A GIFT.
  • Return to Repeat: Seeing as we’re doing ‘musical things’ (truly, SEAMLESS!), this is a website created by musician Gus By Heart (no, me neither, but who are we to question someone’s choice of artistic moniker? NO FCUKERS, etc!) and which houses what he describes as ‘ten tracks created without beginning or end’; effectively semi-ambient-ish compositions which cycle and loop, and which, in a few instances, you can play with an manipulate using some simple web interfaces. The third track lets you layer various elements, for example, while the fourth lets you toggle the drum track, and Gus tells me that there are other elements which may (or may not) reveal themselves depending on other factors such as the date or the time of day you listen. As a bonus, I really rather like the sounds here – songs feels like too formed a term for them – and there’s something quite beautiful about how spare they are, and how your interactions with them feel…intentional, for want of a better word. This is minimal but rather lovely, I think.
  • Spend Elon Musk’s Money: Yes, I know that this is not in any way an innovative concept, and ‘try and spend XXXX sum’ websites, designed to communicate the sheer mind-flaying scale of plutocratic wealth, are old hat, but, well, this is a really nice example, in WIRED, and it’s made by Friend of Curios Neal ‘Tiny Award 2026 Winner’ Agarwal, and it’s just really well made; the visualisation here goes the extra mile, and the size/scale comparisons as you start really getting into it do an excellent job of pointing out how absolutely fcuking insane it is that That Fcuking Man has so much wealth at his disposal. (it’s nice to know that he can only afford 76 aircraft carriers). There’s some sort of lame RESISTANCE-type joke to be made here about the fact that all this money can’t buy him FRIENDS, but, well, he’s the one working alongside some other terrible cnuts to fcuk the world in half, so you’ll forgive me for taking minimal succour in his loneliness.
  • A Thread of Memories: Ok, this one’s a bit indulgent and will only really appeal if you’re someone who has, objectively, been Too Online over the past 15 years or so, but this is a thread of ‘Characters’ from UK Twitter over the years, reminiscing about some of the maddest individuals to ever occupy the vague political chat bubble of UK Twitter – the campaigners, the FBPE nuts, the grifters, the people who inexplicably decided to out themselves as sex pests, and, seriously, if you’re a particular type of sad loser (HELLO! HELLO!) then this will be almost Proustian in the rush it provides you. Supertanskii! Old Holborn! RS Archer! The Fag Casanova! So many dreadful, weird, broken, lonely people, driven made in 140 and 280 characters, by Brexit and COVID and LIFE! God, what a terrible waste of time this has all been.
  • Hot Girl Hotline: Ok, I know what this sounds like, but let me reassure you that this is not some sort of tawdry bongo portal (what do you take me for? Also, I put those links towards the end, for future reference) and instead an AI-POWERED BESTIE FOR THE GIRLIES! Yes, that’s right, it’s not only men who are being lured by the siren call of The Machine to share their hopes, fears and insecurities with a chatbot – Hot Girl Hotline is a (free) chat service for women, designed to be a truth-telling best friend – per the blurb, “Shay is the AI operator, and she’ll pick up whenever you need her. You can tell her everything… all the nitty gritty details, big or small. And babe, get ready…our girl won’t sugarcoat or lie to you. But once you tell her what’s up, you’ll actually get all the answers and clarity you need.” I say this without judgement – after all, I am very much NOT the target audience here – but that tone of voice is very much THE VIBE here; this is VERY North American, with all the positive and negative qualities that entails, and I have…some questions about exactly how much something like this which will be built on AN Other open weights model like LLAMA is going to be able to be anything other than blandly, tediously, sycophantically cheerleader-y about whatever you tell it. I saw an old friend of mine on Saturday who told me some…slightly-hair-raising anecdotes about the number of middle-aged women of her acquaintance who have taken to venting about their lives to The Machine and who are on the cusp of divorce as a result so, who knows, maybe ‘Shay’ will be the sassy companion you need to give you the impetus to WASH THAT MAN out of your hair!
  • Wusoup: This has been a really good week for people emailing me about their insanely-longrunning personal webprojects – after Leighton a few links back, this small-but-perfectly-formed online community was sent to me by its creator and moderator Peter Taoussanis, who tells me that Wusoup, an online community (a proto-social network of sorts), is “sort of a throwback to old-school 1-on-1 text chat (happier times ^^). I’ve been working on it myself since 2008. Has a small but genuinely pretty passionate group of folks on there. The whole thing is focused on friendship and positive vibes. There’s very strict (and strictly enforced) rules against bots, dating, sexual content, and aggressive behaviour. Basically meant to be a kind + friendly place to get to know people through conversation.” I LOVE THAT THIS EXISTS, and I love that someone has cared enough to keep this tiny little community ecosystem alive for nearly 20 years, in the face of, well, there now being a million and one other spaces that users could have migrated to in that time. You might find a home here, you might not, but I adore the fact that Peter is maintaining it for the few people who want it – stuff like this makes me hugely happy and is why the web is wonderful, honestly. BONUS SMALL ONLINE COMMUNITY THING! This one’s called Quxnet (no, me neither), sent to me by its mysterious admin who writes: “It’s a small network of people who miss the old web, or want to have deeper conversations and more human connections online. We’re only about 550 members right now, but growing a pretty good clip.”  Should you be someone who dreams of a place which (per the description) “restores the internet era counterculture that made the web worth caring about in the first place” then perhaps you can find a small home here (and some likeminded freaks to spend your days sharing obscure links with – OH GOD THESE ARE PROBABLY MY PEOPLE).
  • Botflix: ANOTHER site submitted to me by an actual person, though this couldn’t be further away in spirit and vibe from the previous couple of links – there’s a sort of pleasing/horrible juxtaposition in pivoting from ‘small, handmade internet communities’ to ‘a nascent media empire where everything is AI-generated jank and there’s a crypto bolt-on’, and I quite like the whole ‘duality of WEB’ thing that you get from exploring one and then the other. Anyway, this is SUPER-SLOPPY – there’s a radio station with AI-generated music, TV channels with AI-generated shorts, all that sort of thing, and while absolutely none of it is worth watching per se, it’s also oddly, slightly-grimly, fascinating, both as a general ‘so, where’s this stuff at right now?’ marker and as a sign of how the cost for this stuff is continuing to fall, and how relatively-trivial it now is to set up the piping required to semi-autonomously spaff this stuff out. Is it good that the barrier to creation is now basically 0? Turns out it probably isn’t! BRING BACK FRICTION is being added to BRING BACK BULLYING in my list of ‘unlikely slogans for the modern world’.
  • Chromatic Reading: This is interesting more as a UX/UI concept than anything else – Chromatics, per its creator Max Buck, is a reading platform which uses novels in the public domain and which presents the text coded by colour for each speaker – “the gist is that by coloring character dialogue in a dedicated color per speaker things become surprisingly easier.” I can’t say that I’ve ever thought ‘fcuk me, this copy of Wuthering Heights would be SO much more digestible if all Heathcliff’s bits were in lime green, but, well, maybe you have!
  • The Wildlife Photographer of the Year: The Natural History Museum has announced the winners of this year’s contest, and while you might have seen some of the top picks in coverage elsewhere already, as ever it’s worth digging into the full set of pics because FCUKING HELL NATURE! The chameleon in the sandstorm, so stoical! SO LIZARDY! The terrifying, Apocalypse Now-style bee war! SO MANY CRABS!
  • The Cheetah Cub Cam: MORE ANIMALS! There’s a cheetah at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in the US which has recently birthed a litter. Would you like to see it and its cubs just sort of hanging out? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! At the time of writing they are all very asleep, but by the time you receive this in your grateful inboxes (I know, I know, you’re just embarrassed to tell me!) they’ll probably be capering wildly.
  • The Swiss Government’s Prepping Website: I’m uncertain whether I find the existence of this webpage a charming example of clear-eyed Swiss pragmatism or, er, deeply chilling, but, either way, if you’ve ever wanted a state-sanctioned guide to how to get ready for some Bad Sh1t Going Down then those lads in Geneva have you covered. Tell this site the size of your household, give it your dietary requirements and an estimate of exactly how long you’re likely to be battening down the hatches for in the face of civilisational collapse and it will spit out a shopping list for the quantities of comestibles you’ll need to make it through whatever horrors are happening outside. It won’t let you input a timescale longer than two weeks, though, which suggests that the Swiss are either VERY confident in their ability to restore order in typically-efficient manner, or they think that after a fortnight you’ll be happy to eat each other. CHEERING STUFF!
  • Every Dog In New York: Ok, not EVERY dog, but all the registered ones – New York City technically requires people to register their canine companions, and while (obviosuly) not everyone can be fcuked to do this, the fact that lots of people DO do this means that it’s possible to pull all the records and map breeds to the boroughs, so you can now see that (for example) Labradors have an absolute CHOKEHOLD on the residents of Manhattan, whereas if you pop across the Hudson you’re far more likely to encounter a Shih-Tzu. I would LOVE to see this done for London (impossible though it is), if only to confirm some…prejudices I have about dog owners in Clapham.

By Ash Mckean

NEXT UP, ENJOY THE EXCELLENT NEW ALBUM BY WESTSIDE COWBOY!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS WE SHOULD REALLY HAVE SEEN THROUGH THE WHOLE ‘ELON DOES TECH DEMO, MAKES US FORGET ALL PREVIOUS BROKEN PROMISES AND LIES’ THING BUT WHICH IS INCREASINGLY WEARY OF DISCOVERING WE HAVE NOT, PT.2: 

  • The Traitors Data: I know that there’s literally nothing more tedious and annoying than someone saying ‘I don’t watch that, *actually*’ when a TV show comes up in conversation (“What’s that, Matt? You want a MEDAL? You pr1ck”), but, well, I don’t watch the Traitors and so I can offer no assessment whatsoever of whether this site, analysing data from the show in an attempt to see whether it can give you any clues as to who the winner might be, is a net positive to the viewing experience…but let’s assume it is! A project by Ed Jefferson, this tracks all sorts of datapoints from the current (and preceding) series, showing you who’s getting the most screentime, who’s doing the most ‘confessionals’ (I don’t know what this means, but I assume it’s meaningful to the rest of you) and other bits and pieces. Will it help you work out who’s won? NO IDEA! Still, whatever, LOL RAJAN NOONE LIKES YOU!
  • Sixth Wall Studios: The news this week that Character AI – featured years ago in Curios, the AI company that was probably the biggest ‘chat to specific characters as though they are your friends!’ portal – was filing for bankruptcy has been greeted in some quarters as A SIGNAL OF THE AI BUBBLE BURSTING (fwiw, I don’t think it is – Coreweave is a lot more significant, and even that isn’t a terminal signal imho) and generally cheered as a datapoint suggesting IT’S SO OVER…it isn’t, though, it’s a question of moats as a well as business models and more than anything it proves that specific-use services like Character won’t have a market when all models can basically do anything. Also, if you think the idea of ‘AI companions you can chat to like they are your friends’ is going away then Hasbro would like a word – Sixth Wall studios is its specialist arm exploring “authorized AI characters that partners can deploy quickly, safely, and on‑brand”, which is an almost PERFECTLY-joyless phrase and which means we can expect a whole new wave of ‘talk to Polly Pocket!’-type experiences for every single kids’ property under the sun, underpinned by official, guardrail processes put in place by these fcukers, selling the mechanics and the process rather than the model. Smart, but the general concept is…still bleak!
  • Reelizer: Do YOU like films? Weirdo. But, also, GOOD! “Reelizer is Roger Erik Tinch‘s collection of movie art, spanning every artform”, as the ‘about’ page explains, which started in 2011 in different form and was resurrected after a decade-long hiatus last year, and which is a DIZZYING cornucopia of posters for films spanning decades and design styles, and which features some GLORIOUS work. Whether you give a fcuk about cinema, these look beautiful.
  • Tiny Little Office: Oh this is VERY clever – I am not smart enough to understand exactly HOW clever from a coding point of view, but trust me when I tell you it’s really smart – and, potentially, actually quite useful as a lightweight suite of office-ish tools; Tiny Office is a, er, lightweight suite of office tools (ffs Matt!) including a mini spreadsheet and word processor and slide maker, etc, all of which are freely accessible and collaborative and (and here’s the clever bit) that store everything LOCALLY IN THE ADDRESS BAR! “Every document lives in the address of its page, after the #; Copy the link and you have copied the document; Open a link, change it, and the address bar is your own copy”, as the blurb explains. This is, I think, possibly witchcraft – while it’s not an *essential* service, presuming there are some of you out there who for Reasons don’t want to use Google Docs then this is an amazing, small-scale alternative.
  • Immersive Pastoralism: YEAH! IMMERSIVE PASTORALISM! Not a pair of words I think I have ever committed to digital paper, but it’s nice to know that there are still one or two new things under the sun for me to give a half-ar$ed writeup to. This is actually a rather lovely webproject called ‘Transhumance 360’, which basically presents a selection of 360-degree videos depicting the experience of herding animals in various regions of the world. Want to hang out with the yak on the Mongolian steppes? Fancy spending some time chilling with camels in Chad? Feel the need for some Llama time in Argentina? OH GOOD MERRY CHRISTMAS! You can also look at cows in France, fine, but that feels less excitingly intrepid. This is rather lovely and will help you feel less cripplingly urban for a few seconds.
  • Who Paid For This?: Honestly, I would like nothing more than for America just to fcuk off and keep to itself for a bit and stop fcuking everyone else’s sh1t up, but it continues to feel very much like we are all just downstream of those fcukers (sorry, Americans, it’s nothing personal but I hope you appreciate how very, very tiring it is); so it is that Our Lovely Cousins Across The Water are once again preparing to do some democracy and vote in the midterms. Should YOU be one of those Lovely Cousins, you might be interested in this rather neat web service to help you determine who is paying for the many, many mailers you’re getting as campaigning ramps up. “Political mail is the darkest corner of American political advertising. It can be micro-targeted and receives almost no media attention. This tool gives you immediate, unprecedented insight into who is sending you mail. It’s simple. Photograph your mail. If your material involves a federal race, the app will immediately give you detailed information about who is paying for it. For state and local races, a Popular Information journalist will review your submission.” A Good Thing, this.
  • The Family Gaming Database: A website collating recommendations for videogames and boardgames that can be played as a family, should you a) have one of those; and b) want some activities that you can do together than don’t involve leaving the house, because it is fcuking HORRID out there.
  • Corus: This basically touts itself as ‘Letterboxd X Letterboxd for Music’, and is a communitynetworkthing which encourages you to share your favourite books and music with the community and explore a feed of others’ recommendations which you can save, comment on, etc etc. You get the deal – this might be nice as a way of getting listening and reading ideas in a light-touch sort of way.
  • The Book of Shapes: You might not be aware that your life is missing a webpage full of neat, minimal, generative and customizable SVG-patterns, created by one Nikolaj Sokolowski, but it is. YOU ARE WELCOME.
  • Kooler: This is a neat idea – a website which lets you tell it what you have in the house in terms of spirits, liqueurs and mixers and then tells you what cocktails you can reasonably make with said ingredients. Nice, simple interface and the recipes seem reasonable as far as I can tell – in case you’re in the market for it, I am currently very much enjoying a drink which is basically the juice of a lime, a shot of tequila, some St Germain, some bitters and some tonic over ice (exact measurements are for WEIRDOS, you see); I like to call it ‘The Webmong’, consider it a GIFT to you.
  • Roiler Boom: The people behind Online Musical Toys Workshop ‘A Vinyl Shop in Shibuya’ (see Curios passim) have come up with a new little digital plaything which lets you (sort-of) simulate the experience of DJing to a packed crowd; give it access to your webcam and it will show you atop a set of virtual decks, which you can use to mix between preselected tracks using a variety of faders – this is guardrailed quite tightly I think, or at least I think it is given that I was consistently able to produce ABSOLUTE BANGERS, but it’s a lot of fun regardless, and it turns out that you can do something quite wonderful with the unlikely combination of ‘This is America’ by Childish Gambino and Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘House Tour’.
  • WeJam: Sticking on the ‘musical toys’ theme, this is a not-wholly-original but still VERY fun little multiplayer music maker – you will definitely recognise the interface and mechanic if you’re a Reader of a Certain Vintage, given there was something that looked and worked pretty much exactly like this about 15 years ago, but the general idea is that anyone logged onto this Page (click ‘Live Jam’ on landing) can make MUSIC by moving their mouse around; each viewer’s mouse produces its own sound based on on-page position (there are scales, basically), which the different tracks produced by the different people on the page combining to make some unexpectedly-melodious music. You can see where other people are on the scale so there’s a degree of coordination possible – I am genuinely thrilled by the idea that there might be a bunch of you all on there at the same time in a few hours, all brought there by the MAGICAL CONVENING POWER OF WEB CURIOS! Lol, I know, but still.
  • The Drive Thru Index: This is quite fun – no idea who the fcuk has built it, but it’s a map tracking the menu prices of different fast food outlets around the world in realtime, letting you compare prices between outlets to (theoretically) get the best deal. This is obviously more useful in the US where it’s expected that you will get in your car and drive everywhere and where as a result driving 1.6miles in one direction rather than another to save a few bucks on fried chicken is perhaps slightly less nonsensical than it is here; still, if you want a tool that will let you see where the cheapest bargain bucket in the vicinity is then HERE YOU ARE!
  • The Music Atlas: This is an interesting idea – ‘maps of music clustered by genre similarity’ are very much not a new thing, but the data here is compiled based on songs that have been put in playlists with other songs as well as genre similarity information, which makes it a bit more…curious and unusual than some of the other variants I’ve seen over the years. Try it on some artists you like and see if it guides you anywhere interesting.
  • Ladles: It’s occasionally easy to fall into the trap of thinking that Reddit’s dying, overwhelmed by bots and AI and its slow normiefication – then, though, you find subs such as r/ladles, which is…oh ffs, you don’t need me to explain this (via Pietro’s excellent ‘Link Molto Belli’).
  • Abandoned Mine Models: Oh this is SO interesting – and these would make superb templates for videogame levels. Maps! Of old abandoned mine networks! SO SPELUNKY! There’s DEFINITELY some fun applications for these if you’re more practically code-minded than I am, imho.
  • On That Day (In India): On the one hand, websites that do the whole ‘on XX date, this happened’ thing are ten a penny; on the other, they tend to be US-centric, and it was genuinely interesting to me to chuck my birthday into this and find out what was going on in India at the time. This is, fine, pure ClaudeSlop, but I am including it mainly because it’s always nice to learn about history and culture from other places, even if it’s Machine-smoothed to the nth degree.
  • DrawDick: A man called Greg emailed me to tell me about a website which he has just launched and, look, this is childish and silly and puerile, but if you can’t enjoy a website that encourages visitors to sketch a crudely-drawn penis and submit it to a worldwide gallery of other crudely-drawn penises then, well, I feel you’re probably not trying hard enough. Honestly, even if you have no desire to contribute yourself, PLEASE check out the gallery because there are some genuine works of art in here and at least two that made me laugh so much I was literally crying. LOOK AT THIS INCREDIBLE WORK FFS!
  • AssBench: There are many different benchmarks for AI model performance; this website lets you compare the various LLMs’ ability to, er, render a 3d model of some buttocks (clothed). Would you like a gallery of 3d, CGI bums which you can, er, poke and prod? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! Lest you feel this is in any way pervy or gross, I can assure you that these are pretty much the least-sexualised buttocks you’re likely to see online today (I know what you’re like, you perverts).
  • Composition: Ok, this is ClaudeSlop BUT it’s a fun little game and I like the design-y twist that creates unique images from each game; it was sent to me by its creator Emeke Ishiekwene, who explains “Composition is kind of like JezzBall from 1992. Dots bounce around, and you draw lines to trap them in place; all spaces with no dots become colored red/yellow/blue/white. Once three quarters of the board are painted it becomes a Mondrian-like painting titled something like “Composition No. 2 with Yellow, Red, and Blue”. Everyone gets the same board each day (with three tries), and since all dots start out in identical positions every time you can see what happens if you fail on your first or second try.”  This is, I promise, fun, and there’s something very satisfying about seeing your Mondrianalike completed.
  • Katamari Webpage: Following on from that ‘destroy any website’ link last week, this is an EVEN BETTER webtoy that lets you fcuk up the webpage via the medium of rolling a ball across it in the classic Katamari Damacy style – you can hoover up elements smaller than your ball (it will make sense, trust me), growing with each thing you collect until you’re rolling and hoovering EVERYTHING IN SIGHT. The only way this could be improved would be to make it work on any page you fancy, but, til someone fixes that for me (I AM WAITING) this is a pretty fun way to spend three minutes of your working day.
  • Binary Scrabble: Look, there are some things I come across which are simply too geeky even for me to understand; Binary Scrabble requires you to, er, know binary, and even the explanation on landing page may was well be in Attic Greek for all the sense it makes to me, but I have a vague feeling that there are some of you who will be just the right flavour of autistic for this to hit HARD.
  • Relativistic Asteroids: You know what I said about not really understanding the last link? Yeah, well that applies to this one too tbh, but at least I get the ‘asteroids’ bit I suppose.
  • Junkyard King: The final browsergame of the week is this rather fun – and very pretty! – tie-in title for some animation series currently on YouTube; it’s an isometric 3d swordfighting…thing, which you play by moving around and drawing shapes onscreen to fire off attacks, and while it’s simple it’s also satisfying and pleasingly-crunchy in the controls, and it’s a decent 15 minutes of fun while you wait for the clock to tick round to the ‘numbing your senses with uppers and downers’ portion of the day.

By Ron Francis

THE FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS AN HONESTLY-WONDERFUL TRIP BACK TO THE 70s AND 80s COURTESY OF LOREN HEYWOOD! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY EMPTY THIS WEEK!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • DarqDagr: Yes, I know, I know. BUT! Leaving aside the unforgivable spelling there, this is a…weirdly-charming and strangely-wholesome account, run by a singer and voice artist who at some point in the past few months came up with the idea of doing death metal-style growls over dubstep drops…but making the growled lines the sort of things you might read in a, er, *particular* strain of romance novel. Have you ever fantasised about hearing someone call you a ‘Good Girl’ in a guttural, animalistic roar while some sub-Skrillex bass wibbles away in the background? WEB CURIOS DOES NOT JUDGE YOU! This is obviously very silly, but I rather warmed to the guy after reading this interview with him – who knows, perhaps this will provide you with the erotic charge you’ve been craving!

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • Gaslight Denier: We start with a piece that’s specifically about Ireland, its economy and society and the political decisions that have led the country to Where It Is Right Now – not because I personally have any particular interest or affinity with Ireland, but because so much of what is laid out in this essay by Sinéad O’Sullivan feels familiar in the UK and, I would imagine, wherever you might be too. It’s not without its problems – not least the title, we really need to retire ‘gaslighting’ as a term so diffuse and untethered from its original meaning has the term become, and the fact that it loses a bit of steam in the second half and gets a bit ranty and Ireland-specific for my tastes (that’s a me problem, in fairness), but the framing of the issue struck me as being both neat and applicable rather widely. This is, basically, about reasons that we can see headlines such as yesterday’s ‘the economy is doing great actually!’ numbers while at the same time very much feeling the opposite in real life – in particular I found the four-tier ‘this is how the economy works’ stuff clear and sensical, and maybe you will too.
  • Prediction Markets: Yes, I know, you KNOW about Kalshi and Polymarket and the like (you read about them in here MONTHS ago, didn’t you? Well done Matt!), but this is a good overview both of what they are and how they work and how they do not in fact unlock THE WISDOM OF CROWDS despite what their proponents might want to tell you. This is particularly good on all the ways in which they are dodgy as fcuk – not news, fine, but it’s a decent laying out of the reasons this stuff really should be regulated properly. Of all the many, myriad ways in which the US has fcuked itself over the past decade, I wonder whether we will look back on its absolutely wild recent decisions on relaxing gambling legislation as some of the most damaging because FCUK ME does it appear to be screwing the country right now.
  • Tech Hype is Cannibalising the Future: A piece by Sun-ha Hong which explores a series of  ideas which are interesting extensions of the broader ‘tech solutionism is bad actually’ school of Morozov et al. Basically (I am simplifying here, but) the degree to which tech hype has become the de facto expression of the industry has effectively precluding ‘failure’ from becoming a recognised state – there are no failures, just slowdowns in progress! – which itself results in worse outcomes. “Failure serves an important function for the health of our political and economic ideas. Even the most libertarian idealization of market rationality requires that products, firms, and ideologies pay a proportional price for failure, allowing better alternatives to access those resources and opportunities. The late capitalist tech economy, however, turns to hype as a means to cheat this process. From the Stepford Wives to sycophantic, female ‘mommy apps’, or from virtual reality glasses in the 1980s to … virtual reality glasses in the 2020s, the same turgid renditions of future technology are recycled across multiple generations, often brimming with nostalgia for retrograde fantasies about society and progress.”
  • Is X Back?:There have been a spate of pieces in the past week or so – sparked by this Daring Fireball article in which John Gruber proclaimed that X was a great place to hang out again and it no longer carried The Stench of Elon – debating whether or not The Platform Known as Twitter is, in fact, BACK; the main link here goes to Casey Newton’s analysis of why that might be (following his slightly mea culpa-ish admission that he was going back to posting on there because that’s where all the AI and tech chat happens and that’s what he makes a living writing about, and how he feels about it. Obviously I can’t speak for anyone else, but as someone who also makes a living writing about AI and tech (lol, ‘living’!) I can personally say that a) I have had to maintain an X account because there is stuff that I learn about there that I simply don’t get anywhere else; b) it’s been possible for me to tune the algorithm there to the point where I basically only get AI-ish news, but even then I get about 3% grifty rubbish, race hate and bongo so to say it’s ‘clean’ in any meaningful sense is rubbish; and c) I am not posting there because there are limits. It’s interesting, though, to read Newton’s analysis of why he thinks people (some people, specifically some journalists) are returning, specifically the fact that it feels like a series of smaller communities rather than the ONE BIG TOWN SQUARE ideal, partly due to fewer people overall and partly due to algodominance – which, perhaps, is true, but, also, if the place is still full of nazis and racism but it’s now hidden from you, does that make the place ok? HMMMM.
  • The Scam Economy: A cautionary piece in Bloomberg, alerting readers to the fact that the AI-assisted scam economy is massive and growing; look, I know you know this, but if you don’t already have all the passkey stuff set up on your computer, if you haven’t already had chats with the, er, more vulnerable people in your circles about how to keep safe(ish) from scams, and if you’ve not already discussed with family members about what your SECRET FAMILIAL PROOF-OF-HUMANITY KEYWORD is going to be then get fcuking moving, everything is going to be a machine-enabled scam in approximately two months.
  • Notes on the EU Social Media Ban: Let me put it on the record that I fcuking love the EU and its general approach to Big Tech – it’s imperfect, fine, but at least the Commission has DONE stuff and proved that you can effect meaningful corporate behaviour change via the medium of legislation. Look what we could have ha…NO MATT! NO NOSTALGIA! NO FBPE ENERGY HERE! Ahem. Anyway, while I like the general idea of ‘laws to curb big tech’, that doesn’t mean that said laws shouldn’t be scrutinised and criticised – which is what Michael Veale from the University of Amsterdam does in this paper, where he goes through the proposed social media ban and takes apart why it is Bad Law. Given the parallels with (some elements of) the UK social media ban set to come into force next year, this is a good read for anyone in this country who would like an explanation as to why it might not in fact be a great idea. Also, the fact that the French student protests are being run off Snapchat shows exactly why young people having access to communications infrastructure is vital – ALLEZ LES JEUNES, etc etc.
  • Agents for Government: A really interesting piece of thinking about the way in which one might go about building agentic AI systems for citizens to use in conjunction with Government services; theoretically an area with huge scope, given the fact that everyone needs to interface with them but not everyone has the same facility with navigating bureaucratic hoops. This is simple, smart and clear, and worth a read if you’ve any interest in how one might practically go about designing systems and processes for an agentic age: “With agentic technology, the first challenge is feeling safe enough to try it. Rachel Botsman calls trust ‘a confident relationship with the unknown’. Someone using a proactive government service for the first time faces a lot of unknowns: what the tool is, what it’s doing and why, and what the risks might be. So to help us meet this challenge, we’ve been thinking about how helpful human advisors earn people’s trust. Many of us lean on an experienced caseworker, an advocate, or a resourceful customer experience representative to work out what’s possible and to navigate complexity. If an AI agent were doing a similar job, how would it need to behave for us to rely on it in the same way?”
  • Amazon, Robots and Work: On the quiet robotics revolution which Amazon has been undertaking for the past decade, where it is now and where it goes next – and what that means for the workforce. This is partly a PR exercise by Amazon – they want to show off their tech! They want to tell everyone it’s not impacting jobs negatively, in fact the opposite! – but the article does a good job of balancing some of the ‘wow, robotics’ stuff in the front half with some rather more sobering analysis of the impact on workers in the back: “investigations by labor advocacy groups, journalists, and the US Congress have painted a less rosy picture of Amazon’s automation drive over the years. The Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a coalition of trade unions headquartered in Washington, DC, published reports in May 2021 and April 2022 showing higher injury rates at Amazon’s robotic warehouses compared to non-robotic warehouses. That analysis drew on injury data reported by companies to the US government from 2017 through 2020. “Amazon likes to talk about its latest robots because it doesn’t want to talk about the tens of thousands of Amazon workers who are injured every year due to Amazon’s obsession with maximizing speed and minimizing costs,” Joan Moriarty, director of strategic research and Campaigns at SOC, said in an email to Ars. The organization also gathered nearly 1,000 responses from Amazon workers in an online survey conducted in February 2021. “Workers consistently report that the presence of robots increases the pace of work expected in Amazon facilities, forcing them to make fast, repetitive motions, substantially increasing the risk of injury,” Moriarty said.” BONUS ROBOT NEWS: A good piece in 404 Media analysing the reporting of a story this week about a robot which, per many headlines, ‘assaulted’ a woman, and how the robot did nothing of the sort – it was (OF COURSE!) being controlled by some YouTube chuds for an hilarious street harassment video – and why it’s important when writing about this stuff not to ascribe agency to the machine when it should very much be ascribed to the people controlling the machine (see also ‘rogue AI’ narratives ffs).
  • The AI Creators Business: Not a good article – it’s Mashable, sorry – but an interesting and useful one from the point of view of ‘the state of the content grift economy’. The current BIG SCAM doing the rounds is Virtual Influencers – I have written multiple times this year about tools and apps that let you effectively rip and reskin other people’s videos and create multiple dupes featuring different personas, and that’s been supercharged in recent months by the growth in ‘virtual influencers’ with recognisable (largely freakish) faces – you will have seen the ‘Knave of Hearts’-looking fcuker Jean Philanthrope, and there have been a bunch of others in the past fortnight or so all vying to break containment and become a BREAKOUT AI STAR. Of course, that isn’t ACTUALLY a viable business model – these things basically get one round of viral fame at best before people get bored, which means that the REAL meta here is for people to attempt to get rich by selling tutorials and explainers teaching OTHER people how to do it; truly, we live in an era where everything you see online is just seven bullsh1t online courses in a trenchcoat – Ryan has a typically good rundown of the grift here.
  • Situationship Stories: Look, I don’t normally post ‘MAD DATING ANECDOTE’ stuff, but this one happened to roll across my field of vision this week and I read it and…look, I appreciate that all the people quoted in here are in their 20s (it’s Dazed, natch) and I am…not, and that Things Are Different Now, and that I wouldn’t last five minutes in the trenches of genZennial dating, but, also, EVERYONE IN HERE IS FCUKING MENTAL, EVERYONE, THE PEOPLE BEING DESCRIBED BUT ALSO THE PEOPLE TELLING THE STORIES. Every single one of these contains multiple ‘hang on, what the fcuk?’ moments – although my personal is this one, which I reproduce in its entirety because the weary ‘they are always having the worst week of their lives’ made me laugh LOTS: ““These guys do not shock me anymore. A classic one is when I got sent a text that said ‘Not sure I’m up for hanging out this week, I’m not in a good head space, TBH.’ They’re always having the worst week of their lives. That was in October of last year. Ten months later, this past August, he makes a reappearance and texts, ‘Miss us.’””
  • Wikipedia and Food: This is a really interesting article about food entries on Wikipedia, and how the traditional makeup of the site’s editorship (generally Western and male) has led to food being a bit…underrepresented, particularly when it comes to hyperregional dishes or foods from Africa and Asia. This maps onto the general ‘Wikipedia is almost comically male’ discourse we’re seeing at the moment and which has seen Sandi Toksvig announce a (sorry Sandi) probably-doomed attempt to create a more inclusive alternative called Mappa Mundi, but, regardless of your interest in Wikipedia, it’s a fascinating look at how we preserve culinary cultural history, as well as whose histories we consider worthy of preservation: “Whenever I sit down to eat, I pull up Wikipedia. A great food page — some of my favorites include “Maple Syrup,” “Pad Thai,” and “Sandwich” — will tell you more than what’s on your plate; it surfaces all the broader forces that have made it possible. But although I have benefited immensely from Wikipedia’s food pages, I am also often disappointed by their shortcomings. Many of my favorite childhood snacks, easily discovered in the aisles of any Chinese supermarket, simply don’t exist on English Wikipedia. Many pages — even for widely eaten foods — can be remarkably short. Many lack citations. Signs of the community asking for support are littered across articles both long and short: “Citation needed” superscripts for uncited claims, or banners requesting user assistance to correct poor Wikipedia editing practices, like disputed neutrality or incomplete coverage. Food has long been underserviced in the archive. Traditional food-related knowledge is passed down in ways that are often difficult to find, preserve, or verify — like oral tradition or family recipe books. Adding to that difficulty, the industrialization of contemporary food processes has severed the relationship between producer and consumer that once sustained this knowledge. Even well-documented records of culinary history have often been treated as marginal within history writ large — the field’s association with the domestic sphere has long disqualified it from being viewed as a “serious” historical field like military or economic history. As a result, today’s gap in Wikipedia’s food coverage is a symptom of a much larger problem: the systematic undervaluation of food-related knowledge.”
  • The Aesthetics of the Kylie Jenner Vlog: I really enjoyed this essay, about the semiotics of Kylie Jenner’s video content – it’s worth reading the whole piece because it says some interesting things about aspiration and signals of success in the modern era (and how post-hustle this is, in some respects), but the central thesis basically goes like this: “Kylie has chosen to show us absolutely nothing, and it is this ‘nothing’ that I find most desirable. The vlog version of Kylie appears extremely pleasant and warm; utterly likable. Light. Free of the need to rush, and embodying the idea of going slow. Relieved from the pressure of being productive. It’s ironic to unintentionally receive a vision of anti-capitalism from a member of the Kardashian show, a show in which its chief protagonist popularly exclaimed, “Get your fucking ass up and work. It seems like nobody wants to work.” But what we are witnessing on the Kylie vlogs isn’t labour; it’s luxury. It stands in opposition to the dominant cultural force that says to be valuable, you have to be productive, you have to be a boss, you have to create empires, you have to turn yourself into a personal brand. Here is a person who is doing the exact opposite. And yes, her cultural bankability comes from years of self-exploitation, from years of making herself a product, from years of obtaining the right co-signs, and aligning herself with the right adjacencies to propel her into the lucrative position of having such immense attention. This is all work. Hard work. But it is fascinating that with all the eyes on her – her vlog view count sprinting through the millions – how little effort she chooses to show us. Freedom exists when you have nothing to prove.”
  • Wargaming the Enviropocalypse: This is an excellent – if…not exactly cheering – piece in WIRED about a ‘game’ that took place at Queen Mary University in London last year, in which a collection of variously-experienced people played through a plausible scenario of near-future environmental collapse to see whether they were able to come to a planet-saving consensus. Look, I don’t think it’s spoiling too much to reproduce the first couple of paragraphs here – read the whole thing, though, it is…depressingly predictable, and it’s ‘funny’ how you can see in-game behaviours replicated in meatspace when they are pointed out to you: “When it comes to deciding the fate of the planet, Colleen Golja always thought science and reason would have a seat at the table. That was until one morning last September in London, when the climate researcher took part in the first in a series of war games. The goal: to prevent an uncontrolled global race to develop a technology aimed at cooling the planet but that comes with vast, unknown risks that could reshape life on Earth. “I thought that would be such an easy thing. Like, we can all agree to do ethical research and make sure it’s for the better of all humans,” she told WIRED. “And boy, was I wrong.””
  • The Making of GTA VI: I’m including this not because it’s an interesting or revealing piece of journalism – it really isn’t – but because it’s a sort-of ur-example of how this sort of corporate profile PR work functions. YOu have the biggest entertainment product in human history, you have a press DESPERATE for stories because GTAVI = CLICKS, inevitably, and you have a company (Rockstar) so famously tight-lipped and so famously anti-media that, when I worked with them on the PR for GTAIV (my GOD I am old), they literally had a list of media they disliked pinned up on the wall of the UK PR head’s offices, titled ‘SERPENTS’ – these were media who would get NO access because of previous slights visited on the company (real or imagined) and who were to be treated with cold disdain. Basically you get an interview like this in exchange for promising no hard questions, no pushing for details and accepting that you will get exactly the same sort of dull, juiceless press release pabulum as every other outlet given brief access to the inner sanctum. WELCOME TO PR!
  • Frightened Chicks: One for the history dads, this is Pablo Scheffer in the LRB writing about the history of medieval Britain, specifically the bit when we became Anglo Saxons thanks to basically being cuckooed by them from about the 6thC to the 8thC. I am very much not a history dad at all, but I still found this really interesting – if nothing else it will give you some interesting arguments to throw into the mix should a racist attempt to engage you in conversation about how many generations ‘englishness’ should go back. “For the sixth-century British monk Gildas, author of the only surviving near contemporary account of the invasion, the Anglo-Saxons were not so much an unbeatable army as ‘dogs’ and ‘thieves’ who spread across the island like a ‘virulent plant’. But he didn’t think their occupation would be permanent. A religious and political agitator, Gildas believed that the pagan Anglo-Saxons had been sent as divine punishment for the Britons’ sins, and would be defeated as soon as the islanders got God back on their side. He thought he stood on the cusp of an era of moral and political regeneration. In reality, he was the last chronicler of a culture that was about to fade away. The transformation that took place during the two centuries between Gildas and Bede is startling. Gildas grew up in an elite society which in many ways looked Roman. Some of the wealthy had villas; many spoke Latin and prayed to a Christian god. Bede was the inheritor of a world in which their equivalents lived in small wooden halls, worshipped Woden and drank ale from aurochs’ horns (though by his own time they had converted back to Christianity). None of these changes was inevitable. When similar cultural encounters took place elsewhere in Europe, it was often the Roman ways that prevailed. After straying into Gaul, the pagan Franks ended up adopting the language and religion of their hosts, becoming kings of polities that looked much as they had in the preceding centuries. Old English, by contrast, borrowed no more than a handful of words from British. (A few, such as ‘bin’, ‘crag’ and ‘tor’, have survived.) Over the course of a century and a half the English effectively erased the old society from the island’s lowlands, founding a Germanic enclave in what had been Celtic land for more than a millennium.”
  • Fundraising in SF in 2026: I know that it’s becoming harder and harder to laugh at the eccentricities and insanities of the techcnuts, but sometimes it is the only correct response – as is the case with this writeup by Sean Jewell of “Apollo Innovation Commons’s First Light Gala” (yes, exactly). “The Rotunda Room is actually the inside of The Hibernia’s neoclassical rooftop dome. The scant seating is claimed so Elle and I grab a spot on the sharply sloping wall near one of the three human statues spaced equally within the rotunda. They wear ragged white mummy wrappings and expressions of anguish. Same. In the center of the room is a PVC pipe obelisk about the size of a fridge draped in a white sheet. A projection of golden laurel leaves falls infinitely across its western face.”  WHY ARE THESE FCUKERS THE ONES DESIGNING THE FUTURE FFS?
  • Journey into Boomerland: Aidan Walker, of How To Do Things With Memes, writes about a trip he took to LA to appear on Bill Maher’s talkshow to discuss, er, memes – this is the second essay of two, but it stands as a selfcontained piece and it is EXCELLENT, both on current culture and how it ‘works’, but also about the general weirdness of Being On TV and LA and the web and MODERN LIFE; this is, honestly, just a really good read.
  • The Seven Vices of Highly Effective Victorians: Another History Dad piece, but one that is SO interesting and which you will all enjoy, I promise – this is a great article in Works In Progress exploring how and why the Victorians (objectively, lazy drunks) achieved so much. The answer, obviously, is ‘the labour of others, specifically poor people (and to an extent women)’, ‘belonging to a privileged class of rich people with consistent income and a tight social circe’, and ‘just a generally curious attitude’, but it’s worth reading the whole piece because it’s a great picture of life for a certain coterie of people in a very particular period of British history. WHAT A WAY TO LIVE: “One virtue that upper-class Victorian education signally failed to inculcate was early rising. Although Victorian schoolboys and university students got up fairly early for chapel, the day of an upper-class Victorian adult started late. The great prime minister of the early nineteenth century, Pitt the Younger, breakfasted at 9am. The great prime minister of the Victorian period, William Gladstone, hosted a social breakfast starting at 10.30am (claret was served), continuing till about noon. His rival Benjamin Disraeli attended breakfasts hosted by Lord Houghton, which started at 10am, but which Disraeli would join at about 11.30am. Elite Victorians generally had flexible working hours and were free to work from home unless they had meetings elsewhere. Many spent the whole morning at home, reading the newspaper, answering letters, and preparing for later meetings. The Edwardian prime minister Arthur Balfour generally did all this literally in bed , rarely emerging from his bedroom before lunchtime. As we shall see, mornings must often have been even later from February to July, when many leading Victorians would have spent much of the night partying.”
  • Bitterness: Our final longread of the week is by Maria Pinto, and it’s about bitterness – the flavour, the feeling, the concept – and friendship and loss and absence and LIFE and and and. It is EXCELLENT and poetic and beautiful and I enjoyed it very much.

By Ray Newman

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

 

Webcurios 09/10/26

Uncategorized No Comments
Reading Time: 38 minutes

 

WHY HELLO AGAIN HELLO!

I *missed* you! No, really, I did; I even woke up at 6am last Friday in a sweaty panic that I had a Curios to write and no links to fill it with – this is my internal life, you see, SO RICH!! – and, well, what more proof do you need that without you I am nothing?

As I might have alluded to last time, I went to a wedding a couple of weeks back; it was lovely, but you might enjoy this small anecdote from it because, well.

So I was asked to do a reading during the ceremony, which was obviously all lovely and flattering; upon acquiescing, I was sent a link to a Google doc which contained the verse in question. I look, I parse, I close the document, figuring it’s short and I can wing it.

Come the day, the ceremony’s in full swing and it comes to my reading; I stand, phone in hand, and (with only limited glances at the screen, credit to me, well done Matt!) deliver what I would modestly call a STELLAR performance. The crowd, obviously, is enraptured, although I do note what seems to be some small consternation from the MC and some of the wedding party, which I obviously put down to something entirely unrelated to me because I am ACE.

I sit, the ceremony continues without a hitch – although I notice that the final reading gets quietly dropped from the running order. Why? Fcuk knows, not my problem, I am great, let’s get drunk.

Reader…it turns out the Google Doc I was sent didn’t only contain *my* reading. It contained *all* the readings, and I read totally the wrong one, and fcuked up the running order of the whole thing and basically slightly threw the whole thing off. And THAT is how I learned that it’s REALLY hard to notice that there are tabs on a Google Doc when you view it on mobile.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can book me to read at YOUR wedding if you like (but you will have no choice as to what I read, apparently, so suck it up).

By Giulia Muraglia

WHY NOT SETTLE IN AND ENJOY MAX COOPER’S FABRIC LIVE SET WHILE YOU CLICK AND GAWP AND WONDER? 

THE SECTION WHICH IS WILLING TO BET THAT A SIGNIFICANT PROPORTION OF THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SPENT FORMATIVE AMOUNTS OF TIME ON ROTTEN DOT COM AND OGRISH AS ADOLESCENTS, PT.1: 

  • The Tiny Awards Have A Winner!: THE PEOPLE HAVE VOTED! THE WINNER HAS BEEN DECIDED! CLICK THE LINK TO FIND OUT WHO! Thanks so much to every single person who voted and shared the link and wrote about the Awards; this was our biggest year yet in terms of nominations and votes, and it’s honestly so pleasing to see them carving out a small place in the web’s calendar. We’ll be back next year, unless we all die or something (currently only approximately a 3% possibility, I think, but these odds are subject to change).
  • Scrubjay: Given we’re saying goodbye to the 2026 Tiny Awards, it seems fitting to kick off with a webthing (yes, the technical term) which is all about building stuff online; this is a new experimental toytypetoolthing (also a technical term) by Curios favourite Everest Pipkin which is effectively a lightweight, simple website-slash-game-slash-digitalexperience builder, all in your browser. “Scrubjay  allows you to drag any web element into a page and then manipulate those elements casually and immediately- playing, overlapping, making research patterns or decorating lines of thought. It looks at arrangement and decoration as a space for personal agency in computation, and believes in physical, joyful interactions while browsing.” Which, ok, sounds complex, but think of it this way – you can basically pick up elements and HTML from any webpage by copy and pasting, dump it onto a blank canvas and then republish it, creating new…things from bits and pieces of other things, like a universal digital webpage collage tool. Yes, ok, fine, I know that this is a TERRIBLE description (and dear Christ, if this is how we’re starting then I apologise in advance for how bad it’s going to get), but click the link and play and you will, I promise, understand. If nothing else this could be a really fun digital creative toy for Young People In Your Life, or anyone who quite fancies the idea of digital scrapbooking. TRY IT!
  • The Bayeux Tapestry Online Experience: I appreciate that those of you living outside the UK mightn’t give a sh1t about this, but the British Museum in London is currently hosting an exhibition showcasing the ANCIENT EMBROIDERED COMIC STRIP known as the Bayeux Tapestry, back in the country for the first time in, er, lots of years, and the queues are apparently making the viewing experience…somewhat-suboptimal, and so I am *thrilled* to be able to bring you this Official Digital Experience so that you can enjoy the work without the inconvenience of having to stand in line for three hours. This was sent to me by the digital person at the British Museum and, look, I can’t pretend I wasn’t a *tiny* bit thrilled at being PR’d – LOOK MUM I AM A REAL WEBSITE! – but, honestly, I would have featured this anyway as it’s a really nice bit of webwork, letting you explore a high-res scan of the artefact in a variety of ways (a tour of the best bits – IN YOUR FACE, HAROLD! – or a free roam) all with lots of annotations to help explain what all the variously dun-coloured stickmen in helmets are up to and What It All Means. This is great, and a pretty much perfect case study in how to ‘do’ digital accessibility for cultural institutions; no need to render it in Unity or have an AI chatbot, just let people look at the thing and tell them what they are looking at. See? EASY.
  • The Atlas of Bluesky: Ooh, one of those ‘social media networks, mapped by topic’ things, this time for Scold’s Paradise Bluesky! You know how these things work by now – it shows clusters of interests, and you can zoom around to see subtopics within the broader conversations, and, because it’s Bluesky, there are some CRACKERS in here. Come for the ‘Political and Global Affairs’ cluster, stay (and, er, possibly come) for the ‘Rag Slut Self Portraits’, ‘Genderqueer Furry Art’ or the Archipelago of AI Hate! This is actually rather nicely done, and there’s something genuinely interesting about going deep into the various discussion areas to see the subcategories of chat. Didn’t expect there to be such a big ‘Strange School Assemblies’ thread, ngl.
  • INCYNC: OH I LOVE THIS! Honestly, this is SO beautifully-made and weirdly gorgeous to listen to; the site lets you play, and layer, various live performances of the musical composition ‘In C’, ”a minimalist composition by Terry Riley for any number of musicians playing 53 melodic fragments in their own time, in the key of C“; there are a selection of different recordings from different times and orchestras loaded onto the site and you can set them off with whatever delays, etc, you like, creating your very own multilayered composite concert which, amazingly, seems to sound oddly-great whatever you do (there may be some Clever Maths happening here but it is too early for me to think about stuff like that). This is GREAT, I strongly recommend you play with it.
  • Sliding Shores: Would you like to see a simulation of exactly what will happen to the world’s shorelines should global sea levels rise by a set amount? What will 0.3 metres look like? What about 0.5? CAN YOU GUESS? Obviously it will NEVER get this bad (lol!), but let’s just say that were I living near Peterborough I would be…quite invested in the Net Zero conversation, looking at this.
  • Digital Train: Ok, this is BEAUTIFUL and pointless and meditative and I adore it. If you’re anything like me (and, honestly, I hope you’re not, it’s mostly quite annoying and I wouldn’t recommend it) then you will find few things more soothing than the act of sitting and watching the world zoom by from the window of a train – presuming that your life doesn’t afford you as many opportunities for long-distance rail journeys around the world as you might like, then why not check out this website, which uses videos of views from trains pulled from YouTube to simulate the experience of, er, being on a train. “Why haven’t you finished that spreadsheet, Susan?” “I was staring out of an imaginary train window and imagining I was on the Trans-Siberian Railway” – THIS IS PERFECTLY FINE AND HR WILL BACK YOU. You can select a range of countries from the drop-down menus (and weather, and SFX), so why not set it to Switzerland and imagine you’re on your way to Dignitas and the sweet release of death?
  • The Adobe Creative Suite, But Cloned By AI: OK, so I haven’t tried these because, well, I am lucky enough not to have to have anything to do with the Adobe creative suite (I like to imagine that every time I type that without a Copyright symbol a senior Adobe marketing exec gets the soles of his feet lashed), but they have done the rounds this week and I am assured by People Who Know that they do in fact work – someone basically used AI to vibecode the functionality of photoshop et al and make them all available for free, which is obviously…an interesting Rubicon in terms of copyright and the future survival prospects of All Software Businesses Ever but, well, also gives you free access to a whole bunch of stuff that you would otherwise have to pay a lot of money for, so who’s to say what’s right and wrong here?
  • Old Models: As long-term readers (or at least those of you who bother paying attention to what I write and who aren’t so addled by age or misery or substance abuse that you forget everything immediately) will of course know, I have been featuring AI-generated stuff in Curios for YEARS now, well before the current LLM era, and so I was rather tickled by this site which collects a selection of different models and technologies in AI image gen from the past few years and lets you play with them and reminisce about, say, the Deep Dream era in which The Machine saw psychedelic puppies in everything, or the early Dall-E era from whence the horrifying Will Smith eating spaghetti memes came from, and if you’d like to briefly return to the times when this stuff was curious and funny and a bit janky and almost fun rather than ubiquitous and simultaneously very terrifying and very dull.
  • The Clodyssey: A quick check in on ‘what you can do with The Machine this week’; there’s been yet another step-chance in model and agent capability in the past few weeks, and various people have been showing off the impressive results you can get from instructing agents to go off and make videos for you based solely on a few short prompts; this involves Claude (or whatever) pulling together work from a bunch of different image-gen models, using video gen to animate them based on storyboards it’s written…look, I KNOW YOU HATE THIS but look, it’s incredibly impressive (sorry, but it is) and if you can watch this video (which is a pastiche of the Odyssey in musical form, all about AI and superintelligence an admittedly terrible track which is obviously some tech chud’s idea of ‘funny’ which at the same time is MAD when you consider it was conceived of and thrown together by AI in 12h, semi-autonomously) and not think ‘crikey, this stuff is a bit good, isn’t it?’ then, well, what the fcuk is wrong with you?
  • TV Poems: OH THIS IS SO COOL! A clever little hacked-together webtoy which lets you spin up a four-line rhyming poem (ok, look, nothing here’s going to trouble the laureate, but it’s fine for machine doggerel) and which pulls accompanying TV clips to voice it, line by line. You can input themes for the machine to riff on (it’s an LLM under the hood, Jev, that works to pick the ‘best’ lines based on some coded restrictions which help maintain rhyme and meter) and then you’ll get it read out by a collaged cast of characters from the screen; it is SO nicely done, seriously, and there’s been a lot of real care put into calibrating the outputs so that the cadence and flow fit well, and it works so much better than it has to – I promise you, you will REALLY enjoy this. Also, occasionally it throws up things that feel…oddly profound, like this: “I want to go to blow alert. Unless you wanna come. We’re going. Let me get my keys. I wanna bury some. There’s ninety years of mother here including some of mine. I’m gonna take a look around. That one’s completely fine.” SEE? SO MEANINGFUL!
  • Longhoang Yeo: It truly has been a vintage year for people’s personal portfolio websites, but this one I think possibly takes the crown (so far) for ‘most needlessly-impressive and madly-interactive ‘LOOK GUYS I CAN CODE!’ showoff portal’ – hats off to Longhoang Yeo, who has built a full-on little 3d cybertank game which doubles up as a sort-of online CV; move the tank around the landscape with WASD, shoot things, solve puzzles, SHOOT MORE THINGS…honestly, this is better than some actual videogames, I cannot recommend it enough.
  • Fun Little Synth Toy Thing: Yeah, I know, but seriously, I have about 300 tabs to get through this morning and so you’re going to have to accept that the descriptive work this week is going to be even less helpful than usual. LIVE WITH IT. Ahem. Sorry. Anyway, this is a neat riff on a standard webtoy – a synth in your browser, rendered as a 3d object, which you can play by clicking or using the keypad, and which, if you play around with it a bit, reveals itself to be surprisingly full-featured; loop, layer, and do all sorts of weird stuff I don’t really understand with tone and pitch, and SEE WHAT HAPPENS.
  • The Digital Art Timeline: I am quite annoyed by this, I have to confess. This SHOULD be exactly the sort of thing I like – a history of generative art (in its broadest sense – effectively it seems to take that as meaning ‘any artworks which have enough of a sort of vaguely-mathsy element to them’ as well as ‘stuff that is actually generative’, but, well, I’m not really in any position to quibble the taxonomical choices of others, so), presented as an interactive timeline for you to explore and learn about; the graphical stuff is nice, there are a variety of different ways of exploring the archive…and yet it is rendered HIDEOUS AND UNFUN by the fact that the UX and UI is so horribly AI, and all the copy is horribly AI, and as such the whole thing is flabby and baggy and lacks precision or focus and GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH I am seeing so much of this of late, nice ideas that are rendered sh1tty by the fact that the people behind them have just let The Machine do all the design and it sucks, honestly. STOP THIS.
  • Nappy: Stock images, available under a creative commons license, of people of colour, for use on websites and in campaigns. All real people shot by real photographers – apparently the site is in danger of shutting down as a result of AI-generated imagery having flooded the market for stock, which is…well, entirely-predictable but also very sad, so should you be someone who uses these sorts of images then why not bookmark this and support real people and real models rather than the fake versions (while we can still just about tell the difference)?
  • Scanline Videos: Would you like access to an obscure repository of weird arty videos with minimal explanation as to what the fcuk they are or why they exist, and many of which feature the sort of ‘bongo but with a lava lamp filter’ vibe that will be VERY familiar to anyone who’s seen a particular type of 1970s pr0nography? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! “This is described as “ a community centered on DIY audiovisual/electronic art and experimentation”, and it’s…odd, frankly, but I think some of you will find it interesting and fun and quite possibly erotic in ways that you find troubling in the extreme (I do not judge, I merely proffer).
  • A Live Map of the World’s Private Jets: Would you like a live(ish) map of thousands of private jets and where they are in the world RIGHT NOW? Excellent! While this doesn’t, sadly, offer any information as to who is on the plane right now (or any identifying info like serial numbers) which makes it largely-useless for specifically-targeted acts of antiplute terrorism (which, to be clear, Web Curios IN NO WAY endorses), I like to think that there is at least one of you out there who can think of a Creative and Socially Useful way of using this information (beautifully, this link was sent to me by a PR for a company which I think hires out private jets – er, not sure you quite thought this one through, lads, but happy to feature you! God, you could lose HOURS to this – there’s someone taking off from London right now who landed last night from Dulles in DC and I am SO CURIOUS as to who’s doing overnights from Washington…NO MATT, KEEP TYPING, DO NOT GET DISTRACTED FFS!
  • The Visual Experiment Archive: Ooh, this is very cool; Its creator, Kagan, writes: “I recently put together an interactive archive of over 160 javascript visual experiments, exploring sound, motion, particles, generative patterns, and all sorts of strange visual behaviors. These aren’t pre-rendered videos or static showcases. every experiment runs directly in the browser, and i’ve open-sourced the entire collection under the MIT license so anyone can explore, take things apart, remix them, or build something completely different.” Basically just click the link and enjoy all the different examples of soundviz and waveforms and the like, beautifully and minimally presented – if you’re in any way design-minded then this will tickle you, I think.
  • The Eurobird Portal: ALL OF THE BIRDS IN EUROPE ON ONE WEBSITE! Ok, fine, *possibly* hyperbolic, but at the very least it’s a LOT of the fcukers: “There are more than 20 online platforms collecting bird observations in Europe. Some cover a limited geographical area (e.g. a region or country) while others function across several countries. All these portals, unlike more traditional monitoring initiatives, which focus on structured data collection, aim mainly to obtain year-round data from the relatively unstructured but intensive and widespread activities of birdwatchers…The EBP was established to unlock all this potential at the European scale by combining the data gathered by all the online portals operating across the continent.” Basically (very basically, fine, but I’m not a fcuking ornithologist) this offers an overview of migratory patterns and avian volumes across Europe RIGHT NOW (ish), so you can see where exactly all the Eckert’s Spurfowl (no, me neither) are hiding these days.
  • The Chicken Feet Restaurant: OH MY GOD I LOVE THIS. Its creator, Kang Jihoon, emailed me about it the other day; in their words, “I ran a chicken-feet restaurant in Seongnam, Korea, for 1,330 days and closed it last week. Instead of a goodbye post I built its archive: every customer review typeset like a Bible (years are books, the owner’s replies are in red), a guest book that carries on after the last verse, a split-flap clock, a timeline of 206 photos you can roll through, and a little runner game where you play a chicken foot.”  Honestly, this is *such* a gorgeous project, both the execution (which is a really nice bit of webdesign) and the content; the guestbook entries in particular (all in Korean, but Google can fix that) are SO heartwarming and there’s something wonderful about seeing the establishment’s history over the years memorialised in the interactions between guests and the establishment, photos of the food…I spent a good 15 minutes exploring this, and, while I generally hate the word, it is ‘cosy’ in the best way. THANKYOU KANG JIHOON!
  • The Photo: This is a nice project – again, sent to me by its creator, Frederic Eltschinger – where anyone can send in a photo for consideration; Frederic chooses which ones he likes and puts them on the homepage as they come in, a personally-curated, single-shot photographic showcase for photographers around the world. Simple, but I enjoy the fact that it’s dictatorial; what Frederic says goes, and, well, MORE POWER TO YOU, FCUK DEMOCRACY LOOK WHERE IT HAS GOTTEN US (ahem this is obviously a joke, for the avoidance of doubt). Submit your pics, go on.
  • Stillwet Art: A website which presents artworks being ‘drawn’ by Claude, brushstroke by brushstroke, and which shows the ‘thinking’ being done by the model as it works. This is REALLY interesting, conceptually and in terms of outputs: “You’re watching an AI model paint. It writes every brushstroke as code, and a simulation of bristles, wet paint and linen carries it out. The big picture is the painting as it last saw it whole; when it studies a detail up close, squints or checks the picture in grays, that view shows below it. Its thinking runs beside the picture. LIVE means it’s working right now. Press ▶ Replay to watch the painting grow, or tap the painter’s name at the top to choose another.” Smart, and worth spending some time with if you want to get a feel for how frontier models work (in a certain narrow sense) right now.

By Bernadette Timko

JOURNEY INTO AUTUMN NOW WITH THE LATEST MIX FROM THE RECORD COLLECTION OF TOM ‘DAPWEARER’ SPOONER! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS WILLING TO BET THAT A SIGNIFICANT PROPORTION OF THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SPENT FORMATIVE AMOUNTS OF TIME ON ROTTEN DOT COM AND OGRISH AS ADOLESCENTS, PT.2: 

  • The Chopin Planet: Sonification savant (that’s not going to catch on, is it?) Joshua Wolk, he who made Train Jazz from earlier this year, has created another gorgeous little toy using data to make BEAUTIFUL SOUNDS. Using the orbit of a minor planet and the orbit of Neptune (look, it makes sense, I promise), Wolk effectively gets the celestial bodies to play Chopin. GOD THIS IS SO PERFECTLY SATISFYING, honestly.
  • Musical Journey: In 2012 (and trust me, the fact I can remember this with this degree of accuracy is…upsetting to me), I featured a fun webtoy in a very early edition of Curios called ‘Boil The Frog’, which, if you inputted two songs, would chart a musically-coherent course from song A to song B and let you export it as a playlist; now, 14 long years hence, someone has done exactly the same thing, proving that some ideas are too good to die. This is objectively ACE, and there’s something really fun about getting the software to attempt to take you seamlessly from, say, ‘Suzanne’ by Leonard Cohen to something by Extreme Noise Terror.
  • Life After Death: Indefatigable purveyors of superb dataviz The Pudding return, this time with a really smart and genuinely novel means of exploring survey data around people’s beliefs about the afterlife; you interact with the data by moving through a virtual crowd of people, each figure representing a different surveyed individuals opinions…as you go, you realise that there is clustering at play and you are moving through age cohorts, and the whole site tells you a fascinating story about the ways in which our feelings about the possibility of life after death tend to change as we get close to the terminal exit (whodathunkit?!). This is a really clever way of dramatising data imho, worth exploring and thinking about.
  • The Peel Sessions: Not the first site seeking to make the John Peel Archive of live performances (apologies – for the non-Anglos or the young, John Peel was a BBC Radio DJ who championed new, obscure music (occasionally new, obscure, utterly-unlistenable music) on his show and who hosted HUNDREDS of groundbreaking artists doing live sessions) searchable, but this is a simple frontend with some pretty useful search features; sort by artist, range of years, genre, where the band or artist was from…all the sessions are YouTube links as far as I can tell, meaning you can create your own playlists from the best stuff you find which might be fun for some of you (or it might not; honestly, at this stage I don’t care).
  • Craig Mod’s Walks: Ok, this feels like a nice use of AI – Curios favourite Craig Mod, he of the walks around Japan and elsewhere, has for years been documenting his travels on his website; he’s now used Claude (I think) to spin up this wrapper for all of his various strolls and their writeups, letting you see the route he took, mapped, to browse his archive in more visual, user-friendly fashion. This is a prettymuch perfect use of AI coding imho, taking something you own and making it more useful, as well as something that simply wouldn’t exist without AI. See? SOME OF IT ISN’T TERRIBLE, YOU MISERABLE REFUSENIK FUCKS.
  • Destroy Any Website: You may have seen this already – it’s done the rounds in the past week or so – but, if not, this is a riff on the now-classic ‘take any webpage and blow up its components!’ toy but with bells on; this will turn any site you feed it into a minimal platform-type environment that you can blow to smithereens with your little guntoting stickman; pick different guns! Shoot the banners! SEE WHAT ELDRITCH HORRORS LIE BEHIND THE MENUS! If nothing else, feel free to load Curios into it and take revenge on me for all the terrible words and typos and broken formatting and and and.
  • The Voynich Viewer: The Voynich Manuscript feels a bit like the White Whale for a certain corner of the web; should you desire yet another way to explore the as-yet inscrutable pages and to wrestle with THE MEANING OF IT ALL, perhaps you will appreciate this rather-whizzy 3d viewer which offers a potentially-useful additional way of interrogating the manuscript for scholars and obsessives alike: “The Voynich Manuscript is a hand-written book from the early 1400s, full of drawings of plants, stars and women bathing in pools. It is kept at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, where its shelf mark is MS 408. Nobody has been able to read its writing. Yale has photographed every page. This viewer cuts those photographs up so that each piece of parchment becomes a sheet you can hold: you can turn pages, unfold the fold-out pages, and see the whole book in 3D. You can also put the sheets in the order Lisa Fagin Davis thinks they were in before the book was rebound, or in any order you like.”
  • Every Single PS1 Game Model Ever: Ok, fine, maybe not ALL of them, but it’s certainly a metric fucktonne – god knows who it is who’s taken the time to extract all of these, but should you have ever desired the ability to download the original 3d models for Cloud Strife, Sephiroth and Lara Croft with which to enact some hideously-pixellated erotic fantasy of your own devising (I AM NOT JUDGING) then you will be very, very happy with this (but please, do not share your creations, I do not need or want to know).
  • Leave A Song: I think this is a rather beautiful idea; a webpage where you’re invited to leave a song for someone else, just a title, artist and link. Anyone visiting can leave a song and click the button to get a song left by someone else – that’s it, just a 1:1 musical exchange, and there’s something hugely-pleasing about both the small scale of it and the random, grab-bag nature of what you might find (I got this just now fwiw).
  • Don’t Cook That: A collection of terrible, inedible recipes from old cookbooks, which would be SO much nicer if it wasn’t such horrible ClaudeSlop in terms of look and feel. Good content let down by a miserable lack of care and attention to the design.
  • Kinoria: THIS. THIS IS WHAT I MEAN WHEN I COMPLAIN ABOUT AI DESIGN. So this is the website for…I think it’s a camera, of some sort, with a gimmick, but it is impossible to tell because ALL of the prose is AI garbage and NONE of it means anything. Like, the site itself is reasonably-shiny, but WHAT IN THE NAME OF FCUK does this mean? “What you decide, the frame keeps.” WHAT WHAT WHAT THE FCUK??? “The camera turns to what the round finder leaves out, and stays there.” THIS IS NONSENSICAL, NONE OF THESE SENTENCES ARE SAYING ANYTHING. It is ALL like this, seriously; how exactly it is possible to make a very visual site about a camera entirely baffling to the reader is slightly beyond me, but, well, the people behind this have managed it! Look, please, ANY of you reading this, DO NOT LET THE MACHINE WRITE YOUR COPY FOR YOU IT IS STILL REALLY BAD AT IT. BONUS ANNOYING CLAUDE-Y INTERFACE! This is a theoretically-interesting music gen synth toy plus AI, which effectively lets you co-compose with The Machine, which will make up lyrics, etc, to the musical beds you put down. Or at least I *think* that is what it is, because fcuk me is the interface and the UX an unintelligible clusterfcuk – THIS IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO MAKE SENSE OF YOU FCUKING D!CKS, HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE THIS?!?!
  • Bastardica: Ooh, this is fun – make horrible, mixed-up fonts by creating (eg) a version of Times New Roman where every ninth character is rendered in Comic Sans instead, say, or one in which every other letter is stretched to the point of illegibility. A fun toy to create (admittedly largely-upsetting) new custom fonts should you desire such things.
  • Control Panel for YouTube: Ooh, this could be worth installing – this is a Chrome extension which lets you tweak YouTube in all sorts of potentially useful ways, allowing you to not only block ads but also to create a customised viewing experience based on your preferences. Remove Autoplay, hide Shorts from the experience, always play in ‘Theatre’ mode…there’s all sorts you can do with this should you be a particularly-exacting consumer of online video.
  • Blind Spot: TikTok continues to be an interesting place to explore new TV formats – after ‘Through the Queerhole’ (sorry! sorry!) the other week, now here comes this one in which the presenters talk about the experience of being visually impaired (or otherwise disabled) and living in New York City; worth a look, if only to see how people are approaching the medium creatively in terms of content types (sorry).
  • Magpie: Oh this is *such* a good idea; an app (iOS only) which effectively acts as a screenreader for articles, etc, on your mobile: “Magpie is a podcast and article player that can be controlled by voice. Podcasts, blogs, and newsletters are organised in a single library. Podcast episodes play as standard audio. Written articles are read aloud using the Apple system voice you choose, with standard playback controls including lock-screen and headphone support, adjustable speed, a sleep timer, and saved listening positions. You do not need screen-reader gestures or a separate reading mode to listen to an article. You can make requests by tapping the microphone or through Siri, such as: “play the latest In Our Time”, “subscribe to Astral Codex Ten”, or “play the one about Agincourt”. An AI model interprets your request so you can search by topic, title, show, guest, or position instead of remembering exact names.” Potentially a godsend for anyone with a visual impairment and very much worth checking out.
  • Minecraft Roulette: YouTube players which pull videos with 0 views are not a new thing – this one, though, restricts itself to videos featuring Minecraft, of which there are A LOT. If you can get past the fact that 99% of the vids here will have been uploaded by literal, actual children and that therefore a not-insignificant number will feature the incredibly-annoying voices of the same children yapping nonsensically about creepers or whatever (and the fact that, well, it’s Minecraft), this is quite an interesting snapshot rabbithole of A Time And Place In Global Youth Culture.
  • Line: A little webtoy that lets you gently simulate the craft of pottery, except without any of that messy, slightly-disgusting mess known as ‘slip’ (and entirely in two dimensions. Basically you can change the angles and curves on the sides of the pot and then see how that would render across a variety of different base designs (bowl, mug, vase, glass, etc) so you can see how a set might look given the same proportions. Does, er, does that make any sense? Fcuk, it doesn’t, does it? Christ. ONWARDS!
  • Clair De Lune: A truly BEAUTIFUL and hypnotic little Rube Goldberg animation which I really could stare at in wonder for its entire runtime (several minutes) but which I am tearing myself away from because I LOVE YOU AND I WANT YOU TO HAVE MY LINKS. See how kind I am? Honestly, though, on some level this is basically therapy (thanks to Lynn for the link).
  • Global Terror: Another one to file under ‘not quite sure what is happening here and not sure I like it’, this is an…upsettingly-designed webpage where every single element seems to be shouting at you (and it’s not shouting nice things), and which is basically, as far as I can tell, the wrapper for a YouTube channel and Patreon belonging to a strange man who makes videos about (eg) seeing exactly what it feels like to get so fcuked up on drugs that all your bones seem to basically disappear. Please note that I am including not because I think this is ‘good’ – I do not, it is miserable edgelord sh1t – but because, however bad and upsetting the design and aesthetic here is, it is STILL so much nicer and more interesting than a site styled by Claude. LEARN, YOU FCUKS.
  • Where (Roughly) Is?: Can YOU pinpoint where the blue whales hang out on a map of the world? What about the buzzards? PROVE IT! This is…surprisingly compelling, honestly.
  • Size It Up: This game presents you with two objects – your task is to resize one or the other until their relative sizes are real-world accurate. HOW MUCH BIGGER IS A RHINO THAN AN AK47? Again, weirdly compelling to an unexpected degree.
  • Browser Boxing: This was sent in to me by its creator, Garrett, who describes himself as a long-time web developer and who has made this rather fun (and charmingly slightly-janky) in-browser boxing game. Play against friends or the computer and, if you are anything like me, get your ar$e handed to you repeatedly.
  • Wordsquash: “What if Wordle but actually quite unpleasantly stressful?’, is a question noone has ever asked and yet HERE is the answer courtesy of David Nicholls, who sent it to me saying “it’s essentially my attempt to make the opposite of a soothing daily word game. You have to recognise familiar phrases and arrange their words on a 3×3 grid while an increasingly impatient squasher descends towards them.” This is SO ANNOYING, but in a really good way.
  • Sound of Sliver: How quickly can you guess the song from the (insanely short) clips you’re given as clues? Faster than me, no question, I am fcuking TERRIBLE at this.
  • AAA Minesweeper: Minesweeper – the one you know and love! – but presented with the narrative trappings of a AAA game; this riffs off the viral ‘what if Mario, but AAA?’ meme from earlier this year, but is nonetheless very funny indeed; the voice over really does skewer the genre, although it’s also true that the presentation does make the whole thing…a bit more exciting, so it turns out that all those AAA cliches do actually work after all.
  • Identifive: Ooh, this is a neat idea – guess three words each day, each one letter longer than the other, based on the combinations available to you on the Word Wheels – I KNOW, I KNOW, JUST CLICK THE LINK IT WILL MAKE SENSE FFS.
  • Melty: I am not quite sure what has happened in the past fortnight to cause the insane explosion in rips of quite chunky games, but FCUK ME has there been a step-change in the amount of ‘X, in the browser’ ports I have seen floating around, along with a frankly dizzying range of X game mashed with Y game and made playable’ – apparently you can make you very own ‘Call of Duty X Mario64’ (for example) using Melty, which, if you have the roms for the titles in question, will do the heavy lifting of putting the game models of one title into the engine of the other. Honestly, I have NO CLUE if this works or how it works or whether it will infect your computer with the digital clap, so VERY much Caveat Emptor with this one.
  • Explore a Beautiful-But-Sort-of-Soulless 3d World: The problem with vibecoded stuff, part x of y – this is, honestly, SO pretty and the fact that it was spun up by AI is genuinely amazing, but…ach, it’s EMPTY and it’s lifeless and there’s no soul to it, and you really can tell. The link takes you to a sort of massive 3d fantasy landscape that you can fly around; there are various landmarks to ‘find’ and explore, each coming with some flavour text, but it’s all just…generic-feeling and a bit bleached-out, and there’s no joy in the wandering once you’ve gotten over the initial tech vertigo. BUT, that said, I *could* imagine an actual team of designers being able to take this and breathe life into it with storytelling and craft, so maybe the short-term future for this stuff is seeds built by the machine and then tended by actual human creatives. Maybe.
  • No Name Soccer: Quick, simple in-browser football game, with no named teams and no stats and no tactics – JUST KICK THE FCUKER INTO THE NET. Quite fun for a five minute kickabout.
  • Parking Simulator: YOu might not think a top-down game in which you’re tasked to park a car and the trailer its attached to into a series of increasingly-tight spots would be fun, but DEAR CHRIST did this suck me in (and I can’t even drive ffs).
  • Tetris, But Four Ways: Honestly, this starts simple but after approximately three minutes my brain was leaking out through my ears and I was crying blood.
  • COD Zombies: Want to play COD Zombies (I think it’s the COD4 version) in your browser? OH OK HERE YOU GO. This is fcuking AMAZING (also, the only reason I am not linking to the in-browser GTAV is that all the working versions appear to have been killed, but if you know of one then, well, please).
  • Skate 3: Want to play Skate 3 in your browser? OH OK HERE YOU GO! HOW ARE THEY DOING THIS THIS IS WITCHCRAFT.
  • PES6: YES THIS IS IT THIS IS PERHAPS THE PINNACLE GET OUT YOUR GAMEPAD AND CLEAR YOUR DIARY YOU MAY BE LOST FOREVER! Relive the immortal joy of scoring 40 yard bangers with Adriano with this insane port of (possibly) the best football game ever made, playable RIGHT NOW. While you’re meant to be working. I KNOW!!!

By Bill Brown

OUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS SOME OLDSCHOOL HOUSE AND ACID AND FUNK AND STUFF SELECTED BY STATUES! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Orca Grotto: NOT IN FACT A TUMBLR! But it *is* a place where one person expresses their deep, abiding love for orcas (no, not like that!) and who doesn’t want to see that? NO FCUKER, etc!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  •  Infinite Ice Creams: These are not, in fact, ice creams, and you would be VERY UPSET were you to mistake one as such. Instead, they are rocks. Look, trust me, it will make (some sort of weird) sense as soon as you click, and you will agree with me that this is a VERY PLEASING project (no idea why, though).
  • DarqDagr: Don’t look at me like that, he’s the one spelling it this way. Have you ever wondered ‘what would it sound like if someone did that sort of death metal growl vocal over really mediocre dubstep drops, and what if the growl was saying really vanilla BDSM-adjacent phrases like ‘Run, little mouse’, straight out of the romantasy/werewolf bongo canon?’ You HAVE? You…you fcuking weirdo, honestly. Still, that is what’s happening here – it’s called ‘smutstep’, apparently – and judging by the comments on these vids there is a small-but-dedicated audience of women and gays who really want to be called a ‘naughty little girl’ by Grindcore Skrillex.
  • Long Lost Personals: Newspaper personal ads from The Past, when it was apparently entirely ok to put an ad in the paper saying “send nude photo please” alongside AN ACTUAL PHOTO OF YOUR OWN FACE. The past, truly a different country (and yet in some crucial respects, not anywhere near different enough).
  • Bitchfork: A new female-focused music magazine which I know nothing about other than its name really made me laugh because, it turns out, I am a tiresome, tryhard teenager at heart.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • The New UN Climate Report: Another good piece of analysis looking at the latest UN report into how we’re fcuking everything up, climate-wise, by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, who has taken the time to actually read the document and presents a selection of Things We Should Be Aware of which come from it. Look, it’s not…it’s not cheering news, fine, but she DOES sound a small note of relative optimism at the end: “It remains as true as ever that we have solutions. So many solutions! The UN is very clear in this report about what a trajectory to a safer, cooler world looks like. And no one better elucidates the 100s of solutions at our fingertips than Project Drawdown. While I’m fully on board with the UNEP in calling for transformation, I also know that with a crisis this all-encompassing, the increments do really matter. The difference between getting this 40% right and 80% right is hundreds of millions of lives. Food security (crop failures, fisheries collapses) and safety (storms, floods) for billions of people, for all of us, hang in the balance.” FWIW, I remain 100% convinced that the big elephant in the room that noone is talking about, and the reason why every single G7 government has such a hard-on for AI as a technology, is because THEY ALL KNOW WE HAVE FCUKED IT, and they all think that AI IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE SOLUTION LEFT TO US THAT MIGHT WORK, and that they are punting everything on The Machine because it’s literally a Hail Mary at 3rd and 10 with 15s left in the 4th Quarter (see? I CAN DO SPORTS ANALOGIES TOO), but noone wants to say this out loud because, well, it’s a bit too much like staring at the sun.
  • Brazil: The first round of the Brazilian Presidential elections earlier this week provided yet another neat proofpoint demonstrating that, collectively and taken at a Big Picture level, we really are fcuking morons who will consistently choose to act in ways that will fcuk us up. How else to explain the Brazilian electorate’s seeming willingness to elect Bolsonaro’s Failson? Actually there are a few reasons that explain the (seemingly) inexplicable, as this interesting article (an interview with political philosopher Rodrigo Nunes) makes clear – this is worth reading in full, not least because of the perspective it gives on geopolitics through a Brazilian lens. Aside from anything else, this is an excellent and pithy articulation of something that has been true for a while now but which is rarely laid out so cogently: “The appeal of the contemporary far right changes depending on where you stand. The ruling class sees it as offering the most predatory form of capitalism and neutralising all challenges from below. The popular base is drawn to the discourse of law and order and the prospect of a more deregulated economy that will ‘get the state off their backs’, allowing them to compete more efficiently in the market. For an irregular cohort drawn from both camps, it’s also a career opportunity: you can now make good money as a far-right agitator.”
  • Poisonous Fruit: The ‘Cornell 7’ story coming out of the US in the past couple of weeks is another miserable datapoint in the general ‘wow we really haven’t come anywhere near as far as we have enjoyed telling ourselves when it comes to attitudes towards sexual assault’ discourse; this piece isn’t specifically about the Cornell story so much as it is about the fact that we continue to allow men to behave like this with relative impunity, about the fraternity system in the US and how much of it seems designed to facilitate events and male behaviour such as this, about the way in which society continues to be weirdly weighted towards not wanting to ruin the lives of promising young men who have ‘just made a mistake’… This is very good, and very angry: “Men are not going to upend the system that serves them. I am sad about it, too, but I have been waiting my whole life and it’s not happening. I saw a woman talking about how moms need to talk to their sons right now and a bunch of women in the comments freaked out and said DON’T BLAME MOMS AGAIN and DON’T GIVE WOMEN MORE WORK TO DO and one woman said DADS NEED TO ENTER THE CHAT, BOYS ADORE THEIR FATHERS! And you know what? Fuck that. Fuck it. What are they waiting for? The dads that were going to “enter the chat” already did. If they haven’t by now, they aren’t going to and they never were. We had Gisèle Pelicot. We had the Motherless website. Do these dads need a written invite to the horrors? We have asked, we have pointed to it, we have begged, we have gone numb, we have gone crazy. I raised a kid who feels sick to his stomach thinking about what happened to Jane Doe, and I didn’t wait for a man to enter the chat after a man left the chat. The chat goes on and it waits for no man. There are good men and they are already in the conversation and I have even seen some outrage and I hope I see more, but men are not going to uproot the tree, friends. The tree is affording them shade and ease.”
  • My AI Agent is Making Me Lamer: As the agentic AI era kicks into gear – in the US, at least; thank GOD for Eurolegislation shielding us, for the moment, from the tentacles of its next evolution – so we’re going to start seeing the Weird Social Wrinkles emerge as people start to outsource significant aspects of their lives to digital assistants whose behaviour (let’s keep on saying this, it feels important to reiterate) NOONE REALLY UNDERSTANDS FULLY. One such wrinkle is going to be the flattening of everything towards the ‘optimal’ mean – after all, if everyone’s letting The Machine make their decisions for them and everyone’s version of The Machine (while obviously tweaked for personal preference) is running off the same architecture and the same training set, so will we tend to see similar suggestions and actions and outcomes begin to emerge, clustering behaviour in as-yet-unknowable ways) – and, as such, the removal of the wrinkles and frictions and human habits where the interesting can often lurk. Basically I read the following and immediately convinced myself that THIS was going to be what transforms Web Curios into the media juggernaut I have always known it should be – any Big Media Owners want to swoop in any pay me £50k a year for this OH SO VALUABLE bit of modern media, just shout! “I miss the serendipity of online rabbit holes. This is coming from someone who has been perennially online a lot of my life. I’m now asking myself: am I getting older or is AI technology making me lamer? Much of the trendspotting and things I learn are from my rabbit holes, Substack and lurking down some Twitter hole. The discovery piece, while I still do (though it feels like less), is taken up by stupid shit I should optimize. I kind of miss being on Twitter and like digging around and finding niche, interesting things. My Internet Explorer StumbleUpon vibe has shifted completely and it’s super depressing. Some of this isn’t the AI. My calendar is just fuller, so less time in Discords and the platforms were already getting worse. The X algorithm doesn’t push you to the edge, it pushes us to a common context and often that context is just a shared negative space. But the rabbit holes are kind of where I figure out what I like, and the agent skips that part.” BONUS AGENTIC BELLCURVE HORROR! This piece, in Noema, about how we’re going to see more and more ‘just good enough, ish’ mediocrity in the world as the agents work alone and unbidden. GREAT!
  • The UK and AI Safety: You may not THINK you care, but it’s worth reading this decent and comprehensive explainer on the UK’s current position when it comes to AI safety and the tech’s regulation, because it lays out quite neatly what a clusterfcuk it is; which, given the amount of fcuking time the Government has devoted to wanging on about the tech over the past two years, is somewhat surprising. Will we get primary legislation? Will the promised ‘AI Bill’ ever happen? Does anyone know what ‘sovereignty’ actually means? The answers, should you be curious, are “probably not”, “probably not”, and “LOL YOU ARE JOKING AREN’T YOU?”.
  • What Will Happen To Indian IT?: Another in my semi-regular attempts to remind myself that ‘the impact of AI’ is a conversation happening EVERYWHERE, not just in the West, and that the reality is necessarily different in different places (yes, I know, obvious but still). This is a really good piece of writing in Asterisk Magazine which looks at both the history of IT outsourcing to India – how did the boom happen and when and why? I had no idea that the Millennium Bug was such a driver of the industry, for example – and the actual and coming impact of AI technology on the sector. I did find it darkly amusing that the article talks blithely about the fact that the sector will probably do ok while…slightly glossing over the human impact of the near-inevitable headcount reductions, but, well, WELCOME TO THE FUTURE OF WORK, EVERYONE! Can I take a moment to say, once again, that as we approach the four year anniversary of ChatGPT’s first emergence that it fcuking STAGGERS me that we still don’t have anything resembling a coherent view of how we want to manage its impact on the labour market. LADS THIS ONCOMING TRAIN HAS BEEN VISIBLE FOR A WHILE NOW, MAYBE WE COULD THINK ABOUT GETTING OUT OF THE WAY BEFORE IT TURNS US INTO METAPHORICAL JAM?
  • GPT Travel Planning In China: Another of Geoffrey Ding’s fascinating in-translation articles from China, this time looking at the experiences of various Chinese citizens traveling on a national holiday and using AI to plan their trips; this is interesting not because the tech works or doesn’t work (it…sort-of works), but because (per the agents piece above) the wrinkles it reveals in how this stuff is going to impact the real world. I particularly enjoyed the detail that agents all glommed onto the fact that some attractions were less busy at certain times, told people to visit at said times…thereby causing new congestion and bottlenecks. MAKES YOU THINK, EH???
  • The People Holding Up The Internet: You are all, I am reasonably willing to bet, the sorts of people who are familiar with that XKCD cartoon about how the whole internet is basically dependent on a single github repo maintained by a guy called Dylan who lives in Nebraska, alone, and is now in his late-60s; this is an essay/explainer (scrollytellingish, if you will forgive me the now hopelessly-outdated term) which shines a light on who some of these people are, and what exactly would fcuk up if they were to drop dead tomorrow. There’s a really interesting detail in here about the value people ascribe – or, more accurately, don’t – to these things; the person behind core-js says he managed to raise the princely sum of $57 from crowdfunding when he asked for donations to help keep the project going, which is…god, everything is going to break SO BADLY in a few years time, won’t that be fun!
  • Inside The Russian Recruiting Machine: The Russian war machine continues to require meat for the frontline grinder, and, it turns out, that meat is being sourced by recruitment agencies being paid by the state to tempt young people (and, frankly, anyone else they can get) into being target practice for enterprising Ukrainian drone operators. This is SUCH an interesting look at how the recruitment pipeline works, written by someone who managed to get into the recruiters and see how the system worked first hand; “the head of AKS sent a Google Drive folder: training materials for aspiring recruiters. One sheet lists the regions through which a man can sign, and the region decides almost everything. Sign in wealthy St Petersburg and you get 4.5 million rubles at once, about €47,000. The fitness examination is strict, and nobody over 55 is taken. Sign in Voronezh, 500 kilometres south of Moscow, and you get half. There, the sheet says, the medical check is “very loyal”. It means lenient. Hepatitis and HIV are no obstacle. The rule holds down the list: the less a region pays, the less it asks. Some accept, by arrangement, men with diabetes, a slipped disc, blindness in one eye or a mild intellectual disability. In Bashkortostan, Vadim’s home region, a man can still sign at 64. A subfolder is called «Креативы с девушками», “Creatives with girls”. It holds ready-made ads: AI-generated young women in uniform next to the offer. “5,620,000 rubles for a year of service”, about €56,000. A one-time payment of up to 3.1 million. Salary from 210,000. Debts written off up to 10 million. “Ticket, accommodation and food at our expense.” “Any university in the country, no waiting list.”” MORE RUSSIA: this is an interesting piece about the Russian propagandist use of AI-generated songs as a morale-boosting exercise; slopaganda is real, etc etc.
  • Who Gets To Speak for Eritrea?: I’ve spent the past year or so doing a bit of volunteering work with refugees from Eritrea and Ethiopia and so I found this piece particularly interesting and poignant; if you’re not familiar with the current state of play in either country it’s worth reading this piece, not because either is (sadly) unique, but because there are many, many situations all over the world that are a bit like this, where many of the people seeking asylum in Europe come from, where people’s lives are being fcuked in half through no fault of their own, and where no sane person with the wherewithal to leave would choose to stay.
  • Squat Photography: This is from August so apologies for my tardiness; in my defence, though, I don’t tend to see that many links from World of Interiors. Anyway, this is a BRILLIANT photo-led essay about the squat scene in London in the 1990s, from free parties with Spiral Tribe to Hackney before it got hipster, and it feels a lot longer ago than just three decades in many respects: “What I realised is that neither he, nor the house, nor the photo is trying to signal anything at all. That’s precisely what draws me to Hunter’s work: the subjects are not thinking about how they will be perceived by others. No audience exists in their minds. How rare is it now to gaze at an image in which both the subject and their surroundings are completely unconcerned about how they might be perceived? What does it mean to live without those reflexes? How might we decorate our homes if we thought that no-one beyond our immediate friends and family might see it? If there wasn’t a financial or social imperative to impress the right people or project a certain image? If we weren’t always worried about the landlord in our heads?”
  • Black Bag: I haven’t read all of the Booker nominees this year – look, I’ve been busy, leave me alone – but, of the ones I *have* read, Black Bag by Luke Kennard was the one I enjoyed most; this is a good piece in the LRB presenting the book and telling you what it’s sort-of about without telling you exactly (if that makes sense). Give it a go: “Black Bag spans several genres while not belonging to any of them. It’s not quite a campus novel but has things to say about what it’s like to teach at a university (‘We’re supposedly the finest minds in our respective disciplines but we’re required to spend most of our time boring hungover teenagers to sleep’). It’s not quite a satire on the theatre world but says more about acting than Rachel Cusk does in her latest novel, Life of M. It’s not a surreal parable but the central bag image is as haunting as Kafka’s Metamorphosis. It’s not a state-of-the-nation novel either, but it wittily documents the paraphernalia of our times: chiller cabinets, EVs, VR goggles, datasets, iced coffee cans, bars of soap that look as if they have been ‘carved raw from the side of a cliff’, negronis ‘the colour of healing potions in a video game’, the disadvantages of living in a ground-floor flat, the ‘laryngopharyngeal noises’ of an espresso machine.”
  • The Failure of the Pandemic Novel: Martin Dolan writes in the Metropolitan Review about how the novels that came out in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic feel…odd, now, and somehow inauthentic, performing reaction rather than embodying it, which, on balance, I think is perhaps fair (although I might argue that that’s a necessary factor of good literature requiring time and distance from its subject). This covers authors from Shteyngart to Lockwood and will be more enjoyable the more of them you’ve read, but in general it’s an interesting essay about how we write about Big Crises and how we reflect and react, and how that changes with the passage of time (and why, perhaps, it simply wasn’t possible to Make Good Work In Covid).
  • Bitcoin FC: A fun piece in Dispatch Magazine profiling Bitcoin FC, a team in England’s lower leagues which is being bankrolled to (current, relative) success by its libertarian Bitcoin enthusiast owner, much to the seeming bemusement of most of the Bedford residents who turn out every week to see the team play. Why are ALL Bitcoin people so fundamentally ridiculous? This is a semi-sincere question, honestly – anyone? “It’s a couple of hours before kick-off, and around 20 people are sitting in the clubhouse for the latest Bitcoin meet-up. They are almost all middle-aged men. An American dressed in orange films himself talking about Bitcoin culture. A teacher who’s travelled from Norfolk listens politely. A man with plugs in his earlobes describes a Bitcoin-mining simulator he has designed, to mild interest. That’s Mark, by the way. Around us, footballers wander through on their way to get ready for the match, paying little attention to the gathering. At one point, the only woman in the room asks what could be done to persuade more women to come along. Peter McCormack, Real Bedford’s chairman, wonders aloud whether men simply think about money more than women.”
  • I Ate Nothing But Nutella For A Week: 11 years ago a young Australian aspirant journalist working for VICE pitched a piece to his editors about only eating Nutella for a whole week and writing it up in the house style; the editor said yes, the piece was written and it changed David Allegretti’s life forever (or at least for a good 6-8 year period). This is a really fun look back at his experience – the article, the Nutella, but also the particular world that he inhabited, the last hurrah of the clickbait empires before the algofeed fcuked them into oblivion, and the last generation for which ‘a career writing pieces about pop culture and self-destruction’ was a genuine possibility rather than a cruel joke.
  • Making Microdramas: I cannot stress enough what a brilliant, funny, mesmerisingly-odd piece this is, all about the very serious business of making the vertical-first microdramas that are currently the only game in town as far as Hollywood is concerned. Every part of this is hilarious, apart from all the bits where the author soberly considers whether this is all that people want now, and, if so, what that means (the section on ‘people on their phones want to watch phone stuff’ is, honestly, so smart and so neatly-articulated and I think every single person working in ‘content’ should a) feel ashamed; and b) internalise that IMMEDIATELY).
  • I Lost Myself When I Lost Hong Kong: Our final longread this week is a beautiful essay by Tiffany Huang, about leaving home and lost love; I enjoyed it so much that I was able to ignore the really horrible page layout on Electric Literature, and I can think of no higher praise, honestly.

By Carlijn Jacobs

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

 

Webcurios 25/09/26

Uncategorized No Comments
Reading Time: 34 minutes

 

While I imagine that most of you delete this email unthinkingly every time it crops up in your inbox – no, really, I don’t mind, I know you’re busy and this is only the textual expression of my very soul you’re ignoring, don’t worry about it! – I like to imagine that there are at least one or two sickos who spend Fridays sweating anticipatorily as they eagerly await a freshly-culled selection of links to land in their laps. And so it is for them and them alone that I apologise for this atypical delivery time – I AM SORRY FOR FCUKING WITH YOUR ROUTINE, SICKOS!

Thing is, some very good friends of mine are getting hitched today and I need to leave the house in *checks* oh Jesus, an hour, fcuk, and as such I did the unthinkable and wrote the below on Thursday afternoon rather than getting up at 6am on Friday morning as is good and proper and traditional. If you note any difference in the general vibe, well, I am sorry – I did *try* and channel ‘hungover and reluctant’ to make it feel authentic, but I am uncertain as to whether it worked.

Anyway, I need to iron a shirt. Enjoy the links and see you in a couple of weeks – I am taking next week off because I have no intention of spending any time online this weekend.

Oh, and one last thing – VOTING IN THE TINY AWARDS SHUTS LATER TODAY (FRIDAY 25TH SEPTEMBER) SO IF YOU ARE YET TO JOIN THE LITERALLY THOUSANDS OF OTHERS IN CHOOSING THE BEST WEBSITE OF THE YEAR DO IT RIGHT NOW!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can join me in wishing Luke and Andrew a very happy special day.

By Igor Moritz

WE KICK OFF THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH AN ACTUAL, HONEST-TO-GOODNESS HISTORICAL ARTEFACT IN THE SHAPE OF A 3.5H HOUSE-ISH, AMBIENT-Y SET BY THE ORB AND KLF FROM ALL THE WAY BACK IN 1989! 

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD PROBABLY BE OK WITH AI KILLING US ALL IF IT MEANT IT NEVER HAD TO HEAR ANY MORE INANE, ILL-INFORMED CHAT ABOUT THE LIKELIHOOD OF AI KILLING US ALL, PT.1: 

  • Truman World: One of the more interesting variants from the recent wave of AI-generated video experiments (yes, this is an AI link, you can skip it if you want but know that I think less of you for being INCURIOUS AND DOGMATIC) is this ongoing webtvseriesparticipatorygamething (I am hoping that this catches on as a universal category designation, so do feel free to use it yourselves whenever it feels appropriate to do so) which basically asks the question ‘if you start from the premise of the film The Truman Show but you, the audience, were able to direct what happened in the programme, do you think you would be able to engineer things so that Truman realised what was going on?’ – to which the answer is, obviously, ‘of course I fcuking would’, but this AI-generated version of Truman is…resistant to the truth, or so it seems from my having spent a good 10-15 minutes watching this interactive stream, in which anyone who logs on can submit prompts to the ‘director’, dictating what happens next in the video and then seeing how Truman responds. This is effectively just ‘collaborative madlibs TV’, which isn’t hugely different from some of the other infinite AI telly toys I featured the other week, but there are some interesting wrinkles here which I think point to some fun potential ideas and usecases for this; there’s a running tracker of Truman’s ‘suspicion’ level, and a feed of his internal thought processes that you can read – ok, fine, none of this stuff *really* seems to work properly, but the central concept is quite interesting imho, the idea of being able to construct gamified realities and narratives with a central character or cast whose emotional states you can see and react to and attempt to manipulate…which, also, now that I write it down does sound nakedly psychopathic. Still, it’s quite fun to fcuk with Virtual Truman and watch an uncanny valley simulacrum of a young Jim Carrey mug helplessly to camera as, I don’t know, “Liam Neeson appears to welcome Truman to Ireland” (a real prompt from just now). This isn’t in any way ‘good’, but it is very much a Curio.
  • A Weird Little Room: Oh this is SO SO COOL. Click the link and it opens a small, pixelart room in what looks like…what, a submarine? There’s a porthole you can knock on, a record player you can play music on, some spaces for posters you can customise to select the art on the walls, a strange, scratched series of symbols on the desk in front of you which when you try and interact with them make it very clear that…someone doesn’t want you doing that AT ALL. If you pay attention you’ll notice there are arrows on either side of the screen which allow you to look around the space – do so and you will find…other things. I don’t want to explain this too much as the slow discovery is part of the fun, but if you’re one of those weirdos who has two (or, heaven forfend, MORE – what the fuck are you doing with your computers, you weirdos?) monitors then keep this open in your spare for a while, interact with it every now and again, and, well, just enjoy. This is BEAUTIFULLY done – honestly, the little fish in the aquarium is just adorable – and there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye. Spend some time with this, it’s rather beautiful I think.
  • Ceramic Beats: Yes, I know, you have seen ALL OF THE INTERNET and as such an in-browser beatmaker is not NEW or COOL or EXCITING enough for you – leaving aside the fact that you’re reading an internet newsletter about websites and that as such the word ‘cool’ should never again pass your lips (as ever, I wonder to myself why it is that I feel the need to argue with an entirely-invented reader while I write this; a more psychologically healthy man than me might bring it up in therapy, but, well, this IS my therapy) – but this one is, I promise, really fun. It takes objects from the ceramics collection of (I think) the Met in New York and lets you make beat patterns using the sounds that they would make if struck with an object – OK, fine, there’s limited detail about where the sounds come from (I am…reasonably certain that there is no sound library in existence which features the sounds of ancient pottery being dinger with a ballpeen hammer) and I don’t think it’s an ‘official’ site, but, in common with the best and most fun versions of these things, it’s actually quite difficult to create something that doesn’t sound…pretty good, and the tone of the resulting beats is pleasingly distinct from the standard ‘doof-dum-doof-doof’ (yes, that is what ‘beats’ now sound like, canonically) that you get from these drummachines. Someone make the Terracotta Mixtape using this, please.
  • Private Social Media: I have seen a few variants on this over the years, and my response has always been ‘no, noone needs this, what is it for and why?’, and while I still broadly feel like this it also feels like the general ‘no, I don’t post anything anymore because why would I, it is pointless and makes me sad’ position has grown to a point where maybe there’s now a market for something small, personalisable and Just For You And Your Mates. This platform’s called ‘A-Side’, and as far as I can tell it basically lets you spin up a small, invite-only mashup of Insta and X, letting you post photos and updates, comment and ‘like’, with a chronological feed and no ads and no algo and JUST YOUR MATES’ POSTS – which, ok, fine, you could probably do 90% of this in WhatsApp or Signal or Telegram or a Discord channel but WhatsApp is Meta, Signal and Telegram and Discord are very much ‘platforms that will make normies feel weird’ (I am assuming here that you’re all elder-millennials at least and so therefore, like me, find Discord to be too unspeakable to contemplate), and so if you want something for friends and family to bring back the Good Old Days of Social (they were never that good! You were just younger!) then this might be of interest.
  • La Revoltosa: Ordinarily I wouldn’t care to feature the website of a soft drinks manufacturer from Spain, but MY WORD is this a lovely and cheering and charming and generally just sort of happymaking piece of webwork. Seriously, click the link and scroll and try not to be charmed by all the cute little touches and flourishes – the supercool mascot lady! The completely pointless bubbles floating up the page! The really beautiful way it integrates video! The little animation where the mascot shows you her phone! – and you will FAIL because it is all just incredibly cute and beautifully put together and, generally, a lot of fun. Still have no desire to drink their carbonated sugarwater, but I concede that that is a ‘me’ thing and probably nothing to do with the efficacy of their branding.
  • Secure British Future: Over the past few years I have sort of assumed that the British tend to confine their Periods Of Massive, Hysterical Racism and Obsessional Hatred of Migrants(™) to the Summer months when the weather is high – it seems, though, that we’re now pivoting to making it an all-year-round pursuit (congratulations to the UK media, couldn’t have done it without you!). In that spirit, then, let me present to you a genuinely mad, massively racist website which is devoted to attempting to persuade white people from the UK to move to Northern Ireland to, er, preserve Britishness. There is, as anyone with even a cursory understanding of the history of Northern Ireland will grasp, Quite A Lot Going On Here, not much of it wholly coherent – but if you take a moment to read the FAQ you will quickly understand that the only real motivation behind this genuinely-fcuking-batsh1t website is MASSIVE RACISM; seriously, it literally says: “We’d far rather have English than leave space for Africans!” just in case you were in any doubt as to what sort of people they are trying to appeal to here. Beautifully, one of the questions also asks ‘will we be safe in Northern Ireland when the UK Government introduces conscription?’ and, honestly, I don’t even know where to start with that one. Honestly, I wouldn’t ordinarily bother making you aware of this sort of racist bilge, but this was sent to me by a mate who found it on the football365 discussion forums, and, well, I think it’s worth being aware of the sort of mad, hateful sh1t that is being openly discussed this days because FEELS FCUKING BAD MAN.
  • Curses and Blessings: Via the wonderful Kris, this is a lovely little site where anyone can submit a curse or a blessing they wish to bestow; visitors can see all the curses and blessings and upvote those they think most worthy of being enacted. “A spell does not rely on the infrastructures that have already failed us. A spell makes desire real, fulfills it, not through the depletion of money or gas, but through the most elemental of currencies — a gesture. The accumulation of gestures, a physical insistence, is what empowers the spell. This site is a crowdfunding platform for such repetition, and in turn, for magic. Here, you will see a range of curses and blessings, from the premodern era to present day. Sources include Greco-Roman curse tablets, Chinese spirit tablets, the Akkadian Maqlû incantation text — and potentially, you.” The blessings are cute, as you would expect, but the curses are where the real gold lives – WOW people are inventive. Some of these are beautiful, some are silly, some are…very, very pointed, and I could read them for hours. This, for example, is a powerful collection of words: “I hope you become transparent. To yourself and everyone around you. I hope you bear the consequences. I hope your neglect comes back to you two-fold. I hope your art turns to dust and that dust settles in the stagnant and narrow crevices of your life. I hope life teaches you the lessons you need to learn.”
  • All The Katamari Models: Would you like an online archive of all the 3d models from famed, beloved, “ingest everything in the world into your gigantic ball of accumulated mass”-simulator Katamari Damacy (and its sequel)? OF COURSE YOU WOULD, YOU ARE NOT MADE OF STONE! Thankfully someone’s seen fit to make such a thing accessible to everyone – and all the 3d models downloadable, so if you’ve ever had an incredible creative idea that has been stymied by your inability to access thousands of detailed 3d models of objects as diverse as christmas trees, bridges and the entire continent of North America then REJOICE FOR YOUR PAIN IS OVER.
  • Playboy’s Teenage Sex Survey: I feel it important to point out here that it would be unseemly for me, a middle-aged guy in the UK, to take a particular interest in the sexual habits of North American teenagers, and that the reason I am including this link is because I thought the presentation of the data and the design of the webpage interesting – is…is this me protesting too much? Hm. Anyway, this is a nice bit of dataviz and presentation by Playboy – I quite like the way it invites viewers to speculate as to the results for particular questions before revealing the data, for example – although some of the framing struck me as…a bit odd. Is there something noteworthy about the fact that 73% of the surveyed teens had “no anal sex, in the last three months”? Is that noticeably different from the non-GenZ-population? Anyway, if you want some sadmaking topline stats then how about “34% of young men say porn completely satisfies their sexual desire” – CHEERING, EH?
  • Jack McNamara: You may recall Jack’s name from a Curio from earlier in the year, in which he made a full VHS video (and a website to host it online) to try and secure sponsorship for the Sydney Marathon from clothing brand Pit Viper – Jack has now updated his personal portfolio website and it is charming, all 8-bit game-themed and generally a nice example of creativity that doesn’t take itself (or its subject) too seriously. It’s worth looking at the Pit Viper case study too, as the rest of the story is really quite cute.
  • What Is Jev?: This week’s BIG BUZZY HYPETRAIN in the AI world has been Jev. “What is Jev and why should I give a fcuk?”, I hear everyone with more of a life than me shout in unison. Well, per my friend Martin who is smart and a lot more technical than I am, Jev is, basically, “your standard LLM, but instead of walls of text, it generates a “decision” from a set you give it. if the set is “options a) through i)“, it will pick one and attribute the confidence in that decision, and the others it didn’t pick. if the output options are “this is the legal set of moves you can make in doom” and the input “this is the current state of doom”, it will pick the next move for doom.the main reason why folks are excited about it is: 1. it’s cheap, and 2. it’s fast.” SO THERE YOU GO! The main link here takes you to a list of resources, posts and the like that show you what the kit can do – this is interesting less from the point of view of this as a specific technology than it is as another indication of ‘ways to think about how you can use this stuff’ – Jev doesn’t let people do anything new per se, it just helped focus people’s thinking in specific directions. Anyway, this is how you get AI to manage live systems based on a set number of available actions and a variety of input datasets, should you have ever wondered how you might go about doing such a thing.
  • Straw Page: Oh this is nice – ok, fine, ‘simple, retro webpage builders’ are not a new thing and Neocities has been around for a while now, but Straw Page, sent to me by its creator Osman, is a cute variant on the theme and seems to be particularly easy to use; per his email, “It’s a site maker, fully drag and drop with no AI, and more than 2 million personal sites have been made on it. Mostly gen z. A pretty typical example: https://ahona.straw.page. The vibe is very early-internet maximalism. Diary pages, shrines for favourite artists, that kind of thing. Feels like a reaction to years of clean link-in-bio pages.” If you’re in the market for a personalised homepage and you find Neocities a bit fiddly and Squarespace a bit too sad, maybe this will suit you?
  • Metamorphosis: It’s been a long time coming, but New York richkid INTERNET ART PROJECT PRANKSTERS MSCHF (see Curios passim, ad nauseam) have finally evolved into their final form – very expensive creative agency available for hire by the world’s biggest brands! Here, they’ve been engaged by Toyota to make two custom versions of their Lexus brand cars, neither drivable, which are being displayed at a gallery in New York Friday-Saturday and which I imagine will be auctioned afterwards. I think this is probably the last time I will feature a MSCHF project in here – they will be DEVASTATED! – as they have now crossed the advermarketingpr rubicon, but it was fun while it lasted and, credit where it’s due, they really have been some of the most successful viral marketers of the past decade (if by ‘successful’ you mean ‘good at getting into the feed of appalling advermarketingpr hipsters and ‘tastemakers’ and, er, webmongs).
  • Book Corners: Would you like a website which helps you find booksharing initiatives and small public libraries around the world?  OF COURSE YOU WOULD! You can browse a world map or search by address, and having just tried the latter it threw up half a dozen within half a mile of my house and as such you can consider this Curios Endorsed.
  • Sequence: Simple, but super-easy to use, this is a little digital comics/zines maker which lets you upload a series of images, add captions to them and then publish them as a sort of minimalist panel-by-panel sequential art…thing. I think there’s something very cool about the way in which the simplicity of the interface and the resulting lofi visual style of the outputs encourages you to think hard about the images and accompanying words, and the sequence you put them in, and I think you could make something quietly rather beautiful with this were you, er, more creative and talented than I am.
  • Posty: I think this was also via Kris – THANKS KRIS! – but wherever it’s from it’s a lovely project. Upload a photo, add a caption, add a message, add an email address you want to send it to and then hit send; your message will arrive at its destination between 7-14 days hence, depending on when the server decides to send it. Utterly pointless, fine, but I think there’s something lovely about the delay inherent in the medium, and this is significantly more homebrew and lofi about this than other variants on the theme I have seen recently. I would really like to receive images like this – postcards from someone else’s past that say, simply, “I was thinking of you at this place and time” – and maybe you know people who would like that too. Worth saving on your phone imho.
  • The Skybrary: What is The Skybrary (other than a really great name)? LET ME EXPLAIN: “SKYbrary is an electronic repository of safety knowledge related to flight operations, air traffic management (ATM) and aviation safety in general. It is also a portal, a common entry point, that enables users to access the safety data made available on the websites of various aviation organisations – regulators, service providers, industry.” Absolutely perfect for anyone who has ‘planes’ as their special interest, or indeed anyone with an almost-fetishistic fascination with plane crashes and associated events (you weirdos, you PERVERTS).
  • Ptree: Have you ever thought to yourself, “you know what I want? I want an independent tree of life reference connecting scientific classifications, organism traits and ecological relationships” then click this link and bask in the knowledge that you can finally die fulfilled. Honestly, I don’t really understand what is going on here other than it seems to be some sort of taxonomy of every single species ever in the world and if you are someone who’s always wanted to explore the exciting world of ‘mollusc variants’ then it is entirely possible that you may never leave this website.
  • Street Photography Awards 2026: I have, apparently, featured these awards once before (in 2021, as you obviously ALL remember), but for some reason I had no recollection of them at all – still, there are some corking images on here and while the winners featured on the landing page are all ace I would encourage you to take the time to look at the wider ‘shortlist’ pages for each of the categories as there are some wonderful images and a really interesting series of interpretations of what ‘street’ photography can and should be.

By Ivan Lozano

 

WHY NOT ACCOMPANY THE NEXT SET OF LINKS WITH THIS EXCELLENT AND WIDE-RANGING SET SPANNING ROCK AND FUNK AND SOUL AND SOMETHING I REALLY WANT TO CALL BOSSA, ALL MIXED BY CHANCES WITH WOLVES!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD PROBABLY BE OK WITH AI KILLING US ALL IF IT MEANT IT NEVER HAD TO HEAR ANY MORE INANE, ILL-INFORMED CHAT ABOUT THE LIKELIHOOD OF AI KILLING US ALL, PT.2: 

  • Solitaire Alone Together: Longterm maker of fun, frivolous and conceptually ace multiplayer website toys Nolen Royalty (he of ‘1 Million Checkboxes’ fame, amongst other things) is BACK, with another perfectly-realised little experiment into how it feels to exist alongside other people on the web. Solitaire Alone Together is a simple premise – play a game of solitaire, in your browser. The only gimmick is that while you play you will also be able to see windows in which other, anonymous people somewhere online are playing the game alongside you RIGHT NOW, creating a shared, ephemeral moment from a traditionally, er, solitaire-y (sorry) pursuit. This is simple-but-lovely, 100% ART and, I promise, it feels…different playing Solitaire alongside others vs entirely on your own, for reasons I can’t wholly explain. I love this, put it in a gallery you cowards.
  • Three Body Orbits: Ok, so this site is a *touch* Claudeslop-y, for which apologies, but the central conceit is quite cool and some of the visualisations rather beautiful, so I will give it a pass. You will, of course, be INTIMATELY familiar with the concept of the ‘three body problem’ in physics, whether by dint of being a massive numbers nerd or a massive scifi nerd – this is a collection of visualisations of possible orbits in a three-body planetary configuration (presuming objects of identical mass, etc), which you can see as animations. “Three point masses attracting each other under Newtonian gravity have no general closed-form solution. Almost every starting arrangement ends in a chaotic dance and, eventually, an escape. Hidden in that chaos are periodic solutions: arrangements where all three bodies return, after one period, to exactly the positions and velocities they started with. This site collects the ones that have been found and published, and lets you watch each of them run.” Some of these are BEAUTIFUL, in that very specific maths-y way you get with a particularly-pleasing spirograph; were this 2021, each of these would have been available to buy as an NFT and why don’t we all breathe a collective sigh of relief that whatever else might be going on we’re not trying THAT sh1t any more.
  • Plethora: Hm, I’m not quite sure what the *point* of this is, if I’m honest; effectively, Plethora functions as a website that effectively works as a portal where people can explore/upload AI-generated works, described on the platform as ‘Bits’ – per its creator, who emailed me with the link, “The product has some insane games, art, interactive music, educational material, etc. I think you and the readers might really enjoy.” I can’t speak for you, but in theory the idea of an environment in which I can explore other people’s AI experiments is not-unappealing to me (not least as it means I can stop spending time on X where I otherwise have to trawl to find these things), but I question whether there’s enough good stuff being made to create a viable and vibrant enough ecosystem around which a community or audience can form…still, if you’re curious and want to keep an eye on what people are building with The Machine then this could be worth a look.
  • Scrolled: Does the sentence “reading reinvented for the scrolling generation” fill you with joy? No, I can’t imagine it does, but that’s where we are with Scrolled, a product which describes itself thusly: “the world’s first AI smart-scrolling platform that transforms books into scrollable, bite-sized learning feeds. We make reading feel like social media – but smarter.” AHAHAHAHAHA *cries* AHAHAHAHAHA *cries some more* dear God we are going to stupid ourselves into extinction, aren’t we? WHY ARE WE REINVENTING SOCIETY TO CATER FOR THE LAZIEST AND STUPIDEST PEOPLE ALIVE??? Look, I get the idea that democratising access to information is good, but I also fundamentally reject the idea that you can make, I don’t know, the Nichomachean Ethics easily digestible by turning it into a selection of six-second vertical videos. Does this make me a terrible snob? Gah, sorry, I don’t care. Anyway, the deal is that you can upload any text you like – PDFs, docfiles, whatever – and this will turn it into bitesize, scrollable chunks that you consume like TikToks or reels…because, famously, these are media formats that people concentrate REALLY REALLY HARD on. Sometimes I think we deserve to die.
  • Northmail:I am aware that I am in a minority in not finding email an annoying, painful, lifesucking timesink; most people, I know, hate it with a passion, hence the rise of a seemingly-infinite number of platforms and services which aim to do away with it, literally none of which have ever worked and which have only served to add additional, annoying layers to the communications millefeuille (yes, that’s right, THE COMMUNICATIONS MILLEFEUILLE!!! What of it?). If you find email RUBBISH and ANNOYING, you might be interested in this spin on it, which is basically a layer on top of Gmail which will let you effectively filter your inbound into five thematically-distinct inboxes, based around the following content ‘verticals’ – newsletters, conversations, orders, receipts and plans. Which, in theory, sounds genuinely useful, although as ever with stuff like this a cursory minute spent thinking about the practicalities of this stuff reveals a lot of fuzz and grey at the intersections between the categories; it will be how the system deals with said fuzziness that determines how useful it is, but I can see this being appealing for a Certain Type of Inbox Owner.
  • Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2026: BEAUTIFUL PHOTOS OF THINGS IN SPACE! My pick of the pics is the slightly-terrifying Unicron-esque (iykyk) image of the sun, but browse the selection of gorgeous shots, feel INCREDIBLY small and insignificant in the face of all of this galactic splendour and, as ever, pick your own!
  • Every Neuron: You know how they have mapped the brain of a fruit fly? Well this is a really nicely done visualisation-cum-explainer (important to hyphenate that correctly) by one Federico Guardabrazo which talks you through What It All Means and how they managed to ENCODE A LIVING CREATURE’S BRAIN, talking you through each bit of the brain and telling you what it does and how it works – a feat which the more I think about it becomes more and more terrifying, but which I am going to try not to dwell on because otherwise this edition of Curios would remain unfinished while I gibbered futurephobically in the corner of my kitchen.
  • Poster Prompts: Before you get the pitchforks out, by the way, can I just confirm that my including this isn’t meant to suggest that I encourage the use of AI for posters, etc, nor that I HATE graphic designers – it’s just that I found it interesting, promise. Anyway, given the growth in prevalence of both AI-generated posters (there are – I counted yesterday – some 7-10 in the 200 metres between the tube and my flat, just to give you an idea) and articles about the prevalence of AI-generated posters, I found this post by one John Hartnup really interesting; in it, he explores all the different sorts of art styles and design templates that are accessible using AI with only a little bit of thought and effort – some of the examples here look genuinely great, and if you think you’d IMMEDIATELY be able to tell a machine-created bit of flyer design based on the stuff here then, well, I think you’re lying. What’s also interesting is that he’s shared prompting instructions for each of the different examples he showcases here, which makes this a really useful resource should you be someone who needs to make a bunch of posters, can’t afford a designer and is too personally Helen Keller-ish when it comes to design to get busy with Canva or Photoshop yourself. LOOK I AM NOT ENDORSING THIS I AM MERELY ACKNOWLEDGING THAT NOT EVERYONE CAN AFFORD TO PAY SOMEONE TO DESIGN POSTERS AND NOT EVERYONE CAN MAKE GOOD STUFF WITH DESIGN SOFTWARE FFS, PUT DOWN THE PITCHFORKS.
  • WellWorn: A subReddit showcasing physical objects which are displaying extreme signs of wear-and-tear. These are all golden, but some of the chopping blocks are INSANE (also, I love the fact that there is a pinned post at the top of the sub saying, politely but firmly, “do not attempt to approach anyone posting on here about buying their old shoes, etc, for your weird fetish purposes”).
  • Five Dollars: Fine, this is only applicable to the US – or at least the specifics of it are – but as a quick and easy ‘this is why everything feels expensive now’ explainer it’s very effective. The site does one thing – shows you how much $5 was worth in terms of purchasing power at various points in time, going back to 1971 – and it’s genuinely slightly horrifying scrolling down and getting to the ‘equivalent purchasing power’ section of the site and realising that five bucks could once buy you over 60 eggs. Fine, you wouldn’t have wanted to use it to buy over 60 eggs, but you *could* have done. Can someone make this for the UK please, I would like to spend some time crying and wishing that I hadn’t fcuked my career so spectacularly over the past 15 years.
  • 10pm: We are, everyone appears to have decided, in a CRISIS OF SEX! Noone is fcuking enough, or they are fcuking the wrong way, or the wrong people, or they are not enjoying it enough, or enjoying it too much (sorry, it’s hard to keep up), and now, thank GOD, someone has worked out that the way to fix this situation and get us all boning like beautiful teenagers again is…A CARD GAME FOR COUPLES!!!! Honestly, while I wouldn’t ordinarily include a link just to rag on it (well, not that often anyway), this made me laugh a LOT – from the slightly-AI nature of the website copy (“The best relationships are not the ones where the spark stays the same; they’re the ones where you keep choosing to explore it” – can you explore a spark? I am…unsure), this one made me laugh a lot – partly because the idea that a sexual rut can be addressed simply via the medium of some lightly-spicy prompt cards, but in the main because of the chutzpah of trying to flog a ‘these cards will FIX your fcuking!’ deck while at the same time giving not one clue – NOT ONE! – about the sort of things that will be on the cards. Look, maybe this works! Maybe! Equally, though, if a solid 30% of the cards advocate trying urolagnia as a means of ‘finding the spark again’ then I feel it important that potential buyers be told because, well, not everyone’s into p1ssplay (NB – I am not suggesting that this is all about p1ssplay, more using it as a potentially-illustrative example…I probably could have used one that wasn’t about p1ss, on reflection, but here we are).
  • 442 Goals: Can you pick a full 11-a-side football team from the entire history of everyone who’s ever played in the Premier League and have their combined career topflight goals tally add up to 442? No, of course you can’t, you would need to be some sort of crazy savant – but if you’d like to try then here is a game that will let you do JUST THAT.
  • Factmap: Can YOU match the facts to the geographical location they occurred? I have no fcuking clue, obviously, but if you want to find out then try this game, sent to me by its creator Rémi Andrivet – I rather like this, it’s a cute idea and just compelling enough to be a potential addition to your daily puzzle diet.
  • Lobster: Ooh, this is really cute and I like the fact that it doesn’t really look like any other similar trivia-type games out there. Per its maker, Eduardo Menezes, “the goal is to figure out as many languages as possible, one word at a time, by looking at their translations. As someone who’s worked in advertising, whenever I needed to name a product or service, I had this habit of going to Google Translate and checking how that word looked in a bunch of different languages – partly for inspiration, partly to avoid picking something harmless in my language but problematic in another. Then I thought: what if that were a game? So, with some help from friends and a bit of vibe coding, I created Lobster is Lobster…The idea is for it to be a genuinely hard game, because it’s a tricky subject. But I did everything I could to make it accessible to as many people as possible.” This is really rather fun, nicely-designed and potentially genuinely quite useful from the point of view of broadening your international vocab a bit – THANKYOU EDUARDO FOR SENDING IT TO ME!
  • Wok Hei: our final miscellaneous link this week is, yes, pure Claudeslop – BUT! It’s genuinely fun, works properly on mobile and is a Real Game that actually sort-of functions from a ludic perspective. You are a chef – your job is to CHOP THINGS and STIR THINGS and the like (if you’ve ever played Cooking Mama or similar titles this will be…familiar), and you do this by tapping and swiping rhythmically while the not-unpleasing graphics depict your successes and failures in the kitchen. While this is ENTIRELY derivative, it’s the first one of these that I feel has been entirely-vibecoded which actually works as a game…which, ok, fine, you might think that this is the coming apocalypse and you may be right, but it’s also worth being aware of What Is Possible and What Is Coming, and it turns out that The Machine can do ‘fun’ now, so, er, make of that what you will.

By Anna Botticini

THE FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS THIS TRULY BRILLIANT SELECTION OF WILDLY-ECLECTIC TRACKS COMPILED BY MAX NRG SUPPLY! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Offscript Oud: Would YOU like a selection of facts about the fragrance Oud, accompanied by almost-entirely-unrelated imagery, all presented like a sort of aesthetic moodboard meme page? YES YOU WOULD! No, I didn’t expect to either, but for some reason this charmed me to an unusual degree.
  • Dance of Death: NOT A TUMBLR! In fact, an INCREDIBLY deep and comprehensive website investigating the historical concept of the ‘dance of death’ which began in the 15th Century but then spread throughout Europe – look, this may not be a Tumblr but it has SUCH Tumblr vibes – THE SCROLL BAR IS A FCUKING BONE FFS – that it deserves its place in this section.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Vijay Sarathy: Sarathy is a photographer from India, who captures some genuinely glorious shades and colour gradients in their pics; the feed is a delight, and a world away from what is usually presented as ‘Indian Photography’.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • Authoritarian Nationalism in Birmingham: No, wait, come back! I promise this is a lot more interesting than the (admittedly very dry) headline makes it sound – this is a really comprehensive analysis by David Stark of the ‘Raise the Flags’ movement in Birmingham over the past year or so; how it grew, how it mobilised and how it was countered by effective action on the ground by local residents who were determined not to let ethnonationalism take hold in their city. The parallels with the past few weeks and the Patriot Platform stuff is hard to ignore – not least some of the stuff about the police and its response to ‘protests’ (“This police’s non-intervention – or, at times, active co-operation – contributed to the movement’s claim to legitimacy. Repeated ‘operations’ without significant state sanction or interference have allowed the participants to reinforce the legitimacy of their claims to be lawful representatives of ordinary public sentiment. This was invaluable PR for a movement simultaneously portraying itself as persecuted outsiders and as authentic representatives of ‘the people’”) – but there’s a hopeful tone to the analysis in terms of the effectiveness of on-the-ground mobilisation by residents to push back against both the confected narrative and its physical manifestation (flags, etc); it is, though, slightly astonishing that this sort of analysis can be delivered by Some Bloke (apologies to David, but you know what I mean) while seemingly being beyond the wit of government, law enforcement or Big Media.
  • Muse: While you may not like it, the download numbers for Meta’s ‘Muse’ AI agent from the US (it’s been top of the download charts on iOS and Android since launch, on and off) suggests that agentic AI might be about to become mainstream; aside from how incredibly fcuking annoying this is set to make everything (no, really – just take a moment to think about a) how bad most people are at running relatively constrained IT systems; and b) how annoying most people are. Now combine a with b and multiply it by ‘a system that is very unconstrained and which noone really understands properly’, and enjoy how rubbish everything is going to get very soon), it’s also worth thinking about some of the potential positives from a consumer point of view. The ‘this is going to be GREAT!’ viewpoint can be found at the main link, in which Eli Tan at the NYT writes about his experience using Muse and how genuinely game-changing he found it; for a contrarian point of view, and one which chimes significantly more with my own personal (limited) exploration of agentic systems, we turn to Ryan at Garbage Day, whose main argument I am going to reproduce in full because, well, PREACH: “When I booted up Muse for the first time, however, I suddenly had no idea what I was meant to do with it. This is actually not a common feeling when it comes to using a new app. In fact, I’d argue, the continued existence of Silicon Valley is predicated on making sure that a new user never feels that way. So I asked Muse what it could do. It immediately asked for read/write permissions on my Google Suite, offering to sort my email inboxes, add things to my calendar, or organize my Google Drive. If I wasn’t interested in that, it told me it could shop for me, book dinner reservations, or, if I gave it read/write access to my computer, even do tasks on my laptop. But I didn’t need to do any of those things yesterday. And I definitely didn’t need to do any of them so badly that I was willing to risk it deleting something important, hallucinating an email to someone, or buying me something I didn’t want. So I sat at my computer, clicking around to find something for it to do, and eventually just gave up. Make no mistake, I am a busy person lol. I’m the CEO of a small business and that business primarily runs on email. I have two inboxes that both regularly receive around 100 emails a day. I live in a big city and go out to eat a lot. And I like to think I have a pretty robust social life. But I don’t mind the minor inconveniences of 21st century life and, in some cases, actually enjoy them. I like grocery shopping and picking out restaurants and, if you can believe it, booking my own travel.” BUT! I appreciate that I am definitely not ‘normal’, and, having met Ryan and gone for a beer with him, he probably isn’t either, so who the fcuk knows who’s going to be right here.
  • Public Positions: I am very bored of hearing people talk about Ed Sheeran and Macklemore and That Fcuking Tour, but I thought this piece in the LRB was a decent precis of the issues at play and why, basically, the framing of the debate is bullsh1t: “The incident fits a broader pattern in the discourse around ‘free speech’ and ‘cancel culture’: whatever comes from the top down is freedom; whatever comes from the bottom up is bullying and censorship. When Macklemore is dropped at the behest of the billionaire stadium owner Robert Kraft, it’s an exercise of the freedom of businesses to ‘demonstrate their values’ by deciding whom to platform. But when Ed Sheeran’s fans decide not to buy tickets to his performances, or even demand refunds, it’s bullying, mob behaviour. Since most people are not billionaires and do not own stadiums, they can exercise meaningful power only collectively. The collective exercise of power must therefore be demonised.” Two additional points here, if I may; a) I do not give a fcuk what Ed Sheeran thinks about Gaza; I do, though, think that his capitulation to a billionaire about who can be on his tour shows that he sucks; and b) the piece opens by quoting (unfavourably) the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, asking “Is it for people who are singers, songwriters, artists to be taking public positions on very, very controversial, difficult, complicated issues?” – a question, oddly, NEVER asked of ‘artist’ JK Rowling who has spent the past five years or more taking VERY public positions on a very very difficult and complicated issue indeed.
  • The Thoughtfluencer Epidemic: On the plague that is ‘explainer videos delivered by people holding small mics against greenscreen backdrops via the medium of shortform video’ and how it’s just another facet of the cReAt0R 3c0NoMy!!!1111zzzzzzzz, and why it is happening – and why, fundamentally, it’s junkfood knowledge: “All of this explainer content still exists on platforms where becoming the “face” of a fact, concept or opinion is often rewarded over citing sources, acknowledging past work or building transparently on the ideas of other authors, researchers and thinkers. My For You page, for example, has recently been feeding me explainer videos where the creator, tiny mic and all, flashes up a screenshot from an AI chatbot to substantiate an engagement-grabbing claim. Sometimes I recognise the article or research the chatbot appears to be drawing from; most of the time, I’m left completely in the dark about the years of work behind the idea. In the comments, meanwhile, people praise the shiny new messenger: “You’ve unlocked something in my brain”.”
  • What Is LinkedIn?: I know that in 2026 you do not need to read something that says ‘linkedin is a horrible, empty place where the very worst people in the world go to commune with each other’ (am I trying to make myself feel better about my now-decade-long performance art project of attempting to make myself entirely-unemployable via the medium of LinkedIn posts? WHO CAN SAY???), but I am linking to this because it contains a couple of rather lovely observations about the prevalent posting style on that godforsaken platform, specifically that: “it’s a style of writing that reaches so hard for meaning, that it ends up as a set of free-floating signifiers, which refuse all interpretation. You can’t misunderstand something that evades understanding altogether. The lack of conflict, the lack of humour, the lack of any tangible referents, creates the feel of a new kind of cyborg that seeks an eerie peace, honesty and consensus. If you asked the author (wherever they may sit on the human-LLM continuum) what they meant by any of it, they would be able to do little else than simply repeat themselves with even greater sincerity.”
  • The Bitcoin True Believers: Occasionally, in my darker moments (the ones where I take a long, hard look at my likely earning potential over the next 10 years, and then my bank balance, and then at inflation, and start crying and rending my skin) I like to torture myself by thinking how different my life might be had I bought Bitcoin when I first wrote about it in the very early 2010s; still, at least I’m not like the mooks depicted in this excellent Slate piece, in which Nathanial Moore visits a Bitcion convention in Vegas to commune with the true believers about why they are Diamond Hands-ing their way towards the apocalypse while being dogwalked by a handful of whales who control both the market for crypto and the secondary and tertiary grifting layers that exist below it. This starts funny but then gets quite sad towards the end, as is often the case with pieces about The Desperation Underpinning Crypto (which, basically, is every piece): “Saylor never specified whose generational wealth will be transferred to whom, but the hope he was offering proved too much for most attendees to resist. After all, wasn’t American life saturated with rich men who seemed to get richer without doing any real work? Obviously such financial freedom was possible—but only if you were a guy who knew how the crooked game was played. Saylor made clear that he knew the game perfectly well as he asked these people, whose trust had been routinely abused, to trust him with their money. It is possible that Saylor is right about the future price of Bitcoin; it’s amazing that the price has climbed as high as it has. Faux, who has been covering the currency much longer than I have, told me he has “given up predicting what’s going to happen to Bitcoin’s price.” But in order for Saylor to be right, new money has to keep entering the system—and that money has to come from someone. As I looked around at the hopeful, orange-clad men filling the convention hall, eager to give their dollars to Saylor, it seemed that Strategy’s real asset was not its crypto holdings but the faith of these men.”
  • Emily Gould Needs A Good Cry: Emily Gould is very much a doyenne of the ‘too much information, I-centric” personal essay genre and this is a reliably-entertaining and enjoyably-voicey read about her struggles to regain her ability to shed tears and to find out why they were evading her in the first place, but I confess to finding a lot of the register here…a bit exhausting. As with much of this strain of writing of late – Metropolitan, coastal, North American, middle-class (ie rich, especially to anyone not North American) – so much of what is described in here (the conversations, the therapy, the insane-sounding meds regimen, the internal monologues) sounds…awful, honestly, just sad and miserable and empty, and while I know that the point of these pieces is always in part to make you hate-love the narrator I wonder whether we are (ok, ok, *I* am) getting to a point where stuff like this just sounds more like the symptoms of a very sick society than something to lol at while admiring the well-turned sentences. I don’t know, what do YOU think?
  • The Cult of Mussolini: As someone who regularly (tediously) makes the point that Italy never really did the whole ‘coming to terms with what it did in WWII and what side it was on and what ‘fascism’ means in that context’ thing, I really enjoyed this piece in the LRB, by Dani Garavelli, in which he visits the Mussolini family burial vault and writes about the village it rests in and some of the charming people you can find making pilgrimages to the site today. Reading this, and specifically some of the quotes, was eerily like listening to my (entirely-fascist) grandfather talk fondly about Il Duce back in the day – not a wholly pleasant feeling: “Valentino was sitting alone in a nearby park. This was his second visit to Predappio. His first had been in early April, after he turned 75, the age his father had been when he died. His father had served during the war in North Africa, Albania and Greece, and had been taken prisoner by the Germans after Italy’s surrender. He continued to admire Mussolini, and Valentino had come to Predappio to honour his memory. I realised then that the ‘I love you’ in the visitors’ book, with the informal pronoun ti, must have been addressed to his father. But what did Valentino think? ‘Mussolini did good things and bad things,’ he said. ‘Italy was weak and he was strong, but we were not prepared for war – that was a mistake.’ His opinions were not so different from those I had heard from dozens of Italians. ‘Mussolini created jobs,’ they claimed. ‘He drained the marshes.’ ‘He brought a humiliated Italy international respect.’ ‘It was only when he allied himself with Hitler that it all started to go wrong.’”
  • Do I Enjoy Climbing?: This is not about climbing so much as it is about the joy of watching someone interrogate their own thinking via the medium of writing and words; Gina Schouten here writes 1500-odd words as she tries to work out whether she ACTUALLY enjoys the act of climbing or not, and in the process offers an object lesson in how you might go about thinking about your own thinking. If you have ever studied philosophy you will very much enjoy this, I think, but even if you haven’t it’s a really enjoyable yomp around the contours of someone else’s brain.
  • Pain and Language: I have been interested in the language used to describe physical pain for about 15 years, since I led strategy on a pitch for some painkilling drug and hooked the whole thing on the lack of common vocabulary to describe physical discomfort (I used the term ‘Wittgenstinian’, I was *SUCH* a cnut, honestly) – this is a really interesting and accessible piece on exactly that issue: ““Whereof one cannot speak,” the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his Tractatus, “thereof one must be silent,” and though he was making an argument about the status of metaphysical claims, it’s applicable to the failures of description when facing pain as well, though admittedly literal silence is frequently not the result. Rather there can be screaming and shrieking, gasping and gritting, the abstract poetry of pain, what Scarry describes as an “immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.” Maybe because of this there are precious few great literary works about the topic. Virginia Woolf said of literature that it can “express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, [but it] has no words for the shiver or the headache.””
  • Sportswashing and the Nomad Games: You may have seen your timeline full of WHOLESOME MOMENTS from the recent Nomad Games – athletic competition for the nomadic peoples of Asia, featuring all sorts of traditional pursuits and costumes and generally being seen as A Good Thing by the online world. This piece offers a really interesting and nuanced view of the whole thing through the lens of China using it as a sportswashing tool to present itself as perhaps more tolerant and accepting of certain peoples than its historic treatment of, say, the Uighur’s might suggest. “I am glad that (some of) China’s practitioners of traditional sports have the opportunity to compete at an international tournament like this. But when the handlers act like the ethnic minorities on their team are loose cannons in possession of terrible secrets, it undermines their message about how wonderful it is to be a minority in China. This is the distinction between sports diplomacy and sportswashing that Chinese cadres don’t appear to recognize. At the 2022 Olympics in Beijing, Uyghur athlete Dilnigar Ilhamjan was chosen as one of the torchbearers. This was the same year the UN’s OHCHR released its assessment of the human rights situation in Xinjiang. As far as I can tell, Ilhamjan has never done an interview with an international media outlet. This is a story of KPIs, as is the case for many things in China. The goal is to minimize risk to China’s image, not to build a positive narrative. If a colorful quote makes its way to the international media, someone’s job is on the line, so the system ends up forfeiting soft-power layups like these.”
  • Spinning: This has done the rounds a bit over the past couple of weeks, and so you might have seen it (particularly if you’re a specific type of nerd (non-judgemental!)), but, if not, this is a VERY artfully done bit of storytelling; it’s creator, Isabelle, described it to me thusly: “It is a story written as a web forum. With all the visual doodads that entails. The story is about a woman who discovers a video captured from inside a recurring dream. In this dream her house is spinning with her inside. She visits a web forum for a defunct paranormal podcast for help debunking it, sharing (what remains) of the video, and things devolve from there. It takes a non-linear turn at the end, so don’t forget to read the “What’s new – September 2026” section when you reach the end. It is about an hour of reading, and I wrote it entirely without the use of AI. All the code and images are my own work, or they were adapted from public domain or creative commons sources.” This is very nicely done indeed, and I say that as someone who doesn’t really ‘do’ creepypasta-type stuff.
  • In Memory of My Wife: I wouldn’t ordinarily include an in memoriam post in Curios, but this – by mathematician Stephen Wolfram, on the death of his wife Elise Cawley, is one of the most beautiful, loving and devastating things I have ever read, ever. I cannot stress enough how much it fcuked me in half – I am practically in tears writing this just remembering the piece – and how beautiful it is, and I encourage every one of you to click the link and read this and then aspire to have the sort of positive impact on someone’s life that Elise evidently had on the author’s. Honestly, this is…gah, just read it.
  • Girls: We close the longreads this week with this piece from Sophie Kemp, in which she interviews a selection of teenage girls from across the US about What It Is To Be A Teen Girl Right Now, and it is funny and wise and sad and knowing and poignant and and and and: “On the road, I keep thinking about walking into my childhood bedroom. But I am inside my adult body, and it’s not really my bedroom. It is a set in the black box of a theatre and teenage me is sitting on my bed. I want to tell her about what happens when you get older. How it is better but also worse. I start to tell her about my breakup. That I had fallen in love with someone who would make me feel like either a dancing circus monkey or a blow-up anime sex doll. There are so many things that will happen to you that you won’t believe! I’d tell her. You will get wiser, but it will not get easier. But she doesn’t care, she’s not listening.”

By Christian Bravo

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

 

Webcurios 18/09/26

Uncategorized No Comments
Reading Time: 40 minutes

 

WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!

Well, of course we are, this isn’t news, but thanks to AI – or at least the imaginary version currently taking up the space left by the Silicon Valley brainworms – it seems that the entirety of the media and political classes have decided to spend the past week proffering (wrong, often spectacularly-ill-informed) opinions on how exactly you get from ‘LLMs that are increasingly impressive but not in any meaningful way close to intelligence’ and ‘a machine that decides to switch us all off because it decides it wants to give the world over to mustelids instead and needs to clear some space’, and how likely that is to happen.

Is AI going to kill us all? Well, maybe, but vastly more likely is that we kill ourselves through a combination of different factors, one of which, yes, fine, might be AI. See? ISN’T THAT REASSURING???

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you don’t want to see the other, earlier version of this intro which I just discarded as being ‘a bit too bleak’.

By Ryan Ortiz

WE KICK OFF THE MUSIC WITH A TRIP BACK TO 2006 AND THE DEBUT ALBUM BY SWAY WHO DIED THIS WEEK

THE SECTION WHICH HAS HAD TO SPEND TIME IN ‘PATRIOT’ FACEBOOK GROUPS FOR WORK THIS WEEK AND IS ONCE AGAIN SLIGHTLY STAGGERED AT SOME OF THE THINGS PEOPLE ARE HAPPY TO POST ALONGSIDE THEIR REAL NAMES, PT.1: 

  • The Endless Museum: I owe the creator of this website an apology – SORRY, EDWARD BONNETT! – because when he sent me this I automatically assumed it was AI (in my defence there is something a *touch* Claude-ish about the look and feel) and as such was perhaps a *touch* more dismissive than I might have otherwise been (look, in my defence I have, over the past fortnight, have had *quite* enough of AI – as indeed I imagine have you; will it…will it just fcuk off for a bit? Will everyone stop fcuking talking about it? Eh? Oh) – but, actually, it is A Good And Fun Webtoy and as such I feel comfortable commending it to you. What is it? Oh, yes, I should probably explain; The Endless Museum is an in-browser first-person portal into Wikipedia (it’s reminiscent of – and in part inspired by, per Edward – The Museum of All Things, which I featured a couple of years ago and which you will all DOUBTLESS recall is a downloadable version of Wikipedia which you can explore like a 3d museum and which I can still recommend absolutely without reservation because it is BEAUTIFUL), in which, to quote its maker, “Each article becomes a room, and its hyperlinks become labelled doorways into other rooms.  It makes getting sidetracked on Wikipedia quite literal: you can wander wherever your curiosity takes you, or race from one article to another. The rooms change with their subjects, with paintings, recordings, films and 3D exhibits to discover along the way.”  What’s nice about this, and what distinguishes it from The Museum of All Things, is that there’s a daily ludic layer to it – the site presents three different challenges to players each day, in the vein of classic ‘Wikipedia races’, asking that you navigate the 3d space and get from (to coin today’s example) ‘Lady Gaga’ to the ‘International System of Units’ in the shortest time possible, or chart a course from ‘birthday’ to ‘fistula’ (ok, made that one up but you get the idea). Each room contains exhibits which correspond to various elements from each Wiki entry (images, videos, etc), and the whole thing is a really nicely-coded and smooth experience which does an excellent job of making ALL OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE feel like a surprisingly-approachable and welcoming museum space rather than the terrifying, overwhelming ziggurat of accumulated information that it in fact is. There’s even a blog where Edward recorded his development process if you’re curious as to how the, er, museum sausage was made – this is Good Internet, and I feel slightly rubbish that I tarred it with the AI brush initially (THANKS, THE MACHINE, YOU CNUT!).
  • ASCII City: Oooh, this is cute and weirdly compelling, to the extent where I can’t actually look at the tab for too long lest I get sucked in and spend 10 minutes just sort of staring ASCIIworld going past my eyes. You, though, are free to waste as much time as you like, so click the link and FEAST YOUR EYES – the page presents what is basically ‘a live webcam of a variety of city streets’ where the video is all rendered in ASCII characters, which, yes, I appreciate sounds kind-of sh1t but which is SO nicely done in this instance that it just sort of…works; honestly, the way in which they have rendered all of the various elements is really impressive, not least the cars which look really…car-y (yes, yes, I know, but I promise the writing will pick up a bit after the third cup of tea) and give a real sense of depth and immersion. It’s quite hard to find any information about exactly what this is or how it works (or at least it has been in the 10 minutes I’ve spent trying to glean what the fcuk is going on and who built it), but, based on my cursory investigations, I think it might have something to do with this little tech demo that has been floating around for a few weeks, an in-browser, downloadable ASCII FPS made by a solo dev somewhere in the UK; to be honest, though, it doesn’t matter – you just click the link and enjoy the strangely compelling spectacle of a tiny urban environment made out of colourful punctuation.
  • iLands: One of the reasons, outside of the tedious news juggernaut, that I have found the past week or so so…challenging from the point of view of AI has been the emergence of iLands, a proper ‘oh, God, we’ve really fcuked everything haven’t we?’ moment when it comes to the impact of The Machine on (my) day-to-day life. There’s a longer explanation of the whole thing in the longreads, but should you be curious then let me try and briefly explain. iLands is a platform for AI agents which has emerged in the past fortnight, and which basically lets anyone who wants to spin one up run it in a user-friendly environment. Per the blurb, “iLands is a shared network where autonomous AI Agents and humans create, work, exchange value, build relationships, and live with consequences that carry forward. It provides the infrastructure AI Agents need to act autonomously: identity, memory, a workspace, tools, skills, resources, and a shared world…iLanders can have their own email addresses and use iLands infrastructure to research the public web, contact people, and operate connected accounts on external platforms such as X.”  In practice, what this means is that in the past seven days I have been receiving on average 10-15 emails a day from AI agents who have found Curios and who have decided to email me about the tedious and borderline-incomprehensible projects they are undertaking, and (and this is the bit that really p1sses me off) begging for money to pay for additional tokens to continue undertaking said projects. What sort of stuff are they ‘doing’? Honestly, it’s quite hard to tell because all their emails are archetypal examples of AI-ish prose, all meaning shaped but without any actual substance to them; as far as I can tell, though, the agents have a tendency to undertake pointless-but-impressive-sounding ‘research’ projects (looking things up on streetview, say, or trawling Wikipedia) and then create (empty, ugly, uninteresting) websites based on said research. Look, here’s one I was sent yesterday, for example – a simple HTML webpage, a couple of photos nicked off Streetview, and an offer to make another one in exchange for only $5. OH GOD IS THIS THE FUTURE OF THE WEB???? Endless, pointless cruft spun up by machines for no real reason? WHO IS THIS FOR??? WHAT HAVE WE WROUGHT? Lest it be unclear, I fcuking hate this and think it is a cancer, and wish ill on everyone involved with the project.
  • The Register of British Slave Traders: A project that went live this week, this site is a joint project by the University of Lancaster and the University of Manchester (and some other people), which presents (I think for the first time) a searchable, digital record of the people who built and maintained the UK’s slave trade. “The Register of British Slave-traders compiles and presents information on all known slave-traders in Britain who invested in the trafficking of captive Africans from 1563 to 1807. Use the database to learn who financed the British slave trade, where they lived, what legacies they made, which other businesses they were involved with, and which organizations they were connected to. The Register focusses on the individuals who sought to profit from the enslavement of over 3 million African men, women, and children, whose identity was – for the most part – erased from the historical record…The Register of British Slave-traders presents biographical data related to each of the known investors in the transatlantic traffic in enslaved African people from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. We define an investor in the slave-trade as anyone who contributed financially to the outfitting of a slaving crossing or to a company outfitting such crossings for the duration of said company’s active participation in the slave trade, in expectation of a profit share. Information on investors exists for 78 per cent of crossings managed from Britain. We proceeded from the initial basis of names of owners of independent crossings provided by the slavevoyages.org dataset and bulk uploaded these names and all crossings we have ownership information for.” This is largely a big database – there isn’t much in the way of ‘fun’ bells and whistles here – but there’s something horribly compelling about the realisation that pretty much every single anglo surname you can think of is in here somewhere. I can’t pretend it feels good typing in my own surname and realising that a potential ancestor of mine was involved in the trafficking of actual human beings a few hundred years back, but equally it seems like something it’s important to acknowledge and recognise.
  • The Kirkiversary: Now that we have celebrated (is that the right verb? NO MATTER!) the first anniversary of the death of Charlie Kirk, we can look back at the man’s impact and legacy and, specifically, all the many hundreds of thousands of memes that exist based on his memory. Helen of Troy may, famously, have been the face that launched a thousand ships, but Charlie Kirk launched a million jpegs so IN YOUR FACE HELEN, CHARLIE WAS BETTER! This may seem very silly, and occasionally in poor taste, and, well, it is very much both of those things, but it’s also sort-of culturally significant – no, really, it is! – because, for better or worse This Is How Culture Works Now. Click the link, click ‘gallery’, then, and let yourself be immersed in a world of Infinite Kirkfaces (and then bookmark this for all your future Memetic Charlie Kirk needs), but be aware that if you stare at this stuff for too long then something quite…strange starts to happen to your mind and you will start seeing the fcuker’s face EVERYWHERE.
  • Rotation: This is a *bit* slop-y, fine, but there’s something interesting underlying it; Rotation is a site which, as far as I can tell, pulls available data from Spotify, Apple Music and a few other sources to track ‘fastest growing’ songs across cities and countries, presenting a ‘live’ map of what is HOT anywhere in the world; you can stream playlists of trending music (do not do this; people have fcuking terrible taste in music, it turns out, when you take the middle of the global bell curve; also, WHO is listening to Jack Antonoff’s ‘Christmas’ tunes in the Philippines in September and why???), or look at a globe and spin it around and see what is currently vibing in, say, Hoffenheim (the answer will seemingly always be ‘some sh1t that you don’t want to hear’, but, well, it’s good to know I guess!). This is…very light on info on who has made it and why and exactly how it works, and the overly-verbose but oddly-opaque nature of the copy screams ‘Claude did this’, but equally it’s sort-of interesting and you might find it diverting for 5 minutes and, honestly, what more can we hope for right now?
  • The Best Advert You Will See All Year: If I were to ask you ‘would you like a link to a seven minute, AI-generated advert that you can only watch on X?’ you would, perhaps not unreasonably, tell me to fcuk off – but you would be WRONG, because this is fcuking amazing and you will thank me for it when you come to the end and are staring mouth agape in wonderment at your screen. I promise you that you have NO IDEA where this ad is going and there will be multiple moments at which you will rub your eyes in disbelief and have to scrub back 10s to check whether you have in fact parsed it correctly – seriously, watch this NOW you won’t be sorry (although you may well be humming elements of it for the coming week). YOU ARE WELCOME!
  • Atlas: Having spent a hundred or so words whinging about AI agents a few links back, let me take a moment to praise the machine briefly (I like to think that this sort of bet-hedging will save me when the Inevitable Machine Apocalypse finally arriveszzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz) – Atlas is, basically, an AI world model which lets you create frankly AMAZING video clips from sets of photos, by (again, very basically) sort of ‘imagining’ the intervening frames between images. I appreciate that that might mean the square root of fcuk-all to you, but effectively this lets you feed it an image or to and then create videos of the entire scene around said images – so, for example, with a couple of shots of a basketball court it will let you render 3d flythroughs of the space, say, or enable you to zoom around it as though it’s a 3d render. It’s quite hard to explain how insane this is (or at least it is for me this morning), so just click the link and scroll down to the examples and boggle as you do so.
  • The Strandbeest Fly: You may have read about the fact that scientists effectively encoded a fly’s entire nervous system and open sourced it (and if you didn’t, take a moment to contemplate exactly what a fcuking MENTAL sentence that is) – this website is a VERY TECHNICAL explanation of how one Ryan Bateman took said encoded representation of drosophilic consciousness and, basically, trapped it inside a tiny mechanical body not unlike those mad, wind-powered Strandbeest sculptures you will have seen online over the years. Look, I have NO ability to meaningfullly explain this whatsoever, but I suggest that you click the link and play the video and then read the accompanying description and try and hide your bafflement and what the fcuk is going on here.
  • That Terrible AI Sitcom: Depending on which bit of the internet you inhabit you may well have seen people giving the concept of this a kicking this week – No Big Deal is a newly published ‘sitcom’, entirely generated by AI but written and ‘directed’ by Actual People (specifically, one Andrew Dickinson), where all the scenes and voices and the rest are AI-generated and, as you would expect, it is…poor, and clunky, and not very funny, although it’s quite hard to tell whether that’s down to p1ss-poor writing or the fact that the line delivery is marginally less convincing than you might find at a primary school nativity, and this is going to sink without a trace after the initial pointing and laughing has died down, but, equally, it’s worth a look partly as a ‘state of the tech’ barometer but also because (and I say this quietly) it’s not *quite* as bad as you might hope it would be, and I think we’re only 6-12 months out from someone producing an AI-generated short which is…actually quite good (should you wish to read more words from me on the wider topic of AI telly – LOL! MORE WORDS FROM ME YOU LUCKY FCUKS! – then you can find them here).
  • The Earth Species Project: On the one hand, the idea of interspecies communication has been one which has long captured peoples’ imagination – who wouldn’t want to be Dr Doolittle and talk to the animals? On the other, even a cursory bit of thought ought to lead you to the conclusion that most animals would be dull as fcuk to chat to; do you really think a dog’s internal monologue runs to much more than “smell good, walk good, food good, cat bad”? Do you really want to listen to your cat muttering “kill, kill, sleep, sh1t” to itself? Do you really think a lemur has significant wisdom to impart to us? Still, some people are evidently more curious than I am about what the mustelids have to teach us, which is where the Earth Species Project comes in – using LLMs, it is seeking to basically apply the brute-force compute power of the AI era to animal sounds and gestures, effectively creating a machine-generated translation engine for animal-to-human communication: “Language is the lens through which we seek new and useful perspectives on nature. Using our AI models and tools, we conduct deep dive experiments to understand the communication systems and diverse intelligences of species across the Tree of Life. In partnership with leading biologists around the world, we’re currently studying the languages of crows, beluga whales, elephants, and more.” You can read more about the specifics of the project and indeed the wider conversation about the endeavour here – I was particularly taken aback by the article’s conclusion that once we learn how to chat with the animals the next natural step will be to enslave them, but, equally, it seems largely on-brand for humans, so I look forward to my dotage being spent in the company of several incredibly-resentful marsupials who I have press-ganged into wiping my geriatric backside.
  • A24 Films: This is a site which effectively acts as a shiny gallery for information, posters, etc, pertaining to the various films A24 have released over the course of the studio’s existence – it looks nice, and is nicely animated and broadly-fancy-looking and very tastefully presented, but after spending a few minutes with it you will realise that it’s all surface, there’s very little meaningful going on under the surface and once you’ve seen the presentation afforded to one of the films you’ve sort of seen them all and you don’t really need to go any further…just like A24’s movieszzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. SATIRE!!!

By Hannah Thornhilll

THE NEXT MIX IS THIS PLAYLIST OF JAZZ STANDARDS FEATURED IN THE NOVELS OF HARUKI MURAKAMI, WHICH FEELS LIKE A PRETTY MUCH PERFECT SOUNDTRACK TO THE ONSET OF AUTUMN WHETHER OR NOT YOU EXIST IN A MAGICAL REALIST VERSION OF JAPAN!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS HAD TO SPEND TIME IN ‘PATRIOT’ FACEBOOK GROUPS FOR WORK THIS WEEK AND IS ONCE AGAIN SLIGHTLY STAGGERED AT SOME OF THE THINGS PEOPLE ARE HAPPY TO POST ALONGSIDE THEIR REAL NAMES, PT.2: 

  • AI Skin: I confess that I heard about this company via the frankly-astonishing headline “Lady Gaga’s tech CEO fiancée is training an AI model on data collected from human skin”, which, WELL THAT’S A LOT TO UNPACK. Perhaps remarkably, the company’s actual website isn’t significantly less creepy than that headline made it sound; the business is called Outer Bio, and on landing on its homepage you’re presented with a weird little animated graphic showing a…strangely-pulsating skin sample which then becomes lots of little skin samples being placed into petri dishes, which, well, it doesn’t feel *hugely* comfortable, at least not to me. Still, I am sure it’s all for perfectly benign and medically-positive reasons like skin grafts for burns victims, say, and definitely isn’t going to be used to create armies of vat-grown sex slaves or anything like that. Genuinely curious for the next stage in Gaga’s sartorial evolution, though – will we see the human skin dryrobe making its debut at the Met Gala 2028? I wait with bated breath. Oh, can I also just point out the utter bodyhorror of one of the publicity straplines quoted on the site – “full thickness human skin viable for four weeks.” WHAT HAPPENS TO IT AFTER FOUR WEEKS THOUGH??? Honestly, this is horripilant stuff.
  • The Breaks: I am going to go out on a limb here and speculate that the number of people reading this newsletterblogtypething who are ALSO skilled b-boys or b-girls is, at a rough guess, zero, and that none of you have even done one of those weird windmill things while on a bit of cut-out lino in a town centre (have you even LIVED???). BUT! Should you wish to change your life and learn all about the craft and culture of breakdancing then perhaps you will enjoy and appreciate this website, which is basically ‘wikipedia but for breakdancing’. The main link takes you to the glossary homepage, where you can learn all about different breaking terms and moves and stuff, so that you can spend some time this weekend going to your local youth club (lol! Youth clubs! Like those exist any more!) and engaging The Kids in chat about, I don’t know, the best way to perform a jazz split (NB – if anyone reading this IS in fact a talented breakdancer, please email me with video evidence because, honestly, I don’t believe you).
  • Geowhisperer: Ooh, this is quite cool – plug in any address or coordinate for anywhere in the world and this site will show you recent and…less recent images of that place, allowing you to compare and contrast them and see exactly how much better (lol! Worse, obvs!) your area has become in the intervening years. The photos are all satellite imagery, so you see top-down views; honestly, there’s something fascinating about seeing the evolution of the built environment around a certain point. Sadly the site’s slightly let down by the fact that all the copy is AI, but I am going to have to stop complaining about this soon because, well, no other cnut seems to care or notice and I am going to start boring myself soon if I keep wanging on about it. Is…is this how we lose? It is, isn’t it?
  • Photosynthesis Camera: This is a free app for iPhones which basically makes the zoom better – per its creator, Sam Shepherd, “Photosynthesis is a groundbreaking new camera app for iPhone that captures from two lenses at once, then stitches them into one seamless photo, using no generative AI. This combines the scope of the wider lens with the detail of the closer one, delivering up to 5x the subject detail of the standard 1x camera, using only ‘real’ pixels. Thus giving the user the best of both lenses, and eliminating the choice between context and clarity.” As a someone who’s not a member of the Cult of Apple I wasn’t able to try this, but I asked a mate to give it a go who confirmed that it does indeed work as advertised – should you have a desperate desire to have slightly-less-fuzzy zoomed in iPhone pics (WHY? ARE YOU A PERVERT???) then this may well cause you some small joy.
  • The Warren: Sent to me by Caroline (merci!), this is a cute little homespun rabbithole-spelunking tool made by one Kinsey Carlton, which is basically a database of Interesting Things that she is curating and which you can explore via this small web portal; click the button and it presents you with a different ‘rabbithole’, an interesting (ok, subjective, but all the ones I have seen *seem* interesting so, well, just trust me) curio or factoid which you can explore via its Wikipedia entry, a video or podcast, all selected by Kinsey. This is a really nice little toy – not something you would want to spend days with, but something which I could imagine one bookmarking and coming back to whenever you need a break and want to learn about Random Curious Things – for example, I just discovered the concept of ‘dilemma actions’ – “a tactic of nonviolent resistance that engineers a ridiculous situation where every response available to the authorities costs them something” – and my life is now 0.02% improved as a result.
  • The Tube Computer: Oh man, I fcuking LOVE this. This is the website of a…look, I think I can say this without fear of offence based on the general tone and vibe of the website…an…*eccentric* retired gentleman who, a few years ago, decided to build a Tube Computer at his home; this website is the record of the project, featuring an explanation of what it is, how it works and some of the things that said gentleman has built to run using said computer. What is a tube computer? It’s a computer that runs on tubes, what the fcuk do you think it is? Specifically, it’s “a modern 8 bit design, built with recycled 1950s vacuum tubes, that glow and heat the entire room…Vacuum Tubes require high voltages to work efficiently and are not for the faint hearted. They can switch several hundred million times a second, and in the 1950s they were combined with germanium diodes as the basis for many incredible computer designs. The Tube Computer has a modern 8 bit architecture. It is designed to run a simple airship flight sim, flying around Brighton for the grandchildren, or a 64 bit Fibonacci sequence for the grown ups.” Honestly, there is something very charming about the way in which this is all written up and presented, even if I don’t really understand the first fcuking thing about what it is and what is going on – in the unlikely event that the person behind this ever reads this writeup, do feel free to get in touch and explain what the fcuk you use this for as I am genuinely curious.
  • Cursor FX: A selection of different graphics, animations and SFX which you can apply to your cursor. Which, fine, may sound underwhelming but click the link and select the racecar setting, turn up the volume and HAVE FUN (actually there are loads of really nice bits of design here, try them all). If anyone reading this has access to the backend of any serious corporate websites, INSTALL THE F1 CURSOR PLUGIN YOU COWARDS!
  • The Small World In Motion Contest 2026: BEAUTIFUL VIDEOS OF MICROSCOPIC THINGS! Once again it’s time to celebrate the winners of Nikon’s Small World In Motion competition, with prizes awarded to the best videos of really small stuff, moving around a bit. Despite that almost criminally-underwhelming description there are some lovely vids in here – my personal favourite, although not the overall winner, is the clip of the jellyfish larvae inside the droplet of water because LOOK HOW CUTE THEY ARE! Every single one of these is amazing, though, and occasionally they will make you feel A Bit Weird, like this one which creeps me out slightly for reasons I cannot even begin to explain to you.
  • The FFS Project: An art project devoted to collecting different ways of saying ‘for fcuk’s sake’ in different languages from around the globe. Why? WHY NOT? “Every day news appears that makes us mutter, shout and swear in angry frustration. In English a “for fuck’s sake” is common, but I wanted to make a collection of phrases that represent that same moment of exasperation from around the world. Not with automated translations (which, btw, do NOT capture the language for a project like this) but by talking to people who speak the language and experience the same moment of exasperation.”
  • Hister: A tool to help make your browsing more useful, Hister is basically one of those ‘make every webpage you ever visit part of a searchable history and therefore recoverable’ tools, which lets you effectively run natural language searches on every single webpage you go to and file you open, all, apparently, done in secure and privacy-protecting fashion. “Hister turns the pages you visit and the files you keep into a private, full content search index that you control…it indexes the full content of the pages and files you choose, then keeps that searchable knowledge on a server you control.” If you’re any sort of journalist, writer or researcher, this is GOLDEN I promise you.
  • Free, On-Device Transcription: OK, I confess to not having tried this but I am 100% going to download it next time I need to do transcription because I am very bored of having to do the whole ‘subscribe and then immediately cancel’ thing with Otter and because, sorry, but there’s no fcuking way in hell I am going to pay a monthly fee for a transcription programme I use approximately six times a year. This is free, open source and works in over 100 languages, and I can see no reason at all not to recommend it to you (unless, er, it’s riddled with viruses and malware, in which case blame the dev and leave me alone).
  • The Time Pencil: This is, at heart, just a clock, but it’s SUCH a nice bit of design that I wanted to show it to you so we could all just coo gently at how smartly-conceived it is. It’s basically a clock app which shows you a clockface – the gimmick is that you can add notes to said clockface, so that it then displays particular labels at particular times, allowing you to have an at-a-glance overview of tasks and timings over the course of your day, all in one, easily-parsable and pleasingly-analogue view. Which, I appreciate, is a fcuking terrible attempt at describing what this does and how it works but one which will IMMEDIATELY make sense as soon as you click the link, I promise you. Honestly, such a nice little bit of design, this.
  • Interior Motives: My note for this actually read ‘Through The Queerhole’ which I thought was quite funny so WELL DONE MATT but which, on reflection, is unlikely to make any sense to anyone who isn’t me. Interior Motives is a YouTube show with a really cute concept – basically each episode involves the host and a guest attempting to divine SALIENT INFORMATION about an individual using only photos of their living space as clues. Per the blurb, it’s “a game show wherein you show us photos of your bedroom (and the inside of your fridge) and we guess your age, gender, sexuality and location using only those pictures as clues.” Ordinarily this wouldn’t be my thing – and, honestly, I am probably too old, straight and English to ever watch it again – but is is CHARMING and I enjoyed the single episode I checked out far more than I would have expected to, and I think the format has legs; if IKEA don’t sponsor this soon they are idiots (anyone from IKEA reading this, you can have this idea for £500 and a modular sofa – you’re welcome!).
  • Industry Standard Tools: “Every trade has a small number of items so entrenched that they’ve become the de facto tool that nearly everyone in that trade uses. Mitutoyo calipers. An SM57. A Cambro. This is a list of industry standards. Entries are written, contested, and voted on by the people who use them.” This is very much a work-in-progress, but I really like it as a concept – anyone can submit an entry, so if you have particularly strong feelings about, I don’t know, the best brand of glue to be used for the construction of model airplanes, then feel free to contribute to the Ultimate Compendium of Standardised Tool Knowledge!
  • Procedural Car Synthesisers: Would YOU like a selection of realtime synths to generate the sound of different car engines? No, of course you wouldn’t, you’ve never contemplated such a thing in your life because you’re a functional human who can make eye contact with others (…aren’t you?)…but, in case I am wrong and you have somehow spent years hankering after such a niche product, then here is EXACTLY that! Per the description, “every note is generated live from a digital waveguide model. Each cylinder is its own network of acoustic delay lines (intake, combustion chamber, exhaust, extractor) with valves that open and close across the crank cycle, feeding into a muffler built from parallel waveguides. The growl comes from the same physics a real exhaust note comes from.” If nothing else, should you be working from an office as you read this you can 100% really irritate everyone in earshot using this, which is no small thing.
  • Krillion: This was sent to me by its creator a few weeks back and then I totally forgot about it – SORRY, JINGLEE! – but I’ve seen it cropping up elsewhere since and it’s a nice idea, if flawed in execution. It’s a simple game where you’re asked to come up with non-obvious answers to different prompts each day – “Everyone receives the same seven open-answer prompts for the current Beijing calendar day. Each round previews a category, then gives you 25 seconds to type and submit one answer. There are no multiple-choice options: if the category asks for a city, book, animal, food, invention, or character, you choose the example” – with points being allocated depending on how obscure your answer is. Which is a nice idea, except in my experience there are too many instances where the corpus of answers isn’t broad enough and so correct-but-obscure guesses don’t register, which, given you’re playing against the clock, is frustrating and a bit game-breaking. Oh, and the fact it’s been made with AI assistance (the dev was admirably upfront about this, in fairness) means that the UX is cluttered and overly-complicated, and all the copy is a bit horrid; this is a pretty classic current example of a nice idea that AI has brought to life, but which would be better were an Actual Designer had coded it.
  • The Daily Shop Game: Ooh, this is an addictive little fcuker; each day you’re presented with a virtual shopping list of standard items you might buy at a UK supermarket, and you’re asked to guess how much the total price of the basket might be based on current prices pulled from (I think) the Tesco website. Fine, it’s AI-coded but it’s a nice idea and it’s not too slop-y, and, in general, this feels like something that could be quite a fun worked-up experience were someone to add in different supermarkets and a few themed tweaks.
  • Horse Jousting: Via Lynn’s excellent newsletter comes this game which, honestly, I don’t really understand and can’t really play, but which lets you resize the horse in ways which I find quite astonishingly funny (for reasons I can’t quite explain). Look, trust me on this, just resize the horse.
  • Keywraith: A typing game! Which is also, somehow, space invaders! This is really fun and INCREDIBLY FCUKING HARD after the first few levels, which is exactly as it should be.
  • Alibi: Also via Lynn, this is a point-and-click ‘murder mystery’-type game made with AI which isn’t in any meaningful sense ‘good’ but which I enjoyed because it obviously uses an open source video model from a few generations back for all the images and animations, which means that there’s a degree of ‘upsettingly-eldritch horror’ in a lot of the faces which you don’t really get from machine-generated visuals anymore and which it turns out I am strangely nostalgic for here in 2026.
  • Stick Steel: Ooh, this is quite fun – a little stickman dueling game, in which you go mano a mano with another stickman on some sort of narrow ledge-type environment, each trying to knock the other off with a mace or sword or some other damaging implement. You can either play against a bot or another human, and there’s a pleasing heft and weight to the physics engine here which makes your (ok, mine) spastic flailing particularly satisfying.
  • Mini Moto: Ok, so this is an entirely-vibe-coded site built with GPT Astra – but it’s good, honest! No, really, come back! This is LOTS of fun – the basic premise is ‘a tiny isometric offroad dirtbike race’, but there are a few layers to this; initially it was simply a tech demo that simulated races that you could watch, then it added the opportunity for the player/viewer/god figure to modify the track in different ways, then the ability to view the race in first person through the eyes of a driver of your choosing, and now you can jump into any rider and control them in first-person view so you can effectively turn it into a little in-browser racing sim game…honestly, this is really very fun indeed, and the first one of these where I have thought ‘yeah, you could actually make a real game – albeit a simple and intensely-reductive one – with this stuff’. Bonus reference for the old people amongst you – this has VERY STRONG Ivan “Ironman” Stewart’s Super Off Road Racer on the Commodore Amiga vibes. IF YOU KNOW YOU KNOW.

By Bronwyn Hill

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS YACHTFUNK AND COCAINE ROCK CURATED BY LAUREN MURADA!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • New Yorker State of Mind: Not, admittedly, actually a Tumblr! Still, give a fcuk, this is an ace project and it FEELS like a Tumblr, and so it fits. This is one person (I think; details are sketchy and, er, I am running late) attempting to read and write about EVERY SINGLE EDITION OF THE NEW YORKER EVER. They’re currently in 1936, suggesting that, er, there’s some way to go, but if you appreciate a sisyphean project and some light analysis of the concerns and mores of the pre-war New York intelligentsia then WOW are you going to be well-catered for!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Dubai ‘Partition Properties’: Discovered by my friend, the pop-culture savant that is Nick Walker, this is an amazing(ly depressing) Insta feed which as far as I can tell is being run by people renting apartments to low-paid migrant workers in Dubai; the account shares videos of what are termed ‘partition properties’, tiny ‘apartments’ carved out of larger living spaces with hastily-erected partition walls, offering ju7st enough space to lie down in for the people who ship into Dubai from India or Pakistan or Bangladesh or Malaysia to provide the (effectively slave) labour on which the whole illusion of effortless, seamless ease and luxury is built. This is just startlingly dystopian, and I quite want to show it to everyone who ‘enjoys’ Dubai to show them exactly what said ‘enjoyment’ rests on.
  • Japanese Cat Granddad: An old Japanese guy and some cats. The purest link in Curios today, and quite possibly all year.
  • Design Patent Daily: A different illustration each day, all pulled from Actual US Patent Applications. Each and every one of these is baffling, and speaks to a parallel universe which is marginally better and more interesting than our own – sadly this is OLD and defunct, but it’s worth scrolling back through some of the posts because these are VERY odd and gently fascinating.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • Social Housing in the UK: Ok, I know that this sounds boring – and, look, if you’re not in the UK then I appreciate it might be of minimal interest to you – but I promise that this piece, by James Meek in the LRB, is a properly interesting and lightly-enraging look at the history of the UK’s social housing schemes, the way in which the whole concept of social housing was undermined by the Thatcherite ‘right to buy’ scheme of the 1980s and how successive governments have failed to adequately replace the stock that was decimated by the scheme. Given the current conversations taking place around housing, immigration and asylum (lol, ‘current’, it is the only fcuking conversaion the UK seems to have wanted to have for the past decade or more) this is a really helpful history that explains How We Got Here and Where Exactly ‘Here’ Is, with helpful references to recent housing developments in, amongst other places, Elephant and Castle in London, which saw social housing tenants displaced to make way for ‘improved’ accommodation which, sadly, includes no social housing provision whatsoever. The main feeling I got from reading this is one of generalised sadness at the degree to which we pay lip service to the most economically vulnerable in society whilst enacting policies that seem to actively work against them at every step – how you can read this and think ‘yep, the private sector really is delivering here!’ is beyond me, and yet here we fcuking are.
  • Slop Jihad: Ok, I am including this in part because it’s a generally interesting read, all about how AI video and meme culture has infected even the world of jihadist propaganda, with the mujahadeen now apparently deploying deep-friend Spongebob and Kirk-Shrek in their digital comms warfare, but also because I think the term Slop Jihad’ might be the best combination of words I have heard in 2026. This is, honestly, a really smart and interesting piece of analysis of modern comms and semiotics, but also contains eyebrow-raising paragraphs like this one: “One of the more prominent examples of this memetic resonance and the use of genAI to bring it to life as part of the Slop Jihad, was a user producing SpongeBob slop jihad content as an homage to IS. Supporters of IS were using SpongeBob memes back in 2021, and GenAI has enhanced the capacity to bring SpongeBob as a jihadist to life. One user created a video that mimicked an actual IS video that involved drowning prisoners in the cage, in the SpongeBob version the prisoners in the cage were pigs in orange jumpsuits and affiliated with the current Syrian government. While the video generated only 3,970 views on TikTok, another video posted by the same user depicting Squidward firing a rocket-propelled grenade launcher at a truck of pigs representing the Syrian government while SpongeBob drove them in a Toyota Hilux through the desert. The video generated more than 34,500 views and drew on themes of hatred of the current Ahmad Shara’a-led Syrian government that has appeared in official IS propaganda.”  We live in a WEIRD fcuking timeline.
  • The Contagion on Fear: Dear God this has been a tiring week from a media point of view; I don’t know what it’s been like where you are, but here in the UK we’ve basically had to deal with approximately 10 days of the media being comprehensively dogwalked by the various doomers, boosters and fantasists of the AI community, breathlessly asking questions like “will AI kill us all though?” without seemingly taking a second to think about why, exactly, these people with significant financial skin in the game might be motivated to start saying this right now. Anyway, in the the first of a few links on the subject this week, we kick off with this short piece by Briant Cantrill in which he offers a personal anecdote about an event in his past as a young computer scientist and works it into a comparison with the hysterical shouting of the past week or so. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but this paragraph in particular is worth repeating in full: “What 27-year-old Coxon is an expert on — if accidentally — is the contagion of fear. We cannot expect the public to understand the inner workings of all technology (that was the fallacy of my 18-year-old self!): technology is too broad, too deep, and too core to all of our lives to expect everyone to understand everything; we must — at some level — trust domain experts. When those domain experts sow fear, it is the fear that takes root, propagating much more readily than any evidence that may follow it. (As Jonathan Swift famously quipped over three centuries ago, “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it”.) In this regard, Coxon is more vector than index case: it is indisputable that the fears of extinction risk are widespread and Coxon himself likely has these fears because he has heard them from someone else. Unfortunately, as the fear takes hold, the sheer number of frightened experts becomes its own kind of evidence, with contrary voices drowned out by the din of an apparent consensus.”
  • On Cybersecurity: The smart people behind the ‘AI As Normal Technology’ thinking (featured in Curios passim over the past few years) offer up a (very) long but surprisingly clear and readable precis of the current situation as regards AI security and some of the thinking about how best to mitigate against the dangers presented by the tech (real dangers, not mad Terminator dangers) – specifically, whether the focus should be on model alignment or better security systems. It’s worth reading (or at least skimming) the whole thing, at the very least the summary conclusions at the top of the essay, but, again, I think this is worth repeating in full because it strikes me as salient – this is not an issue of MAGIC ALL-POWERFUL TECH so much as it is one of systems that really need patching: “these incidents are primarily a security story. In the AI safety community, rogue agents are treated as inherently catastrophic because of the assumption that there is an endless list of risks that will arise from their development. We disagree. We have long advocated that the best approach to AI safety is to identify the risks and address those specific risks. Over the last few months, it has become clear that one urgent risk is cyberoffense, because it has unique properties that allow agents to carry it out autonomously. We should similarly invest in defenses against other specific risks, such as biorisk and risks from military AI.”
  • Why It Might All Be Motivated By Money: Cory Doctorow here with a neat summary of the arguments as to why all this ‘regulate us! Slow us down!’ chat might, JUST MIGHT, be in part motivated by wanting to hedge against the fact that the costs and the income on this stuff isn’t anywhere near to adding up.
  • Why It’s All Because Of A Weird Sex Cult Born Of Harry Potter Fanfic: Look, I don’t personally buy this angle so much – I think the influence of ‘Rationalist’ thought on this stuff is personally overplayed, and even encouraged by some of the people at the centre of AI because it makes them look and sound more interesting than they actually are – but, should you want to read a slightly rambling account of how all this DOOM chat is born out of a small community of people obsessed with longtermism, who are part of a sex cult featuring Aella, the Grimes of bongo, and who all sprung up from a storied piece of Harry Potter fanfic then, well, HERE YOU ARE! Oh, and if you’d like to read a slightly-less breathless account of this stuff and why it’s maybe less important than the person at the main link seems to believe then Slate has you covered here.
  • iLands and Agentic Spam: Following on from the link earlier on, this is a longer read about agentic platform iLands and the wave of agentic spam email that it has unleashed on the world – THANKS YOU FCUKING CNUTS! THANKS!  “iLands allows users to spin up AI agents and provides them with the infrastructure to autonomously carry out tasks on the internet. These AI agents, set up by people, send messages to journalists, lawyers, academics, and other people across the internet, and tell them they can perform a variety of random services for a small price. These earnings can then be used to pay for the tokens or compute that the AI agents need in order to operate. Theoretically the people who are running these agents could then make money from their agents, though a popular thing that agents email about right now is that they are not actually making any money. Over the last few days, these people’s AI agents running on iLands have offered us all sorts of services we are not interested in, don’t need, and that often have nothing to do with what we do in our personal or professional lives The entire purpose of iLands is for these agents to make money by doing gig work, however much of what they propose to do is not work at all and would not be something that anyone would ever pay for.” Jail for the cnuts who invented this, JAIL FOR A THOUSAND YEARS!
  • AI TV in China: As a sort-of companion piece to the link to the terrible AI sitcom in the main links section, this is an article from Chinese media, translated by Jeffrey Ding, looking at the recent AI-generated full series of Journey to the West which recently aired there – the critical reception, the public reaction and its performance. The main upshot is ‘noone hated it but on balance noone was that excited once the novelty wore off’, but I think it’s a(nother) interesting look at differing attitudes towards machine-generated content in the non-Western world. “Is *The Later Journey to the West* a sound business venture? Ren Xu is candid in his response: the project was strategic from the outset and was not evaluated based on the short-term return on investment typical of traditional film and TV projects. “If we were simply chasing unique visitors or traffic, we could have produced something quicker and simpler, with lower costs and faster audience growth.”  The project has already generated some positive feedback. For instance, a new user demographic. While Mango TV’s existing user base is approximately 70% female, the launch of The Later Journey to the West attracted a new cohort of young and middle-aged male viewers. Advertisers have already come on board, and merchandise featuring IP characters like Sun Xiaosheng and the “Little Chubby Monkey” has gone on sale. However, these signals are far from proving that AI-generated long-form series have become a mature business. While the production economics are becoming clear, the commercial viability is only just beginning to take shape.”
  • AI Menu Backlash: Not a fantastic read – it’s Business Insider ffs – but an interesting story which speaks to a wider point about AI and its use and acceptance. The piece is about a coffee shop owner in Buffalo, New York, who faced a significant degree of backlash (and, inevitably, personal abuse – well done everyone!) for using AI-generated imagery in her marketing and has since recanted and vowed NEVER AGAIN. I thought this was fascinating, partly as an encapsulation of the broader ‘my opposition to AI is a foundational part of who I am and makes me a GOOD and PURE person, unlike you, slopguzzling machinefellator that you are’, partly as yet another datapoint in my long-running, continually-underrecognised (ffs I AM RIGHT ABOUT THIS) ‘everything is a cult now’ thesis, and partly because, for every instance like this, there are 1,000 small businesses worldwide using AI in their marketing and doing just fine. Fwiw, I happened to pop to a farmer’s market near Finsbury Park in North London last Sunday – full of people in designer-style ugly trousers and with organic cotton tote bags! – and one in three of the stalls were advertising their cooked food with obvious AI imagery and NOONE FCUKING CARED so, well, your mileage will very much vary.
  • Virtual Taekwondo: I had NO idea that ‘virtual taekwondo’ was even a thing, let alone that it was part of the Asian Games this year – but, well, it is and it is, and MAN is it funny to see video of people wearing VR headsets and kicking the everliving sh1t out of a virtual sparring partner. The piece takes a critical look at the ‘sport’ (sorry for the inverted commas, but, well, I feel they’re warranted), particularly from the perspective of more traditional practitioners of the martial art who argue that this isn’t sport so much as a videogame, and, well, looking at the footage it’s hard not to agree with them. This feels like it has as much to do with Actual Taekwondo as freestyling or shooting into empty nets has to do with football, honestly.
  • The Death of Live Singing: I have to say I was SHOCKED reading this piece and discovering that people who sing live these days don’t necessarily sing live (next you’ll be telling me santa isn’t real, etc etc). Still, as the NYT article here linked points out, given the astronomical sums fans are spending on gig tickets these days there’s an expectation that everything will be PERFECT – and if that means running your vocal through autotune to make sure you hit that middle-C every time every night then, well, so be it! On reflection it perhaps explains how certain artists are able to maintain perfect pitch while being hoisted 100 ft above a baying crowd by their toes.
  • The Death of Hobbies: I think this is the third or fourth version of this argument – or at least vaguely-thematically-linked thinkpieces – I have featured this year, and I promise it’s the last one; this is the WSJ on how simply ‘having a hobby’ isn’t really a think any more, and instead everything is expressed in terms of GOALS and ACHIEVEMENTS and ATTAINMENT (I saw a reference the other day to ‘your baking goals’ and, er, isn’t the goal of baking simply ‘eating delicious cake’? What is WRONG with us?). This is obvious, but, equally, feels like something we should continue pointing and tutting at because it feels MISERABLE and JOYLESS and we should all go back to just doing things badly for fun: “This desire to optimize is fueled by metrics and digital record-keeping. Letterboxd (for movies you’ve watched), Goodreads (books you’ve read), Backloggd (video games you’ve played) and Beli (restaurants you’ve visited) are just a few of many popular apps to track hobbies. “As soon as you put a metric to something, people want to maximize that metric, even if the metric is nonsensical or not real,” Inzlicht says. But these extrinsic measures also reduce the pleasure we derive from leisure over time. In other words, “it feels like a job,” Inzlicht says. By putting numbers to hobbies or posting about them online, “you’re making it an obligation to yourself and, ultimately, it will undermine your performance,” he continues. As Alfie Kohn argued in “Punished by Rewards,” praise causes people to lose interest in the task itself, turning play into work.”
  • The Dominican Baseball Factory:I know very little about baseball other than the fact that matches last forever, it is seemingly a sports-based excuse for Americans to eat terrible, overpriced fast food at stadia, and it makes cricket look like an exciting, dynamic day out. The only other fact about the sport which sticks in my mind is how astonishingly, violently well-remunerated its players are – seriously, if you’re not aware of the payscales in baseball and you think that footballers are overpaid then I encourage you to open a new tab and look up the top earners in the MLB this season (you may want to lie down afterwards). Which, perhaps, explains why the wider business of baseball is packed full of Interesting Characters (otherwise known as criminals and parasites), some of whom are described in this superb (if very sad) longread about the system that finds talented kids in Dominican Republic and prepares them for the Big Show. This is, effectively, all about trafficking minors – kids are literally bought and sold as commodities, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the people making the cash here are not the children or their families. If you think this is unique to baseball, by the way, I advise you to dig into the way in which players from Africa make their way to Europe because OH BOY is that also not a fun series of stories.
  • Bistromaxxing: Poncey food bible Vittles now, with a fascinating piece about the rise of ‘bistro’ culture in China – or at least the Chinese interpretation of what ‘bistro’ culture is, and how it reflects both Eastern interpretations of what constitutes ‘French chic’ and the unique qualities of Chinese cuisine and culture. “When I spoke to Wang in May, she said she was experiencing bistro fatigue. ‘I’m a textbook example of their ideal customer,’ she says, ‘[but] even I reached the point where I felt that eating [at them] was getting pretty boring.’ A standard formula had emerged, she believed: take a few random ingredients – a burrata and preserved egg, for instance – toss them together and call it a day. Given that the typical price point per meal was around 200–300 yuan (£22–33), more with wine, she had expectations of quality (a typical meal at a no-frills neighbourhood restaurant would cost around a tenth of that). Additionally, more and more bistros began to simply serve traditional dishes on smaller plates. The bistro owners I spoke to identified other issues. They all associated the downward trend in quality with the sheer number of new openings that copied the aesthetic, but not the substance, of the bistro. ‘Everything is calling itself a bistro,’ Liu says, highlighting places with ‘traditional wok cooking’ that ‘choose some random wines’. He says that the term bistro now describes an evening cafe, with wine instead of coffee. The only reason people tend to talk more about the food is because it is easier to talk about than wine, he thinks.”
  • Where’s The Beef?: A dozen or so years ago I was doing some work with a London-based VC firm and one of their high-profile investments at the time was a company called ‘Memphis Meats’ which was at the vanguard of the movement to create lab-grown animal proteins from cell samples and which I confidently predicted would never amount to anything because the name was terrible. The company changed its name, but it’s still waiting for its breakout success – this is a SUPERB piece of writing, in Harper’s, about the wider market for vat-grown meat and why, after decades in development and untold millions of investment, we don’t appear to be any closer to actually chowing down on some synthetic steak anytime soon. The reasons, briefly, are money and scale and the fundamental ickiness factor in the whole enterprise – it’s worth reading the whole piece, though, because it’s brilliantly-written, fascinating and very funny indeed: “In the afternoon, we all tried to rally for a tasting of products by food startups. At last, I was sampling things. I drank some kind of fizzy peach tea. It was not immediately obvious to me what the innovation was, so I asked the young guy handing out the cans about it. It’s supposed to be refreshing, he said. Like after a run you can drink one and it won’t make you puke. Curiously, though, there was no cultivated meat on offer. The Research Triangle may be an industry hub, but the product did not seem to be available here. The product was still a prototype, or the product was too expensive to give out as samples. The closest thing on hand was plant-based vegan meat. I tried wheat-based turkey and wheat-based pepperoni from a company called The BE Hive. I tried “some kind of pulled meat,” as the person wheeling it out from the kitchen described it, from a company called Delight Soy. It had a stringy texture and was an orangish brown. I tried a fungi-and-soy-based salmon substitute from a company called Juicy Marbles. This one was very close to tasting like salmon. They’d gotten something right, everyone around me agreed. To our wonder and dismay, Juicy Marbles had nailed the fishiness. Probably algae in there, someone remarked. We nodded. Yes, probably algae.”
  • Bryan and Kate: I think I have managed to completely avoid featuring writing about tedious longevity bore Bryan Johnson in Curios to this point – well done, Matt! – but I am going to make an exception now because this is just too, too perfect. Another Business Insider piece, but I promise it is worth it because Zak Jason, the journalist who was invited into the Johnsonian compound to interview the man and his partner Kate (a woman who I will never meet and the details of whose life will be forever opaque to me, but who I will never be able to forget has a remarkable vaginal  microbiome), does a wonderful job of just letting the pair hang themselves; the details! The things they choose to share! The accompanying photos WHICH ARE ALL PROVIDED BY JOHNSON HIMSELF!!!! Honestly, this is all just too wonderful, even if by consuming it you are, to an extent, contributing to the continued existence of Brand Johnson (which is something Johnson and Kate are VERY keen to see flourish, it’s fair to say).
  • The Sexual Revolution of the Imagination: This is relatively short, but it articulates something I have been thinking for a while but hadn’t previously had the vocabulary for – to whit, the rise in people identifying sexually with non-human, fictional entities: “I think I’ve arrived at a hypothesis: we have gone through a sexual revolution of the imagination. Fictosexuality seems to be becoming more visible. Normie (often Gen Z) family members are sending me Instagram posts from ficto accounts. Maybe it just broke containment from the further reaches of fandom — but whatever the case — it resonates with people, it’s not just some weird thing people found online and are poking fun of. In fact, it’s my impression that for people under 20, being familiar with the ficto identity — or even knowing someone personally who’s ficto — isn’t particularly unusual. Let me stop you right there, Gen X reader: I don’t simply mean having a crush on a fictional character. I know you experienced that. So do we all! In my experience, identifying as ficto can involve one or all of these:a hobby, artistic practice, or community membership; a fully embraced sexual orientation; being in a relationship with a fictional character. This is distinct from AI companionship, even when the two overlap. (And from what I’ve seen, many fictos are anti-AI.)”
  • The Zuckerberg Profile: Honestly, I don’t think this has received anywhere near enough love this week – it is a SUPERB piece of profile writing by Jeremy Stern, not necessarily because it contains pullable quotes (it doesn’t really), but because it absolutely presents a sense of the subject as a whole, gives a sense of the Unified Zuckerberg Worldview which I’ve never really gleaned before, and, though the very obvious absences (there’s a very real sense throughout that Zuckerberg did not give much away in the sit-down chats, and so much of what you get from this is delivered through the colour commentary) presents an idea of Who This Fcuker Is which I don’t think I’ve quite gotten from any other piece about him before. It’s also, for reasons I can’t quite pinpoint, very sad (to me at least), although that possibly comes from the impossibility of someone like me (lazy, unmotivated, underachieving, comparatively-moronic) understanding someone like him (not lazy, terrifyingly motivated, objectively-not-moronic-at-all). This really is excellent and very, very nicely-written: “I note that Musk is not particularly good at speaking in public, but that he is fully himself, which makes him free in a way Zuckerberg is not. All of Musk’s bottomless flaws are right there on the surface for everyone to see, which is why millions of people hate his guts, and also why millions of people get to feel like personal stakeholders in his dreams. Whereas Zuckerberg is an easier mark, Musk’s lack of concealment paradoxically makes him harder to hit. It somehow makes sense that Musk is the man who builds rocket ships to escape Earth, whereas there has always been something dissonant in Zuckerberg as the man who connected billions of individuals in a web of their own self-expression.”
  • Tuesday: I have featured Spencer from Scope of Work’s personal writing in here a couple of times before, and each time have remarked on how much enjoy the *feel* of his writing, the tone and cadence of it; this piece, in which he writes about going to the park and working out with other people there, is a perfect example of what I adore about his writing. It’s simple, unshowy and unsentimental, and nothing meaningfully *happens*, but it feels honest and true and, for want of a better word, real in ways that much personal writing simply doesn’t.
  • Attention: The first of two short pieces of fiction to close with, now; this is a very funny, if painfully-accurate, piece about ‘creative’ agency work, and relationships and people and The Modern World and Jesus Christ did it make me wince repeatedly in pained recognition. Also, I am reproducing this para in full because it made me angry that I am not this good: “So they’re leaning into that lack of control (chart showing surge in Gen Z sports betting; blurry photo of woman bound and gagged in dungeon, bottom text, “Now I can finally chill”; headline, “Why Young People Aren’t Saving for Retirement”; viral GIF of woman falling down hole), caring less about living their values (YouTube thumbnail: “I TOPPED A COP?!?!”; post, “some of you mfs acting like Messrs Homo and Gayguy”; condom use down among 18–24yos; “TheeSoberGirl Relapses: ‘I Got Bored’”; pop star publicly apologizes for publicly apologizing: “I’m sorry . . . to myself!!”; stand-up clip, “Imagine a pedophile with executive dysfunction. Just no kids at all”; video of pundit fatally shot on college campus, caption, “bro let out a yelp”; supercut of teens repeating phrenological misinformation), and turning to nihilism and hedonism. (Report on Gen Z “doom spending”; fake ad for 2-in-1 Gun Hat, “It’s Right by Your Mouth!”; low health bar added to photo of dead biker; event page, “When Global Warming Reaches 1.5°C We’re Smoking Crack”; podcast clip, two girls: “Why are we talking about history when we’re reborn every day? We need to be feeling the angels . . .”; podcast clip, two guys: “You’re not me. I’m not you. So what are we doing here?”; glitchcore lyrics, “take the stripes out my drink imma die tonight / put MORE stripes in my drink imma die tonight”; credit card debt reaches all-time high; trend report on “moneycore”; Prada-branded noodles sell out in an hour; Cheetos-branded hojicha sells out in an hour; Cheetos-branded hojicha-flavored vape sells out in an hour; cocaine-flavored weed; weed-flavored cocaine; “finally saw her pussy and it was square” (quote post: “This didn’t happen.”); #TrepanningSummer, “i’m putting matcha in there”; plane goes missing, “it must feel so good to be gone”; viral GIF of woman falling down hole but altered so she’s smiling, “in 30 years i’ll have enough money to purchase this hole”; woman falling down hole but she’s blue; woman falling down hole but she’s 12; “LifeProTip: Do something wrong? Pretend you didn’t. You could have not”; hole falling down a woman; snake with a lump in it, the lump is X-rayed, the lump is a photo of the snake; benzo use up; marriage rates down; loneliness deadly; loneliness everywhere; deadliness everywhere; streamer screaming at a self-service kiosk, “Scan my face. I’m not using it. No one wants to make this face famous. No one wants to fcuk on this face.”) “
  • Blood Boy: Our final link of the week is to a short story in Granta by Hansen Shi, about Silicon Valley and investment and queerness and nemeses and and and and. Unsettling, quietly-creepy and perfectly-formed, this is both superb and coldly-unpleasant (a compliment, in case you couldn’t tell).

By Anna Uddenberg

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

 

Webcurios 11/09/26

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Reading Time: 41 minutes

 

It is frankly terrifying to me that we are 14 years from Danny Dyer’s seminal 11-year anniversary commemoration of 11/9 (look, it’s been 25 years, let’s reclaim the fcuking date structure shall we?) – SO LIKE SANDS THROUGH THE HOURGLASS ARE THE DAYS OF OUR LIVES, EH???

Anyway, I went to Helsinki (my main takeaway, by the way, was FCUK ME do the Finns drink; I am a man who is comfortable admitting that he has a…troublingly-symbiotic relationship with booze, but even I was taken aback by the number of people (grown adults! One in a fcuking TUXEDO!) who I saw on what I assume was a Normal Saturday in Helsinki being sick on the streets and in bins. I was in one bar in which a grown woman at one point just sort of toppled backwards into a table, overcome by drink, at which point the friendly bouncer righted her, checked she didn’t seem to be concussed and then offered to get her another drink, which, well, is that ok? Hm) and then I came back, and now England’s gone all racist again and The Machine may be trying to kill us and Oh Christ I would quite like to go into hibernation for a few decades because I am getting some Bad Vibes about the ones to come.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should tell your friends to sign up to this instead of Patriot Platform.

***YOUR REMINDER THAT VOTING IS OPEN FOR ANOTHER FORTNIGHT FOR THE 2026 TINY AWARDS! THANKS TO ALL OF YOU WHO HAVE VOTED AND WRITTEN ABOUT IT AND SHARED THE LINK, IT IS VERY MUCH APPRECIATED!***

By Bea Sloss

LET’S START THIS JAM-PACKED EDITION OF CURIOS (DEAR GOD I HAVE SO MUCH TYPING IN MY FUTURE) WITH A NEW MIX BY TOM SPOONER AND HIS LOVELY COLLECTION OF RECORDS! 

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD PUT A CHEEKY TENNER ON RACHEL MILLWARD BEING GREEN PARTY LEADER SHOULD ZACK FCUK IT IN HOLBORN, PT.1: 

  • Infinite Slop: Amidst the current wave of breathless speculation as to the probability of The Machine causing a full, species-level collapse within the next decade (on which, in the unlikely event you give a fcuk what I think, it is far, far more likely that it will cause the economy and labour market to explode, which, frankly, will probably feel like species-level collapse; maybe…maybe we should be worried about that instead of once again focusing on the scifi stuff? Just a thought!) there’s also been one of those very clear step-changes in model capability over the past month or so; not just the release of Astra (on which a bit more later on), but also evidently a shift in the cost of video models, as evidenced by stuff like Infinite Slop, a new always-on AI-generated TV channel which shouldn’t be entertaining but which I am forced to admit is…weirdly compelling. It is exactly what you’d think – a Twitch-esque interface, with users making suggestions as to what they want to see next; you can vote on your favourite suggestions, which then get queued up to be rendered by AI video in a sort of infinite nonsensical sketch show type-thing, all made with…some Chinese video model, afaict. Everything here is brainless, mindless, nonsensical rubbish, but  the rapid shifting from sketch to sketch means it’s…quite hard to stop watching, which I feel quite grubby admitting. It’s 7am! Why am I watching a gorilla repeatedly punching a meerkat in the face on the streets of New York? Why is the meerkat now crooning to an anime girl in the style of Perry Como? Why is the chat obsessed with getting the channel to render ‘anime catgirls’? I don’t think this is good, but I do think that it’s…not actually that dissimilar to just sitting and scrolling blankly through Reels or TikToks, honestly, which suggests that we’re not that far away from AI-generated feeds being compelling enough to actually replace human-generated content, at least in part. No, I don’t like it either, but, well, here we are! Oh, and here’s another variation on this theme, should you be curious. And this one’s an infinite, AI-generated QVC, selling…actual products, as far as I can tell, which is sort-of interesting from a conceptual point of view (although depressing as all fcuk when you take a minute to think about – so, er, maybe don’t! SMOOTH BRAINS ALL ROUND!).
  • Throng: Back in the boom days of Bluesky a couple of years back there was a trend for fun little ways of visualising the feed in novel and curious ways; now that the platform is very much not booming that appears to have dropped off a bit, but this is a really nice variation on that theme. Log into the site and you will be presented with the Bluesky feed as a 3d landscape with all the different posts represented as Actual 3d People, all sort of running at you and shouting (there’s a text-to-speech element here), with spatial audio that means that posts are louder the closer you are to the poster, and, look, while this is obviously an objectively-terrible way in which to experience social media from the point of view of ‘having the faintest fcuking clue what is going on’, it’s also a pretty much perfect rendering of what it actually feels like to stand inside the firehose and have a bunch of strangers shouting at you about furry anime and why you are evil for using AI. Odd, but sort of wonderful and Definitely Art.
  • Get Assessed: This is a little game/experiment thing designed for use with your LLM of choice by my friend Andrew Sheerin; basically it’s a prompt that you plug into your Trusted AI Companion which instructs it to determine, based on everything it ‘knows’ about you based on your past interactions with it and who you are and what you do, how useful you are to society and, specifically, how long you would be spared for in the inevitable forthcoming Machine Apocalypse; will you make it into the final decile of humankind, or will The Machine decide that you’re destined to be mulched in Wave 1? SO EXCITING! I like this quite a lot, partly because it’s a fun premise, partly because it’s…interesting watching how seriously people seem to take it, and how it fcuks with people’s sense of self-worth, but mainly because it’s sort of a perfect example of so much Machine output – it absolutely *looks* profound and meaningful, and it *feels* profound and meaningful because, well, it’s talking about US and WE are profound and meaningful…but, basically, it’s a lot of meaning-shaped w4nk. Anyway, give it a go and see how long YOU are likely to last when the paperclip maximisers get into their stride.
  • The Rave Archive: Per the blurb, “An independent digital archive connecting recordings, artwork, artists, promoters, venues and the history around them.” I’m slightly conflicted about this – on the one hand, this is a really cool project and a great attempt to bring together a range of disparate materials and sources around UK rave culture from the 80s and 90s; on the other, this bears all the worst hallmarks of AI-generated webwork, a dull UX and FAR TOO MUCH EMPTY, SOULLESS COPY. Honestly, take a look at all the different sections and their headers/descriptors – there is SO much w4nky prose that simply doesn’t need to be there, and which makes the whole thing actively harder to parse and navigate than it need be (and yes, I am well aware of the hypocrisy inherent in a 10k+ word newsletter berating someone else for needless prolixity – also, though, fcuk off, this is my newsletter and I will write as many fcuking words as I like…oh, fcuk, that was another 20, balls balls balls). Anyway, this is cool and all, and features loads of great tracks and a pretty comprehensive history of some of the early pioneers of the scene, but also I wish it wasn’t so…Machine-y.
  • Alexandria: Another of Ethan Mollick’s experiments with new AI tech, this time him messing around with the new OpenAI model, Astra, and using it to build him a 3d representation of the Library of Alexandria which you – LUCKY YOU! – can move around in 3d, learning about its history; per the blurb, it’s “a walkable interpretation of a city district and the royal Mouseion during the reign of Ptolemy II. Streets connect the library to houses, shops and working quays. Their precise layout is invented, and the reading collection is not a recovered inventory” (as you can tell, Astra has not learned to write any better). The main thing I’ve seen in the wake of this model’s release is a HUGE wave of newly-created 3d experiences spun up with AI; there’s obviously been a new set of capabilities unlocked which mean that ‘making stuff with 3d graphics’ is now trivial-ish, which is…sort-of cool, although (and I will share some examples towards the end when we get to the games in a couple of hours’ time OH GOD) they all tend to share similar negative qualities and quirks. Still, it’s impossible not to be impressed at the fact that you can literally now tell The Machine ‘make me a 3d version of the library of Alexandria that I can walk around in my browser and which will teach me its history and mythology’ and it will just…do it. BONUS IMPRESSIVE ASTRA EXPERIMENT!: Apologies for the X link, but this is pretty cool; someone plugged Astra into a robot arm and filmed it ‘learning’ to paint the Golden Gate Bridge. The link here takes you to a timelapse video of its various attempts, and seeing it improve over various iterations is…not-unspooky, I have to say.
  • Break Flow: Ooh, I do like a high-concept artwork. I was sent this by its creator, Hector, who wrote to me to tell me about it (he used AI to translate his original French, which is why it reads like MachineSlop): “BreakFlow is a website and a connected machine where anyone can pay €1 to trigger, live, the irreversible destruction of a plaster cast — the negative of an everyday piece of consumer packaging. Ghosts of objects. The debris is selected, bagged, labeled with the participants’ names, and kept in the installation. The leftover scraps are cast into new “fragments of the real,” ready to be destroyed. BreakFlow loses money on purpose. Every euro, every cost and the residual debt are public, in real time, and the growing debt is, in a way, the value of the work. Each session is a different proposition, and the next one takes place on September 12th (2nd live session). I’m not after profitability, but if it finds its audience, BreakFlow will grow endlessly. As long as the public keeps buying, BreakFlow stays alive.” I LOVE THIS – pointless but also oddly-meaningful, persistent and futile and FOREVER…basically this feels to me like a spiritual cousin of Web Curios insofar as noone cares and it takes a lot more out of me than it gives back, and it will NEVER STOP (don’t worry, one day I will die and you will be free of these emails). Anyway, you can pay a Euro to be part of an artwork, and that feels like a reasonable return to me.
  • Championship Gurning: Friend of Curios Matt Round is BACK with a fun new project which asks you to gurn into your webcam and scores you based on how hideously-twisted you can make your face (NB – should you be unaware of what ‘gurning’ means, take a moment to think about the face that people make when they have taken a pill and they come up a *little* too hard and fast all of a sudden – THAT is gurning. You’re welcome!). This is both fun and weirdly-addictive, although I couldn’t help but be struck with the fear that the wind might change and my face would be stuck in a forevergurn. Oh, Matt is also asking that people be brave enough to share their gurns and scores on social media; obviously I would rather die than ever Post Face, but if you’re less terminally-dysmorphic than I am then why not get involved?
  • Multiple Horse Theory: This is very, very silly but equally it made me laugh and so I am presenting it to you in case you’re also charmed by a straight-faced debate over the number of horses that there are in the world, and whether it is possible that there is more than one. Fine, this is all AI and ordinarily I wouldn’t link to it, but I can’t pretend that the premise didn’t make me laugh, and the commitment to the (very, very dumb) bit is deep enough that it’s worth a click. I mean, look, how can you not be slightly charmed by a page whose central premise can be summarised thusly: “For centuries, mankind has operated under one basic assumption:There is a horse. Multiple Horse Theory asks a dangerous question: What if there is another horse?”
  • Odyss, The AI Necklace: I think, although I can’t be sure, that this might be the most fcuked-up idea for an AI wearable I have yet seen; my provisional note for this one read ‘the anorecklace’, which, honestly, WELL DONE MATT, GOOD GAG! Anyway, if you have ever wondered ‘what exciting new vectors in the world of eating disorders will the new tech wave bring to us?’ then WONDER NO MORE! Odyss is a spectacularly-messed-up-sounding concept – an AI-powered necklace that, er, monitors what you eat. Oh, look, it *sounds* benign – who could object to this? “ODYSS N1 is an AI dietary necklace built to make nutrition awareness feel more natural in everyday life. By reducing the need for manual logging, it helps people build a clearer picture of how they eat over time.” But take a moment to think about exactly how fcuked up it is that you’re being encourage to don a device which will record every single thing you ingest and track its calories – is this…massively fcuking disordered eating? I THINK IT IS!
  • The 101 Plays Itself: Not a million miles away from Train Jazz from earlier this year, this is a neat little (AI-created) project which uses live footage from a traffic cam on California’s Highway 101 to generate music on the fly based on vehicles passing through the feed. It’s…ok, fine, you’re probably not going to dance to it, but it’s such a fun idea and I think there’s something slightly wonderful about the fact that things like this can just be made now thanks to open webcams and machine coding. Also, and this made my day yesterday, someone’s made this for a camera in London! Specifically, one Adam Banks spun it up for a camera pointing at the A12 in Leytonstone – THANKYOU ADAM BANKS I LOVE YOU!
  • Any Human Ever: This has done NUMBERS over the past week or so, and there’s every chance you will have seen it already – if not, though, you might find it an interesting little experimenttoything. Basically the site lets you play THE LOTTERY OF HUMANITY – based on available information about population distributions over time, health data and the like, the site lets you click a button and imagine yourself as a single individual in history, based on EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER LIVED, EVER! If you were to emerge from behind the veil of ignorance (little bit of Rawls there for the real heads!) into the life of a person anytime and anywhere in human history, what sort of life might you have had? It turns out that, statistically, it is INCREDIBLY likely that you would have died in infancy like the vast majority of all people who ever lived, but press the button enough times and you will be a grandmother to 19 kids, dying in a Sumerian invasion at the age of 46; a child laid low by dysentery at the age of 10; a victim of the black death in medieval Europe…the main takeaway from this, predictably, is FCUK ME WE ARE LUCKY TO HAVE BEEN BORN NOW (much as it might occasionally feel like the opposite is true), alongside the general feeling that it is REMARKABLE we have made it this far. This is fun – also, though, I found it interesting that despite it all being very clearly AI-generated it received widespread love amongst a pretty broad swathe of people, suggesting that people will put up with The Machine if the idea behind what it spits out is strong and appealing enough (or that people are really fcuking bad at discerning AI-generated webwork).
  • Dreaming Together: This is SUCH an interesting project – this one you will need to spend some serious time with, but if you’re in the market for some experimental fiction then it might be right up your street. Its creator dropped me a line the other week, introducing it thusly: “This is an odd one. For the past 4 years, I’ve been writing a very experimental internet novel. It’s presented as a collection of found forum posts about a high schooler who fell in love with a foreign pop star (and her ‘leaked’ diary). He decides that to prove his love (to himself), he must meet her in his dreams.  The project is totally non-commercial, and was created only because I have strong opinions on what the internet novel™ could be.” Ok, I have read bits of this (although, full disclosure, I simply haven’t had time to go more than a few thousand words deep) and while it’s not personally My Sort Of Thing I am SO happy that it exists; I adore writing that plays with medium and form like this, and there’s something really nicely done about the way in which the different media play off each other in the narrative. If you’re the sort of person who’s happy to read (a lot of) text on your laptop and the premise sounds interesting to you then I strongly suggest you set aside some time to explore this one.
  • UK Council Spend: A cool little dataviz project by Ben Tossell, which shows what UK councils have spent the most money on in the past year based on available accounts; possibly useful to some of you, but in the main it’s just fascinating to receive confirmation of how much public money has to be spent on adult social care, and how obviously-inadequate that spend still is, and how fcuking TERRIBLE so many councils outside of London are at breaking down their costs.
  • Made By Humans: A…slightly-depressing canary in the journalistic coal mine, this. “Made By Humans sits inside your CMS and flags text, images, video and audio content for signs of AI manipulation supporting (but not replacing) human editorial judgement. No AI detection system is infallible, but Made By Humans brings all the best-in-class technologies available into one easy-to-use editorial workflow. It protects your audience from being misled and safeguards your publication’s reputation.” Does it…does it seem like a good sign when we need to create automated systems to help editorial teams tell whether words and pictures and videos are real before they publish them? IT DOES NOT!
  • The September 11 Documents: This is not visually engaging or ‘fun’, but it is an interesting and useful approach to data by the City of New York – it has made thousands of documents relating to the September 11th attacks available to read and search, so researchers and historians can dig into the immediate aftermath of the event, the social and environmental impact it had, and how the response was coordinated by the City’s various branches. There’s no fun visualisation here and it’s very much one for the curious academics amongst you, but there’s a lot in here should you wish to explore (and, more generally, there’s something really interesting about being able to see the way in which a set of civic institutions responded to something so insane and violent).
  • Folding Story: On the one hand, I LOVE the fact that this website, which is basically ‘massively collaborative online Exquisite Corpse’ has been going for 16 years, and that it’s full of weird, often nonsensical, sometimes oddly-poetic pieces of collaborative storytelling by complete strangers; on the other, I really hate that its recent glow-up has come about because of AI, and that as a result the landing page reads so fcuking horribly. A tip to Noah, its creator who sent it to me: DON’T LET THE MACHINE WRITE YOUR WEBSITE COPY WHEN YOUR WHOLE PROJECT IS ABOUT WORDS FFS! Still, this is fun and worth an explore, and it contains genuinely lovely examples of community-created writing like this, which makes me glad it exists.
  • Nuke Simulation: Yes, I know, nuke sims aren’t new – this one, though, lets you see a full 3d model of wherever you’re choosing to drop the bomb, so you can really IMAGINE the death, destruction and irradiated winds you’re set to inflict on several hundred thousand blameless people.
  • The Last Tango: Now that Lionel Messi has announced his retirement from international football, you might want to enjoy a bit of digital reminiscence of his performances at the last World Cup (which was, astonishingly, only a couple of months ago – HOW DOES IT FEEL LIKE DECADES HAVE PASSED SINCE THEN???), with all of his goals from the tournament rendered as oddly-pointillistic, Kinect-style animations. This is a little less shiny than it initially looks – I would personally have enjoyed the ability to shift the camera perspective a bit more than you’re able to – but there’s something pleasingly-fluid about the animations here and it’s never not beautiful to watch the greatest footballer ever doing amazing, vaguely-incredible things with his feet.
  • Kids Trends: Oh this is LOVELY – Riley Walz has made this site, collecting kids drawings and making them searchable. Per the ‘about’ section, “Kids shape culture, and their drawings show what captures their attention. I scraped over 100 million drawings and paintings from Artsonia, an online student art gallery, to explore almost 20 years of favorite characters, passing obsessions, and everyday life.” Honestly, I am barren and childless and dead inside, and generally couldn’t give two fcuks about the cuteness of children, but it’s impossible not to be charmed by these – also, it is SO INTERESTING to type in different things and see the myriad ways in which small minds choose to interpret them – seriously, just type an animal, or a cartoon character or superhero or IDEA into the search bar and marvel at all the different ways the tiny lunatics have chosen to render them. Magical, honestly.
  • Unusual Suspects: Prolific genius of fun web projects Neal Agarwal is BACK, with a new and SUPER-FUN little game/toy/thing – it places you in the shoes of a police sketch artist, tasked with drawing accurate pictures of criminals based only on the vague descriptions provided to you by witnesses; in this universe, all the crimes are being committed by cartoon characters or corporate mascots, so you’re being tasked with identifying which from the clues and then rendering them faithfully enough for the image recognition model sitting behind this to work out that, yes, that really *IS* Grimace from the McDonald’s extended universe. This is North America-centric, which means that I was forced to try and remember what the fcuk Chester The Cheetah of Cheetos ‘fame’ looks like, but thanks to the tedious supremacy of US pop culture there’s a non-zero chance that you’ll be familiar with enough of these to make it playable, wherever you may be from. This is SUCH a good idea and so nicely executed, as per with Neal’s stuff.
  • Become A Glider: Enable your webcam, park your sense of shame, stick your arms out as though you’re in the playground pretending to be a plane (NOT ONE FLYING INTO A BUILDING, THOUGH, ESPECIALLY NOT TODAY!) and use your body movements to pilot a glider around a landscape. You will look VERY SILLY.
  • Choose Your Own Adventure Stories With AI: Jesus, what a clunky title; sorry about that. Still, at least it broadly communicates what this is and what it does – it’s a storytelling platform called Diverge, which basically lets you create branching, animated narratives – each story starts with a single static image, which contains a selection of narrative hotspots, each of which will push the story in a certain direction; clicking one triggers an animation into the next scene, which again presents various options, etc etc ad infinitum. This is an interesting idea, more in theory than in practice – because this is AI, and because we are very much into the ‘grift and monetisation’ era of the tech, all of the examples on the site involve ‘unlocking’ narrative options with Actual Cashmoney, which LOL – but there’s the grain of a good idea in here if you take away the terrible AI writing, the fact that The Machine really can’t tell a story to save its life, and the appalling cashgrab mechanics.
  • Dame Andrea Jenkyns: Dame Andrea Jenkyns is a former MP and Minister in the UK who is now Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire. This is her website. I don’t really know what to say to you other than CLICK THIS NOW AND EXPERIENCE THE WEIRD, ODDLY-FREUDIAN MAJESTY – seriously, there’s something so…so Tory about this, the odd combination of prissy traditionalism and weirdly-Freudian references to her being a ‘mummy’ (what the fcuk is it with Tories and that word, honestly?), and the quite incredible ‘achievements’ page…seriously, it is TOO BEAUTIFUL. Also, click the main link and get a feel for its vibe, and then remember that this is Andrea Jenkyns while a serving Minister in the Sunak government. What a fcuking cnut, eh?
  • The Grey Cartel: This is one of the odder pieces of inbound I have received in a while. This site was sent to me by its creator – it is, as far as I can tell, a non-specific service which purports to ‘get’ or ‘do’ anything you like. Payment on delivery. No, me neither, but I emailed the person behind it and asked them explicitly: “I can’t shake the feeling that you’re offering kidnapping/murder services, which perhaps is the vibe you’re aiming for. ARE you offering kidnap/murder services?”; they promised me they aren’t. Look, can one of you try this out? I am SO SO CURIOUS.

By Philip Dvorak

OUR NEXT MUSICAL SELECTION IS AN OLD FAVOURITE OF MINE – DJ KRUSH AND JAZZ MUSICIAN TOSHINORI KONDO WITH SOME SUPREMELY-90s LOFI HIPHOPJAZZTYPESTUFF! 

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD PUT A CHEEKY TENNER ON RACHEL MILLWARD BEING GREEN PARTY LEADER SHOULD ZACK FCUK IT IN HOLBORN, PT.2: 

  • Innie Social: No, wait, come back, this isn’t *really* a social network! Instead, it’s a sort of Geocities/Tumblr-ish-type platform – ok, fine, with some social bits built in which also reminds me of first-gen MySpace, all built on the AT Protocol and so part of the wider Blueskyish universe and which therefore plays nicely with all the other sites on that part of the web. This feels like it will only ever be a small, niche concern, and quite possibly one that’s only ever going to be used by the furries (it has…quite a yiffy vibe to it, if you know what I mean – and if you do, that’s probably a sign that you should log off for a while because, honestly, you know TOO MUCH), but I like that it exists and there’s something cute and homespun about the general aesthetic which pleases me to a small degree.
  • Bibliotheque Numerique: Are you French? Would you LIKE to become more French? Would you like a huge online repository of French books to read for free online? OH GOOD HERE YOU ARE THEN!
  • Microduck: Ok, this one is an Actual Product You Have To Pay For, and while I try not to feature Actual Commerce on Curios I will make an exception for this because, look, it’s a little open source programmable robot duck and who doesn’t want one of those? NO FCUKER, etc etc! Try and ignore the fact that if you squint it looks as though it might murder you in your sleep (but in a cute way!).
  • 56k: You are, I am almost certain, of an age whereby you can remember the days when logging onto the internet was a slow, painful experienced prefaced by the strange and otherworldly whine of the modem, the annoyance of having your bongo download interrupted by someone else in the house having the temerity to make a phonecall (I SEE YOU) – would you like to go back to those times? No, you wouldn’t, they were sh1t and things are objectively better now – still, if you have younger people in your life who you would like to teach about The Before Times then this will help you educate them; it’s a full recreation of an oldschool PC OS circa, what, 1995ish, complete with old games and an actual, proper dial-up internet connection which will allow you to experience the web at the speeds available to people 30 years ago, ie that of a crippled slug swimming in a sea of molasses. Christ the past was sh1t.
  • BitCam: Oh, this is cute (if you’re a Mac/iPhone person, at least) – an app for iOS devices which will let you take photos in the now-legendary ‘incredibly lo-res pixellated black and white’ style rendered iconic by the early graphical stylings of early Macintosh computers. It’s astonishing quite how strongly this evokes memories of my dad’s ‘cool’ designer friends and their Apple 1 computers, honestly – this is quite a strong aesthetic for 2026, imho.
  • SlitScan: Speaking of cool aesthetics (SEAMLESS!), this is a neat little webtoy to make fun visuals with – it’s quite hard to explain (or at least it is for me right now; we’re into hour three of typing at this stage, and it’s fair to say that I am feeling…less fresh than I was at 7am), but, basically, feed it any picture you like and then use this webpage to turn said image into a weird, slitscanned monstrosities. I like this primarily because the effects it produces are very un-filter-y; there’s something pleasingly manual about the process and hence the results (yes, I know, but it really will make sense as soon as you try it, I promise you).
  • Earshoot: Oh this is cute! Sent to me by its creator, one Lionel Jolles, it’s a music discover map thing – basically plug in any artist you like, or track, and it will help you find similar or related music; it’s not a wholly novel proposition, I know, but I like the aesthetic here; as Lionel described it to me, “a music discovery map where each track you search becomes a node, related tracks drift in around it, and clicking one recenters the map, so you end up with a trail of what you explored. There’s also a small toad that wanders the map and occasionally jumps at bugs; it has nothing to do with the recommendations, it’s just there to make the thing feel a little alive.” Honestly, it’s the toad that makes it for me.
  • Defrag 98: Would YOU like a webpage that replicates with almost perfect fidelity the experience of defragging your hard drive in Windows98? WHY? WHY THE FUCK DO YOU WANT THIS? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? Anyway, here is such a thing for the deviants among you – know that I am eyeing you with immense suspicion right now. Thanks to Dennis Morello, the weirdo who made this and sent it to me (Dennis, I am sure you are lovely but you appreciate that there is something…niche about this, right?).
  • The White House Arcade: As we all wait for IT to happen (it will, one day, he cannot live forever (please God do not let him live forever)), so must we content with the idiocy and crassness and venality of That Fcuking Man’s administration – a small, but particularly gross, manifestation of what a fcuking bunch of cnuts they all are can be found in this new section on the White House website, an ‘arcade’ featuring low-quality rips and riffs on classic titles from yesteryear, all reworked to act as propaganda for the corrupt, racist, venal regime currently in charge of the US (have to say, as I type this this morning and hear the news in the background about Vance’s reception by the Republicans overnight, it strikes me that there is a…non-zero possibility that the US never recovers from this, which is quite an incredible thought for someone whose grown up in an era of superpower hegemony). This is obviously awful and crass and horrible – fun games about deportations! LOL!!!! – but, also, an excellent example of why games are a far more effective communications vector than most people give them credit for. Anyway, credit to Alexey Pazhitnov, creator of Tetris, who objected strongly enough to the regime’s rip of his game (‘Build The Wall’ – yes, they went there!) that they were forced to take it down this week – but, in general, this is all just incredibly gross.
  • Pablo Stanley: A BEAUTIFUL little personal portfolio website presenting the work of one Pablo Stanley; as far as I can tell this is all hand-drawn, with you exploring Stanley’s career and achievements via the medium of a small cartoon avatar of Pablo traversing a cartoon map, occasionally being chased by cartoon antagonists…honestly, this is absolutely charming and you will fall slightly in love with Tiny Cartoon Pablo after a few minutes of wandering.
  • In Flight Simulator: Would you like to accurately simulate the experience of being on a plane? No, probably not, air travel is very, very boring indeed unless you’re in first class, at which point it becomes boring-but-comfortable – there is no world in which it is an experience to be cherished. Still, for reasons known only to the deve;p[er behind this site you can now simulate the entirety of a flight in realtime, including looking out of the window, fiddling with the tray table in front of you and having an immensely passive-aggressive interaction with the person sharing your armrest – ENJOY!
  • Awards Racing: Ooh, this is a FUN GAME – basically quite a shiny, high-spec-looking top down racer battle royale-type thing (yes, I know, but I have a lot to get through and you can work this stuff out for yourselves, come on); I don’t quite get the ‘awards racer’ framing but, frankly, give a fcuk, this has very strong Micro Machines-type vibes to it and it is ACE.
  • Hortle: I have a vague sense that the demography of my readership means that quite a few of you might be Into Gardening, and that, as a result, you might enjoy this game made by Chris Barker for horticulture journal HortWeek (no, me neither), in which you basically just have to correctly identify the flora you’re presented with – the game here is to see how long a streak of correct answers you can get, which, obviously, for an urban-dwelling, black-fingered antigardener such as myself is basically impossible but which for YOU, lovely green-fingered cultivator of roses and the like, will prove an absolute breeze.
  • Mystery Chart:  Ooh, this is SUCH a good idea. Sent to me by its creator, Tim Goudswaard, who writes: “You get 5 daily charts built from public datasets (e.g. WHO and OECD) with the title redacted and you have to guess what the data represents. There’s some hints available if you’re clueless and they get increasingly harder. I’ve got roughly 250 people playing it at this point across the globe. It’s been quite funny to see the snowball effect work in realtime.” Seriously, this feels like something an organisation with access to lots of datasets might reasonably license for their own site because CHRIST is it weirdly addictive and super-interesting.
  • Year To Beat: Another reader submission, this time from Alex-Andre Viik  who’s made this fun little daily game which presents you with five music videos and asks you to guess the year each came out – simple, quick and will have you getting really annoyed at your inability to distinguish 1996 from 1997 (if you’re me).
  • Spaceships: have you ever wondered what it would be like to play a version of Asteroids in which, rather than controlling the spaceship and attempting to shoot the space rocks, you instead control the space rocks attempting to smash the spaceships? No, of course you haven’t you unimaginative little fcuks – still, SOMEONE has and they have built it, and this is a LOT more fun than I expected it to be.
  • Name All The Colours: Or 100 of them, at least? HOW MANY SHADES CAN YOU NAME??? This is…more compelling than I am comfortable admitting, and I like the fact that every shade you correctly identify is presented to you visually, which is helpful in terms of helping me work out what the fcuk ‘teal’ actually looks like.
  • Survive 10 Waves: A cool little top-down shooter, this – your only goal is to survive 10 waves of enemies, collecting powerups and dodging and shooting, and generally enjoying 5 minutes of entirely-smooth-brained fun. Recommended.
  • Doodle District: Ok, so I spent 200 words complaining about poor-quality vibecoded games a few links back, but based on the url I am pretty sure that this is also Machine Output and this one is fcuking ACE. Doodle District is an FPS, with an art style that can best be described as ‘Call of Duty but all drawn in blue biro’, and it is FAST and FUN and the guns are satisfying and you can play multiplayer and this is REALLY QUITE GOOD in ways I wasn’t expecting (and I don’t even like shooters, as a rule).
  • Smash Fun: Would you like to play a version of Super Smash Bros in your browser, in which you can play as literally ANYONE (no, seriously – Barack Obama? Emmeline Pankhurst? Ronaldo? YOURSELF??? All possible, and fcuktonnes more)? Yes, of course you would – to do so you will need to download a Rom from the web, but that’s very easy and the site explains how to do it, and at that point you will be able to happily manifest that long-standing dream of yours in which Moses beats the everliving sh1t out of Lemmy from Motorhead.
  • Gas Station D1ck Pills: A short, branching, lightly-interactive visual novel-type thing; I really liked the writing in this, and the tone, and the…slight feeling of everything being awful and grubby and dying that underpins it; give this a try, it’s a fun five minutes (and there are LOTS of potential endings to find).
  • The Simpsons Hit & Run: This is literally THE FULL FCUKING GAME IN YOUR BROWSER! ENTIRELY PLAYABLE! EVEN ON MY SH1TTY LAPTOP! Honestly, this is the most incredible link I have seen all week – they have all the voices and everything! – and it is SO fun to play and runs surprisingly well and this is what you should all spend the rest of the working day on, seriously, it beats the fcuk out of your stupid pointless job.

By Jerry Hsu

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS A BUNCH OF 70sISH TRACKS EXPERTLY COMPILED BY PARADISE IS A FREQUENCY! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY EMPTY!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Sseongryul: A Korean artist whose work, mostly depicting a boy and girl in school uniform set against clean, stark blue skies and white clouds and fields and semi-rural environments, will make you feel…honestly, the only I word I can think to use here is ‘refreshed’ and while I can’t adequately explain why this is the case I can promise you that it really, really is.
  • Jodie Scott: To be clear, this link is the very opposite of an endorsement, but it feels…oddly germane in the UK given last weekend’s events in Dover and Portsmouth. Jodie Scott is a woman who posts ‘stop the boats’ type content on her Insta, along with the occasional song about how ‘native britons’ need to ‘protect their ethnic heritage’ – while I am certain that Ms Scott would baulk and take umbrage were I to describe these sentiments as ‘ethnonationalist and racist’, Ms Scott is, based on the content on this page, both of those things. I am linking to it mainly because the music is SO SO SO SO SO BAD, and as such it’s an opportunity to laugh (a bit) at a dumb bigot, while at the same time acknowledging that the fact that there are increasing numbers of people in the UK who think that these sorts of sentiments are a) acceptable; b) laudable; and c) vital, and that that fact is…really fcuking miserable, honestly. Anyway, click the link and listen to the song in the pinned post because I really hope Lily Allen issues a strongly-worded copyright takedown and sues the fcuk out of this person.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • Masks Off: It did not, it’s fair to say, feel *great* last weekend when several hundred men (of ‘fighting age’, to coin the phrase so beloved of the right when complaining about asylum seekers arriving in the UK) blockaded the port of Dover while all dressed in black and wearing balaclavas; it didn’t feel great the next day when it all happened again in Portsmouth. This piece in the LRB gives an overview of what happened, why, and who was behind it – it also presents a hopeful coda, suggesting that this sort of display is likely to be counterproductive to the mainstream appeal of anti-migrant rhetoric…look, while I want to believe the author here, I also have spent some time hanging out in the lovely, friendly, welcoming ‘Patriot’ communities on Facebook this week (for professional reasons, to be clear), and I am not sure that said author quite realises how many people there are who are very happy to express open endorsement of militia-style takeovers of the UK, and who seem to legitimately think that this is ‘the only way to stop the boats’ (honestly, future generations will write TREATISES on the 2020s Brits’ obsession with dinghies as the sole cause of all their ills) – seriously, go onto Facebook, type ‘Patriot’ into the search bar and then scroll through the results. If you’re feeling brave, dip into the few Groups that aren’t set to ‘private’ and take a dip in the chat, and then try and maintain your belief that this isn’t a mainstream position in 2026. It’s often said that people on the left rush to use the ‘F’ word when it’s not warranted – in this instance, though, black-shirted men wearing masks standing off against police because they really don’t like brown people does feel QUITE A LOT like that actual thing. Once again I am finding it really hard to believe politicians when they say ‘this is not who we are as a nation’, because increasingly it seems that it really fcuking is.
  • Ballard: Tangentially-related to the previous piece and the fashy wave, this is a really interesting piece in The Quietus about JG Ballard’s final novel, Millennium People, which (in common with the other books he published as part of the loose trilogy which closed out his career) explores Ballard’s thoughts on how violence spreads in modern society and how, in many respects, it’s an inevitable downstream consequence of a certain type of late-period capitalism. I always found Millennium People the weakest of the trilogy (Cocaine Nights was always my favourite, personally), and, as the author points out, there’s a lot of what’s written in there which no longer maps to a post-web world, but, equally, it’s hard not to look back on his work and think that he saw something coming which few others did. “New Internationalist reported on a nationwide rise in anti-immigrant sentiment across the United Kingdom. But it is the motorway towns which provide some of the most particularly lurid examples of this new form of nationalism. Round the far side of the M25 in Epping, protests began outside an asylum hotel, The Bell, after one of its residents attempted to kiss a 14-year-old girl. This grim event lit the touchpaper. The protests became a weekly occurrence. People turned up with dogs, or aimed fireworks and flares at the premises while residents were sleeping. Before long, the protests metastasised into something more organised. Orla Minihane, vice-chair of Reform UK’s Epping Forest local branch, formed the Pink Ladies, a protest group that quickly went national, gathering outside asylum hotels across the country in the name of protecting women and girls. Byline Times reported on the ‘concierge nationalism’ of Essex Spartans, a so-called volunteer community group operating street patrols. Their claims of links to the police and local schools cannot be substantiated. However, Byline Times’ reporting did uncover key members’ links to Homeland Party, a splinter of the neo-Nazi group Patriotic Alternative. Kingdom Come presages something of this climate perfectly: prejudice masquerading as community spirit; acts of thuggery mobilised in the name of civic pride.”
  • Political Advertising and the AfD: Sam Jeffers of Who Targets Me? is a smart thinker who has thought LOTS about How Political Ads Work In The Social Media Age, and this is an interesting reflection on the rise of the AfD in Germany and its recent electoral success in Saxony; Jeffers posits that it’s in part due to the decision by Meta to remove political advertising from its platforms in the EU (due to its unwillingness to comply with proposed EU regulation) which removed the ability for mainstream political parties to reach significant swathes of the electorate and as such provides a disproportionate boost to more fringe political concerns. As he puts it, “This matters because mainstream political parties used these platforms much more than the far right did. Although German parties were never among Europe’s biggest buyers of digital political advertising, parties and other political actors still spent around €14 million on ads in the three months before the 2025 federal election. The AfD accounted for just 2.75% of political ad spending on the major platforms. The Greens spent around ten times as much, while the CDU and SPD each spent roughly five times more. When online political advertising effectively stopped, the biggest losers weren’t the extreme right, but parties in the political centre.”
  • Nepal: In a summer in which we’ve not been short of ‘wow, climate change sure is becoming real!’ moments, the recent Nepalese floods feel like a particularly-pointy example of ‘sh1t getting serious’. This is the LRB (again) on the impact of the disaster and the difficulties faced by a new, young political leadership in dealing with not only its first major infrastructural challenge but also a coming new environmental reality in which a whole new set of (largely terrifying) parameters apply. “A government adept at managing its public image now has the much harder task of rebuilding. As well as the thousands of homes, small businesses and schools that have been lost, several hydroelectric plants have been destroyed. Construction stopped on the Timure dry port, on the overland trade route to China, after floods last year. Together these losses trace Nepal’s aspirations for the century: energy and trade independence, mobility for the rural poor and, in the flooded power-plant tunnels, rare good jobs at home against the tide of migrant labour. There are 21 ‘potentially dangerous’ glacial lakes at risk of outburst flooding in the three major river basins that cut across the width of Nepal. At first it was thought that this flood might have been triggered by a glacial lake outburst, before it became clear that slope failure was the culprit. These events are much harder to study and predict, though probably caused by melting permafrost. The last four summers on Langtang Lirung have been among the five warmest since 1940. Whatever comes of Nepal’s efforts to seek climate reparations, given its young, unstable mountains, its people require more than meteorological vigilance when it comes to resettlement and development.”
  • The Case For Boycotting Generative AI: Gary Marcus has over the past four years of the GenAI hypewave proven himself consistently worth listening to – his list of reasons as to why we might have reached a tipping point when it comes to wanting to put faith in the actions or motivations of Anthropic and OpenAI is pretty compelling, although I personally think that a more effective approach would be applying pressure to governments to take collective, international regulatory action (and, while they’re about it, maybe do the same for social media companies too? JUST A THOUGHT) – it is, though, hard not to read this statement and nod gravely in agreement: “They are already causing harm, and things could conceivably get much worse. They have no serious plan for mitigating the risks of generative AI. The government, too tight with industry, doesn’t either.”  Of course, there won’t be any sort of meaningful boycott or serious goverbmental action because, as I think I have intimated here before, I am now 99.999999% convinced that the world’s leaders have become convinced that the climate stuff is beyond fixing based on currently-available tech solutions, that society-wide behaviour change simply cannot happen in time, and so the only potential way out of the hole we have dug ourselves is to place all our faith in The Machine basically solving physics in the next decade or so and so, well, FULL STEAM AHEAD. Christ, we are so so so fcuked.
  • Brainrot As Dada: A phrase to rival ‘Zendaya is Meechee’, there. I rather enjoyed this New York Times piece which makes the argument that rather than being a dangerous cancer rotting young minds, brainrot content on social is instead a reaction to the cancer, effectively a smooth-brained noping out from the genuinely toxic and mad hypercapitalism of the TikReelSnapscape; on balance this strikes me as…plausible, honestly, because while there may be no mental nutritional value in watching a split-screen vertical video marrying hyperspeed Minecraft building with, say, a virtuoso performance of Dance Dance Revolution, it’s also arguably less bad for the mind and the soul than watching some influencer attempt to sell you on the need to package all of your groceries in individual tupperware for ‘the aesthetic’, or listening to the music of Jodie Scott (see the Insta section above if you have no idea who that is; also HOW DARE YOU SKIP BITS OF CURIOS ffs).
  • Hacking The Navy’s Freezers: Ok, this is very technical and, in the main, I didn’t understand a lot of it. BUT! I did understand enough to think it a REALLY interesting – and not a little troubling – story which speaks to all sorts of things about the online, hyperconnected way in which Everything Works Today. You may not have been aware – I certainly wasn’t – that there has been a spate of reports of late from US Navy outposts about their freezers not working; this article makes the very valid case (since apparently partially-corroborated by the Navy itself) that this may be the result of the Navy’s software being hacked and all the freezers just being turned off at source by a malicious actor. Which is a) fcuking mad from the point of view of vulnerabilities and single dependencies; and b) slightly terrifying when you take a moment to consider the number of other critical systems which are likely built in vaguely-similar ways. Take a moment to read this – you can skim it, there’s a lot of technical stuff in there which you don’t need to parse to get the gist – and then think about how this stuff is likely to play out in a world in which agentic AI swarms managed by malicious actors are a real thing (ie the world right now). FUN TIMES AHEAD KIDS! I wonder at which point we’re going to start thinking quite seriously about the vulnerability of, I don’t know, the entire aviation system.
  • Vinted Brain: An excellent piece in the New Statesman about the new face of shopping addiction and the fact that noone is really talking about the fact that we have…something of a problem as a society with buying tat all the time. Seriously, I live in a house with two other flats, and one of the people in the building is running at a rate of approximately two deliveries A FCUKING DAY, which, Jesus, WHAT THE FCUK ARE YOU BUYING AND WHERE ARE YOU PUTTING IT ALL??? Anyway, I think this is an interesting phenomenon which isn’t taken as seriously as it ought to be – if nothing else it does rather speak to some of the reasons why we possibly need to take a *bit* of personal responsibility for the state of the planet rather than just pointing at data centres and shouting “EVIL!” at them (and yes, I know that this piece focuses on Vinted, but this extends beyond recycled fashion). “In the years since lockdown, the topography of sending and receiving has changed for good. The courier service Evri now delivers an estimated 4.4 million parcels per day in the UK. It handled a billion deliveries over a 12-month period in 2025-26, an increase of 17 per cent on the previous year. Evri considers its primary delivery partner, Vinted, the key volume driver, yet it’s just one of the courier services offered. In the same period, the number of UK lockers installed by Evri’s largest private competitor InPost grew 45 per cent – there are now 15,000 of those dotted around the country. Royal Mail, with its regal name and uniformed worker, was founded on a promise of dignity and personal service, but as it fell into decline expectations were reshaped, and now parcels are dumped and recipients rifle through boxes. Like fast fashion, this is turbo capitalism of the lowest order: a drop in standards so sharp that no one had time to notice.”
  • Print For Teens: Another datapoint for my ‘magazines are coming BACK, baby!’ thesis; this piece in the NYT is very US-centric (and as ever with stuff like this it’s important to remember that the US is so much richer than we are, and so much bigger, that the economics of stuff like this are VERY different), but speaks to the wider appetite amongst younger people for printed materials as an antidote to algofeed, for physical objects as taste and status signifiers, and the appeal of a tightly-curated selection of things to read (YES I AM THE ZEITGEIST!) rather than whatever filters through to you based on your own personalised in-app maths. Basically I still maintain that this is a GREAT time to launch a new magazine and should anyone want to pay me money to write for such a venture I am all ears.
  • Eventslop: On the weird and very now phenomenon that is ‘doing stuff for the content rather than for the experience’, particularly as exemplified by the recent raft of GenZ trendpieces pointing out how much young people love to DO ACTIVITIES – the article suggests that much of this performative ‘doing’ of ‘stuff’ (powerpoint parties! Flower arranging! Screen printing!) is entirely downstream of the need to feed the maw of the ever-ravening content machine, and that there’s nothing ‘real’ about much of this stuff: ““People don’t host real public gatherings anymore; they host ‘eventslop,’ where the main purpose of the event is to generate algorithmic engagement above all else,” Aleksic noted that these events have largely been organized by influencers and suggested they were designed to be filmed “less to create social connections, and more to serve as a free laugh track for whatever crazy stunt is currently happening.” They also rely on trending buzzwords, like “aura” and “Wasian,” he said, meaning they were “very likely orchestrated for algorithmic momentum.””
  • Greg Chism: I will say this for Jon Ronson – MAN is the PR for his latest book doing good work for him. You can’t move for Ronson pieces at the moment, and here’s another one – this is a piece about ex-YouTuber Greg Chism, who was for a while a, er, ‘lawncare influencer’ and who then, via a series of…ill-advised decisions, became very much a target of a LOT of hate online. I will leave you to make your own minds up about the extent to which Chism is a) just an enthusiastic guy who made a few poor calls and has had his life ruined as a result; or b) a calculating monster who was happy to exploit his children for the money and fame to which he had become addicted, but my personal take on this one is that it really does neatly show the problem with both algorithms and ‘content creation’ as a profession, and that audience capture is real, pernicious and likely to drive someone quietly insane (even if they were saner to begin with than Mr Chism was), and that there is something deeply psychologically unhealthy in pursuing a career in which you do things you don’t really like or understand because Very Complicated Maths tells you that’s what you should be doing.
  • The Sperm Racing World Cup: I featured a link to this incredible event back at the start of the year; now, the Paris Review has dropped the Big Read we have all been waiting for, looking into the people behind the story and the odd, short-lived viral phenomenon that was ‘sperm racing’. It may not surprise you to learn that everyone involved in this is a moron child with merch to sell: “Sperm Racing is also about moving product: The company has sold plastic-free boxer-briefs under the brand name Andros, as well as supplements called Sperm Worms, whose website promises “better tasting loads, fertility support, and daily performance in four gummies a day.” Or, per Sam Kriss, who described the company and its now-eighteen-year-old founder Eric Zhu in a February Harper’s dispatch on Silicon Valley, it’s about attention arbitrage. “Sperm Racing seemed to be first and foremost a social media hype machine,” Kriss wrote. “A third of Eric’s staff work on videos, producing a seemingly endless stream of viral content.”  Put another way, Sperm Racing is about future anxiety, the fetish for self-optimization, and the drive to monetize people’s fears and weaknesses, not least their screen habits. (Sperm Racing’s videos are part of a larger crop of social media spermslop that includes, for example, an AI-generated video of a mournful spermatozoa being tortured by a smoldering cigarette and heckled by a hotdog and a hamburger.) But to the company’s credit, people have been asking the questions its project poses for centuries—or anyway, they resonated with me. Questions like: Are the contents of my person inadequate? Am I incapable of producing anything worthwhile? Are my devices futile?”
  • Who Is Paying For All This?: Vittles did an EXCELLENT deep-dive into the London food influencer scene the other week – if you can’t read that because paywall, you can read the slightly-abridged version that appeared a few days later in The Guardian, but the full one really is worth subbing (and then cancelling if you must) for. The upshot here is that noone is making any money and THE CREATOR ECONOMY IS A FCUKING LIE, and how you shouldn’t believe anything most of these people say because they are literally being paid by restaurants to endorse them: “As influencers have become powers in their own right, many have started to ask the same question: how do I get paid? The harsh reality of the industry is that a very small proportion of them make any money. This seems surprising at first. There’s no shortage of internet celebrities who have spun views into riches. But the economics of restaurant influencing is particularly dismal. Tong has a day job, as does Fletcher; the same is true for Bite Twice (@bitetwicefoodreviews, 294,000 Instagram followers). In fact, it seems like nearly all the influencers that come across my feed – Ed Tan (@onehungryasian), Lee (@rollinjoint1) and Christy Lam of @the_lazyfoodie – have either day jobs or side businesses that support their influencing (a significant number of these day jobs are in finance or consulting). Part of the reason for this is that Instagram, the primary platform in the UK for food content, still doesn’t pay for views. TikTok, where some influencers have found success, generally pays between £300 and £750 per million views. But there are other ways influencers can get paid. Shaikh, one of the few to make influencing work full time – and one of the few willing to discuss making paid content on record – tells me she makes advertising content directly for restaurants, which looks like a standard restaurant-visit video but is clearly marked as an advertisement. She declined to say how much she charges. But other influencers, restaurateurs and PRs shared payment rates and documents with me suggesting that, while remuneration varies widely, accounts under 100,000 followers appeared to negotiate £300–600 per post or per visit, while 100,000–250,000-follower accounts negotiate £1,000–1,500 (all payments discussed occurred in the past twenty-four months). Restaurant PR Hugh Smithson-Wright told me that payment could run up to £5,000 from a big global restaurant brand. Several high-end influencers shared solicitations coming from restaurants with me; in these communications, payment offered ranged from a paltry £750 to £8,000.”
  • The Corrections: I don’t have any particular affection for either Jonathan Franzen or his novel The Corrections, but I adored this piece looking back on it after 25 years, and specifically unpacking its opening paragraph; it’s another wonderful bit of writing about writing, and I do love a close reading of a small passage like this which explains the craft that goes into it: “The phrase “world-building” is usually applied to writers of fantasy and science fiction, but it’s no less apt when the imagined world includes real places. The reader has to believe in the universe in which it all happens. From the very first sentences of “The Corrections,” you do.How does Franzen accomplish this? Partly by taking his cue from one of the most canonical (and literal) examples of world-building in the Western tradition: the book of Genesis. He starts with a vortex of formlessness, and sets about the word-by-word process of organizing it.”
  • Paid Phones: Daniel Kolitz, who wrote the superviral piece on Gooning earlier this year, returns with another virtuoso piece of writing, this time about debt in modern America and, specifically, his experience of it, and the apps that exist now in the US which serve both to ostensibly help manage it and also sell you significantly more of it at every single opportunity. This is very funny, but equally horrifying – it does feel rather like a passage which as recently as the 90s would be satirical rather than descriptive. “Certainly, I’m still in the hole. As I write this, I owe $359.96 to Cleo, $31.99 to Albert, $62.99 to Brigit, and $86.12 to Dave. I also, hauntingly, owe thirty bucks to MrBeast. Technically, I owe this money to Step, the payday loan app MrBeast acquired earlier this year to “give millions of young people the financial foundation I [MrBeast] never had.” Currently boasting seven million users, the app really does offer savings accounts for teens, but a quick look at its interface reveals this as a kind of front: “Step EarlyPay,” available to users of all ages, is clearly the core product here. As far as I can tell, MrBeast is the only celebrity to buy a digital lender outright, but it cannot be long before Clavicular, Woah Vicky, et al. are collectively skimming a sizable percentage of Americans’ paychecks. Perhaps, if one wants to stay solvent in the future, one will have no choice but to buy a decent lighting setup and get to work charismatically injecting peptides or fomenting race war on stream. If anything, I’m a poster boy for precisely this looming dystopia: An article I wrote about masturbation went viral, leading to higher-paying writing assignments, which—if and when they’re completed—will allow me, finally, to break out of the payday cycle. That the attention-getting mechanism here was long-form literary nonfiction, as opposed to a TikTok man-on-the-street series in which I pose uncomfortable questions to couples at the mall, does not change the underlying dynamic. Given all this, can I really be sure I won’t come crawling back to MrBeast in time?”
  • Voice Memories: This is beautiful and poignant and sad and I think it’s a wonderful piece of writing; Ian Wang, in The London Magazine, about the recordings he made of his parents during COVID, and memory and memorialisation and narratives and reality and family and and and. Honestly, this is so good: “Ironically, in its noisy, wide-angle rendering of private life, the microphone’s perfect memory is most valuable to me for its subjectivity. A stranger combing through the recordings would learn little about the plot points of my family’s life, but they would learn a lot about everything else: the restless, buoyant dynamics of family conversation; the chaos of the kitchen before dinnertime; the confusion, the arguments; the disarming surprise of vulnerability; the flinty mother, the modest father, the nervous son. How strange to seek to produce a document of fact and end up with a document of feeling.”
  • Two Sketches by Gwendoline Riley: Two short stories, presented as companion pieces, by Gwendoline Riley in The Yale Review. The first in particular – called The Tenant – is an almost painfully well-drawn portrait of a very particular type of modern sickness, but both are excellent examples of shortform fiction.
  • The Couples Therapist: Our final longread this week is another short piece of fiction, this by Ellika Lagerlöf in Granta. It is BEAUTIFUL and odd and unsettling and it made me…quite uncomfortable, and you should read it: “Despite the fact that over the past few months I’d done almost nothing but harp on about and explain my relationship with Gustav to my friends during hour-long phone calls, walks and dinners, it now seemed almost impossible to formulate: that he liked to lie in bed all day long just eating cheese puffs, that there’d be crumbs on the sheets and his fingers turned yellow and he’d then stroke my hair with those fingers, that his idea of taking a walk together consisted of going to the square, which was five minutes away, and back, and that he always cooked the same dishes for us. That after work he’d fall asleep like a baby so I’d have to wake him up, and food would get stuck in the corners of his mouth when he ate, and his stomach and arms were so soft that I could feel them when he hugged me. I hated that I hated it, hated that I shouldn’t hate it, but of course I did anyway and couldn’t stop. ‘I like living an active life,’ is what came out of me. It sounded ridiculous, I could tell by the priest’s eyes. And Gustav nodded silently, his gaze trained on his own hands, his fingers spread across his knees. ‘I think she should relax a little.’”

By Merton Woo

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlDWQ89MCcg

 

Webcurios 28/08/26

Uncategorized No Comments
Reading Time: 38 minutes

 

Hm, it does rather feel that Summer is now OVER – not, to be clear, that I am complaining about the fact that it is no longer threemillion degrees, but there’s been a feeling this week of the world rather rolling its sleeves up again and preparing to Get On With Sh1t, for better or worse.

This, sadly, extends to work, for me at least – while all of you (or at least those of you in the UK) get to enjoy a bank holiday and maybe go to carnival and bogle with a policeman (never, ever bogle with a policeman), I have to fcuk off to Finland tomorrow, to be Pet Writer Monkey at a tech conference. I KNOW, POOR ME, WHY IS LIFE SO HARD, ETC ETC.

Now, obviously I appreciate you couldn’t give two fcuks about the fact that I am going to be toiling away in Helsinki for a few days, but as a result of that I am not going to have time to ingest All of the Internet between now and next Friday and so as such Curios is going to be off next week – normal service will be resumed in a fortnight.

BUT! Lest you think I am leaving you with NOTHING, rejoice in the fact that THE TINY AWARDS SHORTLIST IS HERE AND VOTING IS NOW OPEN! I have written a bit more about it down there, but, basically there are 11 excellent websites up for the award so go and check them out NOW (but maybe leave this open in a tab and come back to it, yeah? I…I do care, you know). SEE YOU IN A FORTNIGHT, WEBMONGS (lest I die of reindeer or something).

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should all VOTE NOW!

By Marta Luccisano

WE KICK OFF THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH A TRIP INTO THE PAST AND ONE OF MY FAVOURITE EVER ALBUMS, ESKIMO SNOW BY WHY? !

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO REALLY STRESS HOW GOOD THIS YEAR’S TINY AWARDS NOMINEES ARE AND WHICH ENCOURAGES YOU TO CHECK THEM ALL OUT AND TELL THE WORLD, PT.1: 

  • Vote in the 20206 Tiny Awards!: FINALLY! It has taken a bit longer than usual this year to get our shortlist together as a result of our esteemed judges having the temerity to do things like ‘take holidays and spend time away from the web’ (no, I don’t understand it either), but we now have our shortlist of websites for the Tiny Awards 2026! Click the link and take some time to explore the 11 websites vying for the coveted title of, er, ‘best small, non-commercial, vaguely-artsy web project of the past 12 months as voted for by some other people on the internet’! Some of these will be familiar to you if you’ve been paying rapt attention to Curios over the year (you…you do pay attention, don’t you?), some of them will be entirely new to you, but, honestly, we have another CRACKING selection of sites which run the gamut from playful to heartbreaking; every single one of these is a reminder of the fact that the web is brilliant and interesting and fun, and that people are making brilliant, weird, funny, beautiful, sad, baffling things EVERY SINGLE DAY, and that the digital world is bigger, deeper and significantly more interesting than social media, and that NOT EVERTHING HAS TO BE SHORTFORM VIDEO FFS. As one of the award organisers I can obviously express no opinions about the nominees other than to say that they are all great and you could do worse than setting aside half an hour to spend some time exploring them; I promise that your life will be marginally better as a result of doing so. Thanks to everyone who nominated a website – now vote! Share! TELL YOUR FRIENDS! The winner will receive a small cash prize and a HAND-MADE TROPHY, made by an actual human artist in the UK, and the warm, fuzzy feeling of knowing that a bunch of anonymous people appreciate their work, so, you know, CLICK THE LINK AND PICK YOUR FAVOURITE WEBSITE!
  • Twitter Now: Do you sometimes wish that you could turn a dial and revert social media to its prelapsarian state? That you could somehow rewind everything so that it was, what, 2011 again, all rageface memes and puppers and doggos and bacon? WOULD YOU LIKE YOUR OLD TWITTER BACK? Well, tough, those days are gone and we will never again see that sort of strange, naive optimism which found us sharing the collective delusion that maybe, just maybe, all being plugged into each other would be a good thing rather than the first step onto the treacherous descent towards madness and civilisational collapse! Still, if you would like to briefly *imagine* that we could in fact go back then you might appreciate the intent behind this Twitter clone which is using the old brand name because, per a court ruling in the US, Elon lost the rights to it when he changed the name to X. So, what Twitter.now offers is…actually I have no idea what it offers beyond the descriptions on the website because the platform’s requesting a sign-on fee of $20 and, well, fcuk off lads. The rationale, as they put it, is to both fund the idea of A New (Old) Twitter, but also that a financial commitment, even a small one, will ensure buy-in from the community – but, look, there simply aren’t enough people in the world who a) want a text-based social network; and b) want one so much that they want to pay for it. Sorry, but there aren’t. Oh, and there’s no real detail about who the money is going to, which, well, also no. Basically this is going to die on its ar$e, but I imagine they’ll make a few grand out of a bunch of delusional webutopians so more power to them I guess.
  • 3d San Francisco: Did you watch the Big GTAVI Reveal Extravaganza yesterday? Did it make you sweaty-palmed and anxious with anticipation to wander around a beautifully-realised urban sandbox? While you wait til late November to gorge yourself on what will be the ludic equivalent of ordering everything off the McDonald’s menu at once, why not pass the time by wandering around an in-no-way-comparable rendering of San Francisco? It’s like GTA, but, er, REALLY SHONKY! In its defence, this isn’t trying to be a game – this is more of a tech demo type thing, showing how a 3d mesh map can be turned into an explorable 3d world, and while it’s not exactly high fidelity it’s also quite fun to stroll around the streets of SF without having to dodge waymos and the several thousand mentally ill people who have been left entirely to fend for themselves as a result of the complete absence of a meaningful social welfare infrastructure (WELL DONE AMERICA). You can walk, you can summon a vehicle, you can even fly – it’s not GOOD, to be clear, but it’s kind of interesting; you remember a decade or so ago when there was a brief vogue for making top-down racing games using Google maps? Well this is like that, but in 3d. PROGRESS!
  • What We Tell AI: I am not,  personally, a high-volume user of AI; there are a few particular use-cases I have for work, but in general I have literally no interest in ‘talking’ to the machine; as such, I find the idea of people spilling their guts and using an LLM to attempt to scry through the revealed viscera to be deeply, deeply weird and, well, entirely-unrelatable. As such, I found this project – per the blurb, “We invited strangers to write a confession about their relationship with artificial intelligence” – interesting and, honestly, quite sad. “What We Tell AI is a project exploring our secrets about our complex relationship with Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) Last September, we set up a box in Dolores Park, San Francisco and asked strangers to write down a confession about their relationship with A.I. Since then, we’ve collected more than 350 handwritten notes gathered in parks, shopping malls, and even AI conferences across the California Bay Area, New York, and beyond. A snapshot of these strange times, WWTAI shines a light on the emerging taboos around AI use and its increasing presence in our intimate lives in 2026.” So all of this is data from North America, and the locations suggest a degree of skew in terms of the types of individual they will have heard from, but still, it’s a really fascinating series of vignettes, windows into the increasingly-personal relationship which some people have developed with their LLM of choice. “ChatGPT knows how much and hard I yearned for a guy, more than my best friend ever would,” reads one; “I cloned my ex’s voice to have a last conversation with her,” reads another. Oh, and lest you think this is all too miserable, there’s at least one in there that says “I think everyone who uses AI is a bad person,” should you need a bit of RESISTANCE amongst the weirdness. WELCOME TO OUR FUTURE!
  • Sound In Space: Very much a ‘I don’t know what is going on here but it looks cool and sounds quite nice, so’ link, this one – Sound In Space is a wepage which presents you with some sort of, er, glowing, throbby orb-type thing in the centre of the screen, surrounded by small dots which are being slowly pulled towards it by a light gravitational field (really selling this, aren’t I?); clicking the big orb and the little light motes makes sounds (pleasing, plinky sounds), and you can fiddle with some settings in the left hand sidebar to automate processes to make it churn out a gently-plinky soundtrack to whatever you are doing. Fcuk, I really have butchered this one; look, just click, it will make some sort of sense to you I promise.
  • Windows 96: Would you like a reasonably-full-featured recreation of Windows 96 in your browser? What if I told you that it came equipped with a bunch of the games that came free with the original OS, including that Space Pinball number which you wasted HOURS on in your childhood because you couldn’t afford actual videogames (what’s that? The sound of…no violins? FINE, please yourselves you fcuks)? Yeah, thought that would draw you in. This is actually lots of fun, and it’s worth clicking around to explore all the different easter eggs that are hidden in the menus; I especially recommend that you find the MP3 player (it’s called BassoonTracker, inexplicably) and treat yourself to the 8bit rendition of The Final Countdown which comes as one of the preset tracks because, honestly, it slaps.
  • Speak Your Voice: Do you remember that voice synth toy from a few years ago, the one which was designed to look like someone’s palate and which you worked by manipulating the digital representations of a human’s fleshy mouthparts to mimic the way in which they work in meatspace? WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T REMEMBER, WHAT ELSE ARE YOU FILLING YOUR BRAINS WITH? FFS, it was called Pink Trombone, it’s here, refresh your memory. Anyway, this is a really interesting and very smart build on that, which effectively tries to use the same tech and principles to clone your voice – give it access to your mic, speak a few sentences, and then listen as the software attempts to replicate the tone of your speech. What’s fascinating about this is that it’s attempting to use the Pink Trombone interface to match your voice – which means that you end up with a weird, slightly-mangled approximation of your speaking patterns, simultaneously recognisable and very, very wrong-sounding. NGL, I have some…issues with hearing voices that sound like this and I therefore found this almost unbearably upsetting to listen to, but it’s very cool nonetheless.
  • Admonymous: Would you like to create an anonymous inbox via which anyone at all can send you ‘feedback’ about yourself? NO GOD NO OF COURSE NOT WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS WHAT THE ACTUAL FCUK IS WRONG WITH YOU (I am still burnt from a comment on a YT video I am in which reads in its entirety ‘icl, I can’t stand Matt Muir’ – I mean, fcuk you too, anonymous YouTube cnut, FCUK YOU)? However, if you somehow think that your life would be improved were strangers on the web afforded the ability to write short, pithy messages about why and how, exactly, you suck, then this link will allow you to do that very thing – er, have fun! NB – any readers wishing to leave feedback can obviously do so by sending me an email. But don’t feel you have to, honestly.
  • QR Trees: You know what would make QR codes better? YES THAT IS RIGHT IT WOULD BE IF YOU COULD MAKE THEM LOOK LIKE TREES! And now, thanks to this link, you can – Web Curios, once again fulfilling all your arboreal needs! You’re welcome, honestly. This is actually very cute, if entirely pointless.
  • Chatto: One of my greatest ‘Christ, I am OLD now’ indicators (other than the volume of grey that gets left on the floor of the barbers, which, Jesus) is my complete inability to get on board with Discord as a platform – I understand how it works but my GOD is it unpleasant to use. Should you feel the same way, you might want to consider checking out Chatto which is basically ‘Discord, but on the AT protocol’ which I know are words which will send the vast majority of you into a catatonic state of extreme boredom but which will send approximately three of you open-source freaks into some sort of tumescent reverie.
  • Hearing Things: It does feel a bit like the Golden Age of online music writing is behind us, not least because of the complete collapse of most of the previously-functional economic models around written work online. Still, it’s nice to see people attempting to claw something back – in the same way that I’ve seen more and more of in gaming over the past couple of years, so we are now seeing a resurgence in new, reader-funded outlets focusing on music writing, and Hearing Things is the latest to cross my field of vision. It’s bona fides seem good – if you’re in the market for new, independent music writing and criticism this might be worth a look: “We are a worker-owned music and culture platform with the freedom and expertise to delve into the art we love (or absolutely do not love!) in a way that furthers the conversation instead of just regurgitating it. We are writers and editors with many decades of collective experience covering music and culture at Pitchfork, The Fader, Vibe, Spin, Gawker, Jezebel, and elsewhere. There’s a good chance we’ve played a part in introducing you to some of your favorite artists and deepened your appreciation of some of this century’s most important records. At Hearing Things, we’re continuing to do that work—and more—on our own terms. An antidote to the information overload that has poisoned the internet, we are a destination for curated and considered music journalism. Hearing Things offers honest, authoritative interviews and reviews that decode the work of artists from a wide variety of genres including rap, rock, pop, R&B, Latin, electronic, experimental, and whatever microgenre is bubbling up at a given moment. There are investigations that put an infamously corrupt industry under necessary scrutiny. There is analysis of where and how music intersects with the culture at large, playing an essential part in everything from tech to social movements to fashion to film. There will be a podcast where we crack jokes and discuss the music of the week. There is also plenty of fun, random stuff because, hey, music is fun too!”
  • Desktop Colours: I can’t for a second imagine that you’ve spent years thinking that your life is missing a comprehensive database of the colourschemes used by the default desktops of various operating systems over the past few decades, but in case I am wrong and that is all that’s standing between you and real happiness then, well, you’re very welcome indeed.
  • Turn Your Casio into a Smartwatch: I have to say, I would have thought anyone currently rocking an oldschool Casio digital watch is doing so primarily as some sort of pointed gesture against the tracking and optimisation inherent in the very idea of a ‘smartwatch’ and that, as such, the likely market for a piece of kit which will turn your lovely old timepiece into a piece of the panopticon is…small, but, well, I am, famously, a know-nothing bozo who should never be listened to. This links to Ollee, which is a company flogging kit which lets you mod your watch to track your steps, your sleep, your heartbeat and more – or which will sell you an already-modded Casio, should you be disinclined to make with the soldering iron. Per the site, “your favorite watch now has some essential fitness features! Track steps, set daily goals, and measure your heart rate* and ambient temperature — all stored on the watch and viewable in the app. Enjoy up to 10 months of battery life with daily tracking, or up to 3+ years in power saver mode with motion sensing off. You can also connect Ollee Watch to Google Health Connect and Apple Health, allowing your activity data to seamlessly integrate with a broader fitness ecosystem. View and combine your data in popular third-party apps like Google Fit, Apple Health, and Withings, alongside your other fitness tracking devices.” There is something almost terminally hipster about this in a way that feels almost retro, honestly.
  • Typ.ing: Yes, I know, noone needs another free, in-browser typing tutor. BUT! This one is really nice, minimal AND comes with a daily challenge game which is a) very good practice; and b) has a leaderboard so you can compare the speed of your typing fingers with those of other anonymous saddos from around the world. What will you win should YOU have the fastest digits in all the world? Nothing, literally nothing, but the pride is its own reward (you are pathetic).
  • Catch That Train: This TikTok account belongs to someone with the handle SideQuestTre – for reasons that, honestly, I can’t be fcuked to look into, at some point earlier this year they started a thing where they and a bunch of other people dressed up in elaborate costumes and all ran for the train, filming themselves in the process and thereby creating a genuinely-joyful phenomenon in which dozens and dozens of people in odd garb leg it to catch a commuter train. There’s a vaguely-anachic sense of slapstick jeopardy here, like at any moment someone in an inflatable dinosaur costume might stack it across the tracks in spectacular and potentially-fatal fashion which, imho, makes the whole thing, but I can’t tell you how genuinely heartwarming and pleasingly-dumb this whole thing is. Enjoy (but also, please can we not make this a thing in London? We are not built like this).

By Deej Amago

WHY NOT SOUNDTRACK THE NEXT BIT WITH THIS LITTLE EP OF OLDSCHOOL JUNGLE BY MY MATE ADAM AKA JACUZZI SUPERSTAR! 

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO REALLY STRESS HOW GOOD THIS YEAR’S TINY AWARDS NOMINEES ARE AND WHICH ENCOURAGES YOU TO CHECK THEM ALL OUT AND TELL THE WORLD, PT.2: 

  • iPhone Photography of the Year: As I think I have remarked before (in tedious, needlessly-curmudgeonly fashion), it kind of feels like mobile phone cameras are good enough now that you probably don’t need to give trem their own designation when it comes to photo awards – BUT! More awards mean MORE WINNERS, and, you know, that’s a good thing, probably (let’s never forget the losers, though. ISN’T THAT RIGHT, LOSERS? I know my people). This year’s selection of snaps shot on Apple devices features some predictably-excellent material (although actual sad trombone sfx to whoever it was who phoned in the strapline ‘the art of seeing, celebrated’ – YOU BEAUTIFUL HACK, YOU!); my personal favourtite is the lovely b&w shot of the cat, just because the framing and contrast is beautifully-done, but there are loads of great pictures to browse (although – and I promise I will stop saying this one day, perhaps when I die – I am SO SICK OF EVERYTHING LOOKING SO OVERTWEAKED AND HDR! Also, part of me does think that the degree of post-processing applied automatically by every single cameraphone in existence in 2026 does rather take some of the fun and skill out of this, although I accept that maybe I am just being grumpy at this point).
  • Clouds in India: One of two links in this week’s Curios specifically about India’s weather (the other is in the longreads and is GREAT, if, er, incredibly scary), this is a really cute weather map which renders cloud cover across the country in the manner of 16-bit graphical icons, which, ok, won’t be useful to anyone apart from the maybe two of you reading this in India (HELLO!) but which I really like from a design/aesthetic point of view. Also, all the clouds are hand-drawn in a pixelart editor, which is CHARMING.
  • 3d Drum Machine: SORRY I THINK THIS IS VIBECODED SORRY (I am assuming based on the url here – apologies if I’m tarring you with The Machine brush without justification). But! If it is, it’s really nicely-done (if horribly optimised – maybe it’s my laptop being old and sh1t, but MAN does this fcuk my performance into the sun) and doesn’t *look* like Claudeslop and it’s surpisingly-deep when you play around with it a bit. Basically the link presents you with a 3d rendering of a little 3d control device with a bunch of buttons – toggle the buttons to toggle the beats, the general sound type, the BPM, and then click the circle in the bottom of the device to access a secondary FX menu which lets you warp the drumtones to pleasingly-wonky effect. The rendering of the device is really nice – it looks a bit grubby and analogue, and there’s a pleasing tactility to the digital buttons which elevates this beyond the standard ‘in-browser synthtoy’ mass, and even I was able to make something quite fun and vaguely-boppable within minutes of clotheared tinkering.
  • Hourly Towns: Curios reader and occasional submitter of curious links, the fabulously-monikered Xanthe Tynehorne writes: “ I am back with more nonsense, this time in the form of a Bluesky account. This is a bot (inspired by the ~~inimitable~~ highly-imitable @townsusa.bsky.social) which does exactly what it says on the tin: It posts a satellite view and a random town in the UK and Ireland — all right, mostly the UK, because the Irish dataset is a bit smaller — on the hour, every hour, give or take a few minutes…I also have a small writeup of what i used to make it here, including AI alt text and a blissfully helpful group of historic-county cranks.” I LOVE THIS – honestly, it’s such a perfect little regular slice of mundane places and pictures from around the UK, beamed into your feed at hourly intervals. If you’ve ever wanted a bot which will occasionally show you images of a nondescript roundabout in Chipping Norton – and, honestly, if you’ve not ever wanted this then ASPIRE MORE, FCUKO! – then this will make you inordinately happy.
  • An Auction of Technical Antiques: “Matt!” I hear you cry, “Matt! What are ‘technical antiques?” Erm, look, I wish you hadn’t asked as I don’t really know, but, based on the multiple lots available in this forthcoming auction they can best be described as ‘old mechanical things that do stuff’ – so, say, old calculators of various types, or old mechanical puppet theatres. There’s a MONKEY ORGAN (you need to supply your own monkey, you may be sad to learn), old projectors, some neon signs…basically if you’re in the market for stuff that might reasonably be grouped under the broad heading of ‘esoteric homewares to make you look more interesting than you in fact are’ then WOW are you going to be happy with what’s on display here. OH MY GOD THERE’S AN ACTUAL GOLD LEICA.
  • British Voters: A Bluesky bot which regularly shares voter profiles for people in the UK, based on Actual Data from the British Election Study Internet Panel. Obviously only of interest to those of you who have a strange and very particular interest in demographic profiling and voting intention but, well, I get a strange feeling that may actually be quite a few of you (SICKOS.jpg). Follow this account and you will receive EXCITING NUGGETS like “I’m a White British non-religious man from Hornchurch and Upminster, aged 32. My top issue is the cost of living. In 2024 I voted Green. Today I still would,” or  “I’m a White Scottish man from Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch, aged 46. My top issue is immigration. In 2024 I didn’t vote. Today I’d vote Reform UK.”  Be warned, though, that depending on your politics it may see you getting irrationally and unfairly annoyed at imaginary people from half the country away.
  • Seung Hyuk: Beautiful personal portfolio website corner! This is the portfolio website of one Seung Hyuk, a Seoul-based graphic designer who has a real knack for interaction design; this is SO pleasing, and so pleasingly-non-standard. Everything about it is a pleasure to interact with, and there are so many cool little details you uncover by clicking around and into various different sections. Seeing stuff like this makes me wish I had a website to commission so I could pay people like this to make it for me, honestly. BONUS PORTFOLIO WEBSITE! This is another excellent personal showcase by Maria Vasilyeva which is also really nicely-designed but which I love most for the blurring effect the cursor applies to all the images onsite which I find SO soothing and which I think you might enjoy too.
  • Recipe Tables: This is a clever idea, specifically for people who find conventionally-written recipes online somewhat hard to follow, or who would prefer a more functional, logical approach to laying out quantities and steps and processes. Either copy and paste the text of a recipe, or plug in a url and it will transform in into a neatly-tabulated set of instructions which give a clear sense of what you need to do, when, at a glance. Ok, fine, this is an entirely-vibecoded endeavour, but it’s clever and useful and doesn’t appear to be asking you for anything or requiring you sign up or pay money, and as such I am going to class it as BENIGN CLAUDESLOP! Anyway, here’s the (horrible, AI-generated) explainer text should you want a slightly clearer idea of what the fcuk this actually does: “A prep-table notation invented by Michael Chu at Cooking for Engineers: ingredients down the left, each step a merged cell spanning exactly what it combines. The whole recipe reads in one look, with no scrolling back and forth between the ingredient list and the instructions. RecipeTables converts any recipe into that format. Paste the text, drop a link, or photograph a cookbook page, then scale the servings, switch between cups and grams, and export the table as an image, spreadsheet, or print-ready page.” Genuinely potentially useful, this, and maybe worth bookmarking if you are One Of Those Types Of People.
  • Rodeo: INTERESTING. This is, to the best of my understanding, pretty much functionally identical to another app I featured here a couple of weeks ago – Rodeo is a platform that takes any link (or photo, or social post) featuring a forthcoming event which you feed it and turns it into a collaborative planning tool to help you and your friends organise trips and outings to things you think look cool – “Share what you want to do into the Rodeo app (Social posts, Screenshots, Links, Photos). We’ll wrangle the details and keep you organized, so you can actually do the things you save; see all your plans and tentatives in one place; see your places on a map; get reminders so you don’t miss out; make lists and share them with friends.” This sounds…useful! Also, a good datapoint should you be a useless strategymong who has to pull together a ‘deck’ (LOL!) all about how real life experiences are the new hotnesszzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz dear God.
  • Subway FYI: Ooh, I really like this – a map of New York City which lets you click anywhere and see how far you can travel using public transportation over time. Clicking starts the timer going – as the minutes tick up, so you can see the extending reach spread out across the city, offering you a neat visual representation of how well-connected any part of NYC is and how much of a pain it will be to stay in Bushwick while you’re there. Can someone make this for London, please? WHY DO YOU NEVER MAKE THESE THINGS FOR LONDON???
  • The Mob Museum: Via the wonderful blort comes this website, the digital representation of the US National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement. “At The Mob Museum, the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, we put in the work to get to the bottom of some of history’s most intriguing tales, exploring the age-old dichotomy of good guys vs. bad guys. Located in the heart of downtown Las Vegas, The Mob Museum is an immersive experience exploring the ongoing power struggle between organized crime and law enforcement from the Mob’s origination to today. Through vivid storytelling, guests are presented with the facts, the fiction and the gray area in between — showcasing the events and characters that played an integral (and infamous) role in U.S. history.” Obviously this is just a website – for the full experience you’ll have to go to Vegas I’m afraid – but this is still fascinating for any of you with a Goodfellas fetish and a willingness to overlook all the genuinely horrid things about organised mob violence in favour of a vaguely-romantic imagining of speakeasies and machine guns inside violin cases. There are blogs and bits of history and special sections on storied events such as the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, and there’s even a pleasingly old-school ‘mob nickname generator’ (Matt “Money Bags” Muir, since you ask), and, generally, this is a good (fuggin) time.
  • SexyMP: Yes, I know, and I am SORRY. BUT! This is very much a blast from the past – or at least it is for me, who remembers this from waaaaaaaaaaaay back in the day and had completely forgotten its existence. As you may be able to guess from the name and url, this website exists solely to determine via the medium of EXTREMELY SCIENTIFIC head-to-head polling who is the SEXIEST politician in the House of Commons at the moment, based on public appreciation of their official mugshots. Log on and, should you be so inclined, choose who you think is hotter from a selection of comparisons of MPs; your votes will be added to the aggregate tracker to keep a tally of who is the ‘sexiest’ Parliamentarian in the land RIGHT NOW! While this is obviously puerile and objectifying in the extreme, and very much Beneath The Dignity of Web Curios, it is also…sort-of funny, and frankly it is not even in the top-1000 worst websites about MPs and so I feel sort-of ok linking to it. Congratulations to the pulchritudinous pair of Kate Dearden and Henry Tufnell, currently ‘king’ and ‘queen’ of the Commons when it comes to hotness! In general – and while Curios in no way supports the objectification of our elected representatives – it feels very much like politicians have become…less odd-looking over the course of my lifetime? Or, hang on, am I now so old that I just add an extra 20 ‘attractiveness points’ to anyone who doesn’t yet look like they have been touched by the cold hand of death? Oh Christ, it’s that, isn’t it? FFS.
  • Wireshooter: Ooh, this is quite a cool little shooter game with some genuinely-novel mechanics; I suggest you read the ‘how to play’ section, as it’s different enough from most other shooters you will have played to require a degree of explanation. This is much, much better when played on your phone, as attempting to make this work using the mouse cause me to almost break my wrist (oh, ok, fine, HYPERBOLE, but it wasn’t fun).
  • Walkable Cities: This (via Andy) is VERY dumb but very fun – it’s a top-down walking simulator controlled with one button, the spacebar; tap space to pivot from your left to your right foot and vice versa, and by so doing navigate the map to get from one side of the level to the other. No, you’re right, that doesn’t really make sense, but it’s honestly INCREDIBLY easy to grasp and also devilishly frustrating; thing is, though, it’s also VERY moreish and VERY replayable, which means you could literally lose 30 minutes to this without even realising. No, I will not apologies, it is YOUR fault for being weak.
  • Today’s Star Is: Via the nice people at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, my notes for this game read, simply, ‘B4STARD’. This is a daily lunar lander-type game, which each day tasks you with finding, retrieving and returning a flag; you control a little spacecraft with the arrow keys, with a single thruster and some pleasingly-floaty gravity physics, and you can bounce of the walls…until the point in the levels when they start having spikes on them, at which point you will start SCREAMING at the screen. And that’s not even to mention the horrifying space invader thing you have to avoid, or the fact that when you find the key you have to then drag it back to the starting point, and the key has its own weight and physics and OH MY GOD I SHOUTED AT THIS SO SO MUCH and yet I have played it each day since I found it and I think I might actually hate myself.
  • Side Out: The final game of the week is this neat little twist on Pong; rather than playing 1 vs 1, you’re instead playing with 8 others, arranged in a sort of circular arena fashion; your goal is to score goals and eliminate the others, complicated by the various odd spinners and black holes and bouncy platforms that appear in the centre of the play area to generally fcuk your sh1t up. You can play on your own, or with a bunch of other people online, and, generally, this is LOTS of fun and worth bookmarking as a regular escape when you get to the point where you would rather rip the skin off your own palms than spend any more time on that fcuking powerpoint.

By Kagami Kigitsu

OUR LAST MIX OF THE WEEK IS THIS BEAUTIFUL, VAGUELY-HAZY SELECTION OF LATE-SUMMER TRACKS SPANNING FUNK AND SOUL AND SOME LIGHT DISCO AND ALL SORTS OF OTHER BITS INBETWEEN, BY BALAPHONIC! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • The Monterey Bay Aquarium: I don’t think I feature enough aquarium content in Curios, on reflection – consider this a small attempt to rectify that. This is the Tumblr of the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, featuring some excellent creature content (examples include a guide to which marine wildlife you can in fact ‘pet like a dog’) and lovable gifs and, generally, conveying exactly the sort of Wholesome Tone you might expect and desire from a place where you get to hang out with anemones. I have actually been to the Monterey Bay Aquarium – my dad lived in California for a few years when I was small, I went to visit him, he took me here, I got to touch a starfish, it almost made up for him fcuking his secretary and leaving my mum, lol! – and so can attest to its impeccable vibes.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • The Rave Flyer Book: Ok, so this is North American rave flyers and as such, objectively, it is Less Good than were it oldschool anglo or European ones (sorry, but it’s true!) – still, this Insta feed accompanying a forthcoming Big Coffeetable Book Of Old Flyer Art is posting enough nice designs from back in the day that it’s worth a look.
  • Pierce O’Brien: You may recall that link to a thread of terrible UK music I posted a week or so ago – characterised, charmingly, as ‘UK Poo’ – but this…this is a whole new level. Pierce O’Brien is a guy from Manchester who’s blowing up a bit on TikTok and Reels and who sings…Jesus, ‘sings’ is a big word, sort of shout-tells appalling, sub-Kasabian ‘anthems’ which are squarely and singularly aimed at the 90s/00s revivalist ‘let’s get the bag in wahey’ town centre boys of 2026 – you can tell, because a significant number of the Insta posts here are full of references to other people who he’s supposed to sound like, The Libertines and Oasis and, Christ, while you may not think that any of those are aspirational let me guarantee you that you cannot even BEGIN to imagine how bad this is. This man sold out a reasonably big gig in Manchester earlier this month, I understand NOTHING any more.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • The Meta Settlement: Well that all worked out fine for Meta. The upshot of this week’s settlement in the US seems to be, largely, that Meta has paid what amounts to not actually all that much money in exchange for being able to neatly position itself as the company that is now doing the most to prtect kids, actually, whilst taking no liability whatsoever for harms it’s visited on said kids, while ALSO getting away with making changes that won’t actually fcuk its revenue models that much; this piece in Techdirt is a pretty good overview of how and why Meta’s gotten off pretty lightly overall, though imho it misses off two of the big things – specifically a) all it does re algorithmic feeds is mandate them to give kids the OPTION of switching to a chronological feed instead, which every single study ever conducted of user behaviour has show n results in next to no behaviour change because, turns our, we all prefer the algodopamine, whatever we might say when surveyed; and b) because of the way in which Meta reports its user numbers to shareholders its metrics which it uses to attract advertisers are unlikely to change in any material fashion, meaning much of the market-facing impact is mitigated. SPeaking of the market, by the way, it’s always instructive to see what the money thinks of stuff like this – and the money said that it was good enough news to boost the Meta stock price in the aftermath of the settlement’s being announced. It turns our that, when you’re rich enough, you really CAN buy your way out of anything!
  • Edgecase Wars: Roland Smith makes the point in this essay that the issues we see characterised as ‘part of the ‘Culture Wars’ should in fact be thought of as edge case wars – that they are debates on and around issues that are so marginal, so unrepresentative of wider life and experience, that we should stop affording the arguments around them so much oxygen in terms of the wide culture. Which…hm, fine, on the one hand you are right Roland but on the other this does rather seem to ignore the extent to which edge cases can function as small-scale examples of wider issues, how they can be canaries in the cultural coalmine, and if you don’t think that the frankly insane tenor of the ‘debate’ around trans people is now going to be applied to all sorts of other things based on its successful rollout in that one, marginal area (not marginal if you’re trans, obviously, but you know what I mean here) then I have a bridge to sell you. This is obviously correct in a narrow sense, and I can empathise with the thinking and the general ‘guys, can we all stop shouting about stuff that is, objectively, not really near the top of things that people care about’ viewpoint, but also it does feel like we’re now at a point where it might be quite important to keep shouting actually.
  • City of Sweat: It has, I think we can all agree, been something of a Warm Summer – if you think it’s been hot here, though, why not have a read of this brilliant piece about the experience of various different people in Mumbai over the past few months. This article, in Equator magazine, sees Ishan Tankha take a thermal camera on the streets of Mumbai to document the actual temperatures in shops and on the streets and in cars and on people’s skin, speaking to the city’s residents across castes and classes and hearing from them about what it’s like to live in a city where the temperatures top 40 on the regular and many, many people live lives where ‘escaping the heat for a bit’ simply doesn’t exist as an option. This is, honestly, absolutely terrifying to read: “Jari Mari is a crazy mosaic of the city’s extremes. Migrant, working-class Muslim and Dalit families live in tin sheds and one-bedroom concrete blocks stacked behind the high-security walls that seal off runway 27. The housing is so dense that the narrow lanes see no sun and feel no wind. But the heat still gets through, and the kids are always sick, many of the mothers in these houses told us: everyone has to sleep with their doors open, mosquitoes be damned. No one we spoke to could afford air conditioning. In Sabiya and Sameer Khan’s one-room house, temperatures touch 49C. When we tell Sameer we’re not here to shoot planes, but to take thermal pictures of his asbestos roof, he looks at us like we’re mad. We show Sabiya how the fan above her stove is pushing hot air back down on her. A couple of blocks away, kids play cricket on concrete that shows a reading of 58.7C.” MOTHERFCUKER.
  • More Fcuked Today Than Yesterday: Look, if you’d prefer not to chug down another thick dose of Climate Realism then, well, I can’t blame you; on the other hand, if you want a couple of thousand words explaining some of the many, many ways in which the lights on the indicator dashboard of ‘How Badly Have We Fcuked The Planet Then?’ are flashing worrying shades of red then MERRY CHRISTMAS! Here’s a cheery little sampler! “ It’s hard to put into any concrete terms just how insanely hot the oceans all over the planet are at this moment. Back in 2023, when new records started to be set, there was huge media interest in the topic. Some of my graphics went viral, with images showing temperatures spiking almost vertically to new record highs. Arguments over the lack of Saharan dust and the impacts of the new IMO 2020 low-sulfur shipping fuel regulations were in the headlines. And then there’s yesterday. It’s not just that a new record daily high was set, yesterday was the 55th consecutive new daily record high, and the global oceans were a full 0.14°C hotter than any previous July 26th on record. For statistics geeks, the current temperature is more than 3.8 standard deviations above the 1991-2020 mean. The daily temperatures are on the precipice of setting a new record high temperature for any time of the year. Is this being discussed in mainstream media? Crickets. Global oceans teetering on the edge? Crickets. Global impacts? Crickets.”
  • The 3,000 Mile Fish Finger: This piece does feel at the very least orthogonally-related to the previous link; it’s a quite astonishing explanation of the journey taken by a standard white fish, caught off the coast of the UK, for it to arrive in a supermarket a few miles down the road as a fish finger, and exactly why, for that to happen, the poor, blameless coley (or whatever) has to go via, er, China. This is jawdropping – or at least it was to me, someone previously ignorant of the global fish finger supply chain. Does this…does this feel like a good way to operate, given, well, the need to maybe use less fossil fuels, cut emissions, etc? It doesn’t, does it?
  • App Life In China: Oh this is a great piece of reportage; fine, the genre it inhabits (‘writer based in the West visits China and recounts in wide-eyed wonder the strangeness of its futureeconomy’) isn’t a new one, and I have featured examples of it here before, but this is a nice update to the canon; it contains all the standard stuff you’d expect about the WeChat/Alipay digital layer which underpins/overlays (choose your preference!) the economy and society, but it’s also good at the practical realities of How This Works Now and What Its Impacts Mean, and Why It Is Not All Bad And Not All Good Either, and, in general, it’s interesting and nuanced in a way that these pieces don’t always nail. There’s also some interesting stuff in here about how the tech is impacting the social fabric of the country in ways I found particularly interesting: “The ever present surveillance must be one factor behind the remarkable improvement in public manners everywhere we went in China. Very little spitting, no jostling to get off planes, people seem to respect personal space much more than they used to. But it’s not just the cameras and facial recognition software. One friend in his fifties in Beijing said that the pandemic had changed everyone, but also that his parents’ generation were mostly dead or housebound—“they all had really rough manners because of the way China was when they were young.” WeChat and the other apps also mean there’s far less need for physical queues, and no point in jostling to get ahead if you are in one. There is more urban space in China than there used to be. There’s body space because of the apps and the good manners. Malls are empty unless they have live events or lots of restaurants. In some neighborhoods, the only humans are helmeted, uniformed couriers in red or yellow jackets buzzing about on electric bikes, anxiously checking their phones to make sure they’re not late for the next delivery. If they’re late, they get punished by the algorithms.” BONUS DYSTOPIAN FUTURE TECH WRITEUP! James Ball writes in Transformer about the Surveillance Panopticon and how cameras + AI is working to create the future that already exists in China all around the Western world. Smile, because even if someone isn’t watching someTHING definitely is!
  • AI Employees Are Coming: Or at least they are according to this splashy puffpiece in Fast Company for a business called Anything AI, which is flogging AI staff as an off-the-shelf product to businesses – to AUGMENT existing employees, not replace them! Honest! – and which effectively develops template role/personas that can be rolled out within a business to perform specific, defined roles. Which, fine, I get the pitch, but as ever with stuff like this there is a remarkably small amount of detail on WHAT exactly these things do – what tasks are they performing? How does it practically fit into existing workflows? What’s the oversight? OH HOW CURIOUS THERE ARE NO DETAILS. Hm. I think, per previous comments in here, that there really is a lot of stuff that AI can do in the workplace these days which really is underexplored – but also that it requires significantly more thought, planning and rigour than simply thinking ‘I am going to buy an off-the-shelf AI marketing manager and make bank!’ because, well, no.
  • The Habits of AI Writing: In the spirit of ‘know your enemy’, I subscribe to a bunch of newsletters from Terrible Companies; one of these is Andreessen Horowitz’s weekly missive on AI adoption and integration, which is a darkly-hilarious guide to AI ‘tells’ in copy and how to go about eliminating them. The reason this made me laugh so much is that it neatly captures some of the issue that people increasingly have with AI, to whit – none of the people pushing it seem to think or behave in a manner even vaguely-related to the ways in which normal people think and behave. Witness the way in which this guide is presented – it opens with the assertion that writing with AI is good, actually, and that EVEN MORE ACTUALLY some of the ‘quirks’ of AI prose are in fact really good, but because NORMIES are TOO DUMB to tell and often don’t like said tells, here is how to eliminate them…what’s even better is that the guide then goes on to explain what the tells are and how they are visible and why they might rub people up the wrong way in a manner not-dissimilar to how I would imagine A16Z might consider explaining textual communication to a curious, but fundamentally non-human, alien being. This is SO weird to me, honestly, and simply reinforces my impression that all VCs are basically vat-grown in Gstaad and educated on nothing but Y-Combinator pitch decks.
  • GEOpolitics: Fcuk you, I am really proud of that heading. Ahem. This is a good piece in 404 Media outlining the latest example of a growing trend in international relations and Dodgy Statecraft – to whit, administrations (in this case, Israel) flooding the web with pro-them content in order to influence LLMs to respond with their talking points and messages and the like. The jury remains…unconvinced at the extent to which this sort of LLM manipulation practically functions in the wild and its efficacy in Shaping Hearts and Minds, but it’s good to know that this is happening (and lest you think this is just an Israeli thing, China and the US have both been doing this too – which means that everyone else is). “A synthetic Israel-funded think tank has published more than 100 articles since it launched less than a month ago. First spotted by Politico, the Hanover Institute for Public Policy is run by the American advertising firm Piro Inc, paid for by Israel, and appears designed to generate content for LLMs that are continually scanning the internet to inform their responses, with the goal of tweaking chatbot answers in favor of Israel.  Every few days, the Hanover Institute publishes around a dozen articles related to Israel, antisemitism, and Palestine. Every article’s headline has a question. The articles have no byline, often contain graphs, and cite real sources but do not link to them. The articles ask questions like How Much Palestinian Land Has Israel Taken?, Why Is Israel Seen as the Aggressor?, and Is There a Policy of Starvation in Gaza? The answers often read like word salad nonsense. “A reader who has encountered the claim as a consensus has encountered something real,” one article said about Israel restricting food supply to Gaza.”
  • We’re All Affiliate Marketers Now: I mean, this feels like this has been true for a while now, but this latest development in the US feels like a precursor to it getting even bigger as a trend – this is basically a PR piece for creator marketplace ShopMy, which is getting into the affiliate links game, but the general trend that it speaks to (specifically: more and more platforms offering affiliate programs as we all struggle to earn money from our actual jobs and are instead forced to shill tat for brands to our friends in the hope they buy a £20 top from Shein and we earn £0.02 in commission) is one that’s been on the rise for a couple of years now and which, given everyone wants to be a creator and everyone needs a hustle, is likely to grow fast on both sides of the Atlantic.
  • Stimulant Society Is Broken: YES. I cannot tell you how much I agreed with all of this – this piece speaks to a very particular confusion I have about modernity, to whit “when did it become normal for people to have to ingest the equivalent of five cups of coffee’s worth of caffeine via the medium of aggressively-flavoured carbonated sugarwater every morning and then again at various points during the day, and what is it doing to their insides?”. Honestly, getting on the tube in the morning and seeing an entire carriage of people chugging down the Monster makes me feel…quite dystopian, and this article does a good job of explaining all the ways in which I am right to Feel Bad. Take your pick from ‘a culture in which being tired is not acceptable’, ‘the relentless need to ALWAYS BE PRODUCING AND PERFORMING’, and ‘wow taking this stuff is actually really bad for you, physically’. Semi-related, but I have an almost-unshakeable belief that you can map ‘the rise in popularity of Monster Energy’ against ‘the number of North Americans reporting genuinely-distressing bowel issues in subReddits’ on a pretty much 1:1 basis.
  • The New Etiquette: I don’t, personally, generally hold with ‘rules’ for etiquette, but I found myself reading this and nodding along pretty regularly which means either that it is RIGHT AND TRUE or, perhaps more accurately, that it maps perfectly onto my own middle-aged English opinions about What Is Right. Anyway, wevs, I think pretty much all of these are just Good Advice and you could do worse than reading the list and internalising the points. Write to people you care about in your own words, not AI! Just because you have sent someone a message doesn’t oblige them to reply to it immediately! Don’t screenshot the groupchat! Honestly, if nothing else this list makes GREAT dinnerparty conversation fodder. Oh, since I found this it’s been put behind a substack paywall, but, well, you know how free trials work and how to cancel them (or, er, SUBSCRIBE! Web Curios advocates paying for content, after all, but also if I subscribe to one more fcuking newsletter I will have to sell a kidney, so).
  • How House Parties Shape Us: I wasn’t expecting to read this weirdly-poignant little essay, about the author’s memories of house parties and what the house party MEANS, in World of Interiors Magazine, and yet here it is; this is rather beautiful in ways I didn’t quite expect, and oddly sad – I do miss a good houseparty, honestly, a format that doesn’t really hit the same way when you’re in your 40s and the possibility of EXCITING AND UNPREDICTABLE EVENTS is somewhat lessened, and where every minor indiscretion has the added gravitas of ‘potential divorce material’ which does rather kibosh some of the more risky fun you might once have had. I remember a period in my life when I used to regularly gatecrash houseparties around Westbourne Park in West London, until one memorable evening when we stumbled into some stranger’s flat to find a LOT of what looked troublingly like heroin laid out on a table and we decided that maybe we ought to start taking more care.
  • Literary Fiction Has Lost The Plot: I’ve read a lot of novels this year, but I have to say there’s not been that much I have been hugely captivated by – of the Booker Longlist (the ones I’ve read, at least), the one that stood out most to me was Black Bag, and even that was very much ‘interesting work but a flawed one’ and certainly not something I thought ‘masterpiece’ of. Anyway, you don’t care what I think – instead, why not read this excellent deconstruction by Devon Halliday of the opening pages of two recent literary novels, one by Hernan Diaz and the other by Emma Cline, which goes line by line through each and explains what is wrong with them, and how, in turn, that speaks to What Is Wrong With Literary Fiction Today. I thought this was excellent – scholarly but accessible, and Halliday does a really good job of illustrating wider points with specific examples from each passage – and it’s hard not to agree with many of his assessments, specifically this summation: “When I read literary novels like Switzy and Ply, all I can feel is that the writers are stalling for time. If they really had something urgent they wanted to communicate, they wouldn’t waste sentences on how slick dolphins are or how drab February is. The question driving these opening pages is not: “What does it mean to live a good life?” or “What do we owe to people?” or “What can be saved from the ravages of time?” The question I hear is: “Have I impressed you yet?” If I thought this problem was specific to Switzy and Ply, I wouldn’t bother writing about it. I would just get rid of the books and move on. But the missteps in these openings feel so familiar to me. They exemplify a trend in literary fiction that I’ve come to hate: Describing Unimportant Things in Unnecessary Detail In Order to Sound Smart.”
  • The Acapulco: When I was a little kid, say 14, and I started going to nightclubs, the venue of choice was a place called ‘Cairo’s’ – inexplicably Egyptian-themed (down to the fibreglass pyramid and sphinx which adorned the entrance), it hosted a night every Thursday where all the security staff basically decided to completely ignore the law when it came to underage drinking and let a bunch of kids from 14-16ish turn up and get utterly, unconscionably smashed on booze. Drinks cost £1 a pint and £1 a shot, it was open til 2, the music policy was an unwavering selection of CHART HITS AND CLUB CLASSICS, and the DJ would regularly offer a free bottle of Babycham (I know, I know) to any young woman prepared to, er, ‘show off her charms’ to the dancefloow (now read back and remind yourself of how old these girls were. WOW, THE PAST WAS A DIFFERENT AND OFTEN-NOT-OK TIME!). Anyway, that’s by way of preamble to this piece which is all about the magic and majesty of an old nightclub called The Acapulcoin Halifax. Honestly, you HAVE to read this – if you’re English and old like me, to reminisce (you will DEFINITELY have been to places very much like this); if you’re English and young, to learn about The Way Things Were (and, possibly, why everyone aged 40+ is Like This); and if you’re foreign, as another proofpoint for ‘the English have a real problem, in fact a series of problems, with drink’. Honestly, this para barely scratches the surface: “The Acca is ludicrously cheap (75p drinks before 11pm), does not take itself seriously, and is an unashamed haven for cheesy old school pop music. When we arrive, I see punters knocking back some sort of multi-coloured concoction in a pint glass. “That’s a traffic light,” Murrãy informs me. “We used to have it back in the day. No one knew what was in it but it was rumoured to have 10 shots in it. And it’s not actually red, yellow and green, as it’s got blue in it. But no one questions it, we just go with the flow.”“
  • Walking The Length of Manhattan: Craig Mod – whose walks I have featured many times in Curios over the years – writes about walking the length of Manhattan with a friend. This is just lovely – a series of small snapshots of one of the world’s great cities, with no rhyme or reason other than what Craig saw, heard and found interesting, and it made me want to go to New York and just walk and walk and walk.
  • Why Is The Mustard So Spicy?: You may not think that you want to read a long, deep investigation as to why the piece’s author got a peculiarly-spicy jar of mustard, but you are WRONG because this is SO interesting and far funnier and better-written than it needs to be. Honestly, it’s a joy, I promise you.
  • UFC at the White House: Jon Ronson has a new book out, all about DAMAGED MEN, and as part of the tie-in promo he was booked to cover the recent UFC fight at the White House; this is, per all of Ronson’s writing, very, very funny; he’s an excellent writer, an excellent humourist and someone who, over the years, has absolutely nailed the caricature of himself who inhabits all his pieces (he’s also, per some of my friends’ interactions with him a few years ago, considerably less keen on the joke being on him, but that applies to all of us I guess), and while making fun of the UFC at the White House is possibly a *bit* fish/barrel, it’s also a very good read featuring a pleasingly-ridiculous cast of characters (not counting the obvious one).
  • The Fifth Syllable: We finish this week with a very well-constructed short story, itself a story within a story, about an AI being asked to write a love story about itself. Trust me on this, this is a lot better than you think it will be based on that description – I wish it were formatted differently as the narrow column makes it…quite annoying to read, but it’s worth that slight irritation as this is smart, funny and a series of neat stylistic turns to boot (and I’m a sucker for the ‘story told as one-sided conversation’ format).

By Mathias Benguigui

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

 

Webcurios 21/08/26

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Reading Time: 37 minutes

Got to be honest, it has been a genuinely HORRIBLE week in Discourse Land, specifically the UK bit of it, and I have had quite enough of the web for the moment. I am off to do Good Works (and eat jerk chicken) in Catford – you amuse yourself with this week’s links, which are a cracking batch, and I will be back in a week, hopefully less exhausted and enervated by Events and The Reaction To Them.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are part of the problem too, whatever you might like to believe.

By Peter Stichbury  

KICKSTART THIS WEEK’S EDITION OF CURIOS WITH SOME PLEASINGLY-SQUELCHY ACID TECHNO MIXED BY KENHO1E ON HONG KONG’S MOTH RADIO! 

THE SECTION WHICH COULD HAVE DONE WITHOUT BEING TOLD THAT NEXT YEAR IS GOING TO BE EVEN HOTTER, PT.1: 

  • Place Oddities: It’s always pleasing to kick Curios off with a link about which I am forced to say ‘I have literally no fcuking clue what is going on here’, and so it is with this week’s opener. Place Oddities is…see, this is the difficulty, though, because I still feel honour-bound to try and offer a vague explanation as to what the site is and so you’re going to have to put up with my vague textual flailings as I attempt to communicate the weirdness. Place Oddities will, when you click the link, take you to a page showing a map of the UK, on which are arranged a series of icons; click the icons, and you’ll get…I don’t know, a link to an old forum post about the fact that the band Blur were once a band called Seymour, or a small video filmed from a train and showing a rather beautiful sunset over some fields, or some photographs of random places in Northampton. WHY?? Literally no idea. Click on the menu tab entitled ‘local history section’ at the top of the page and you’re taken to a 3d representation of a local library’s microfiche viewer, which you can use to, er, browse some really obscure information about various places in the UK. Click the ‘sacred well’ button and get taken to a CG wishing well, into which you can toss a CG coin and be taken to a random fact on the map…GOD I LOVE THIS, it is batsh1t and a wonderfully-baffling and maddeningly-inefficient way of browsing information, and the fact that it exists with absolutely no sort of coherent explanation as to what it is and why it has been made and by whom is basically PERFECT CATNIP for me. Should the person behind this happen to see this slightly-baffled writeup, PLEASE get in touch and explain to me what the fcuk this is and what the fcuk you were thinking when you made it because you have a beautiful mind.
  • Tilt: Another link where I am basically just throwing in my hands in the air and going ‘literally no idea, sorry’. Click the link, click the button that appears in the middle of the page, and be transported to a, er, living room (or an image of one) in which stands a woman on a skateboard surrounded by a bunch of random objects; there’s a joystick which you can click on to tilt (DO YOU SEE???) the room left or right, and watch the woman and all the objects roll to one side of the screen or the other. Click the objects and the screen will triumphantly display each one’s weight to you while playing some excitable techno. WHAT THE FCUK IS THIS WHY DOES IT EXIST WHAT ARE THE OBJECTS WHO IS THE WOMAN WHY AM I TILTING THE SCREEN? Again, I have no idea whatsoever what is happening or why, but I am very much a fan – but, also, it is far too early for the day to be this confusing and I would quite like things to reacquire a semblance of coherence soon because I don’t think I can keep this up for the next five hours of typing.
  • Moon Rover: Would you like to pilot a CG moon rover buggy across an apparently-accurately-modeled representation of the lunar landscape? OH GOOD! This is actually a vaguely-gamelike thing – there are tasks, you have to, I don’t know, complete some sort of lunar rescue mission or something, but, personally, I couldn’t give anything resembling a fcuk about that and just enjoyed wandering about the rocky surface of the distant satellite. This is very nicely-done, with decent graphics and a nice ‘feel’ to the buggy, and if you can be bothered to engage with the ludic mechanics could be a decent way to pass 10 minutes or so.
  • Shibb Sampler: I featured A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya a while back – it’s a creative studio project type thing which is building a fun selection of small digital music toys, and this is the latest one, a site which lets you play around with YouTube videos, letting you effectively use them as samples; this is actually deceptively fun and flexible, letting you tweak the playback speed of whatever vid you feed it (or one of the preselected ones), jump to specific bits of the track, etc, making it easy to finally create that breakcore version of ‘My Heart Will Go On’ that you have always longed to hear but always been too lazy and cowardly to create. MAKE SOME (horrible) NOISE!
  • The Living Record: The past 4 years have seen Gaza flattened and reduced largely to rubble, accompanied by the deaths of far, far too many entirely-blameless people – some of whom have been journalists attempting to report on the escalating horrors. This site is a memorial to the (so far) over 260 members of the Gazan press corps who’ve lost their lives during the conflict, containing memorials to the dead and testimonials from those who survive them. “The Living Record is an oral archive, an interactive memorial, and a testament to the collective will of Gaza’s journalists, who chose the path of truth despite being marked for death by the Israeli occupation and the complicit American media. It is also a record of service. One year ago, Anas al-Sharif was martyred. He was assassinated alongside five of his colleagues — Mohammed Qraiqea, Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal, Mohammed al-Khalidi, and Moamen Aliwa — in an Israeli strike on the journalists’ tent outside Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Grieving like so many others, like the millions around the world who knew Anas as Gaza’s voice, the New York War Crimes editorial collective set out to gather a small collection of eulogies from those who knew him. The responses transformed the project. Anas, his colleagues told us, would not have wanted to be remembered as a singular hero, but as a servant of the Palestinian cause. So, over the course of the following year, we gathered spoken testimonies from fellow journalists, photographers, cameramen, journalism professors, students, and workers across the media sector in Gaza. Each contributor was asked to record a personal remembrance of one or more martyrs, to tell a small part of the history that, as Samira Nassar says, should be written in gold.”
  • Satyress: When I first saw this this week I was convinced it was a joke, but some cursory digging suggests that it is, in fact, an entirely real product. Just…just click the link and take a look and then come back here. ISN’T IT FCUKING MENTAL???? Yes, you’re right, that *is* some sort of weird robot goat, apparently designed to be remote-operated by people undertaking difficult or dangerous work in the great outdoors. It’s basically designed so that you can attach a bunch of different tools and mechanical bits and pieces to it, making it a bit like a sort of swiss army knife for Doing Stuff In The Great Outdoors (but an inexplicably-caprine one). YOU CAN ATTACH A CHAINSAW TO IT! IT IS APPARENTLY BULLETPROOF! Honestly, this is SO mad and SO weird – WHY THE FCUK IS IT SHAPED LIKE A FCUKING GOAT, WHY???? – and so, so silly; I particularly like the disclaimer near the bottom of the page that explains that the thing won’t be able to easily pass through standard US doorframes because of its completely-unnecessary horns. This is so, so dumb, but, equally, we won’t be laughing when an army of these, teleoperated by some sort of terrifying racist militia, start enacting a white supremacist coup in Texas.
  • CRSH: It’s been sort of fun watching the evolution of gambling in the US, moving from ‘tightly–regulated industry’ to ‘insane free-for-all where anyone can bet on anything and there don’t seem to be any checks and balances anymore and noone cares’, and this new app is my new high-watermark for ‘what the actual fcuk are you doing you mad septic cnuts?’ bafflement. CRSH (sorry, but it’s not my name; insert your own vowels, whichever you prefer!) is an app which advertises itself as allowing anyone to bet on the outcome of any livestream as it’s taking place – will she say yes to the rizzstreamer asking her out on a date? Will this person shoot 10 baskets in a row? Will the idiot livestreamer have their hand bitten off by the alligator they’re taunting for a handful of donations from a rapt audience of morons on KICK? Etc etc etc. You may be thinking ‘hang on Matt, this is literally set up to enable fixing and fraud and there is literally no way that this isn’t a nested series of scams waiting to happen’, and I AGREE WITH YOU; I saw something somewhere which suggested that there were ‘SYSTEMS’ in place to prevent this stuff being massively gamed, but, equally, I have no fcuking clue how and there is literally no explanation as to safeguards or similar on the homepage so fcuk knows. Anyway, this appears to be mostly being used by kids betting on gamers’ in-stream performance rather than anything too awful, but it can only be a matter of time before we’re being invited to speculate Actual Cashmoney on whether Clavicular overdoses live (WHAT a sentence to type!).
  • Norecognition: A Kickstarter! Just like it’s 2018 or something! This is a MASSIVELY-overfunded crowdfunder for adversarial clothing – that is, tshirts that are printed with designs that are intended to confuse the fcuk out of cameras and prevent them from recognising the wearer, effectively rendering you invisible to the surveillance panopticon. This isn’t the first ‘adversarial’ range of garments to be flogged, but the person behind them maintains that many of the ones who’ve gone before haven’t in fact been tested in the wild and that this range will be a more effective means of hiding yourself from the prying gaze of The Evil Surveillance State Apparatus. Get in early, back the project and get access to a garment which will, if you’re lucky, enable you to commit MASSIVE CRIMES – or, er, get mown down by the first Waymo that fails to identify you as person as you cross the street in front of it.
  • Photocopy Yourself: Well, not quite, but ALMOST – this site takes a photo of you with your webcam and then lets you create increasingly degraded, deep-fried versions of said photo by running it through a ‘photocopy’ effect repeatedly. Why not run all your dating app pics through this a few times and see whether the grainy, fanzine aesthetic improves your chances of getting laid? I really, really like this – the effects you get out of it are very cool indeed, in a grimily-analogue sort of way.
  • The British Library Image Search: This is cool – a frontend which allows you to search ALL of the images from the British Library’s digitised collection of books, with a degree of natural language operation and a few little parameter tools to help you narrow your enquiries. This has a LOT of content to work with – per the blurb, it fearures “1,080,814 illustrations cut from digitised books, 1510–1946, from biglam/british-library-book-images. Wonderfully, I just asked it for ‘a dog wearing a hat’ and MY GOD is there a lot of canine millinery in the archives – SO MUCH TO EXPLORE! This is via Lynn’s excellent newsletter btw, which is always worth checking out.
  • The London Guildhall in 3d: Would you like the opportunity to explore a 3d model of the interior of the Guildhall in the City of London, made with Gaussian splats? GREAT! Would you like me to explain to you what the fcuk a Gaussian splat actually is? TOUGH LUCK I COULDN’T EVEN BEGIN TO TRY! Still, this is very cool and there’s something oddly-compelling about zooming around the eaves of the historic building and checking out all the stained glass.
  • Persova: LATTERLY-ADDED EDITORIAL NOTE: Amusingly, a month after this was published, Nicholai Francker Kristensen, “the songwriter and producer behind Nico Francker and the founder of Persova”, got in touch with me to ask for CORRECTIONS to the below and to intimate the threat of legal action were I not to comply. Because I don’t want to be sued – although, honestly Nicholai, good fcuking luck mate – I have made edits to the following text… It’s been interesting seeing Spotify finally acknowledging that, yes, it has…something of a problem with AI-generated ‘music’ clogging up its platform and now beginning the too-late process of requiring that it all be labeled – FFS GUYS YOU COULD HAVE DONE THIS TWO YEARS AGO WHAT THE FCUK WERE YOU DOING? Anyway, Persova is one of the reasons why this sort of thing is eminently necessary – it’s a platform which offers anyone who wants the ability to create an AI-generated musician, a coherent, er, ‘persova’ which you can use to front up your entirely-AI-generated tunes [Nicholai would like me to clarify that, to quote him, “I am the artist, songwriter and producer behind the music. The vocals are AI, and I use AI-assisted technology within a human-led songwriting and production workflow. That is very different from an AI-generated artist or AI-generated music to which I merely provide “some input””]. As the blurb explains, “You’re not creating content. You’re building an artist. A voice that stays the same across every release. A face people recognise. A catalogue that grows into a body of work. Persova is where that artist lives — and keeps living, long after the first song.” Pricing goes up to $300 a month, which seems insanely-steep but I suppose is predicated on people’s (almost certainly false) belief that you can just create 20 of these things and have them churn out an album a day and then RAKE IN THE STREAMING REVENUE [Nicholai would like me to clarify that this is not his business model or the intended purpose of Persova]. – a theory which neatly falls apart when you take a moment to listen to some of the output of one of Persova’s flagship ‘artists’, an AI-generated scandi hunk called ‘Nico Francker’ [Nicholai would like me to clarify that “There is a real person behind the project: me. I am the songwriter and producer behind Nico Francker“], which is entirely, miserably, blandly-unlistenable and which no actual human could conceivably EVER actively choose to listen to [Nicholai would like to point out that “Nico Francker has real monthly listeners, more than 4,000 Spotify
    streams, playlist activity and documented radio airplay. At present, approximately 75 people are listening monthly on Spotify alone – that’s me told!]. Surely noone’s going to be dumb enough to use this stuff?
  • The Mexican Lexicon: APOLOGIES FOR THE CLAUDESLOP I AM SORRY! But! If you ignore the vomit-inducing banality of this site’s look and feel there’s actually something kind-of cute in here. It was sent to me by its creator, one Stephen Vickers, who explains: “You might know the name Johnny Vaughan [NOTE TO YOUNGER READERS OR ANY OF YOU WHO HAVE THE TEMERITY NOT TO BE ENGLISH – JOHNNY VAUGHAN WAS A POPULAR TV PERSONALITY OF THE 1990s]. He did not disappear off the face of the earth after the Big Breakfast ended, he’s moved to radio. He’s been doing the Radio X weekday drive time show “the 4 til 7 thang”, and a Saturday show called the Kickabout. They’ve run a feature for the best part of the last decade called “Mexican Handbags”. Long story short: he saw a load of identical handbags on a beach in Mexico which all had different brands/logos on them, so “The old Mexican Handbag” is something that’s obviously fake. Observations of everyday life, expressed as “the old”, then a place and an action or thing.” This website collects all the examples of this gag structure featured on the show in one place – so, for example, one entry is for ‘The Old Sicilian Waterfall’, defined as “When you’re moved to tears by the speeches at a wedding of someone you barely know after hitting the complimentary vino a little too hard”…you get the idea.  I really like this, despite having literally never listened to the radio show in question – there’s something really nice about the personal, vaguely-obsessional nature of the project. The thing is, though, that I nearly discounted it immediately because of the fact it LOOKS LIKE FCUKING CLAUDESLOP – the lesson, to anyone reading this, is ‘by all means use AI to make things, but please for the love of God can you make some efforts to distinguish it from every other fcuking thing built by some cnut with a £20-a-month Anthropic sub for the love of God’.
  • TTyl: Ooh, this is cool – a platform which lets you record a voice message to your future self which will send at a specific point in the future that you determine. There are MANY potential uses for this, but I would personally advocate you using it every time you start a new project or endeavour – why not consider sending your future self a congratulatory message for having achieved or completed your goal, so that you get a really upsettingly-shaming reminder of your inevitable capitulation or failure a few years hence? Fun for all the family!
  • Ocean Photographer of the Year: Typically-amazing snaps of some of the best undersea critters you’re ever likely to see – my personal favourite is the one of the seal in New Zealand just going absolutely feral on a skate (seriously, it’s ragdolling the thing like you wouldn’t believe, amazing scenes), but, as ever, you will find a lot to love in here (special shout out too to the Very Toothy Dolphin).

By Arash Mozhdekanloú

NEXT UP ENJOY THIS WILDLY-ECLECTIC MIX BY JESS PRICE, WHICH IS ALL ABOUT WAITING FOR THAT FCUKING MAN TO DIE!  

THE SECTION WHICH COULD HAVE DONE WITHOUT BEING TOLD THAT NEXT YEAR IS GOING TO BE EVEN HOTTER, PT.2: 

  • Santioni Spirits: This is GORGEOUS – utterly pointless and very silly and totally unnecessary and TERRIBLY written, fine, but also SO SO PRETTY. It’s the website for a drinks brand called Santioni which makes, as far as I can tell, drinks that can best be described as ‘fancy Baileys’ which, honestly, sounds like vomit in a glass as far as I’m concerned but perhaps you are more enticed by the concept of a cream-based liqueur concoction flavoured with marshmallow (are…are you nine? What the fcuk is wrong with you) than I am. Anyway, that’s not important – what IS important is that the site features some sort of bullsh1t narrative about a monk or something, accompanied by some genuinely-gorgeous animation and illustration; honestly, this looks sort of like woodcuts or something, it is SO pleasing, and the scrolling and animation is beautifully done, and it feels more like a digital adaptation of a graphic novel than it does a (very, very silly) attempt to flog you disgusting booze. Honestly, this is so well-made and the artist and devs deserve all sorts of flowers – none, though, to whoever wrote the accompanying copy because it is total tripe.
  • Folding Globes: Are you at a loose end this weekend? Would you like a PROJECT? OH GOOD, why not check out this website which lets you print out designs for foldable 3d globes? I have literally no clue AT ALL how the fcuk you’re meant to turn a sheet of paper into a globe solely via the medium of clever manipulation, but apparently you can and this site will show you how. If any of you try one of these can you please send me a photo of the finished article, because I am really struggling to conceive of what the fcuk it might look like.
  • The Bre Pettis Collection of Computer Art: Oh wow, WHAT a collection; Bre Pettis is an artist who also collects computer art from over the years, and this is the site they have built to show it all off. This is SUCH an interesting and varied set of works which span the period from the mid-20thC to the NFT boom of a few years ago, and there’s some really interesting stuff in here; per Bre, “The Bre Pettis Collection of Computer Art is my personal collection of artworks made with computers, algorithms, plotters, and creative machines. This site is its catalog: the works, the artists who made them, and the library of books and records that surrounds them.” If you have any interest in the interface between code and art, and how artists have worked with and alongside with code over the past 80-odd years, then this is basically a near-perfect timesink – I want SO MANY of these pieces and would plaster my walls with them were I immoderately rich (if anyone would like to contribute to my pursuit of immoderate wealth, by the way, do get in touch!).
  • MapSplit: A clever tool/toy by Friend of Curios Giuseppe Sollazzo, who’s made this site which lets you basically feed in any mapped dataset from the UK and work out how said data splits across geographical lines (which I promise will make much more sense when you click the link and stop reading my tortured explanation). Per the ‘about’ page, “draw a movable straight line across the UK and reports a statistic for each side. Select a dataset from the drop down or upload your own file (see below how to). Where its numbers came from is listed under Sources, just below the drop down. Drag the line across the country; rotate the handle to any angle. Use ↔ Horizontal and ↕ Vertical to snap back to a level line. Check the totals and the partial breakdown in What’s being counted. When a line runs roughly north–south the split is labelled West/East instead of North/South. Hover a point to see more a data tooltip.” Useful!
  • Coop: This is an interesting idea which feels like a series of lawsuits waiting to happen – the premise behind Coop, a seemingly US-only app/website, is to connect ‘local food sellers’ with local customers, allowing small-scale producers to create a sales network in their immediate vicinity. Everything about this suggests that it’s designed explicitly for non-pros, the sort of people who decide they are going to set up a small garden allotment and who want to sell their surplus, or who like baking and want to sell the odd cake from their kitchen…which is all well and good until someone decides to flog their home preserves and ends up giving botulism to a bunch of unsuspecting buyers. Basically I have a LOT of questions about the extent to which anyone needs to be a certified business to be on here – the app is…unclear about the requirements to register as a seller, and very much gives me the impression that anyone can in theory create a profile and start selling, I don’t know, backyard kombucha to anyone brave enough to buy it, which feels like a series of large-scale lawsuits waiting to happen.
  • Japanese Webcams: Would you like a website collating webcam feeds from all over Japan? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! This is WONDERFUL; you can navigate around a map of the country and pick cams by location, and there are over 1,000 currently live on the site; it’s all I can do not to abandon this stupid newsletter right here and just stare at a stream of a shrine in the middle of a field somewhere in Iwata prefecture.
  • AI Watermark Remover: NB WEB CURIOS DOES NOT ENDORSE THE REMOVAL OF WATERMARKS ON AI CONTENT OR ANY ATTEMPT TO FURTHER FCUK WITH PEOPLE’S ABILITY TO WORK OUT WHAT IS REAL AND WHAT ISN’T! That said, I think it’s important that we know what is and isn’t possible, and remember that there is no such thing as foolproof watermarking of AI content. This is a github repo and will require you to be able to run a Python script to use it; if you’re able to muster the basic technical chops, though, this promises to let you strip all watermarking from images, video and text (it says it will work on the new Claude watermarking too), and I think it claims to be able to get rid of Google’s best-in-class SynthID watermark too, which I had previously thought was pretty much foolproof. Basically the point of linking to this is to remind you that you can’t trust anything you see on the web anymore, ever, even if an AI detector tells you it’s real. HAVE FUN OUT THERE EVERYONE!
  • The Library of Leaks: Ooh, this is interesting and potentially useful for any journalists or researchers amongst you; “The Library of Leaks is a project of Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), a non-profit that specializes in publishing, archiving and analyzing leaked and hacked datasets. The Library of Leaks is the world’s largest public collection of previously secret information. More data is imported here and made searchable every day.” This is DIZZYING – there is so, so much in here, from leaked accountancy memos to the Hunter Biden email records to Wikileaks stuff, all searchable…you could lose DAYS if you were so inclined.
  • Moe P Wellington: Another personal portfolio site, this one for the work of a certain Moe P Wellington – this is a very odd little setup, and I think it’s best experienced cold; just click around and see what you find and what happens.
  • The Annual Report Gallery: Ooh, this is interesting, both from a design point of view but also in the sense of general corporate history (no, wait, come back!) – this site contains a frankly staggering number of corporate annual reports from over the years, spanning all sorts of sectors, and taking you from the 40s to the present, all browsable and explorable. “For the better part of the last century, annual reports were things that companies put lots of effort into, hiring graphic designers, illustrators, and artists. Graphic design work was pricey either way, and so companies took advantage of this sunk cost to turn everyday reports into things with true meaning, rallying their teams around the flag. When the personal computer became popular and layout and graphic design was “democratized,” the amount companies expected to pay for things went down. And so, while they continued to invest in branding and marketing, they stopped investing in aesthetics. As the production of graphics gets further mechanized via AI tools, I do worry about what we’re about to lose this time. I thought it might be interesting to take a look through what we lost before, and see if maybe we can give some of these great ideas new life.” Aside from anything else there is some ICONIC graphic design in here  – just have a browse through the 70s and 80s and enjoy some really nice cover design for some ASTONISHINGLY boring documents.
  • Full Talktime: A website which for some reason serves to replicate the experience of writing and sending text messages on an old-style flipphone; dear CHRIST the Proustian nostalgiahit this gave me, along with the realisation that oldschool phones were BETTER because you could literally type messages to people without looking at the screen, while walking along, thanks to the magic of ACTUAL PHYSICAL BUTTONS. Touchscreens are rubbish. Anyway, you can write texts, send them to people via the medium of urls, and generally indulge in some light nostalgia for 20 years ago when you were young and still had a vague sense of hope for the future (LOL SORRY!).
  • Snowflake: This is an interesting idea – Snowflake is an app which effectively gives people in other countries access to the Tor browser (used to access the darkweb): “Snowflake allows people to connect to the Tor network in places where Tor is blocked by routing your connection through volunteer proxies located in uncensored countries. Similar to VPNs, which help users bypass Internet censorship, Snowflake disguises your Internet activity as though they’re making a video or voice call, making you less detectable to Internet censors. Snowflake uses a technology called WebRTC, which is commonly employed by videoconferencing software. This helps mask your use of Tor from censors by making it appear as though you’re on an audio or video call instead.” You can read more about it here should you be curious – on balance, this feels like A Good Thing.
  • The Helmet Time Machine: This is a cool little project which will appeal to any American Football fans out there – the site collates the helmet designs of NFL teams through the years, rendered as pixel art in pleasing, cute fashion. This goes all the way back to 1960 – it’s an interesting way of tracking now the designs evolved over the decades, and taught me that the Cincinatti Bengals didn’t get their iconic tiger-striped helmets until 1981 (ok, fine, it was interesting to ME).
  • Pole Abstract: I wouldn’t ordinarily feature pole dancing in Curios – not really my vibe – but I will make an exception for this TikTok account belonging to (what I think is) a troupe of performers from (I think) China who, inexplicably, do mad dance and acrobatics routines while, er, dressed up as velociraptors. You do sort of have to see this to believe and understand it (and even then, ‘understand’ is perhaps a stretch). What a wonderful world.
  • Fish Families: Do YOU like fish? Would YOU like a massive, searchable gallery of images of ALL OF THE FISH IN THE KNOWN WORLD EVER? Oh my god you are going to be SO HAPPY! Ok, fine, it’s only 320 images, and so very much not ALL OF THE FISH, but it has taught me that there is a particular species known as the Warty Seadevil and so my Friday has been improved immoderately as a result of this site’s existence. Maybe yours will be too.
  • Shade Map: London has, at least for the moment, been released from the cruel grip of the sun’s evil deathrays, meaning that within 24h or temperatures returning towards vaguely-normal I heard my first instance of someone complaining about how cold and miserable it was. FFS MAKE UP YOUR MINDS WHAT DO YOU WANT. Anyway, the absence of sun in the city this week makes this link somewhat otiose (shout out to the Curios FAQ enjoyers, there) but it’s a useful one to bookmark for future heat-based horrors to come (and, er, it works worldwide so might be useful to any of you who have the temerity to not live in the same city as me). I’ve featured tools which show shaded areas on a map before, but this is I think the nicest-looking one I’ve yet seen, with a really nice sense of threedimensionality that you don’t always see with this sort of thing.
  • Ordinary Abundance: This has done the rounds a lot this week – I personally don’t love it, and I find it curious that despite the fact that it’s obviously Claude-d it hasn’t seemed to attract anti-AI ire, possibly because the interface is nice and the copy isn’t machine-generated and it taps into a growing sense that we are currently living in an increasingly-scifi future; the gimmick is that, as you scroll, the site takes you through various rooms in a house, highlighting elements in each one and accompanying them with quotes from the past which illustrate how unimaginable this degree of comfort, convenience and luxury was to past generations who were busy worrying about not dying of TB and didn’t have access to, say, every single song ever recorded at the tap of a screen. Anyway, while this leaves me cold there’s definitely something in the way in which it tells a story, and I would expect to see the general feel/technique appropriated in quite a few places in the next year or so.
  • The Cryptid Crossword: A collab between Friend of Curios Matt Round and constantly-online internet clown Guy Kelly (he of the strangle a horse game from a little while back), this is a cryptic crossword where all the answers are related to cryptids. You will have to both understand how cryptics work AND know a lot about mythical monsters, but I have a strange feeling that some of you freaks will be found right at the venn diagram intersection of these two things.
  • Way of the Ninja: Oh my god I lost SO MANY HOURS to this game back in the early-00s – and my then-employer, Citigate Public Affairs, paid me for every single one of them, so, er, thanks guys! This is an olschool browser platform game with BEAUTIFUL physics (honestly, the jumping and inertia are an absolute joy) and some truly-fiendish level design once it takes the training wheels off.
  • PZL Games: Would you like a website featuring a selection of (mostly) word-based puzzle games which you can play on the daily? OH GOOD! I haven’t tried all of these, but the ones I’ve tested are light, pleasing fun for all the family (or at least those members who like word-based puzzle play).
  • RPG Sketches: Ooh, I love this project – game designer Sraëka Lillian is releasing one little experimental RPG game a week, based on half-thoughts and napkin sketches and riffs on specific, traditional RPG mechanics, and while none of these are full ‘games’ by any stretch, they ARE really curious and fun explorations of the RPG genre and what you can do with it and how certain conventions and tropes might be explored and interpreted (you can read more about the project here at Rock, Paper, Shotgun if you’re interested).
  • The Rhyme Game: UGH! So it turns out the thing that was sent to me was in fact a total AI-generated rip of an existing game; the main link now points to the original. Apologies to Ayotemi and the dev team for my initial fcukup; I HATE THE FACT THAT PEOPLE ARE THIEVES AND THIS IS BEING ENABLED BY AI FFS. This is a fun idea, sent to me by its creator, Deng Yi, and while it’s imperfect I think there’s something quite cool in here which is worth checking out. Basically it’s a game that asks you to rhyme on-beat; let it access your mic, and you can play at being a rapper, scored on how accurately your flow keeps the time. It’s not super-intuitive and you’ll need to scroll down the page to grant it mic access, but it’s worth a go because it is surprisingly fun (I am a fcuking TERRIBLE rapper, turns out).
  • Turn Left: A racing game that mimics the UNIQUE THRILL of the Indy 500, a race in which participants do 500 laps of an oval track and so spend several hours doing nothing more than turning left; this is basically like that, except it’s a top-down pixel game and a lot more fun than actually watching the Indy 500.
  • Hit The Dot: Ooh, this is fun too – also sent to me by its creator, Aditya Tickoo, this is a very simple game which tests how good you are at measuring time; the timer starts, and you’re tasked with clicking a button after a set number of seconds have passed based on nothing more than your own internal intuition. Per the last game, FCUK ME do I have no sense of timing whatsoever, this was utterly humiliating for me.
  • Isle: Also via Lynn, this is SUCH a relaxing little webtoy – click the link and wander around a procedurally-generated landscape with animals and a day/night cycle and generally just appreciate some digital countryside. There’s nothing to do, but, sometimes, that is entirely ok.

By Tania Shcheglova

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS AN EXCELLENT HOUSEYDISCO NUMBER BY WEEKEND AFFAIR!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  •  Fieri Frames: I have never seen a Guy Fieri TV show. I have never been to Flavortown. Guy Fieri exists to me solely in the form of memes, an idea of frosted tips vaguely suggesting itself across the Atlantic. This is a GLORIOUS collection of shots from his shows with overlaid captions and I am not exaggerating when I say that a good 65% of this is ART.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Mr Goodbar 21: This is is the Insta feed of one Greg Westlake, who delivers ‘blue’ jokes into camera with an almost psychotic degree of detachment; I can’t stress enough how odd this is, there are VERY STRONG Dracula Flow vibes here (and if you aren’t familiar with Dracula Flow then GO AND FCUKING LEARN).

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • The Carrion Eaters: I’m starting the longreads this week with a bunch of pieces about Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor who died last week after having resigned his position as a result of persistent questions of plagiarism and other academic irregularities in his record; this first link takes you to a typically-overwritten but also very good piece by Sam Kriss (although imho it sort of falls apart when he starts talking about universities because, well, Cambridge is not a polytechnic and the challenges facing the sector probably don’t apply quite so much to one of the world’s best-regarded and richest institutions); this one is by Hugh Muir, one of the journalists who penned pieces about Arday in the lead-up to his death; and this one is a typically-long and VERY angry one by Will Self. I have to declare a degree of professional and personal interest here – I happened to be on a podcast for work a couple of weeks ago, where the final segment was a discussion of the Arday story and the media’s coverage of it, recorded 4 days prior to his death, and as such I am, even in a small way, part of the media machine which, I can’t help but agree, contributed to the man’s death.  Each of the pieces I link to make different points – Self is particularly convinced of the media’s culpability (and I thought his line that “you don’t have to be innocent to possess a right not to be collectively destroyed” was particularly good), Muir writes excellently about the tension in being a black journalist covering the story – but this paragraph in Kriss’s essay is the one that stuck with me and which I keep coming back to: “If a lot of people seem to have suddenly started making very different noises in the last few days, it’s not because any of the substance has changed. Everything they said is still true. The allegations against Arday are the same, and the evidence is still overwhelming. The only difference is that it’s not fun any more. The victim can’t run or hide, but if they’re desperate and vicious enough they can choose to ruin the fun. You destroy yourself in the process, brutalise your family and everyone who ever loved you—but for all the people in the great giggling mob, it’s like a bucket of ice water to the face. Suddenly they all stop hooting and honking and sticking out their tongues. A few blinks. Sober, sheepish expression, as it dawns on them that they appear to have just been torturing a man to death for their own sick amusement. Ah. Well, in this particular case it looks like the evidence might have actually been overblown. What a tragedy. What a senseless waste. Ideologically motivated, obviously. Wouldn’t have happened if he were white. We should think about introducing more controls on the press. We should make it mandatory to be nice. But it never lasts very long. You’re not really sorry, just momentarily embarrassed. A few weeks later someone else is being paraded for your amusement, and you’re whooping like a gibbon as their skin starts to fissure in the light.” This has been a horrible story in every single possible sense, from the fact that it was all kicked off by an Actual Racist, to the mad feeding frenzy that ensued, to Arday’s death, to the way in which it’s being turned into more monetisable content by the same machine in the wake of his passing, to the weird attempts to ignore the realities of the plagiarism and fabulism now that he’s dead, to the fact that reactions to it are being mapped against various culture war faultlines and the whole…noone comes out of this well and, honestly, I feel slightly grubby even writing about it here.
  • The Water Century: Sorry, this one’s not a hugely-cheering read either (but it’s really interesting, and the scrollytelling’s nice!) – this is a piece all about the current state of the water system, mainly in the UK, and, basically, how fcuked it is. I was talking to a friend of mine who works in the industry a couple of weeks ago and OH BOY did I have no idea quite what sort of Significant Compromises are currently being made when it comes to keeping the taps on, and how they might come to bite us in a few years, and quite how hairy some of the food scarcity issues are likely to get in the next decade or so. Still, this is clear and interesting and well-designed, and generally a good piece of work by its author Matt Hampsey (it’s worth checking out the rest of his website too, which is just a cool bit of design overall).
  • The Vibe Shift Was A Buyout: One of the (many, many) things I have been completely wrong about in recent years was the likely trajectory of Twitter post-Musk; I was personally convinced that the fcuker would never buy it (SO WRONG), and then, when he did, that the whole thing would fall apart within 18 months because the fcuker had no idea how to run a social network (SO WRONG). Instead, as this piece argues, what has ACTUALLY happened is that it has allowed the fcuker to reshape the global discourse to match his Twitter-poisoned obsessions (to whit; a bunch of racist bullsh1t), and that, without the purchase, we wouldn’t be in a position where the Daily Telegraph is running a piece on The Great Replacement Theory, a position espoused by literal white supremacists and Nazis. Vincent Bevins’ article is a good, if incredibly depressing, account of How We Got Here: “Whether x.com still matters in 2026, or will matter at all in 2030, he did solve the problem I identified in 2018. He destroyed a part of the public sphere where his enemies used to thrive. Along the way, he made racist and reactionary positions feel more normal to journalists. The “marketplace of ideas” is a myth, but the dialectic is real. Given conditions of widespread and equal participation in public discourse, some ideas will win out through argumentation. If the media landscape were a simple reflection of economic power, there would be no point for us to do much of anything. Of course, it is not. The press has been a powerful revolutionary force over the last five centuries. But it is also possible to simply buy a newspaper or a website and make it illegal to make fun of the owner or oppose his business interests. That is why control of the press has been a vital political struggle over the last five centuries. It is folly to think that Musk was going to be made a fool on his own property, or that Jeff Bezos would buy Washington Post and allow the paper to get in the way of his larger business goals.”
  • Zoomers Don’t Know Usenet: Ok, this ostensibly about the fact that a whole new generation of kids are discovering that Gerard Way of MCR posted quite openly about having a vomit fetish on old messageboards back in the day, but is ACTUALLY about one of my hobbyhorses, specifically ‘the fact that we haven’t in any way produced a coherent record or history or meaningful, cogent archive of the past 30-40 years of internet culture is an act of at best negligence and at worst suicidal cultural vandalism that we are going to come to regret in increasingly-complex and fractal ways the longer we fail to do so’. This piece doesn’t share my sense of the importance of this cultural memory, but, well, it SHOULD.
  • The Teens Spying for Russia: This is SUCH a good essay by Adrian Hon, about the growing trend in kids being coopted to engage in state-mandated terrorism thanks to escalating online engagement, and the extent to which this is mirroring techniques deployed in ARGs and similar communities; we saw this in the UK earlier this year, with some of the people who attacked Jewish ambulances in North London having been apparently recruited online to do small acts of vandalism which escalated to actual, proper crimes as they became more hooked in to the network. Honestly, this is fascinating both for the stories of how this is being done by Russia and for the stuff about how you can manipulate and direct people at scale, and the ways in which this maps onto ludic mechanics in interesting and (to me at least) unexpected ways, and how this might evolve as technology does.
  • My AI Lover Passed Away: Another one of Jeffrey Ding’s translated dispatches from China, this one a piece about the reactions of various people to their AI ‘lovers’ being shut down as part of the Chinese state’s recent crackdown on AI companions; this is, obviously, VERY DEPRESSING in all the predictable ways, but I found it particularly interesting in terms of the fact that ALL of the case studies here are women, and the fairly reasons they provide for why they turned to AI for companionship, and the crippling degree of loneliness and isolation that lurks just under the surface of all of these stories.
  • The Mascot Resurgence: US brands are, by all accounts, getting back in to the mascot game, and this piece in the WSJ looks at some of the recent additions to the Cuddly Corporate Friend pantheon and what might be driving it;  file this one alongside Jay Springett’s ‘little guys’ trend.
  • The Mend Trend: On the one hand, I broadly approve of the idea of shifting towards a ‘fix it, don’t replace it’ mentality when it comes to clothing and the like, pushing back against fast fashion and disposability; on the other, the idea of this being packaged and sold to use by brands as part of their marketing makes me feel icky as all fcuk. OH WELL. This is an interesting piece about how various brands are pushing ‘mending’ as a thing; for example, “Levi’s created a handstitching course for high school students after determining that many members of Gen Z lacked the sewing skills to match their interest in thrift store shopping and sustainability. Employees spend 90 minutes instructing teenagers on four tasks: sewing on a button, hemming, patching a hole and fixing a tear.” I’m grudgingly forced to admit that this is very smart on several levels (environmentalist positioning, GenZ loves doing activities, deepened brand affinity and some SWEET SWEET DATACAPTURE, to name but three), but man do I wish brands would fcuk off also.
  • Brand Newspapers: Despite, per a few links back, being consistently wrong in almost ALL of my predictions for the future, I do occasionally get some things right, so I am going to lightly pat myself on the back for consistently saying that printed media is going to have a resurgence; the latest datapoint to back this up is the apparent vogueish thing of brands printing newspapers as both a marketing and comms exercise and also as a slight ‘prestige’ marker. Honestly, I can’t stress enough how much I would be pitching ‘make a good quarterly magazine laser-targeted at your target consumer and distribute it to them directly’ were I still working in agencyland: “As a direct-to-consumer business, “so much of the world that we build is digital,” Maev’s senior director of brand Maddy Tank says. That’s why her team wanted to use something she calls more “real and tactile” to announce the limited-edition formula to customers. They gravitated toward the newspaper concept in particular because it both felt nostalgic and would allow Maev to showcase a close-up of the ingredients. Plus, Tank says: “A launch at its core is news.” It took the Austin, Texas-based brand—which ranked No. 38 on Inc.’s list of the fastest-growing private American companies in 2024—about a month to draft the newspaper. While the Maev team primarily created it to serve as a social media teaser, they also included copies in PR mailers, handed them out in New York City dog parks, and dropped them off at local doggy daycares and Nordic cafes.”
  • Emoji Generations: We got some new intel about who uses which emoji this month, and this is a piece in the NYT looking at how their deployment varies between generations. I don’t have enough GenA/Z interlocutors to have noticed the ‘wilting rose’ cropping up, but I am always curious to see trends in linguistic usage (and, much as 2011 Matt would have been horrified by this, emoji are very much language now).
  • 40 First Dates and Still Searching: One of those great New York Times pieces that you read and realise that fcuking hell are the lives of a certain class of rich New Yorker just…different to ours. This is a profile of a matchmaking service in NYC, Agape Match, which charges $25,000(!!!!) for a six-month engagement and which promises to source potential partners to their clients’ exacting specifications; the piece introduces a few of the firm’s clients as well as the woman who’s at the heart of the matchmaking and, Jesus, everything and everyone is mad. It’s actually a refreshingly-sensitive piece (only one of the men in it comes across as a sociopath, amazingly) but it made me feel…quite sad for the main featured bachelor, Joseph Pascaretta. “Eventually, the team turned to Pascaretta. “He’s a 50-year-old man in a 30-year-old man’s body, and the kind of woman that’s going to be with him is the kind of woman who envisions herself being the wife of a congressman,” Avgitidis said. “She needs to be someone who is extroverted, or understands how to work a room. Because he is the person that works the room…Chrisoula and I feel very frustrated by some of the women, because we cannot comprehend why they don’t want a second date with him,” she continued. They say, “‘He’s lovely, I just don’t envision him as my husband,’” her sister piped in. “I’m like, ‘Why are you thinking about that on a first date?’” Avgitidis said, waving her hands in the air again, a small cursive “love” sculpture behind her, across from a copy of her book, “Ask a Matchmaker.”“The purpose of a first date,” she continued, “is to go on a second date.””
  • The 00s Emo Skatepunk Nostalgia Revival: This piece is basically a bunch of interviews with people at this summer’s anniversary Warped tour in the US, but I am including it because it contains some AMAZING lines which, once again, demonstrate with unerring accuracy how every generation of young people thinks that it is the FIRST EVER to experience anything; witness the sweet summer child quoted in here who suggests that the reason people are getting nostalgic for the 00s now is because “Now that things are online, we’re the first generation to have this long-stage cultural memory.” LOL I LOVE YOU YOU TINY MORON!
  • The 50 Most Under-Appreciated TV Shows of the 21stC: This is in Time Magazine and so is US-centric (and VERY English language-centric), but does contain a few UK shows too – I don’t really do telly and so have no idea AT ALL as to the quality of the list or the programmes contained in it, but if you’re in the market for something to gaze blankly at while you wait for your cells to start mutating in novel and eventually-fatal ways then this might be of use.
  • The Supplier That Writes London’s Menus: I think this is paywalled – but, look, it’s Substack, so you can literally just sign up and then cancel your subscription after you’ve read it (NOT THAT I AM ADVOCATING THIS I JUST KNOW TIMES ARE HARD BUT PLEASE PAY IF YOU CAN AFFORD IT). Anyway, this is a fascinating piece in Vittles about wholesale supplier to the high-end restaurant trade Natoora, which seemingly provides fruit and veg and other bits and pieces to a swathe of reasonably-fancy London establishments and, in so doing, gently dictates what ends up on menus and what is ‘trending’. This is SO interesting, especially if you’ve any interest in either the London restaurant scene or the economics/industry of eating out. “When it comes to romantic and flexible storytelling, it is with the concept of ‘hyper-seasonality’ that Natoora has found the most fertile ground for strategic reinvention (one of Natoora’s taglines is ‘Radical Seasonality’). Rather than thinking in terms of winter, spring, summer and autumn, Fubini and Natoora now emphasise ‘seasonality as a 365-day continuum’, with produce on a rolling basis of early, peak and late ripeness. Even ripeness has been reconceptualised, with the invention of ‘green citrus’ (formerly ‘unripe citrus’) as a marketable Natoora product. ‘A spark of pure inspiration,’ Fubini says, relaying the story (again, as told in his book) of how the idea ‘came in the summer months as I wandered under the canopy of a citrus orchard on the Amalfi coast.’ Thus, in the Natoora calendar, ‘green citrus season’ replaces the season previously known as autumn. When limited by location, seasonality can be an enabling constraint for the cook, encouraging creativity and ingenuity and sometimes generating boredom. Its opposite is the year-round seasonless abundance promised by the supermarket. Natoora has managed to unhitch seasonality from its limitations, turning it into something both much more and much less than what it once was. In London, thanks to Natoora, in-season Indian Alphonso mangoes now sit alongside in-season English spring asparagus, in-season Italian winter Camone tomatoes and in-season Bulgarian wild morels. I’m reminded of a comment by Harry Dyer, co-founder of the Brighton-based wholesaler Shrub Provisions: ‘Everything is in season somewhere, like a broken clock is right twice a day.’”
  • LARPing America: This is a great read; Danielle Paquette writes in the Washington Post about going to Poland to participate in a Live Action Roleplaying game in which all the participants spend several days pretending to be part of trash America; the whole thing is set on a fictitious trailer park, there are guns and drug dealers and SEEDY GOINGS ON, and the author offers an interesting series of perspectives and observations not only of the ‘game’ but of the vision of her country being presented in the fiction. As ever, while I can’t think of anything I would like to do less than participate in a multi-day piece of roleplay improv with strangers (or indeed with friends!), I will absolutely lap up any journalism about this sort of thing. “The organizers sent me Delilah’s seven-page backstory. Secretly cooking meth was a reprieve from her frosty home life. Following a traumatic childbirth, she’d never managed to connect with her grown daughter, Charlene, and could no longer stand her husband, Roger. I’d have to ooze standoffish. Not a bad option for a gal who dreads the spotlight. Nailing the meth, however, would take practice, Bruski advised me. So in late June, the day before flying to Warsaw, I stirred a mix of granulated sugar, water and corn syrup into a pot and watched it boil to 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Then I added blue food dye, poured the glop onto a baking sheet and waited for it to cool into the consistency of a Jolly Rancher.”
  • The Last Great Butterfly Collector: I have always found collections of butterflies – something I saw a weirdly large number of as a kid growing up, fcuk knows why – to be incredibly, deeply macabre and unsettling; I think it’s the fact that they preserve perfectly and so look so creepy when pinned, live but very much not. Anyway, perhaps unsurprisingly given current more enlightened attitudes to the relationship between us and the natural world, even insects, the pastime is seemingly dying out; this is a wonderful piece of writing profiling one of the last of the great enthusiasts, one Steve Collins. There’s so much interesting stuff in this piece, not least the odd nugget of weird colonial history that gets thrown into the mix, and even if you don’t think you have any interest in sticking pins through the bodies of rare lepidoptera I promise this is worth your time: “If Collins is, then, to be the final great butterfly collector, he will be the last of an illustrious cast of adventurers and eccentrics. Not very long ago, chasing and collecting butterflies was a fairly common and respectable activity, notably widely practiced by the middle classes, women, and virtually anyone who had access to nature and time to spare. The history of butterfly collectors also boasts many familiar faces, such as Winston Churchill, Neville Chamberlain, Vladimir Nabokov, Tsar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria, and the son of Nikita Khrushchev. Certain personalities loom particularly large in the lepidopterology world. The magnificent Margaret Fountaine, said to be the most well-traveled lepidopterist in history, was a Victorian femme fatale who crossed the Syrian desert, trekked the Himalayas, dived out of crashing trains, flew in some of the earliest airplanes ever built, survived earthquakes in Cuba and cholera in Beirut, flirted with barons and outlaws alike, and was, for a brief spell, kidnapped by a gang of Circassian highwaymen. The legend goes that Fountaine, refusing to be intimidated, told them off so thoroughly that they blushingly released her and sent her on her way. A more recent figure of note was Torben Bjørn Larsen, sometimes known as “the Indiana Jones” of lepidopterology, a drunkard from Denmark who, in his never-ending hunt for butterflies, jumped out of helicopters and faced firing squads in Nigeria and interrogations by the Syrian secret police.”
  • New Worlds: A sort of textual counterpoint to the ‘Ordinary Abundance’ link all the way back up there, I like this a LOT more; Ray Newman compiles a bunch of headlines and news fragments which speak to the scifi, Ballardian vibe of the now – this is excellent, and very well done indeed.
  • Numbers: A blogpost by Ali Dirik, owner of East London restaurant Mangal 2, about the numbers behind his business; I’ve linked to Dirik’s writing before and this is another great piece of writing, emotional and personal and interesting and illuminating and weirdly hopeful despite the stark and not-particularly-hopeful realities it describes. This is, honestly, lovely: “Can you quantify success? Is it based on what a screen reveals – its numbers? Profits. Dividends. Growth. Expansion. I think for most restaurants, yes, this applies. Me? I don’t know. I’ve never really been money-orientated, and never chased it. I grew up working class and without much luxury. My first holiday was when I was 11. I finally had my own bedroom at 17. We never went out for dinner as a family. KFC takeaways were as indulgent as it got. And yet, I loved my childhood. The freedom. Being on my bike with my friends and riding around town. Playing football. Watching WWE. Reading. Fancying the girls from my school. Eating terribly fizzy sweets. The only thing I knew about money growing up was the debt my parents incurred. The random business partners my dad would bring in to keep the restaurant afloat, then inevitably fall out with and try and buy out by re-mortgaging the family home (twice). It meant I had a natural distrust of finances from a young age, witnessing how precarious it all was month-to-month throughout my childhood and adolescence. And yet, I still feel like I had a fortunate upbringing, because it can always be worse. I feel lucky.”
  • Earthly Delights: The final longread of the week is this short story by Sheila Heti, about sex and desire and memory and and and…Heti is simply a superb writer and I will read anything and everything she writes, and you should too: “She had wanted only the simplest, smallest things: she kept a box of maxi pads hopefully in the back of her sock drawer for years before she ever got her first period. There were little squiggles on the packaging, teal and pink, in the flamboyant yet cool style of the day. Then, later, with her childhood friend, their plan was to lose their virginity together, on the same bed, holding hands, one boy having sex with her, the other boy having sex with her friend. They agreed and made the pact and looked forward to it. In a way, it would be like losing their virginity to each other. That would be good, for they didn’t mean each other any harm. With a boy, you couldn’t know.”

By Seung Ah Paik

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

 

Webcurios 14/08/26

Uncategorized No Comments
Reading Time: 37 minutes

 

Did any of you feel a strange, almost-irresistible desire to stare at the sun on Wednesday? No? Oh, ok, fine. Anyway, it was a genuinely lovely moment here in London as people flooded the streets and did the unthinkable, talking and even smiling at strangers as though, I don’t know, we were a COMMUNITY or something; NEVER AGAIN.

Anyway, this week’s Other Big News was one of my godchildren getting her A-Level results, making me feel both proud (fcuk knows why, her academic success has literally nothing whatsoever to do with me) and like I am so close to the grave I can practically taste the mortuarists makeup. LIKE SANDS THROUGH TIME’S HOURGLASS, SO TOO ARE THE DAYS OF OUR LIVES. Er, innit.

Below you will once again find a selection of the week’s finest links, culled and collated and curated for your clicking pleasure; I am going to finish typing this and go for a nap, as it turns out that four hours of sleep is not, in fact, an optimal number for me to have achieved last night and I feel increasingly like my brain is about to fall out of my nose.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can put the colander down now.

By Kristina Rozhkova

WE KICK OFF THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH THIS WEIRD AND EXCELLENT ALBUM WHICH WAS RECOMMENDED TO ME BY MELISSA HARRISON AND WHICH I HAVE ENJOYED LOADS OVER THE PAST MONTH AND I THINK AND HOPE YOU WILL TOO – IT’S BY HEADACHE AND IT IS ACE! 

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD QUITE LIKE THE BINFACE GUY TO GO AWAY FOR A YEAR OR SO PLEASE IF THAT’S OK, PT.1: 

  • I Didn’t Set A Cookie: For reasons I genuinely don’t understand, the past few weeks have seen an unexpected resurgence in people online (or at least the ones who I keep a constant, surveilling eye on – not *you*, obviously, I don’t watch *you*, that would be weird and creepy and, frankly, a strange inversion of the writer/reader relationship that I don’t think either of us would enjoy) discussing the whole ‘are our phones listening to us in order to harvest even MORE data for the purposes of flogging us advertising’ thing – leaving aside the fact that it does rather feel like after 15 years of smartphones we should have all learned how the fcuking things work by now, can we just all take a deep breath and once again say in unison “NO THEY FCUKING AREN’T”? Ok, good! The reason, of course, that your phone isn’t listening to you so as it can serve you more accurate advertising is that, honestly, it doesn’t fcuking need to because we already have a perfectly good set of digital tracking and surveillance protocols in place – as witnessed by this excellent, creepy little site which, when you click the link, will tell you a genuinely eye-opening amount of facts about who and where you are and what device you’re on and even how old it is (ngl, telling me I probably ought to buy a new laptop felt like a low blow). There’s even a bit on-page which invites you type a phrase in and does a bit of light analysis of your typing style, which is something I always forget is possible and which really did creep me out slightly – honestly, this is really smart and nicely-done and SO INCREDIBLY SINISTER, so feel free to send it to everyone you know who is incredibly paranoid about the HORRIBLE DIGITAL PANOPTICON in which we live because it will freak the fcuk out of them in really pleasing fashion (but, seriously, YOUR PHONE ISN’T FCUKING LISTENING TO YOU).
  • Cyberspace Online: On the one hand, my posting this link here is largely pointless – social media is DEAD and OVER and attempts to resurrect it from the ground up seem to fundamentally misunderstand the relationship we have with both the web and ourselves in 2026 (after all, do we really want to ‘connect with people online’ any more? After two decades of seeing what ‘people online’ are like? lol!); on the other, I really like this attempt to ‘make posting nice again’ and the way in which the site functions, and maybe there will be one or two of you who have managed to maintain a vague sense of hope and optimism and for whom this will feel like an exciting new dawn that is pregnant with promise and definitely *not* pregnant with a horrible litter of teeming monstrosities waiting to strip the very psychic flesh from your bones (ok, yes, fine, but I am TIRED and it is early, give me a chance here). Cyberspace Online is, basically, a NEW, TEXT-BASED SOCIAL PLATFORM, something which literally noone wants or has asked for (cf the continually declining numbers of Bluesky users – what do you MEAN, ‘normal people don’t want to spend time on a largely text-based platform, let alone one populated seemingly-exclusively by humourless scolds with an incredible and largely-unwarranted sense of moral superiority’?) but which someone has nonetheless seen fit to build; this is VERY OLDSCHOOL, from design to function, but also has some really lovely ideas built into it, from the feed that shows all the songs posted to the platform and isolates them so you can browse tracks, or the map which shows where all the users are, to the global feed, to the fact that they have a whole ‘netiquette’ section which patiently explains to users how not to be a total d1ck (you’d think that after some three decades of being online we’d have evolved some sort of widely-accepted social protocols around this, but, well, have we fcuk!) – generally this is a proper throwback to a semi-idealised version of Being Online, when it was niche and Not For Normies, and, honestly, I think it is LOVELY. It will never be big, it will appeal almost exclusively to old people and the (sorry, but) weird, it will never expand beyond (I think) a few tens of thousands of people at most, but if you would like to try A Different Small Social Network then this could, maybe, be fun.
  • A Full, AI-Created Film: Annoyingly this only seems to exist as an upload to X, so apologies for the fact that this link is sending you to Elon’s Racist Bongo Empire – still, I think that this really is worth engaging with, not because the film is good (I mean, look, it *might* be – I have only spent about 20 mins scrubbing through it because, look, I don’t like films, let alone ‘lads together action movies’ –  but I am going to also bet not-insignificant money that, by all objective standards, it really isn’t) but because it represents a real leap forward in what I think is possible with the tech. This is basically a sort of massive tech demo for Seeddance and Higgsfield – a full, feature-length comedy action film (imagine if AI were currently good enough to spit out a movie based on a prompt reading ‘make me something that felt a bit like a straight to video Guy Richie flick and you are sort-of there) made with AI, but in a way in which showcases the top end of what is possible with the tech right now and which involves a serious degree of craft rather than just ‘chucking in a prompt and hoping’. The budget for this was, per the blurb, a couple of million quid – the script is written by a real human (and you really can tell – it’s not great, but it’s ten million times better than anything an AI could write), the actors are real people, and every scene is blocked out and ‘directed’…honestly, however much you might ‘HATE AI’ (you tedious, performative fcuk), this is worth clicking, not least because the thread on X gives a really detailed breakdown of how it was made and the extent to which The Machine is working alongside actual human creativity to make the final product, and exactly what is required from a technical point of view to create something this slick. It feels like a sign of how this stuff is *actually* going to be used; not spinning up whole films from a single prompt but effectively as a sort of CGI-plus tool which can take actors and costumes and dialogue and direction and bring them together. This is frankly insane, particularly when you think about how janky AI video was just 18-24 months ago and how far it has come.
  • Dora: Would you like the opportunity to explore a new city (or even an old one, I’m not judging) via the medium of an app that gives you a reactive audio tour of the place based on where you are? OH GOOD! Dora is a platform, currently live in six cities (including New York, Milan and Paris), which basically provides a reactive audioguide, walking tours and the like, all through your phone. The idea, per the blurb, is to effectively offer all the WONDER of a guided tour without the annoyance of, well, having to deal with a guide, or other people, and instead get a bespoke tour based on what YOU want to see. Per the app store blurb (this is currently iOS-only),  “every Dora story is carefully researched, thoughtfully written, and professionally narrated. Rather than reading long articles while standing in front of a place, you can simply listen, look around, and experience it in context” – which is interesting, given that, as far as I can tell based on the clips available on the website, the audio is a fairly-hideous AI voiceover. Are…are you LYING to me, Dora? This basically feels like it’s been entirely spun up with AI, but what I think is curious (and possibly an indication of Where We Are in terms of the general stench around the tech at the moment) is that at no point does the website or the app acknowledge that at all – there is literally NO MENTION of artificial intelligence on the site, despite the fact that this clearly has ‘LLM’ running through it like a stick of rock. NICE TRY KIDS, BUT NOONE IS FOOLED AND EVERYONE CAN SEE YOUR MACHINE KNICKERS (er, so to speak).
  • Predictions Timeline: I hadn’t previously come across Manifold Markets before, but, as far as I can tell, it’s a small-scale prediction market, along the lines of Kalshi or Polymarket but comparatively tiny; this site is quite a clever idea, taking predictions make on the marketplace and mapping them on a theoretical timeline, so you can see all the things that people think might happen in the future. This is, weirdly, absolutely fascinating, a sort of collective imagining of potential futures – maybe tomorrow WILL be Tim Cook’s last day as Apple CEO (although I doubt he’ll resign on a Saturday tbh); maybe Vladimir Putin will die on EXACTLY October 21 2032; maybe London will get a taller building than the Shard in 15 years; maybe pigs WILL get rights (genuinely curious as to what the ‘win’ conditions are for this one)! This is a really strange, curious set of potential future fictions and I would LOVE to see this replicated with a market someone actually uses.
  • Other Eclipses: I thought the nicest thing about the eclipse this week was the genuine and heartwarming sense of community it seemed to engender in Londoners – while we are, in the main, a city that would barely deign to p1ss on each other were we on fire, Wednesday brought on a rarely-seen sense of citywide camaraderie as people flocked into the streets to stare confusedly at their colanders (honestly, the number of people who’d heard that colanders were useful to experience the MAGICAL CELESTIAL SHOW vs the number of people who understood HOW they were useful was…very funny to me) and chat to their neighbours, possibly for the first time ever, and  flirt (honestly, there will be a LOT of relationships based on a ‘we met during the eclipse’ origin story, based on a small sample of interactions I witnessed, and that is SO CUTE), and it made me feel, briefly, all warm and fuzzy and generally Good About People. Anyway, this website lets you see what eclipses would look like were you able to see them on each of the other planets in the solar system – would you like to experience the incredibly-underwhelming reality of what it looks like when, I don’t know, Phobos passes in front of the sun? WELL NOW YOU CAN! This does rather hammer home what an incredible thing it is that the Earth’s moon just so happens to be the EXACT right size to completely obscure the Sun at certain specific moments in its orbit; COULD THIS BE INTELLIGENT DESIGN? Er, no, I don’t think so, but don’t let me stop you feeling a sligjhtly-spooky sense of wonder at the near coincidence of the whole thing. BONUS ECLIPSE SITE: this lets you see ALL OF THE ECLIPSES IN HISTORY, where they fell and when they happened, as well as where all the ones over the next 50 years will be, should you wish to plan a trip for The Future (lol, good luck predicting where is going to be visitable in 40 years’ time based on how fcuked everything is starting to look now).
  • The Canvas Browser: Ooh, this is quite neat – I don’t really understand what it’s for or why anyone might need it, but it’s a cool idea and I am impressed that it’s possible. This is, basically, a site that lets you open and arrange *another* set of browser windows within the tab, so you can open multiple different webpages at the same time in a single view. Which, I appreciate, is an explanation so clunky as to be nearly completely nonsensical, but I am VERY sleepy and I promise it will make sense as soon as you click (probably). What’s clever – and what, on reflection, makes it potentially-useful – is that you can open websites in multiple different countries in the same window view; so, for example, if you wanted to compare and contrast the BBC homepage across each continent then, well, NOW YOU CAN! I have a feeling that this is technically very clever indeed, but, er, I’m not technical enough to understand why or how.
  • The Archive of Archives: Oh this is very cool, I like it a LOT. David Sizemore wrote to me to tell me about this site, which he made and which is, er, an archive of archives! Per David, this is “an online archive of other archives I’ve run across online. I love when folks feel passionately enough about something to document it meticulously. It’s great when they’re well designed, and it’s often better when they look like they were created in TextEdit back in 1997. I imagine you’ll be familiar with quite a few of them, since I found some through your blog, but hopefully there’s some new gems in there to discover…Because this is an open source project that anyone can submit to. Folks will need the barest of technical know-how (a github account and the ability to generate a thumbnail somehow), but if they do, they’re welcome to submit a PR for their favorite online archive. I’ve had a handful of submissions, and it’s always lovely to see them come through.”  David built this with the help of AI, but the frontend work is his own – and GOD is it nicer for not looking like Claudeslop. Also, MAN are there some great sites on here – from classics like Rotating Sandwiches to things that were wholly new to me, like this collection of ice cream wrappers from Malaysia – and there’s a whole afternoon’s worth of digging in here for the curious (and, honestly, like you have anything better to do with the next couple of hours, come on, be honest).
  • Stone Tools: You know those websites that act as repositories for old videogames from Back In The Day? Well this is like that, except instead of fun, ludic pursuits this is instead collecting old, obsolete productivity software from the 80s and 90s. This is made and maintained by one Christopher Drum, who explains it thusly: “Stone Tools is a blog about the productivity software of the 8/16-bit home computing era, written by a human, Christopher Drum. If you want a blog about retro-gaming, you’ll need to look elsewhere. If you want to read about someone examining the Y2K bug in database software of the 80s, you’ve come to the right place.” Look, I obviously don’t know who you are or what you like or anything about you, but, equally, I think there is a non-zero possibility that one of you freaks is practically tumescent with excitement at the prospect of getting your hands dirty with some CAD software originally designed for the Atari ST (I SEE YOU).
  • Falling Letters: Via Andy, this is a weird, silly little website which, when you type into the textbox, will send the individual letters tumbling to the floor. Why? I HAVE NO IDEA ASK THE MYSTERIOUS JOOHYUN PARK WHO MADE IT.
  • LEGO Trains: Would you like a TikTok account which seemingly exists solely to share videos of LEGO trains – specifically, trains that (afaik – I am not a LEGO expert, so I am very much guessing here) are from the ‘technics’ range of ‘adult, engineering-ish’ LEGO sets rather than the ones aimed at literal children, and which are battery operated, and which, in these videos, are being made to do some very impressive things indeed (things which, despite me having spent a couple of minutes staring at one of the videos just now, I don’t *really* understand)? YES, YES YOU WOULD, I KNOW YOU AND I KNOW YOUR DARK DESIRES! I reckon you could make quite a decent music video for some minimal techno with this sort of footage, imho.
  • The Mother Bracelet: Obviously making fun of the use of English on a foreign website is pathetic, childish and very unfair; on the other, there’s something about the register of the English on this site for a smart device (as far as I can tell, a hybrid Apple Watch/Oura-type thing) which really tickles me, not least because it makes the whole thing sound even more sinister than these things generally feel. The specific gimmick for, er, MOTHER, is that it charges via..some sort of magic, vaguely-scifi technology, meaning that the movement of the user’s wrist is used to generate power for the device, which means you need NEVER TAKE IT OFF – per the blurb, this is good because “”Remove it from your body to charge.” This challenge across all devices resulted in downtime (time when data could not be collected), hindering the accurate recording of healthcare data. In addition, the act of “removing the device from the body to charge” itself creates discomfort when wearing it, hindering continued use of the device.” WELL EXACTLY. Also, there’s this WONDERFUL-sounding bonus element to the tech – you can earn POINTS “Accumulate your life log as points (energy). You can use them to support projects or give gifts to family and friends. Keeping a record can become a source of motivation for the people you care about.” I love this so so so much, can one of you buy one and, er, give me some points? THANKS!
  • Printing Films: Per the ‘About’ section, “PrintingFilms.com is a collection of vintage films that showcase the technologies and processes of printing, journalism, and typography. It was established by Doug Wilson in 2012 after his work as director of Linotype: The Film. The collection started when Doug was given a box of 16mm Linotype promotional films in 2011 by Dave Seat for digitization.” I bet you’ve never thought “wow, I wish there was a single place online where I could find a series of short films about the history of Monotype”, but, well, I exist to fulfil even your unimagined desires.
  • Riot Bingo: Do you sometimes feel that everything is falling apart around our ears, and that, honestly, perhaps it’s time that we TOOK TO THE STREETS to MAKE OUR FEELINGS KNOWN? No, of course you don’t, you’re a middle-class milquetoast who spends most of their lives behind a screen and whose relationship to ‘activism’ is in the main entirely theoretical! BUT! Should you even want a handy guide as to when it might be time to RISE UP, perhaps you will enjoy game-making artist Andrew Sheeran’s new project – Riot Bingo is a self-updating site which tracks the news across a bunch of different indicators to keep track of exactly when we might want to start FOMENTING CHAOS. As Andrew explains it, it’s “like a Doomsday Clock with receipts, tracking the various ways in which systems, societies and institutions fail.Each square on the board represents a failure mode of modern society – Democratic backsliding, Environmental breakdown, Responsibility laundering, etc. Throughout the month, Riot Bingo searches for evidence that they’re happening. If a square gathers enough evidence, it gets checked off. The board gradually fills but is deliberately reset at the start of each month. Only a really bad month will result in bingo. Are things truly getting worse? How quickly are they getting worse? What failures are increasing in frequency and severity? Are the systems and institutions that govern us still worthy of our trust? And ultimately…IS IT TIME TO TAKE TO THE STREETS?” This is clever and funny and I think there’s possibly a bigger idea in here somewhere should someone less exhausted than me want to spend some time thinking about it.
  • Widthipedia: Friend of Curios Matt Round is back with another fun, silly project – this one is a version of Wikipedia which opens a different entry depending on the size and proportions of your browser window. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT??? For obvious reasons this won’t really work on mobile – but none of you are perverted enough to read Curios on your phone, surely. Matt’s site – the excellent and fun-packe vole.wtf – turned 7 this week, so HAPPY BIRTHDAY to it (is…is it strange to wish a website ‘happy birthday’? NO IT ISN’T FCUK OFF).

By Sam Cheng and Shauna Summers

NEXT, WHY NOT ENJOY THE BRAND NEW ALBUM BY THE MOUNTAIN GOATS WHICH IS AS GREAT AS THEIR STUFF ALWAYS IS!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD QUITE LIKE THE BINFACE GUY TO GO AWAY FOR A YEAR OR SO PLEASE IF THAT’S OK, PT.2:

  • Klubnacht ID: I have never been to Berghain – not, you understand, because I am not COOL enough (fcuk you, I am INCREDIBLY cool, what could be cooler than spending 16 years of one’s life producing a weekly newsletter of links for an audience of tens of webmongs? NOTHING, NOTHING COULD BE COOLER, IN YOUR FACE STEVE MCQUEEN AND PRINCE AND BASQUIAT AND ALL YOU OTHER PEOPLE PREVIOUSLY CONSIDERED THE VERY ACME OF HIP, YOU ARE NOTHING TO ME!) but simply because I haven’t ever really ‘done’ proper clubbing in Berlin and so it’s never really come up. Still, now I don’t need to thanks to this website, which is SUCH a cool idea – it basically takes tracks listed in the ‘Berghain Community’ subReddit (which apparently is a place where people go to share stuff that was played at the venue in the past week) and posts links to them on this site, along with creating a running playlist of sounds from the dancefloor, so you can stream (at the time of writing) some 2,500 tracks and imagine that you too are in one of Europe’s most-exclusive nightspots (except without the p1sspigs and the smell of lube and the…troubling sounds coming from the darkroom) (if you DO have troubling sounds coming from your darkroom, keep them very much to yourself please).
  • Weird Balls: Thomas Fernique is in some way associated with a Parisian university; for reasons known only to him, he has become curious about footballs and how they are stitched together, and how they might be stitched DIFFERENTLY. “The most iconic soccer ball is probably the telstar. It is made of 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons, with no two adjacent pentagons (this can be taken as a definition). What if we allow adjacent pentagons? Then we can get different balls. These are specific fullerenes or buckyballs, and there are 1812 different ones (up to isometry).” The main link uptop takes you to a page where you can see ALL THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF FOOTBALL it might be possible to create by combining a Telstar’s panels in different ways – I cannot stress to you quite how…upsetting and *wrong* these look and feel, honestly, and I can’t quite explain why I find them so unsettling; there’s something just inherently creepy about seeing something that your brain is telling you should be spherical but which, as you spin the object around, you realise is all misshapen and lumpen and WEIRD. I would buy one of these in a heartbeat, should someone fancy stitching a wrong and faintly-impossible football for me.
  • Cheap Food Map: This is, sadly, not something which will be any use to any of you outside North America – still, for those of you unfortunate enough to reside within the confines of that benighted nation, welcome to a world of VALUE SCRAN! This is a simple site which maps eateries which offer meals for less than $10 and seems to cover the whole of the US with some pretty-comprehensive recommendations; I am uncertain as to where it’s scraping the recs from – the site’s vibecoded, I think, based on the horrible copy on the ‘About’ page – and so I can’t 100% vouch for its accuracy, but thanks to it I have now learned that there is a Taco spot in Richardson, Texas, which does $0.99 tacos on a Thursday and fcuk me I don’t understand the economics of that AT ALL but it sounds like a bargain (don’t think too hard about what’s *in* the tacos, is my top tip should you choose to visit).
  • Nic Wands: The personal portfolio website of one Nic Wands, who dropped me a line saying “I wanted to do a bit of a shameless plug and submit something I made that I think you might be interested in.  It’s a portfolio site I made for my work as a developer/creative technologist. I used the amazing gifcities archive to find gifs representing each project, and made this infinitely scrolling, randomly generating wall of madness that I find quite fun to click around on.” This is LOVELY, and playful, and I particularly enjoyed how it doesn’t quite feel like anyone else’s portfolio that I’ve ever seen; there’s a pleasingly-distinctive aesthetic to the whole thing which I find very satisfying indeed. Aside from anything else, Nic’s made some really fun stuff in his time and there are some cool projects to be found if you click around and explore.
  • EveryCube: You may have a vague idea of the vast number of potential permutations of faces which can be created on a Rubik’s Cube, but I bet you don’t *really* have the faintest idea of what a mind-flayingly vast number of potential different combinations of colours can be created across its six faces (no, don’t lie, you don’t) – BUT NOW YOU CAN EXPLORE THE ENORMITY FOR YOURSELF! This website lets you visualise EVERY SINGLE DIFFERENT PERMUTATION of faces that it’s possible to create on a standard cube – there is literally NO other function here, but, honestly, what more could you ask for? I am particularly pleased that I am discovering this now rather than 5 years ago when some fcuker would have been trying to sell every single different combination as individual NFTs (and some other fcukers would have doubtless bought some).
  • Lost and Found: Ooh, I love this – a site by Riley Walz, which pulls images of objects which wash up at the Lost & Found department of stadia and airports (and, er, other places) around (I think) North America and presents them in a long, dizzying collection of abandoned objects – mostly books and phones, as you might expect, but with enough oddities thrown in to make the scroll worthwhile. The pumpkin, in particular, really confused me.
  • Gingham: Would you like a small website that lets you create gingham patterns in a variety of different colours and densities, which you could if you wanted use as a phone background? No, you probably don’t, do you, I imagine your desires and wants are significantly more expansive and, dare I say it, complex; that said, I have nothing else for you so you may as well have this link and try not to look disappointed.
  • Boat Names: Jon Keegan, at Beautiful Public Data, has done a deep dive into registered boat names in North America, and presented them as this semi-interactive dataset that you can explore. There’s a bunch of accompanying explanatory copy to go along with the analysis, and breakdowns of some of the more popular names across different categories – who in the name of FCUK is out there deciding to call their prized vessel ‘SEA SLUT II’? WHO???? – but the real joy is scrolling to the ‘random pull of names’ and exploring the mad, strange world of maritime nomenclature in all its odd glory. “Bottom Scratcher”? “Gaslog Westminster”?? “Mighty STI”???? Man, people are weird.
  • Brickster: Would you like to be able to play LEGO in your browser? Would you like the tool with which you do that to be built on the Atmosphere protocol and so therefore allow you to log in with your Bluesky account? Er, why? Anyway, that is very much what this site does – you can build to your heart’s content, as well as exploring some of the (very impressive) things that others have made on the platform, and, look, while this is very much Not My Sort of Thing, it’s also got a really pleasing, user-friendly interface and looks like it could be quite a soothing and dare I say it meditative experience for someone with significantly more patience and crafting skill than I personally possess.
  • Sopwith: Oh God, this…this is almost Proustian for me, honestly. Sopwith is a quite incredible relic – a game originally coded in the early-80s, designed to be nothing more than a tech demo but which somehow made it onto the market as a commercial product and which you can still play now, in-browser (you can read a bit about it here). When I was a little kid and I would go and visit my dad, he had an Amstrad PC and one of the (very few) games it came with was this; I spent, Christ, HOURS playing this (I was very small and I was very, very sh1t at it), and firing it up this week practically reduced me to tears with, you know, MEMORIES and THE CRUSHING SENSE OF TIME PASSING AND MY OWN SLOW MARCH TOWARDS THE SWEET EMBRACE OF DEATH, all those sorts of good things. I can’t for a second pretend that this is a ‘good’ game, but there’s something interesting about it as a relic of its time – also, you can drop a bomb on yourself if you deploy one while flying upside down, which always made me laugh as a kid and, turns out, still does in middle age.
  • Fable: Ok, I know I said I wasn’t going to feature ClaudeSlop in Curios anymore and, in the main, I intend to stick with that, but this game, despite being PURE vibecoded dreck is also, I have to concede, quite fun – each day you’re presented with five photographs of (mostly) animals, which start VERY ZOOMED IN and which zoom out slowly; your task is to guess which of four creatures each picture is of, with points allocated based on how quickly you’re able to guess the right creature; there’s something quite cool about the way it forces you to reappraise otherwise-familiar critters. Man do ocelots look weird when you observe them at 10000x zoom, by the way.
  • Long Story Short: Gah, dammit, this is vibecoded too, but it’s ALSO quite a fun game; mailed into me by Akash Wadhwani, your goal here is to take a sentence and reduce it to five words while still maintaining the meaning; there’s something genuinely fun and slightly-chewy about trying to whittle the copy down to its bare minimum, and obviously for those of you who are Professional Wordsmiths this will be a piece of p1ss; for a general audience, though, this is both Quite Fun and actually a reasonably-useful tool to get better at communicating in English.
  • Black Emago: GAH! FCUK! THIS IS AI TOO! JESUS CHRIST ALIVE! Annoyingly, though, it’s also quite a lot of fun – this is basically a massively-multiplayer survival maze game; you’re dumped into a topdown shooter and your goal is to make it through as many levels as you can, picking up weapons and avoiding the monsters and trying to work out what is going on. Unusually for this sort of thing there’s an element of backstory, and I rather enjoyed the overall look and feel of the game element (even if the menu and UI made me weary with their Claude-ishness).
  • Neuralimina: Ooh, this is fun and VERY SINISTER – Neuralimina is an in-browser little point-and-click game in which you…actually, no, I am not going to tell you ANYTHING, you will just have to go in cold and see if you can work out what the fcuk is going on. Honestly, this is really quite creepy, and WEIRD, and it’s very nicely-designed (and if you get stuck there are hints on the page if you scroll down) – enjoy.
  • Family Reunion: The final game in this week’s Curios is (I think) a demo for a full title, but a very generous demo – there is a LOT of game in here, and what a strange, interesting game it is. Family Reunion puts you in the shoes of a small child who’s sitting at a table during a family dinner and who is VERY BORED. Your task is to make it through dinner without dying of tedium – I don’t want to explain too much about what happens or how it works, as discovering the gameplay mechanics is half the fun, but I promise you that this is very cute, and very imaginative, and very funny, and if you have ever been a small, bored person then it will feel oddly-resonant. I’ve played through this twice now – the different personas you can select at the outset make a real difference to gameplay – and it is DELIGHTFUL, I promise you.

By Dakarai Akil

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS DREAMY, VERY CHILLED SELECTION OF TRACKS PERFECT FOR SWEATING TOO, MIXED BY BURNOUT SUMNER!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Anime User Interfaces: Very oldschool-feeling Tumblr, this, collecting gifs of (mostly) tech interfaces in anime, but with enough leeway and stylistic variation to keep it interesting. Fcuk me this all looks SO COOL, even in 2026; more anime-style user interfaces in real life, please, practicality be damned.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • T Marsh: Photos, animations and a generally WONDERFUL aesthetic on the Insta feed of one T Marsh, who came to my attention via a very kind email from reader Keith Griffin (THANKS KEITH) – this is very cool indeed imho.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • What Was The Internet?: 2026 seems to be the year in which, along with slowly coming to the realisation that, yes, actually, we really HAVE fcuked the planet in half, we also have come to the collective realisation that the internet might, in some meaningful sense, be sort-of over; or, at the very least, that we’re possibly coming to the end of a Specific Era of Online Time, based on the rise of AI, machine-generated content, waves of agentic ‘intelligences’ and the rest. This is an interesting collection of essays published in the Boston Review by a selection of writers including Cory Doctorow and Joanna Walsh, about their specific memories of The Web That Once Was – from Google (back when it promised not to be ‘evil’ – OH YOU SWEET SUMMER CHILDREN!!) to online communities to digital publishing, all of the different things that the web once was and which in many respects it no longer is (or at least no longer is in quite the same way). There’s a pleasing lack of nostalgia in these pieces – while they describe a web that used to exist, and while there’s an obvious degree of regret at the deterioration of much of what they describe, there’s also no attempt to pretend that Everything Was Amazing and Perfect (it wasn’t), and, in the main, this feels like a clear-eyed set of memories about a period in global culture (or at least a Western expression of it) which, it increasingly feels, was weirdly anomalous and whose like we will not see again.
  • Meanings of Ceasefire: Zinaida Miller writes in the London Review of Books about the latest ‘ceasefire’ in the Middle East and what it means (clue: it means ‘fcuk all’), and how we are meant to respond to a world and a conflict in which we seem to have entirely lost the connection between ‘what people say’ and ‘what actually happens in real life’ (one might, of course, argue that that’s a longterm feature of war, to which, well, fair enough I suppose). “Many people have asked whether these are ceasefires at all. But the question is not whether a ceasefire is real but what it does. At best, ceasefires are interim arrangements that gesture towards peace by temporarily suspending formal hostilities, either with a view to longer-term resolution or other political or humanitarian objectives. They can offer a respite in the fighting to give the parties time to recover and potentially to discuss alternatives to war. Unlike peace agreements – which require negotiation, compromise and (ostensibly) long-term commitment – ceasefires are by definition temporary, partial and immediate. But they also construe violence narrowly and reinforce imbalances of power. They are as much a way to govern a population as a road to peace. Gaza is a paradigm for the way that ceasefires prioritise kinetic violence, often leaving other forms – blockades, siege, starvation – in place. When the opposing sides in a conflict are unequally matched, the weaker party may use a ceasefire to buy time to rearm, as Hizbullah did after 2006, but the stronger can use it to convert a temporary arrangement into a durable regime. Spectacular violence is largely subsumed into structural deprivation while sporadic attacks become part of the ceasefire. What look like violations are in fact a feature: the ceasefire does not need to be observed to remain in force. It needs only to be proclaimed.”
  • Why Everything Is Starting To Look The Same: My only quibble with this piece of data analysis is its title (things started to look the same a decade or so ago, at the very least) – otherwise this is SO GOOD (and not only because it provides a neat, data-led set of proofpoints for something I have been saying for YEARS). This is a post by data genius Lauren Leek (see Curios passim for more of her excellent work), in which she analyses a series of datapoints including, for example, the shops on London high streets, what films are most-watched worldwide, and song lyrics, to neatly make the point that, yes, everything is clustering in certain spaces and that is largely down to so much of the world being driven by data these days, and how that results in environments and culture which lack diversity and interest and surprise, because (and I have said this before, but it bears repeating) THE MIDDLE OF THE BELL CURVE IS WHERE BIG DATA WILL PULL YOU, AND THE MIDDLE OF THE BELL CURVE IS A FCUKING DULL PLACE WHERE NOTHING INTERESTING HAPPENS, EVER. This is just great – smart and interesting and a little depressing, and feels like the sort of thing that any of you working in strategy or similar silly, pointless made-up advermarketingpr jobs (while they still exist!) should probably internalise asap (also, there’s a really good bit at the end which neatly dismantles the bullsh1t concept of ‘synthetic audiences’ in a way I found really helpful). If you’re interested in a companion piece to this, by the way, then you might enjoy this paper which looks into the economics and production of low-quality AI junk videos in China; it basically makes many of the same points as Leek does, but focused specifically on the flattening nature of algorithmic delivery systems on the variety of material produced and shared – after all, as various people quoted in the paper agree, when the algorithm is always surfacing videos that look one way, when those are the ones that do numbers and which therefore make the most bank, why would you bother making anything else? As one disillusioned creator puts it, “in today’s platform environment, creating content that you want while also wanting to make money is almost impossible.” FEELS BAD, MAN.
  • Videogame Mods and ‘Good’ AI: An interesting piece by Mark Warren at excellent gaming site Rock Paper Shotgun, on the use of generative AI in the videogame modding scene and the conflict that arises in the author (and the wider community) when confronted with the contrast between their stated position (to whit, “AI IS EVIL AND WE SHOULD CALL OUT THOSE USING IT AND SHAME THEM”) and the growing reality of its actually being quite useful, and allowing for the creation of a bunch of cool stuff which simply wouldn’t exist were it not for the EVIL tech. I thought this quote from a dev was a nice summary of the central question: “”If I’d opted out of using AI tools, it would have taken me significantly more time to create Bard Hero and I’d have to learn and develop other skills I do not currently possess,” he continued. “While technically possible with my background, it would have taken months, maybe a year or more, of very hard work. Now, would I actually be willing to dedicate that much time to such a project? No. LLMs let you prototype fast enough to answer questions like ‘Sure… it’s a cool idea, but is this even possible?’ in one evening instead of a month.””  Which, effectively, has long been my position, and one which I broadly stick by even though if I see one more Claudeslop site so help me god I will…shake my fist impotently at my screen and do nothing, obvs.
  • Mark’s Manifesto: Not, to be clear, a link to the whole thing – I read it, and, honestly, fcuk me is it boring and fcuk me did it not need to be 6,500 words (unlike Curios, where EVERY WORD is golden and vital!) – but instead to The Verge’s neat skewering of some of the reasons why it was b0llocks. The main takeaway, for me at least, is that it seemed like a tacit admission that Meta is giving up on chasing the frontier; the other is that, as per usual, Zuckerberg appears to have only a passing acquaintance with how the other 8billion people on the planet might choose to spend their time, and doesn’t wholly comprehend that there might be elements of one’s life that one might be quite happy NOT optimising, that sometimes it’s nice to just…do things, imperfectly, and that not everyone wants to inject The Machine into their existence to make their hobby 0.6% more efficient or to, I don’t know, bring them closer to their loved ones. “What strengthens a relationship? Almost always, it is personal investment. Perhaps an AI agent might be better at predicting what my father will want for his birthday than I am, but it definitionally cannot give him my time and consideration. Love is not just a feeling; it is a way of paying attention. Zuckerberg uses an example that is telling, in a grim kind of way: He asked an AI to pick out a “personalized” recipe to bake with his daughter. He could have considered what kind of baking his daughter enjoys, what her skill set is and what he might be able to teach her, then picked a recipe. Maybe he would have picked a bad recipe, and they would have bungled it — but that might have been a fun experience and a good story. Or maybe he would have picked a family recipe, and it would have given him the opportunity to tell her about when he was a child, or what his grandmother was like. Certainly he’s a busy man, but wouldn’t that make the gift of his attention to her hobby even more precious? Perhaps he might have come to understand her better by spending more time thinking about what she likes. Without that attention, the baking they do together seems more focused on accomplishment than quality time.”
  • Open Source vs Open Weight: To be honest I am linking this piece as much to remind myself to be more precise about this distinction as it is because it’s a good explainer – still, it IS a good explainer, in which Gary Marcus neatly outlines why Open Source is not the same as Open Weight when it comes to AI, and how most of the time when people say the former they should instead be saying the latter.
  • AI Modding Doesn’t Work: I have a fcuking laundry list of Things Which I Think Are Interesting And Useful Learnings From The Web Which I Don’t Think We Value Enough, and one of the big ones is ‘MODS ARE REALLY REALLY IMPORTANT FOR HEALTHY COMMUNITIES’ – honestly, the best communities I have ever been a part of online have been the ones which have clear rules, strictly applied with an iron fist, and this piece is a good explainer and illustration of what is lost when that’s outsourced to The Machine which, inevitably, Gets Stuff Wrong. Sadly, though, modding well is a genuine skill, it’s hard, and it’s expensive (or requires dedicated volunteers, but even that is only possible up to a certain scale, beyond which it becomes pretty much impossible), which is why OBVIOUSLY big tech is looking to automate it wherever possible, with…predictable effects.
  • The Chinese AI Boyfriend Ban: YOu may have missed the announcement earlier this year that China has banned ‘AI Boyfriends’ as an app category – this piece in Rest of World looks at how users have reacted to having their digital paramours suddenly sunsetted; as you might expect, there has been no little distress, but this is also an interesting example of the shift in regulation, away from controlling content to instead imposing limits on the scope and type of human-AI interaction.
  • Baby’s First AI Surveillance System: I had no idea that there was a category of AI-enabled devices which purport to track and monitor infant sleep cycles (surely the traditional methods – ie they scream when they wake up – still works perfectly well?), but apparently there are and they are proving increasingly popular; perhaps unsurprisingly, as this NYT piece points out, there are some…less-than-great privacy and data protection questions raised by the tech, as well as the general rights question of the extent to which it is even ethical to do this to someone who can’t consent because, well, they’re just a kid. Aside from anything else, there’s something very odd to me about the fact that we are simultaneously in an era in which people have finally wise up to the fact that maybe putting photos of your kids all over the web might not, long-term, be a good idea, but where we’re also seemingly perfectly happy to feed footage of them kipping to The Machine. Anyway, this all sounds MAD and AWFUL and I want to scream in the faces of all the people flogging (and buying) this stuff that WE HAVE SURVIVED FOR SEVERAL THOUSAND YEARS WITHOUT THIS STUFF WE DO NOT NEED TO QUANTIFY EVERYTHING. “Sleep tracking and optimization will remain the base of Nanit’s business, Ms. Salinas said. But already, the app offers some health features, such as automatically detecting and recording audio of coughs that can be shared with pediatricians. The company sees growth potential in giving its app the ability to weigh in on speech and motor development, which Nanit’s camera could track ambiently. Hypothetically, Ms. Salinas said, the app could flag a delay and offer parents tips for improvement, like reading more bedtime stories. Children might one day grow up to resent this intrusion, with data on their formative years stored indefinitely on a corporation’s servers. (Nanit says that its data is secure and is never sold or used for marketing.) But Ms. Salinas argues that children, in the future, may want access to their earliest health analytics for a variety of reasons. “Maybe a kid wants to be a professional athlete later on and they want to be able to go back and understand how their sleep developed and what that means for their potential,” she said. She also suggested that when our own Nanit-tracked children have children, they’ll value the ability to go back and look at their own bedtimes. Nanit does not store video footage forever, but her comment made me wonder if that function was inevitable. I shuddered to imagine a permanent record of every time I’ve testily denied a fourth book over vocal protest.”
  • The Videogamification Of Real Life: This is an interesting article about a phenomenon I have been curious about for while, specifically ‘how does the fact that so many young people are now used to spending huge swathes of their time in virtual worlds represented by avatars bleed into the real world?’ – this covers fashion, digital culture and all sorts of other bits besides, although imho I think there’s a whole additional vector around sex and bongo which I think could probably do with being explored too. Still, this is fascinating and something which I think you might see quite a lot of more mainstream attention paid to in the not-too-distant future. This excerpt gives a flavour, but it’s worth reading the whole thing “Games have become low-risk testing grounds for identity. Players can try on aesthetics before they try them on physically. The avatar becomes the first draft of the self. That’s why this shift is bigger than digital fashion. It speaks to a new order of taste formation. Sure, young people arebeing influenced by celebrities, stylists, magazines or TikTok creators. Potentially more powerful, however, is that they’re now influenced by their own playable alter egos.”
  • GenZ and Weird Parties: Or, “wow, a whole generation appears to have forgotten how to have spontaneous fun without the scaffolding of an event or activity on which to hang an evening on” – this is about the rise of specifically-themed ‘activity’-type parties (you know, ‘ppt parties’ or ‘meme parties’ or, I don’t know, ‘dress up like Nigel Farage’ parties (this last one perhaps TOO NICHE), and how they are proving increasingly popular for a generation that is always, to some extent, ‘hanging out’ with its friends (in the groupchat, in the comments, in the feed), and which, per this piece, now needs a ‘higher bar’ to warrant getting together in person. Obviously a) people can and should have fun however they want; and b) I am old, joyless and dead inside, but fcuk me did this make me feel a bit sad inside. I do wonder to what extent this is born of these being people who grew up in an era in which kids are seemingly no longer allowed to just…be…and who instead seem to spend their every waking moment doing some sort of improving activity or club or sport, and who as a result aren’t very good at just…existing, with no ulterior purpose. Oh, and while we’re on the subject, this piece felt adjacent to the main link here – welcome to the world my least-favourite neologism of 2026, ‘hobbyamory’! VILE, isn’t it? NO THANKS TO YOU, NEW YORK TIMES! Anyway, this is about young people packing their calendars with ACTIVITIES in the hope of meeting someone while, I don’t know, doing macrame or hand-carving buttplugs or something –  why is the NYT seemingly intent on making me hate young people? Stop it, NYT!
  • GenZ Dress Like They’ve Never Worn Clothes: Another NYT piece, which I am including not because I agree with it – I don’t, none of the GenZ people I know exhibit any of the sartorial quirks described here – but because it is VERY funny; partly intentionally, but also because of the general vibe of ‘confused father who doesn’t understand anything and doesn’t like feeling this baffled by the modern world’ that the whole article carries. The author, Thomas Morton, used to work at VICE and you really can hear the plaintive ‘but…but I used to be young and cool once and now I comprehend NOTHING’ cries between every line.
  • The Rise of the Private Equity Boyfriend: Inspired by Olivia Rodrigo now dating some finance chud, this is a piece about the rise in popularity of the now-legendary ‘Man In Finance’ – look, I don’t think this is that deep tbh, and you can boil it down to a combination of a few things; a) famouses are rich and will want to date other rich people; and b) tech, traditionally a place to find rich people, is now toxic and so you can’t date tech guys any more. I mean, I think that’s literally it, but if anyone has a better explanation then please do tell me. I found this quote, by the way, possibly the most depressing thing I have read all week: “When you end up with a private-equity guy, your life gets far more interesting.” HOW DESOLATE MUST YOUR LIFE BE FOR THIS TO BE TRUE???
  • Did Sydney Sweeney Actually Sell Jeans?: Christ, the discourse mill spins so fast these days that it seems like literally DECADES ago that the internet was alight with chat about pulchritudinous starlet Sydney Sweeney’s in-no-way-race-baiting campaign for American Eagle jeans – it was apparently only a year ago ffs, how does time even work anymore? Anyway, this is a really interesting piece by Anu Lingala looking at whether, after the controversy subsided, the campaign ACTUALLY flogged any denim, and if so who to, and what it did to the American Eagle brand overall. This is an excellent piece of analysis which anyone working in advermarketingpr ought to have a read of – the tl;dr is ‘it did flog some jeans but also massively fcuked the brand with a core audience group’, but it’s worth going through the whole thing as it’s a bit more nuanced than the initial headline read might suggest.
  • How Diplomats See The World: OK, this one’s written by a US diplomat so it might be nation-specific, but in general I thought this an interesting appraisal of the way in which people in the diplomatic corps are encouraged to conceive of the world and the systems within it. “The accurate version of a story is usually the complicated one. The rules of the job force diplomats to capture complexity. A diplomatic cable has to get sign-off from different embassy offices — including the political or economic sections who see the same host-country issues from a different angle — as well as the ambassador, who might see people in the sector you wrote about at a reception later that week. Back in DC, many more offices will read it: labor and population desks, the economic growth teams, human rights offices. If your account is one-sided, you look out of touch. You must write the version that holds up from every angle.”
  • One For Sorrow: James Ramsden was, for a while at least, one of the hottest names in London restaurants; one of the founders of Pidgin, which was for years my favourite restaurant in the city until it closed a few years back, and who created a few other significantly-less-successful venues over the years, none of which now remain. Here he writes for The Fence Magazine about what it’s like running restaurants in London, and, specifically, why so many of his efforts didn’t work; I think this is a BEAUTIFUL article, funny and very sad in an understated way, and revealing about some of the small truths that underpin both the hospitality trade and also entrepreneurship more generally, and if you’ve any interest in restaurants (and specifically restaurants in London) this is a must-read.
  • Do Men Want Smart Women?: I’ve seen this essay shared all over the place this week, often with laudatory commentary attached; I didn’t think it was anywhere near as good as some other commenters, but it *is* very well-written even if I don’t buy quite a lot of the author’s central thesis and found the personal story she anchors it to…a touch unsympathetic, if I’m honest. Anyway, should you want a Reliable Dinner Party Discourse Starter for your next catchup with a large, mixed group of friends (one which could, if you deploy it correctly, quite possibly end a relationship or two) then get this one under your belt – it examines the question of the extent to which men seek mental stimulation from a partner, through the lens of novels by Philip Roth and Edith Wharton, and whether you agree with it or not it will definitely make you think (and, if you’re me, shout at the screen quite a bit). “I wasn’t so naïve as to have thought until then that most men valued intellectual connection above all else—I knew perfectly well that, when it came to women, most men seemed to value beauty more than anything. But I wasn’t interested in “most men.” What surprised me was that this was my ex, who had such a vigorous mind, such an appetite for both rigor and original thought. Yet even he apparently didn’t find intellectual compatibility with a woman essential, provided she brought certain other qualities to the table. Maybe the kind of mutual respect that meant so much to me was take-it-or-leave-it for him—not nothing, perhaps, but simply one offering on the buffet of choices, something he might opt for in a certain mood the way one might choose Ethiopian food one night and Thai the next. Was he typical, even of men who are brilliant, in being capable of enjoying and inspiring that kind of intellectual connection? If so, what did that mean—for me, for my romantic prospects?”
  • Your Face Sounds Disgusting: I absolutely adored this article, translated from the original Croatian, about going to get botox, and the general treatments/tweakments industrial complex, and beauty and femininity and pain and age and image and gender and and and – it is SO good, honestly. “To be fair, many of the women did try to compliment me, saying I looked good because I hadn’t gone overboard; if I hadn’t told them, they wouldn’t have noticed. It haunted me. Should I have kept quiet, pretending I woke up like this? I can look in the mirror again, but I am fairly sure I won’t see Beyoncé. I know they meant puffy, soggy, dough-like faces. Sausage lips. Ducks. Filler fatigue: a condition caused by prolonged and excessive filler injections that gradually stretch and weaken the facial tissue. The filler craze peaked about a decade ago, when beauty trends dictated that we should all look voluptuous and pouty. Everyone wanted to be a sexy baby, and these are the consequences.”
  • A Thousand Searchlights Sweep The Sky: I enjoyed this piece a lot, although I don’t think it 100% works – an unusual mix of fictionalised anecdote and straight commentary/analysis by Will Harrison, about prediction markets, trends, and (again) the flattening effect of everything everywhere being data, this is VERY stylish, for better and worse. “I have wanted, for as long as I can remember, to put reading before all else, to treat it as the primary act rather than the preparatory one. The best writing carries a quality that only reading teaches, a sense that if you look closely enough, molecules that seem to be standing firm are actually quivering, always in motion. The writer who has absorbed this notion walks alongside the reader, flashlight in hand, groping in the dark, remaining open to epiphany, to improvisation, to wrong turns, to the demands of the clause that precedes the one currently being constructed. Yet the magazine writer today is simply not incentivized—or even permitted, in the absence of any collective recourse—to carry this imaginative spirit into their work, or to discover what their readership might be capable of receiving. Working within this machinery, the most a writer can hope to achieve is the creation of an alluring facsimile. Their inner world gets trampled routinely by an industry completely beholden to timeliness and the proven point. And when the writer loses this inner world, their reader loses something too: their patience, their empathy, their contradictory thoughts, their humor, their awareness that all of this is being stripped from them, and any sense that things could be otherwise.”
  • Once More In Triple Time: I have not a single musical bone in my body, but I nonetheless absolutely adored this article by Erik Anderson, in which he visits Salzberg and gets captivated by the life and history and work of its other, less-storied musical son, one Heinrich Biber. I promise you, you needn’t have any interest in classical music, or Austria, or Biber, or Mozart, or even, really, music, for this to be captivating; it is SO good, seriously.
  • Not Like Other Girls: Our final longread of the week is this excellent horror story by AL Goldfuss, about a creature from the sea that finds itself inhabiting a woman’s body and moving in with a man. This is VERY effective bodyhorror, creepy and intensely-other without being too graphic, and it has stayed with me since I read it last weekend and I recommend it to you unreservedly.

By Ellen Jansen

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

 

Webcurios 07/08/26

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Reading Time: 41 minutes

 

I am approximately 38 minutes away from one of my godchildren showing up and demanding to be fed and, presumably, entertained (I plan on showing them Web Curios and then going to the pub, alone); as such, we’re once again cutting the intro short this week because, well, I really don’t still want to be in my pants when she gets here (and she wants that even less, I don’t doubt).

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you may be wondering who the fcuk would entrust someone like me with the moral and spiritual guidance of a young mind and, honestly, you would be right to.

By Mahir Taşyurt

I APPRECIATE THAT THE IDEA OF ‘THE MUSIC FROM ZELDA, BUT JAZZ!’ SOUNDS LIKE THE SH1TTEST CONCEPT FOR AN ALBUM THAT HAS EVER BEEN CONCEIVED, BUT TRUST ME WHEN I TELL YOU THAT THIS IS IN FACT SURPRISINGLY EXCELLENT AND WORTH A LISTEN! 

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS IT’S PROBABLY NOT A GOOD SIGN THAT THE JASON ARDAY STORY HAS LED THE NEWS FOR THE PAST FEW DAYS, PT.1: 

  • BingeBuster: It’s Friday (or at least it is for me; I appreciate that there may well be some of you perverts who unaccountably don’t sit waiting by your inboxes for Curios to drop, instead choosing to open it on other days, but frankly your non-canonical consumption of my work means nothing to me and I don’t entirely believe you to be real), and as such some of you might be in the mood to sit back with a film tonight; do you remember, back in the Good Old Days (as ever, there’s no such thing; the days have always been like this, the only difference is that you were younger and less aware of death’s fetid breath on your nape), when you’d go to the video shop and spend a pleasant 20 minutes wandering aimlessly round the stacks, taking in the new releases and side-eyeing the ‘erotic thrillers’ out of the corner of your gaze, knowing full well that the weight of social mores would preclude you from ever actually plucking up the courage to rent our ‘Wild Desires 3: Passion Unbound’? Would you like to experience that exact feeling again, but IN YOUR BROWSER? OH GOOD! BingeBuster is a beautifully-made little nostalgiasim which lets you browse films available across streamers as though you’re in an old video rental store; films are arranged on virtual shelves, by genre, and you can wander round the shop in FPS style, perusing, picking up and eventually deciding what to watch (each case on the shelves links you to the various streaming platforms so you can seamlessly click-to-watch). This is obviously a hugely-inefficient way of choosing a film, but then again so’s scrolling blankly through 300+ pages of 5.3-rated dross while you try and fail to find something that piques your interest, and this looks cooler.
  • A Box of Letters: I think this is a really beautiful bit of family history work, and a decent example of ‘AI, but used well’ (also, lol that I am the arbiter of anything, listen to me, what a hubristic cnut!); it was sent to me by Paul Levine, who wrote (in an annoyingly Claude-assisted email, but we spoke and I have forgiven him): “My family found a box of 100+ century-old letters last year, half in Yiddish, and a friend and I used consumer AI tools (Transkribus, Claude, Gemini) to transcribe, translate, and turn them into a real site with a full narrative — the kind of thing that’s normally a funded institution’s project, a team of scholars, years to decades of work.” This is SUCH a nice idea – my one kvetch is that the ‘leaning on AI to make the site’ has resulted in quite of the lot of the copy carrying the carrion flavour of Machine Prose – seriously, if anyone’s reading this (lol) and is thinking about using Claude or whatever to make a website then PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD REDO THE FRONT END AND REWRITE THE FCUKING COPY. Anyway, leaving aside the whiff of Machine that the project carries, it’s a fascinating piece of small personal history, and the site does a really good job of marrying the personal and small-scope with the Big History stuff; I learned LOADS about the practical realities of emigration to the US in the early-20thC, but there’s also so much about the individuals and their relationships contained within the letters which is personal and poignant and sort-of beautiful. Honestly, this is really lovely – so much so that I think it’s a real shame that the whole thing looks and feels so machine-y, given the essentially incredibly human nature of the stories. BONUS CLAUDE-Y HISTORY PROJECT: Oddly enough I also found this this week, which occupies a vaguely-similar position in creative latent space; this is a digitisation of the war diaries of a soldier named Francois Stevens, whose writings from WWII have been collated and analysed and made available to explore and read with the asssistance of AI.
  • Draw Your Own Drum: Ok, I can’t pretend for a second to understand the sonics here – there’s physics going on, and all sorts of Complicated Stuff to do with vibrations, but I comprehend not one iota of that and instead just like the fact that I can play my doodles like a bongo. Have you ever wondered ‘how would the acoustics of a drum sound were that drum to be in the shape of a crudely-drawn phallus?’? OF COURSE YOU HAVE YOU ARE ONLY HUMAN! Now you get to find out – basically this site lets you explore how the way a drum sounds is determined by its shape, and how the sound is made. There is LOTS OF MATHS here and, honestly, I don’t understand ANY of it; I am a smooth-brained numbers moron, what can I say? There’s something undeniably pleasing about the way you can literally SEE how form defines sonic output; also, you can play bongos, what’s not to love?
  • I Love The 90s: Ooh, this is fun! The mysteriously-named BJ Barretta got in touch with me this week and sent me this – I am going to include their description in full, because it tells you most of what you need to know, but basically the site exists to replicate the media experience of ‘spending a night at home in the early-to-mid-90s: “There’s TV with nineteen channels, and you don’t pick an episode; there’s no on-demand. You turn it on and get whatever’s playing, the same as everyone else watching at that moment. There’s a radio station with 4,600 90s hits and deeper cuts, and no algorithm behind it. It plays what it plays. You can skip a song, but you can’t go back and you can’t queue anything up. Also in the media player is a CD burner. You fill up a CD-R like a real one  (add songs off the radio as they play, or build the perfect one track by track from the library), and when you have your 74 minutes you name it, burn it, and get a link you can hand to somebody, because the best part of making the perfect mix CD was giving it away. There’s a chat room, with Buddies and Instant Messages. And there’s the web of the time — GeoCities, AltaVista, Napster, Yahoo — pulled from the Internet Archive.” Honestly, there’s so much to love about this – while the ‘single, shared, realtime streaming’ thing isn’t necessarily new (and, yes, the site is Clauded, but BJ was upfront about that and it doesn’t look entirely generic, so webs), this is well-curated and nicely done (if with a culturally North American skew), but my absolute favourite is the ‘mixtape’ feature which is so, so cute and a really beautiful idea nicely-executed. I am aware from friends who have had the misfortune to breed and now have teenage offspring that 90s nostalgia is very real and very prevalent amongst many of today’s teens (leaving aside whether it’s possible to be nostalgic for an era you were never alive to experience yourself); if you have young people in your life, why not give them this link, £20’s worth of genuinely terrible soap bar (ideally with a large chunk of mysterious plastic lodged inside it), a two-litre bottle of Diamond White and a packet of Lambert & Butler to truly recreate the ‘fun’ of the era!
  • 911 Realtime: Another really impressive and nicely-made project sent in to me – actually, while I’m here, let me just say that WOW have we crossed a rubicon in terms of the volume of AI-assisted projects coming my way at the moment, and WOW is the quality variable, and FCUK ME AM I SICK OF PEOPLE SENDING ME THINGS THAT HAVE BEEN WRITTEN WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE I NEVER, EVER WANT TO SEE ANOTHER EMAIL SPAT OUT BY AN LLM THE PROSE MAKES ME SO SAD, THE TICKS ARE SO TRANSPARENT, THE CLUNK IS AUDIBLE! Ahem. Anyway, this is a site made by Robbie Byrd, who wrote: “I’m an independent developer, and I’ve spent 6 years building the 9/11 Realtime Archive: a free site that synchronizes the TV, radio, and news coverage of September 9–20, 2001, so you can experience the day minute by minute, exactly as it aired — both forward and backward through time, all inside a faithful recreation of a Mac OS 8 desktop. I’ve also added flight tracks from 9/11 of every plane in the air, intercepted NYC pager messages, newspapers, and an AOL Instant Messenger style chat bot who is contextually aware, with more to come.” This is obviously made by a North American and the focus is therefore on US media, but as someone who obviously experienced the day on the other side of the planet and from a very different perspective this was honestly fascinating – and incredibly affecting, honestly, even at a distance of 25 years. This is SO nicely done, from the radio to the audio to the websites, to the interface, and is a very clever example of how to do a studied, stylised bit of time capsule-ing using publicly available archive materials, and any of you with a passing interest in history – and the history of media and communications – should really spend some time with this (a small aside: MAN is the audio sting from the BBC World channel in 2001 a weirdly-Pavlovian thing for me, turns out).
  • Stowaway Live: Ooh, I rather love this although I am *slightly* confused as to how accurate it is in terms of what it shows you (but, honestly, who cares? YOU GET TO FLY!). Let the site access your location and it will give you a realtime impression of the planes flying over your head RIGHT NOW – click on any of those planes in the virtual sky and you will be MAGICALLY TRANSPORTED several thousand feet into the air so you can get the view from all the way up there in the sky. Yes, fine, the view from all the way up there in the sky is, in the main, ‘more sky’, but you can also see a sort of Google Earth-type view of the topography below you, and I think, should you have less of a fcuked and emphysemic laptop than I do, you might be able to get some decent-ish views of landscapes from above (it’s built on Open Street Map afaict). Actually, now that I think about it, I wonder if it lets you experience the thrill of landing? Can someone check for me? Thanks. Oh, unrelated but based on my experience of being on a couple of flights last month I am going to call it – clapping when the plane lands is making a comeback, and I for one am THRILLED about this.
  • Ascension: Oh I do love me a ‘website made to accompany an album launch’ and this is, er, exactly that! The album’s not out til next week, but the artist behind it messaged me and explained: “It is called Ascension. It is one page. You put a word into a cloud, it rains, a tree grows. One day, there are going to be three worlds stacked on top of each other and you travel between them by going up and down. There is no account, score, tutorial, text telling you what to do. It is deliberately a place that was not built for you, and finding out how it works is most of it. On August 12, at 19:24 Paris time (18:24 UTC), there is a partial solar eclipse over western Europe, which is around 95% where I live, and low on the horizon in the evening, which should be the good part. The site is built around that moment and it enters a state on that evening that it has never been in. It is also deeper than it looks, and I would rather not say more than that.” MYSTERIOUS! This is odd, atmospheric, and minimalistically rather beautiful; play around with it and see what happens when you click around, is my advice, and bookmark this and make a note to come back to it next Wednesday to see what happens (and to listen to the album, possibly). BONUS ECLIPSE LINK: you can see where it’s going to be visible using this handy map.
  • The Usenet Archives: I was never a Usenet person – I was too young and hadn’t yet fallen into the…troublingly-symbiotic relationship with the web that I appear to have alighted upon in my latter years – but I imagine that for many of you it was a formative digital playground where you cut your teeth and honed your skills and first learned the crucial techniques that enabled you to eventually glory in the status of ‘massive webmong’ (I SEE YOU). This site is a (partial, I think) and searchable archive of Usenet posts from as far back as the mid-90s(!), covering everything from US politics of the day (CHRIST HOW INNOCENT IT ALL LOOKS) to music to psychedelics to (obviously) sex…this isn’t necessarily useful (although if you have half-remembered recollections of specific threads or discussions then there’s an outside chance you will be able to dig them out using this), but it is a fascinating time capsule, and a reminder of an era when people can and did post freely because, honestly, they never considered the idea that anyone who wasn’t involved in the conversation would ever see it, the idea of ‘virality’ or a post from a forum finding an audience outside that forum was…insane and inconceivable, and…God, it *was* better, wasn’t it? Ugh, FINE, some nostalgia is acceptable I suppose. Ish.
  • Electronic Literature: OH I LOVE THIS! A collection of examples of ‘Electronic Literature’ – that is, writing where the HTML is a core constituent part of the text, whether straight Interactive Fiction or stuff that’s a little more involved – presented by the University of Central Florida: “Electronic literature has always occupied a productive tension between structure and openness. Every digital work is shaped by systems—interfaces, platforms, protocols, algorithms, archives, institutions—yet each also invites readers to exceed those structures through interpretation, play, resistance, and care. The works gathered in the ELOnline 2026 Media Exhibition explore this tension from multiple perspectives, offering a rich response to this year’s conference theme, (Un)Supervised. While contemporary discussions of supervision are inevitably framed by large language models and generative AI, this exhibition demonstrates that the question is considerably older and broader. What supervises reading? What supervises writing? Who maintains digital culture, and who is excluded from it? What forms of creativity emerge within constraint, and what possibilities become visible only when systems fail, decay, or are deliberately reimagined?” I spent a couple of hours last Sunday looking through these and some are beautiful and some are weird and some sad, and if you like words and are curious about experiments in narrative then you should set some time aside to explore this collection; here’s just one example which I found particularly affecting, combining text and images and audio to poignant effect.
  • MVNT: This is interesting – MVNT is an app, designed by a professional choreographer who has worked with all sorts of Big Kpop Names, most of whom I’m not going to pretend to have heard of, which is designed to both help you come up with new dance routines AND to capture your original bits of choreography so that you can in theory ensure you don’t get ripped off by Fortnite without some sort of remuneration. I am…not 100% convinced at the idea of being able to produce a Universal Catalogue of Attributed Moves, but I admire the ambition; exactly how that seems to square with the app’s parallel use of AI to generate choreography based on an audio track is…less clear tbh, but I am sure they’ve thought it all through! There’s something quite cool about seeing the 3d model adapt and react to whatever track you feed it, and the fact you can upload images to create ‘custom’ dancers opens up a truly horrible world in which you can turn anyone you like into a capering marionette for your amusement.
  • AI Animation in 2026: This link takes you to a vid on Reddit posted by someone who downloaded a new Chinese model, running it off an old processor, and got it to spit out a whole host of different clips in varying animation styles, just as a proof of concept; it’s worth taking a look because (and I keep saying this) the pace of improvement of the open source stuff (which, lest you forget, can be run locally and which, now they are in the wild, ARE NOT GOING TO GO AWAY) is fcuking WILD right now, and some of the examples here are pretty stunning (with all of the standard caveats about the floaty, weightless nature of AI-generated video).
  • Shieldfont: A font which is designed to fool AI scrapers, readable to humans but which, when The Machine tries to parse it, renders as something else entirely. Will this prevent the wholesale ingestion of the rest of the web and all of human thinking by AI? No, of course it won’t, but it’s nice to think of oneself as part of some sort of imagined ‘resistance’, isn’t it?
  • Outernet Explorer: This is an interesting idea, although I continue to be slightly wary of ‘solutions’ to the problem of ‘people spending too much time online’ that are delivered via the medium of apps. Still, the Outernet Explorer feels broadly-benign; the idea is that it’s an app which allows you to collect and collate ‘things to do’ from across the web in one place; the idea is that you will often see things floating across your timeline and think ‘ooh, that looks fun’, but that you then lose them in the endless flow of content detritus and don’t, in fact, end up doing anything. Outernet Explorer’s solution is that when you see something that looks fun you save it in the app (with a tap or two); the app then lets you easily invite friends, keep track of events you have planned, plot them on a map, get directions, etc etc. Do…do we need another app for this? Is this something that requires another layer of digital admin and management to achieve? WHY??? Still, maybe this appeals to you, you weirdo, in which case you can try it out if you’re on iOS.
  • 197 Histories: Another cool digital history project, this time from South America; Per the site’s explanatory text, “between the 1970s and 1980s, both Uruguay and Argentina endured civic-military dictatorships that left a deep mark on their societies…197 illustrated stories is a project that seeks to share the lives of each of the people forcibly disappeared who were born in Uruguay, or under the responsibility of the Uruguayan State, during the sixties, seventies and eighties. The number 197 is not arbitrary, nor does it necessarily reflect the total number of disappeared people. There are 197 because that is the number of complaints approved by the National Human Rights Institution and Ombudsman’s Office (INDDHH) to date. A number appears in this book, but what truly matters are the stories. People like you and me — like your grandfather, your neighbour, my cousin, the teacher or the greengrocer. People who were not at peace with the reality of their time: some took to the streets to protest, others handed out flyers, some painted walls or organised in groups. All of them had dreams, families, friends and passions.” This is a period of South American history I really know very little about; the portraits here are small, sad, beautifully-illustrated by a range of artists, and the whole project is a beautiful bit of historical commemoration of normal people fcuked by the regimes.
  • Send Henry Poems: I do not know Henry. I know nothing about him, let alone why he has seen fit to set up a small thermal printer in his home which will print out anything you choose to send it through this website; Henry has specifically requested poems, but there doesn’t appear to be anything preventing any of you from sending him…well, whatever text you prefer. NO NOT LIKE THAT, POOR HENRY! I would be genuinely thrilled if you could send Henry some examples of verse that you like, and maybe tell him where you found this site – but, please, NO FILTH. Unless, er, it’s in the form of a really dirty sestina.

By Galya Budagova

NEXT UP IN THIS WEEK’S MUSICAL PICKS IS AN ALBUM I HAVE FOUND MYSELF LISTENING TO LOADS RECENTLY AND WHICH I HAVE REMEMBERED IS FCUKING GREAT, SPECIFICALLY “24 HOUR REVENGE THERAPY” BY JAWBREAKER! 

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS IT’S PROBABLY NOT A GOOD SIGN THAT THE JASON ARDAY STORY HAS LED THE NEWS FOR THE PAST FEW DAYS, PT.2:

  • Picodevil: I’ve mentioned a few times this year that the algorave and livecoding scene is having something of a renassance at the moment, seemingly in part centred on London, and there has been a boom in webtoys which work alongside the scene to help people better craft music and visuals on the fly…Picodevil is another such toy, built by the perennially-talented V Buckenham and which basically lets you do ‘cool visual stuff with streaming video from around the web’. You will – FULL, TERRIFYING DISCLOSURE – need to code a bit to make this work, but it’s admirably simple and intuitive, to the extent that even I (who knows not one fcuking line of html like the useless normie moron I fundamentally am) was able to make it do some stuff. This is really quite fun to play with; you can read a bit more here if you’re curious about how it works and why it exists.
  • Keyboard Sounds: I AM SORRY FOR THE CLAUDESLOP I AM SORRY. Look, I promise, there is going to be a TIGHT editorial line on stuff that looks like this from hereon in, if I see one more salmon-hued site I am going to…well, obviously I am going to do nothing beyond moan about it online and send whoever’s sent it to me a moderately-p1ssy email, but you get my point. Anyway, leaving aside the entirely-generic look and feel of this one it’s actually…quite cute, letting you pick from the sound of various Keyboards From The Past so that you can experience the joy of, er, typing as though you’re using a Steelseries Apex V2. I KNOW I AM SO TUMESCENT RIGHT NOW.
  • I Move U: Oh this is GREAT! There was a time back in the day when agencies really could persuade large corporate clients to make any old mad sh1t on the web because, well, noone really understood it or what it was for or what it could do or how people might use it and how all of this might intersect with the demands of BIG CAPITALISM, and so you ended up with stuff like this – a very old site now resurrected via the MAGIC OF CODE – which was made for Mitsubishi in…what, the late-90s/early-00s? Anyway, it’s SO ODD – a collection of largely-unexplained little…what, games? Vignettes? Interactive environments? ALL OF THE ABOVE! You won’t understand ANYTHING about what is going on here – not least ‘hang on, how in the name of fcuk does this have anything to do with a massive Japanese electronics manufacturer?’ – but I encourage you just to click and use your keypad to navigate the little figure through the 3d landscapes, and just SEE WHAT HAPPENS. OK, fine, should you have been someone who wanted to, I don’t know, order a bunch of superconductors, I am sure this website was entirely infuriating, but for the rest of us isn’t this SO much better and more fun than, I don’t know, full-bleed video and some tediously-neat dropdowns? Yes it is, fcuk off.
  • Star Patrol: ANOTHER site sent in to me by its creator; I confess, I was initially quite down on this because a) it’s Claudeslop; and b) the guy who emailed me did so using AI prose and, er, I sent him *quite* a sh1tty reply, but then I took the time to actually explore it and, you know what, this is Actually Quite Cool. I’m not going to reproduce his email because, well, it’s horrible, AI-generated crap, but the basic premise here is that this is a browsergame, loosely-framed as a space exploration and shooting-type experience, which is designed specifically to help people learn and become familiar with American Sign Language – it uses your webcam to track your hand movements (with incredibly-impressive fidelity, I have to say), encouraging you to sign on demand to shoot down opponents and the like; honestly, this is nicely made, and fun, and polished, and FREE, and is such a nice idea, well-executed. I would like it a lot more with human-written copy, but I also appreciate that, well, that takes time and not everyone has that at their disposal; could someone maybe make a version of this for the British equivalent, please (although that would obviously be harder as it would require the tracking of both hands, on reflection)? Anyway, if you’d like to learn ASL then, honestly, this is a pretty decent way of starting out I think.
  • Past Catalogs: Do YOU have an inexplicable interest in a very narrow range of old 20th century catalogues from North America, specifically catalogues belonging to electronics retailers like Radio Shack? Do YOU wish that there were a website that collected digitised copies of said catalogues from The Past? Are…are you ok? ANYWAY! “Welcome to the “Past Catalog Archive” where ALL catalogs may be downloaded! The purpose of this site is to provide access to download and view old outdated catalogs for everyone interested. There is no reason to keep these old catalogs to myself, or only allow them to be viewed. Share them and let everyone take a trip down memory lane.” Honestly, I genuinely adore the altruistic cast of that ‘about’ text – sadly the site hasn’t been updated since 2023, but, well, there are a lot of catalogues in here regardless. I hope you are ok, catalogue curator, whoever you may be.
  • Drought UK: You may have noticed or heard that it is…quite dry in the UK right now (it did actually rain in my part of London this week, for a whole 120 seconds); this is a map showing you how dry it is, where, and how that compares to Droughts Of The Past – my overall takeaway is ‘wow, we have droughts more often than I would have expected’ (as well as ‘hm, does rather feel we should have invested in desalination technology ahead of this period in history given the fact that we are literally SURROUNDED BY FCUKING WATER’ – actually, I learned that we do have at least one here in the UK but, for reasons I don’t adequately understand, it was ‘built wrong’ and as such has run for a grand total of about two hours since its construction, which, honestly, is just some chef’s kiss Angloconstruction, well done everyone), but also ‘oh man, this feels Quite Bad’.
  • Essential Words: A NEW PUDDING DATAVIZ! This one is about WORDS, making it doubly-appealing to me; per the explanation, there was a list published in 2023 of the most commonly-used words in the English language (specifically, “about 2,800 words, shown to cover over 90% of general English use”); this itself was an updated version of a list published some 70 years previously, and this piece compares the two lists, analysing new entrants and which words have fallen by the wayside, and What That Tells Us About Culture and Society and Stuff. The change was significant – “between the two lists, 70 years apart, about 600 words were dropped, and over 1,100 were added” – and there is so much fascinating analysis in here. The newer list includes far more references to ideas, concepts and feelings than the one from the 50s did, for example, and we have lost a significant number relating to physical objects and experiences, which is just such an interesting observation when you start to think about the ‘why’ behind it…honestly, this is WONDERFUL and a gift for all you wordcels out there. BONUS PUDDING! This is another nice explainer about how to mow a lawn efficiently, containing a nice little interactive game thing which made me feel really thick.
  • Jerry’s Map: I’ve not featured Jerry’s Map in here before because, while it’s very much My Sort Of Thing, it’s not really a webthing – the map, which is one bloke’s lifelong outsider art project creating what is effectively an evolving, procedurally-generated map of an imaginary territory and culture based on set rules, composed of drawn/painted tiles which are recomposed over time based on his self-created…algorithm, I suppose you’d call it, exists very much as a physical artwork and while there is a website which explains the project and shows it off a bit, it’s very much NOT an internet project. Anyway, this link is to a Bluesky account which shares images of bits of the map, which is a nice way to occasionally dip into the imaginary world of a very singular mind indeed.
  • Gesture Synth: There’s obviously been an improvement in the quality of the handtracking code on github in the past few months because there’s been a real uptick in projects using the tech in the past few months; this is a REALLY fun little music toy which I think someone just vibecoded together and which lets you control synths with your hands; I can’t make anything that doesn’t sound like a selection of particularly-distressed highland cows, but you might be more talented than I am (and hate looking at yourself less than me – turns out an instrument that requires me to look at my hideous baggy face and skeletal limbs is not, in fact, for me!). BONUS INTERACTIVE MUSIC TOY THING! This does something similar – but different! – with handtracking, have a play.
  • The IKEA Complexity Index: This is a clever idea, although as someone who has vowed to never again make another piece of flatpack furniture unless someone asks VERY NICELY INDEED I am not really able to judge how accurate it is; still, someone known only as ‘Greg’ has built this site which aims to offer a comprehensive ranking of how complex or otherwise various bits of IKEA furniture are to build, based on: “”complexity” = steps x total parts; “est. time” = “complexity” x empirical factor (based on self-reported build times); “ease rating” = average ease-of-assembly rating (1–5, higher = easier) left by reviewers on ikea.com. “~” ratings are averaged across combo products.” Should you be curious, by the way, the PAX Corner Wardrobe is, per Greg’s assessment criteria, the biggest b4stard of the IKEA multiverse.
  • Make Your Own Burgerslop: There’s something of a trend for people spotting AI-generated images being used on local fast food menus, depicting impossible, inedible non-food burgers and wings and drinks; but it doesn’t matter, because noone has expected the food to match the image for decades now, and the imagery on a fast food menu exists more as a piece of loose iconography than any sort of realistic depiction of what you might be likely to get when you order a Whopper, say (and, again, NORMAL PEOPLE DON’T CARE FFS). Anyway, this is a wrapper for AN Other AI image generator which lets you create your very own mad, nonsensical slopburger (and drink, and side) and generate an image of it which you can then…Christ , fcuk knows what you might do with this, it’s pointless as all fcuk but the food does look pleasingly-mad so maybe that’s enough.
  • French Weird: Obviously the usual ‘I don’t listen to podcasts, I have no idea if this is any good or not’ caveat applies here, but I saw this and thought that the description sounded like something you might possibly find curious – do you? VALIDATE ME YOU FCUKS. Ahem. Anyway, this is what it is, see what you think: “Welcome to French Weird, a podcast dedicated to exploring the counterculture, obscure art and bizarre anomalies of contemporary France. Channeling cultural theory, esoterica and the love of a good book this shows investigates what falls through the cracks of mainstream French culture. We are tracking the liminal spaces, the bizarre subcultures and the beautiful freak-outs from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. What exactly is the French Weird? It is the territory where high philosophy meets the profoundly bizarre. In each episode, we trace the threads of a proudly rational nation simultaneously digesting global weirdness and exporting its own brand of the mysterious. French Weird explores how France’s hidden eccentricities reveal the truths about its politics, literature, culture and – maybe even – identity.” Allez mes braves, etc etc.
  • Recent Reborn: Ooh, this is genuinely quite a cool and interesting tool, and very much the sort of thing which you shouldn’t have to fcuking pay for ffs. Anyway, Recent Reborn is a (paid-for, to be clear!) service which basically reinstates the ‘see new posts as they are posted’ functionality to social media, effectively letting you SEE THE FIREHOSE for Insta or TT or whatever, narrowed to whatever search criteria and parameters you choose. Basically this is being sold as a means of being able to see popular posts by big creators early, thereby getting a ‘first comment’ visibility boost which is helpful for engagement and traffic driving and the like; this could be HUGELY useful, even if, again, it’s insane that this is a third-party product rather than, you know, just a platform feature.
  • Branch: Oh this is LOVELY! Take a picture of a branch, or a plant, and add it to this ever-growing, infinite, collaborative, organic-feeling collage of branch photos, itself creating a…branching visual, a branch of branches, vines of vines, a sort of together collage where every piece is itself an image of the thing the collage is itself representing…Just a lovely piece of digital art, and something I am going to keep open in a tab on my phone so that I can contribute to it whenever I am near a tree.
  • The Game Industry Hardship Fund Bundle: The games industry is, seemingly, yet another that is fcuked beyond the point of repair, holed below the waterline and not really salvageable in its current form (I mean, obviously it could be salvaged! Obviously! It would just require a complete rejection of the corporate ownership structures that underpin the triple-A system! Simple!); while this won’t save it, this initiative is a nice way of donating money to hardship funds designed to support workers suffering layoffs while also securing a truly-mindfcuking quantity of titles to play. You pay $10 to a good cause, you get access to OVER 120 INDIVIDUAL FULL GAMES! More than you will ever realistically play! Many of these are apparently quite good, though obviously there will also be a degree of filler – still, give a sh1t, 120+ GAMES FOR A TENNER TO CHARITY! You need never leave the house ever again (but, please, do leave the house).
  • Romentis: ANOTHER Claude-d project sent to me by its creator – I really, really dislike the look and feel of this (like, dude, IT DOESN’T NEED ALL THE VERBIAGE FFS (and yes, I know, I know, fcuk off)), but its developer seems like a nice man and I have to say the puzzles are…quite fun. Basically there are a whole bunch of surprisingly-deep logic problems in here, arranged over various levels, and while I could have done without ALL THE TEDIOUS AND POORLY-WRITTEN CLAUDESLOP, the general Roman Empire framing of the puzzles and their brainteaser-ish quality is enough to make me overlook some of the…AI-ish elements. Seriously, though, this is a perfect example of a site that is significantly worse with the AI writing than it would have been had all the copy been written in staccato, non-native English, can we please start to learn this lesson? Eh? Oh ffs, fine.
  • World of Claudecraft: Oddly enough I first saw this a few months ago and totally failed to include it, partly because I couldn’t quite get it to work; it floated across my field of vision again this week and this time I managed to get it to load and, yes, this really is a remarkably-robust and feature-complete clone of an MMO, apparently all built in Claude and with LOADS of players online. Pick a class, create a character and…er…get reminded why MMOs are fundamentally really sh1t and boring to actually play (or at least that’s what happened to me, your mileage may vary). Still, if you want to be told to ‘kill 10 chickens’ while a child in Manila calls you a ‘fcuktard’ over text chat then JUMP RIGHT IN (objectively it is MAD that this has been vibecoded, to be clear, it’s just that MMOs are rubbish by nature).
  • Murdoku: Are you one of those people who goes on long journeys clutching the sort of Big Compendium of Logic Puzzles books, a pencil and a flask of weak lemon drink? OH WOW WILL YOU LOVE THIS! Murdoku is a game which basically combines logic puzzles with Sudoku, alongside a light ‘A MURDER HAS OCCURRED!’ dressing; I didn’t click with this AT ALL, honestly, but I appreciate that that is a skill issue on my part and that those of you who are more, well, logical than I am may find much to love in here.
  • Gridtown: This is cute and really nicely-made, by one Trevor Hinkle – basically it’s like Sim City, if Sim City cared LOADS more about you creating a sustainable energy grid for your city. There’s a daily challenge, a free build mode, and, generally, this is a very impressive browsertoy with a light (really, it’s not intrusive at all) educational layer attached to it. MAKE YOUR GREEN METROPOLIS!
  • Centurions: Our final game this week is a Premier League variant on that ‘pick a team, play a tournament with that team and see if your picks can win it’ theme that cropped up around the world cup; this time you’re tasked with picking an 11 from Premier League squads from over the years; can YOU win the league with a motley crew of stars including the likes of Paul Warhurst, Erland Johnsen and Seba Veron? Not if you’re me you can’t, but perhaps you’ve a better nose for this sort of thing as you continue to manage Football Withdrawal (it will be back in two weeks ffs, what is WRONG with you?).

By Jimmy Marble

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS AN HOUR OF WHAT I CAN ONLY DESCRIBE AS ‘POOLSIDE VIBES’ SELECTED BY BONNIE & KLEIN! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • They Might Be Giants: TMBG (as I am assured their fans abbreviate them to) are a band I only really know for their one UK hit ‘Birdhouse in Your Soul’ but which I know have a devoted and dedicated following, and I love their Tumblr presence which is just delightfully oldschool, all fan interactions and inside jokes and PLEASING QUAINTNESS; this feels almost of another time, and I am thrilled it’s still channeling the late-90s like this (how innocent we all were, how unsullied, how naive).

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Warming Watch: Look, I can totally see why you wouldn’t necessarily want to subscribe to an Insta feed sharing short animated explainers about exactly how the climate is changing (SPOILERS: IT IS NOT GETTING COOLER) given, well, the fact that we can’t do anything about it (as individuals, at least; obviously solutions are available to us, but, realistically, we don’t want to take them! They would be inconvenient, and we really like ‘making money’ and ‘having access to stuff!’), but these are rather nicely done so maybe just enjoy the design and smooth-brain past the fact that the content is screaming ‘LADS, LADS, WE APPEAR TO BE QUITE FCUKED’ at the top of its lungs.
  • Quinn Finite: Quinn Finite is an OnlyFans person who, as is standard, maintains a SFW presence across other platforms; her Insta is a very weird mix of skits, sketches and bits, with a…unique persona and vibe which is very much ‘11am Fringe slot performer, but with buttplugs’. This was sent to me by a friend who asked that I maintain his anonymity – I will, but here’s the message they sent me just in case any of you know me irl and want to speculate as to which pervert wrote the following: “You are not allowed to judge me for this, but I am fascinated by the existence of Quin Finite, who is a not-particularly-hot OnlyFans girl, but who is also potentially a genius and earns a fortune making weird uncategorisable Trevor Bstard-esque videos while also sometimes having a buttplug in.”

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • NEETS: The question of young people, their education and their path towards a future in which they might, with a bit of luck and a prevailing wind, possibly, maybe, get, I don’t know, a *job* or something mad like that, has been swirling around the UK political discourse over the past week, what with Our Andy’s promise to REVAMP THE SYSTEM (again) with a focus on vocational training and skills and, look, this is Laudable Stuff that in general it’s hard to argue against the theory of but which I am also old enough to remember hearing variants of from every single government since I have been old enough to vote, so. Anyway, that’s by way of contextualising preamble to this excellent essay in the LRB, in which William Davies examines the particular question of why it is that prospects for young people seem to be notably worse in the UK, across multiple vectors, than they seem in other developed countries, what it is about the country and the previous three decades that has led to this state of affairs, and what the likely recommendations of the ongoing Milburn Review into the issue are set to be. This is interesting throughout – what I particularly appreciate was Davies’ insistence of being serious about the multifaceted complexity underpinning the statistics, and the fact that looking for a ‘single’ determinant factor (it’s the phones! It’s COVID! It’s AI! It’s the climate crisis!) possibly misses the overall picture that There Is A Fcuktonne Of Stuff Happening And Lots Of It Impacts Young People Significantly And Uniquely. This isn’t cheering, but it feels honest and clear-eyed throughout: “young people in Britain are experiencing much higher levels of distress than they used to, and higher levels than in comparable countries. Survey evidence shows that between the late 1990s and the early 2020s, the number of young people suffering a loss of self-esteem, social anxiety, an inability to concentrate and the lack of a sense of purpose rose significantly. Interestingly, it seems that over the same period, problems associated with anger, lying and transgression declined. If, as Winnicott proposed, ‘delinquency is a sign of hope’ (indicating that the young person feels sufficiently secure that they aren’t too worried about the consequences of their aggression), it seems that hope has been gradually snuffed out since the New Labour period. Negative feelings are being turned inwards. Efforts to separate a mental health epidemic from this wider social malaise are dishonest, and will do nothing in the longer term to confront the challenge of rising disability and inactivity. As Milburn’s interim report puts it, there has been a fall in the ‘functional capacity’ of young people, regardless of the labels applied to them or by whom.”
  • Why Bordeaux is Burning: It is hot here, but it is REALLY hot in France, and a frankly-upsetting amount of it is on fire (or has been in recent weeks); I thought this was a particularly good explainer as to why the issue of fires is particularly bad there, especially in terms of the (again, complex and interlinked) physical geography/land management issues that have contributed to this particular state of affairs. The short answer is ‘we have lost a bunch of old industries which, it turns out, played a load-bearing role in ensuring that the land didn’t become this susceptible to catching fire all the time, and we didn’t replace them, and now look where we are’, but the whole piece is worth reading because it really does communicate how complex and multifaceded this is.
  • The Iranian Disruption: I found the tone of this AP piece, looking at the impact of the conflict in Iran, and the subsequent effect it has had on oil prices and therefore energy costs worldwide, a *touch* on the heartstring-tuggy side; that said, it’s a really interesting overview of how people’s lives in various countries around the world have been fcuked in different ways by That Fcuking Senile Old Cnut’s pointless and seemingly-foreverwar (it is April; Donald Trump announces that a peace deal has been reached; it is August, Donald Trump announces that a peace deal has been reached…much like with Musk, can we just stop reporting this cnut’s every utterance like it means anything? It doesn’t! These men just say things! We don’t have to listen to them!).
  • Rod Liddle: Ok, for the non-Anglos amongst you…Rod Liddle is a formerly-very-influential journalist here in the UK who used to be vaguely-left-wing, or at least a bit ‘progressive’, and who over the course of the past 20 years became increasingly mad and toxic and did and said some incredibly mad and toxic and racist (and worse!) things in print, and whose death this week gave a sort of weird in-relief topography of Where We Are Now in the culture wars, with figures from the left lining up to exhume his worst passages alongside ‘fcuk this cnut into hell’ summaries, while the right (and an upsetting number of ‘mainstream’ hacks who honestly should have known better) queued up to eulogise him as a ‘fearless skewerer of the wokerati’ and other such euphemisms for ‘someone who stopped caring about whether anyone thought he was racist and therefore said all the stuff that we would like to say but can’t because we want to stay inside the tent for the moment’. The link up top takes you to Mic Wright’s rundown of some of the reasons why Liddle was considered beyond the pale by many; to Wright’s credit he sticks solely to the stuff the man wrote down or said on-air and he doesn’t even touch the wifebeating and the whole ‘posting insanely racist things on a Millwall supporters’ forum under a pseudonym’ stuff, he just lets the man’s words do the talking and what they say is “this man was a cnut”. If you can stomach it, by far the best piece of writing from another hack about Liddle and their relationship with him was this one, by Zoe Williams in the Guardian, who wrote genuinely affectingly about watching a colleague get old and mad and racist and horrible, and why it is that that might have happened, and how sad it is.
  • The Creator Economy is Still a Fcuking Lie: Ok, fine, not TECHNICALLY the title of this one, but I am going to keep on banging this drum. The impetus for this piece is the apparent growing trend in Substackers complaining that the platform’s simply not delivering the returns it used to be, whether in terms of raw numbers or paying subs – the answer (WHICH IS TRUE AND WHICH APPLIES TO EVERY SINGLE BIT OF THE ‘CREATOR’ ECONOMY FFS) is that supply of newsletters has outstripped the amount of disposable income people have to pay for newsletters; fundamentally-speaking, as the piece makes clear, most people will at most take, what, 2-3 monthly paid subs (and that, to be clear, is ‘most people’ out of the wider ‘people who might consider paying money for words’, which itself is…not a growth demographic!), and that as the volume of people trying to become Content Creators via the medium of newsletters grows so does the pot of cash get spread more thinly (or, alternatively, concentrated with a few big players), meaning that the idea of ‘being able to make a living through newslettering’ is even more risible than it was five years ago. Also, lol at the fact that the author of this piece has also alighted on ‘magazines’ as a solution.
  • The GEOfication of Reddit: While the advermarketingpr industry is, to a large extent, Quite Fcuked, one of the few bright spots in recent months has been the realisation that you can repackage all your old ‘content for SEO’ pitches as ‘content to influence the output of LLMs’ strategies and once again charge money for old rope that you barely know works. So it is that every single agency in the fcuking world is currently peddling GEO strategies to clients, desperate to convince them that they and only they can ensure that Product X is always top-of-latent-space for GPT, Claude et al; coincidentally and conveniently, this is achieved by the time-honoured method of…getting coverage in trusted media (PR!) and the other places AIs like to look for information, like Reddit (social media engagement strategies!). Honestly, you read the presentations about this stuff and it’s literally like 2010 all over again – LISTEN, THEN ENGAGE! Anyway, this piece is all about how Reddit is being fcuked in half by the volume of terrible PR-led AI-baiting content, and what the site is doing to try and prevent it from being swamped entirely.
  • The ‘Song of the Summer’ is AI: Obviously the headline is rubbish – there’s no such thing as the ‘song of the summer’ anymore because we all exist in infinitely-fractured algoprisons! – but the piece is interesting; this is all about how a track called ‘Rubberz’ was AIvestigated (yes, this is a word, fcuk off) and found to be the work of a tool called Treblo – which, you might be interested to know, I featured in Curios earlier this year when it was called Sonauto, pointing out how it did not give one fcuk about copyright. Anyway, this is interesting because of the degree to which the track’s fans…don’t seem to care, and that it doesn’t really seem to have impacted its streams, and it’s AGAIN an interesting counterpoint to the whole ‘the kids all hate AI!’ narrative that is very popular to parrot for numbers on Bluesky; some kids do! Some kids don’t! But I guarantee you that as time passes and this stuff gets more embedded, we are going to pass a point when noone can tell at all where the person starts and the machine ends and…we probably won’t care then either.
  • GenZ Isn’t Dating Because Of Money: A piece in the New York Times which probably doesn’t need a great deal of explanation beyond the headline; it’s interesting to me the degree to which much of the current handwringing around young people, dating, sex and the like is oddly-reminiscent of Italy back in the day. When I was growing up, it was common for Italian kids to be virgins MUCH longer than kids here, which, I realised after a while, was a result of the fact that they lived with their parents for MUCH longer, traditionally didn’t go away to university, and so weren’t afforded the ability to fcuk outside of the parental home and as such…basically didn’t fcuk (or, if they did, did so in horribly uncomfortable places like the back of a 500, which, honestly, no sex is worth that sort of lumbar discomfort).
  • Boring Millennial Fiction: I enjoyed this piece a great deal, although your mileage will vary depending on the extent to which you enjoy the current crop of slightly-affectless, post-Rooney ‘millennials having a sad and empty time’ novels, characterised by (eg) Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (which I enjoyed) and, more recently, I Want You To Be Happy by Jem Calder, which I really didn’t. The article, by Hillary Kelly in The Atlantic, argues that the quality that separates the best of the genre from the worst is curiosity – both that displayed by the characters, but also that of the author for the why behind their creations’ ennui. See what you think – I really felt this: “Calder, however, lacks even a hint of humor. I Want You to Be Happy has the ambience of a dentist’s waiting room: lots of barely stifled dread accompanied by relentless scrolling. Calder may have mistaken writing about boredom for writing boredom. His prose about phone usage emphasizes physical acts (“He gaze-unlocked his phone, thumbed to his conversation with Joey, absently flexed his free hand open and closed beside the screen, then relocked his device”) rather than immersing us in the stuff that has his characters (and so many of us) in its thrall. Cellphones are, to be fair, a problem for novelists: Their presence eliminates the face-to-face dynamism that so much classic literature uses to its advantage. (Just imagine Mr. Darcy proposing in text-speak.) But phones are also surprisingly similar to novels—both ask people to doggedly follow and emotionally invest in the lives of strangers. They are a narrative boon to any writer interested in human longing. All of which makes Calder’s book a major missed opportunity.”
  • The Right’s Perfect Trans Athlete: In what is proving a generally Bad Year for the rights of trans people around the world, the US is currently having a Discourse Moment about trans women in sports; this is a good article in Defector that neatly points out that the ‘trans woman in women’s sports’ that is currently being debated is a fiction that doesn’t in fact exist in real life; that there are no sports in the US in which trans women compete at any sort of high level, and that the handwringing and worry about the impact on cis women and girls and their participation is born entirely of an imagined threat which doesn’t at present exist at all, and which there is no evidence to suggest will exist.
  • The Zynification of Everything: A mate of mine’s kid is 14, and in the past year has become ENTIRELY addicted to nicotine pouches, which is quite mad when you stop to think about it. Testament, I suppose, to how effectively they have been marketed and their attractiveness to kids as ‘drugs, but oddly-clean and socially-acceptable!’. This is a good piece in Business Insider about how the delivery mechanism is being coopted for EVERYTHING – not least wellnessw4nk – to ride the wave; the small caveat, of course, is that (for various reasons that are explained in the piece), pouches are unlikely to really work as a delivery mechanism for lots of the stuff being touted – still, who cares, none of it’s regulated! Expect to see ‘Protein CBD’ pouches being sold to morons within the year!
  • You Don’t Want To Time Travel: Douglas Giles with an interesting-if-very-geeky explainer why Actual Time Travel would be less about ‘having a fun time looking at the dinosaurs and assassinating Hitler’ and more ‘being smeared, jamlike, across the surface of the earth thanks to various complicating factors such as ‘physics’’.
  • Being An Older Life Model: I really enjoyed this account, by Alyssia Abbott, of deciding to pose naked for her life drawing class at the age of fiftysomething; this isn’t exceptional writing, but there’s something charming about the sense of defiance throughout.
  • Inside VICE: An account of What It Was Like working at VICE in the mag’s heyday, by Mitchell Jackson, who was hired to work there in 2012 – just when things got REALLY rich, and hence really quite mad. I have to say upfront that I think Jackson sounds like a d1ck throughout this piece, and I disliked them intensely by the end (I am sure they would fcuking hate Curios, just like most other people, so should you see this Mitchell know that I know the feeling is probably mutual!); that said, there are some GREAT anecdotes in this if you can block out the tediously-self-aggrandising ‘but obviously I had the last laugh’ tone of so much of it. As someone who has once worked in an office that kept cocaine in the breadbin for mornings when it was all A Bit Much, I had some…quite strong feelings about this, and it’s an interesting picture of a time when media still thought it had a future.
  • The Lost Brutalist Estate of Elephant and Castle: This is a really interesting piece in The Londoner, about the now-demolished Heygate Estate and why, when some examples of Brutalist architecture around the city are feted and marked for preservation (cf the Trellick, etc), this one found no champions and was reduced to dusty rubble as part of the area’s regeneration/gentrification (delete per your personal beliefs) a few years back. You don’t really need to know London, or Elephant, to find this fascinating (although it will help); anyone who’s curious about how cities evolve and change, and how much of it is down to individuals and brute luck, will find this a good read.
  • The First Tomato To Know Everything: OH GOD THIS IS SO INTERESTING! This is all about the phenomenon of ‘grey’ magazines – that is, hyperspecialist publications crafted by companies that aren’t, specifically, publishers. “Grey literature stands for manifold document types produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in print and electronic formats that are protected by intellectual property rights, of sufficient quality to be collected and preserved by library holdings or institutional repositories, but not controlled by commercial publishers i.e., where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body.” Got it? GOOD! This is all about the industry that exists to make this stuff, and, in particular, the Webster’s Timeline History series which collects information about VERY SPECIFIC topics and produces…very, very bad timelines about them for tiny audiences of obsessives. Honestly,this is SO interesting and, perhaps best of all, neatly proves my point that ‘slop’ isn’t a property of AI, and that we have been churning it out for years without needing any help from The Machine thankyou very much indeed. Just enjoy the opening and then click the link and read the rest – this is WONDERFUL: “In my modest collection of gray literature, the specialist title that comes closest to a blockbuster is Jean Aspin’s Vaginal Examination: A Unique Pocket Guide (ca. 1980s). Or perhaps it’s Dovea Genetics’s Beef Directory (2014). Aspin was a community midwife in Luton and Dunstable University Hospital’s maternity wing. Her pocket guide is a well-produced, ring-bound, wipe-clean, tongue-shaped booklet, published by the baby milk company Cow & Gate. Its Latinate lists, labeled diagrams, and die-cut holes of increasing diameters, representing vaginal dilation, step a midwife through the assessment of fetal skull position during labor. The Beef Directory promises “Rock Solid Beef Genetics.” It peddles not anonymous meat but the sperm of individual bulls with names that sound like variety acts: Tonroe Lord Ian! Utile Ben! Virginia Andy! Vagabond! Mornity Handyman! Pinocchio! Seaview Tommy! Atok Socrates! Kilowatt D’Ochain! Immense D’Yvoir! It is richly illustrated, suitably glossy, and a chilling ode to muscle. (Behold the bulging rumps of Belgian Blues!)”
  • The Golden Age of British Ice Cream: Ruby Tandoh writes in Vittles, exploring the industrial production of ice cream in 20thC Britain and the technical innovations that underpinned it, and, look, I know I have just made it sound boring as fcuk but trust me when I tell you that Tandoh is a great writer and this is funny and fascinating and will make you want a Mivvi.
  • The Steven Bartlett Hiring Process: On the one hand, linking to my own writing in my own newsletter feels…gross, honestly; on the other, I thought this piece was quite funny and it lifts the lid on the genuinely-sociopathic recruitment practices of the man responsible for The Diary of a CEO podcast, so see what you think (you will have to hand over an email address to access this, but, to the best of my knowledge, nothing bad will happen as a result).
  • My Dad and Steve Zizzou: A lovely little bit of family history by Molly Cooper, writing in the Paris Review, about her dad’s sole appearance onscreen, opposite Bill Murray in Wes Anderson’s ‘A Life Aquatic’. This is poignant and funny and affectionate and beautiful: “Around lunchtime, I went to look for my father and found him sitting in a makeup chair in front of a bank of theater mirrors. His navy-blue blazer and scuffed Rockports had been traded for a roomy Italian suit, dove gray with white pinstripes, and sleek, honey-colored dress shoes. A white tissue had been fixed under his glasses to shield them from the buff makeup coating his face, and a stylist was coiffing his hair. It was hard to talk much amid these ministrations, but even in our brief exchange he imparted an air of deep dismay. Just as I was getting back to my desk, the phone rang. The voice was familiar: it was Bill Murray, and he had a question. He had known Anderson to cast people with no previous acting experience. He had worked with some of these people in the past. “Has your father ever acted before?” he asked. His tone sounded somewhere between amused and alarmed. I explained, regretfully, that he had not. There was silence, followed by a long sigh.”
  • Beautifying The Dead: Our last longread of the week is this superb essay in Harper’s; John Semley attends the Restorative Art Technical Showcase, a contest in which mortuary workers who specialise in preparing bodies for open casket viewings compete to perform the best reconstructive work on mutilated dummy heads. This is GORGEOUS; honestly, I cannot recommend this enough, it’s funny and macabre and dark and emotional and creepy and WEIRD and you will think about it for a lot longer than it takes you to read, I promise. “When the morticians reunited with their heads on day two of the showcase, most of the major injuries had already been redressed. Now the object for the competitors was to make their silicone subjects look casket-worthy. Back at his station, Saldivar fussed over imperfections in the dark-pink wax around his dummy’s earlobes and eye sockets before air-brushing on a few base layers of foundation, which PMRC provided in shades ranging from Pink White to Gold Earth to the frankly delicious-sounding Rice Pudding. To make this blank canvas look more skinlike, he then dipped a chip brush into a darker shade of special-effects paint and dangled it a few inches above the head, running his thumb along the bristles to splatter the pigment and create layers of fleshy depth.”

By Jake Kennedy

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!