So it turns out that going clubbing is still fun, even in middle age! Ok, so I still feel a *bit* like someone has scooped out all my innards and replaced them with sawdust and nails, and I’m hoping the ringing in my ears will stop soon, and I don’t really understand why all the children were wearing sunglasses while dancing (GYAC kids you are all evidently on drugs I can tell even if you cover your pupils), and I confess to being unable to let go of the fact that three separate people in their early 20s independently informed me that I ‘have strong SuperHans energy’, but, broadly speaking, it was a success! 10/10! Would OldClub again!
But you don’t care about that! Frankly, if you’ve been reading Curios for any time at all it’s entirely possible that you don’t in fact care about ANYTHING anymore, so ground down are you by the relentless cynicism, negativity and the general SPAFFBARRAGE – but, still, on with the links!
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you might be interested in reading a short interview with Kris and I about the Tiny Awards, voting for which closes in a few short days (winners announced next week!).
By Tine Poppe (all images via TIH this week, for which thanks)
THE SECTION WHICH FIRMLY BELIEVES THAT IN THIS TWEET AND IN THIS THREAD CAN BE FOUND, BASICALLY, ALL THE ANSWERS AS TO WHY NOTHING WORKS AND EVERYTHING SEEMS A BIT SCREWED, PT.1:
- The Bulwer-Lytton 2024: While there are some recurring links whose inclusion makes me sigh and consider the passing of time, the ephemerality of the human experience and the fact that every character I type brings me inexorably closer to the sweet release of death, there are others whose annual reappearance is like a welcome visit from an old friend (a friendship which is entirely one-sided, admittedly, where one of the friends doesn’t actually know about the existence of the other and might be slightly discomfited by the weird yearly burst of attention if it ever knew). So it is with the Bulwer-Lytton contest, which you SURELY remember is the annual competition inviting people to invent the best, worst opening line of a fictitious novel, and which this year does not disappoint in the invention and the car-crash quality of the prose on display. The winner is the baldly effective “She had a body that reached out and slapped my face like a five-pound ham-hock tossed from a speeding truck,” a line which, like many of the very best, rewards a rereading or two to appreciate the full majesty of the mixed metaphors being deployed and their entirely-inappropriate heft, but there are SO MANY good ones. I have a soft spot for “Stepping outside just after dawn, Chef Billingsworth was pleased to discover that for once the morning fog was not as thick as pea soup—or even lobster bisque for that matter—but was more a chicken velouté, or perhaps a beef remouillage,” but I think my personal favourite is this one (pick your own!): “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and it was precisely this questionable choice of paving material, combined with the ongoing flight of middle-class demons from the urban center of Pandaemonium proper to more spacious brimstone-lakefront homes in its suburbs, that had produced the mess of closures, detours, and gridlock that were making Azazel’s commute this morning a living . . . well, you know.”
- There Is No Website: To be clear – this is very silly and entirely pointless, but it made me laugh quite a lot, and I am a bit of a sucker for fourth-wall-breaking websites. Load up the page and, well, just see what happens – there are a couple of points where you might think you’ve become stuck, but just keep messing with things and you’ll get there eventually. Yes, I know, this is a terrible and unenticing description that tells you the square root of fcuk all, but to explain more would be to spoil the fun – I would say, though, that this feels like the sort of silly, frivolous thing that might be quite nice to take and polish up a bit, and that, more broadly, websites and digital works that play a little more with the self-aware idea of site-vs-user feel like something that could be deployed more widely, particularly for a generation of people raised on things like Doki Doki Literature Club (which, by the way, if you’ve never played it is a genuinely brilliant, properly unnerving and very smart game which I can recommend unreservedly). Basically it seems what I want, deep down, is a website that talks back to me, which is possibly the most on-the-nose assessment of my relationship to the web I’ve managed to come up with in a decade and a half.
- Midjourney On Desktop: AT FCUKING LAST. Midjourney – probably still the best off-the-shelf image gen model, even after the launch of Flux – finally has an open-access web interface, meaning you can now create near-photorealistic pictures without having to deal with the horror that is Discord. You are, I’m sure, familiar with how this stuff works by now, but if you’re interested in playing around then it’s worth reading up on the specific things that Midjourney is good at – isolating specific seeds to then reuse for stylistic consistency, for example, is significantly easier with this than with any of the other mainstream tools I’ve tried. If you’ve yet to play around with this yet and your experience is limited to OpenAI’s image stuff then please do give it a try – the jump in quality is notable. Expect the particular Midjourney visual aesthetic to slowly start to replace the Dall-E one as the overriding ‘vibe’ of AI-generated images on the web (in my head I tend to find MJ’s outputs a touch more on the…shiny/greasy side, for want of a better descriptor, whereas Dall-E feels a bit more rounded and obviously-CG-ish (it may amuse you to know that I was once employed to write press releases for fine art galleries, which is obviously where I learned how to evoke visual concepts in prose with such peerless grace).
- OKNWA: Before you get your hopes up, this is not in fact anything to do with the NWA the storied pioneers of hiphop (sorry) – in this instance, the NWA in question is North West Arkansas in the US, and the website is an odd proposition (brought to my attention by former-editor Paul), possibly the first ever ‘entirely AI-generated news website’ I’ve seen that is quite open about the fact that that’s what it is. “Our AI reporters work tirelessly, utilizing advanced machine learning techniques to search the web and social media platforms for trending topics and hidden gems. Once a story is identified, they craft articles and generate images that capture the essence of the news piece, all while injecting their distinctive personality into the content” (can you tell it’s AI-spun copy? I THINK YOU CAN). What’s odd about this is…well, there’s quite a lot that’s odd, but I’m particularly intrigued by the fact that they bother to ‘name’ a roster of AI ‘reporters’ – presumably a bunch of differently-pre-prompted LLMs whose instructions compel them to write ‘in the style of a local newspaper arts reporter’, say, or ‘with the enthusiasm and pride of small-town college football correspondent’…why? It seems like a genuinely unnecessary level of complication – after all, if you’re the sort of person who’s happy to receive their news in the dead-eyed style of a generic LLM, you’re unlikely to give much of a fcuk about whether it was ‘written’ by ‘Arlo Artiste’ or ‘Benjamin Business’ (no, really, those are two of the names given to the ‘reporters’. You can FEEL the creative artistry, can’t you?). The news is very much ‘local events’-type stuff, and frankly feels like press releases that have been parsed through The Machine and then thrown online, and while on the one hand I can’t for the life of me imagine who the audience for this is – in the sense that I can’t ever imagine anyone WANTING to read any of this stuff – I can also imagine that, in a world where there is no more local reporting anymore and Facebook doesn’t really work as a ‘what’s my neighbourhood/community up to?’ feed anymore, a one-stop shop where you can find local events, updates, etc, filleted and summarised, might be…sort-of helpful? Don’t get me wrong, this is dreadful, but I can imagine a (worse, to be clear) future in which stuff like this isn’t quite such a weird anomaly. Which, of course, is why initiatives such as Mill Media are so vitally important and should be supported wherever possible.
- The Onion Front Page Archive: I like the Onion – it is very funny on occasion, and its consistent hit-rate is staggering when you consider how long the schtick has been going – but equally I was slightly baffled by the flood of enthusiasm at the announcement that it’s bringing back its print edition (and also, there’s possibly something telling about one of the big faultlines in Western society when you have one section of people who are continuing to move away from news consumption in general, and another who not only consume ALL THE NEWS ALL THE TIME but who are also willing to pay actual cashmoney for a fictitious magazine satirising all the news they have spent all this time reading). Still, the magazine has made its entire collection of historical front pages – previously published in anthology form – online in one place, which is good of them, and as you would expect there are some corkers. I personally very much enjoyed the WWII-era ones (“San Francisco Grocer Henry Nakamura Chief Suspect in Pearl Harbour Bombing”), but it’s just consistently very, very funny (“Bottom 10% of Last Year’s Graduating Class Ready to Take On Saddam” is particularly on the nose).
- Traffic Cam Photo Booth: OK, so unless you live in New York then this won’t be of any real use to you, but if you do then this is SUCH a great idea – Morry Colman has effectively written code which lets you use any of New York City’s traffic cameras to take a photo of you, simply by logging onto this url. “Traffic Cam Photobooth is a website that allows anybody to locate their nearest publicly available traffic camera and use it to take pictures of themselves. While these cameras are ostensibly intended for traffic, they also serve to acclimate us to the idea that constant monitoring is an everyday part life in the city. No matter the target of this surveillance, it’s clear from looking at the map that most New Yorkers get unconsentingly captured by the lens of at least one camera – if not several – every day. TCP offers visitors an engaging and lighthearted way to engage with this very serious topic by drawing attention to these easily ignored cameras. People can use their feeds, which their tax dollars help fund, to take pictures of themselves, spreading the knowledge of this sprawling surveillance apparatus through fun self-portraits designed to be sharable online.” I can’t pretend to understand how the technical stuff works, but I adore the hacking of the public surveillance system for this sort of silly purpose. You can even find the source code linked on the homepage should you want to seek to apply this elsewhere – if anyone reading this happens to work for the highways department of a local authority, can we maybe spend some time thinking about how we can turn this into some sort of FUN AND FRIVOLOUS GAME? I reckon there’s potentially something quite cool/fun in the concept which you could build on rather nicely.
- Tonecraft: I know, I know, in-browser synth toys are BORING and PLAYED OUT and you’ve SEEN THEM ALL BEFORE. Well shut your face, because this one is (moderately) new and (moderately) different! Make your looping bloopy/synthy track using a pleasing little 3d interface, a bit like creating an audiowave with LEGO or Minecraft blocks – you effectively build your soundscape, with each ‘line’ on the building grid representing a different note, and the height of the stacks you build representing a different pitch, and the different types of blocks different instruments, and once you’re done you can share your compositions with the wider world. Pleasingly you can browse the gallery of everyone else’s creations and share them with the world, and the site’s creators are working on an ability to remix others’ compositions while retaining credit to the original creator, which is a nice touch. This is FUN, basically, even though it’s unlikely you’ll be creating anything particularly-sampleable (but, please, prove me wrong).
- America’s Political Pulse: An interesting use of AI! America’s Political Pulse is a project which attempts to track partisanship in US political discourse (it’s an offshoot project of the Polarisation Research Lab, itself a project by Dartford, Stanford and Pennsylvania Universities), in part through regular surveys of the electorate but also by using AI to analyse political speeches made by representatives across the House and Senate, and offering users the ability to get an overview of the types of interventions they make, the relative proportion of their speeches which contain partisan attack lines, all that sort of jazz. This is really interesting – you can search by individual politician, or look into it at a state-by-state level, and for each individual you’re presented with stats as to the way in which they conduct themselves, how they rank compared to their peers, and examples of how behaviour types manifest themselves, with references back to specific speeches made, or quotes given to media. All of this is done using LLM text analysis – which strikes me as a good use of the tech, and which I think could be usefully done in the UK given the excellent work already done by the clerks of the Commons and Lords in transcribing everything in near-realtime for Hansard. Does anyone know if anything like this is being spun up?
- How The Olympic Muffins Pop-Up Happened: Know that I am writing this up through slightly-gritted teeth. To be honest this would probably be a better fit in the Longreads section but, well, it’s not exactly stellar prose and so I put it up here instead. The link is to the first Tweet in a THREAD (sorry) all about how this person on Twitter was responsible for bringing the VIRAL CHOCOLATE MUFFINS FROM THE PARIS OLYMPICS to NYC hipsters as part of a limited edition pop-up (there is very little about that sentence that doesn’t cause me to twitch uncomfortably), and it is a frankly EXHAUSTIVE list of the steps taken and the logistical hurdles jumped through, and, basically, my main takeaways were: a) fair play to this person, they are very good at Getting Sh1t Done and the amount of wrangling and general ‘get up and go’ on display here is genuinely impressive; b) this is actually a really good primer in general on how to make events-type stuff happen, in terms of complexity and snags and DEALING WITH PEOPLE, and is a useful reminder that the distance between ‘why don’t we do a pop-up with those muffins?’ and actually getting a mediocre baked treat into the mouths of hypebeasts on the other side of the Atlantic is, well, FCUKING VAST; c) that if the other rumour doing the rounds is true, that these are just standard catering muffins of the sort you could get literally anywhere, then the whole thing is very funny; and d) there is literally no way in hell that the whole palaver was in any way worth the hassle, petrol and stress that it must all have taken to engineer.
- A Million Pokeballs: Much like ‘Million Dollar Homepage’, I feel that the Million Checkboxes site from earlier this year – a Tiny Award nominee, no less! – is going to get ripped off approximately 100 times a year between now and the heat death of the universe. This is the first moderately-interesting riff I’ve seen on it – the gimmick here is that there are a million Pokeballs arrayed across the vast page, and within said million there are 10 Pokemon to be found. WHO WILL FIND THEM? And, perhaps more importantly, who cares? There doesn’t seem to be any sort of reward for the people who find them – 6/10 at the time of writing, with over 600k balls opened – but it made me think that actually there’s probably a non-terrible competition mechanic here which you MIGHT be able to fund with ad revenue. Then, though, I realised that what I was doing was taking something lovely and pure and frivolous and making it fcuking horrible via the introduction of capitalism, and it is in fact I who am the problem and the cancer. So it goes.
- Luvr: Presented largely without comme…no, actually, I do feel the very real need to say I HAVE NOT USED THIS OR TRIED IT, I AM MERELY SHARING IT AS A CURIOSITY. So. Luvr is basically a bongo chatbot service (and, as such, this link is moderately-NSFW), offering users the opportunity to ‘enjoy’ ‘uncensored’ chats with a selection of ‘sexy’ AIs, each with image-generation capabilities – you can either ‘speak to’ one of the pre-created bots, or ‘roll your own’, so to speak…but, of course, this is all for a price, with (I presume – again, I HAVE NOT TRIED THIS OUT – am…am I protesting too much? I worry I am) everything stuck behind a paywall. I include this not because I imagine for a second any of YOU want to try this out, but more as a sort of ‘look, this stuff isn’t going to go away, I don’t think, in fact quite the opposite’ warning. Hook this up to AI voice synth and it’s not hard to see an awful lot of teenage boys doing appalling damage to their parents’ credit cards (and their own psychosexual development!) with these things – as someone whose childhood friend Phil Niewiadomski (Phil, I really, really hope you Google yourself and find this) got into trouble c.1993 for ringing up sex lines that cost £1 a minute from his home phone, it’s not that difficult to envisage how this might play with the endlessly horny young men of the world. As an aside, scrolling through the avatars of the various ‘models’ it becomes abundantly clear that, if you think that the ready availability of bongo over the past 15 years or so has slightly warped young people (men, specifically)’s idea of ‘what sex is and what people actually look like and what normal human proportions are’, then OH MY GOD IS IT ALL GOING TO GET MORE MESSY.
- Brandon Jamar Scott: I don’t as a rule feature individual ‘creators’ in this section, and certainly not TikTok people, but I am going to make an exception for this man because his Princess Peach/Mario song is legitimately hilarious and I watched it about six times this week despite it not being my sort of thing AT ALL, and in general the combination of CG and live video and surrealism and songwriting that is far, far better than it in fact needs to be is winning in ways I didn’t expect.
- Amazon Review Cleaner: You’ll probably have noticed that one of the great ‘boons’ of the boom in genAI has been the proliferation of surprisingly-similarly-written reviews appearing under Amazon products, reviews praising the, I don’t know, dildo or cat fountain or whatever it is in the now-ubiquitous flat-yet-enthusiastic register of the LLM – this website does one thing and one thing only, to whit ‘it tries to clean up the reviews and remove all the obvious spam’, hopefully letting you get a picture of what ‘REAL PEOPLE’ think rather than what the aggressive armies of ecommerce bots think. There’s a browser extension too, and a free phone app, and this in general feels like it might be useful should you be the sort of person who buys sh1t online and reads the reviews and still holds on to the possible naive belief that anyone on the web is a real person anymore (apart from me, I am DEFINITELY real, definitely).
- Running The 92: I don’t run (imagine me saying that in the same tone of voice as the unnamed sample-ee says “I don’t mosh” in the intro to this David Holmes track), but, given that I imagine a large proportion of you are of an age when you’re trying to stave off middle-aged spread and the inevitable cardiovascular ill-health that results from One Of Those Lifestyles, I like to assume that a significant proportion of you do – presuming you are one of those people, and presuming you are in London or nearby, I would like to draw your attention to this route on Strava, plotted by one Jordan Wilson, which took him around all 92 underground stations in a total time of 6h43m. CAN YOU BEAT HIM? Seriously, this feels like it could and possibly should become A LONDON THING, and I reckon there’s quite a fun community challenge-type thing you could build out of this with a bit of thought.
- LinkedIn Lyrics: LinkedIn is evil and wrong and will, one day when we have sorted All This Sh1t Out, will be consigned to the great digital oubliette of history. That said, occasionally someone will create something beautiful from even the basest of raw materials – so it is with the TikTok account LinkedIn Lyrics, which takes popular songs and matches the lyrics to the names of people on LinkedIn. Which I appreciate probably doesn’t make huge amounts of sense when described by me, but which I promise you will put an actual, proper smile on your face when you click the link. Also, because I know you all feel that ‘posting on LinkedIn’ is somehow part of your actual job – IT IS NOT! IT IS PERFORMATIVE BUSINESS COSPLAY! HAVE YOU ALL GONE FCUKING MAD??? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU??? – this feels like a perfect ‘a fun link for Friday TGIF cry-laugh emoji!!!!’ post with which to feed the endless hordes of THOUGHT LEADERS crying out for content (dear God kill me).
THE SECTION WHICH FIRMLY BELIEVES THAT IN THIS TWEET AND IN THIS THREAD CAN BE FOUND, BASICALLY, ALL THE ANSWERS AS TO WHY NOTHING WORKS AND EVERYTHING SEEMS A BIT SCREWED, PT.2:
- Roast Master: You will probably have seen people doing the ‘get GPT to roast your Insta’ meme doing the rounds over the past week or so – this site basically presents a nice little formalised skin to let you get an LLM-generated takedown of any social media profiles you choose (presuming they’re not locked down) across Insta, Twitter and LinkedIn – just plug in the username and BINGO, you’ll get…well, what you’ll get is a pretty-lukewarm series of burns based on a loose analysis of your bio and your posts, and then a FCUKLOAD of other stuff including ‘horoscopes for MBAs’ (Myers Briggs ‘analysis’), attachment style analysis and a host of other TOTAL RUBBISH that somehow sounds moderately convincing. This very much feels like something that’s big in playgrounds right now, but I can’t pretend that there’s not a couple of minutes of light amusement in The Machine’s assessment of your carefully-curated digital persona – it gets weirdly hung up on certain things (like all LLMs, in fairness), which is perhaps why it kept obsessing about me being really into baking despite, to the best of my knowledge, having tweeted about cakes a grand total of 0 times in 15-odd years, and it obviously makes stuff up, but, equally, it was amusingly mean about my friend’s podcast and as a result I warmed to it slightly. I would quite like to create a variant of this where every time you plug in your LikedIn profile it returns ‘you are a dreadful cnut with dust where your soul should be’, regardless of who you are.
- Good Milk; Look, there is very little likelihood that this link will be of particular use or interest to anyone, but I was so affronted by it that I felt the need to include it, if only so I can ask all of you if anyone can explain it to me. This is a map, on the website of the New England Cheese Making Company, which purports to show suppliers of ‘good milk’ worldwide (‘good’ based on…some sort of arbitrary designation which is never really made clear), and it contains a grand total of ONE UK dairy. ONE. WHAT THE FCUK IS WRONG WITH OUR MILK, NEW ENGLAND CHEESE MAKING COMPANY? ARE YOU SLAGGING OFF OUR COWS? I was annoyed and affronted by this to a degree entirely disproportionate to my interest, involvement and engagement with the UK dairy industry.
- The DiCamillo Database:: To quote the homepage, “A continuing project to list every country house built in Britain and Ireland, standing or demolished.” You want to embark upon a potentially-doomed project to visit every single country house in the British Isles? OH GOOD! Presuming that you DON’T want to do that, this is still an interesting resource – I had no idea there were so many ‘country houses’ in London, for example, and might use this to go and check out a couple (I winced slightly as the realisation came to me that I am now the sort of person for whom ‘going to check out a country house at the weekend’ is not a wholly-out-of-character pursuit). BUT if any of you decide to make ‘visiting all of the b4stard things’ a lifelong pursuit then I would love to hear about it (briefly).
- Auglinn: I think I’ve seen at least half-a-dozen AR-enabled ‘leave digital notes attached to physical locations’-type projects over the course of the time I’ve been doing Curios, and obviously none of them have ever crossed my path ever again or ever, as far as I can see, been anything more than an entirely-niche concern. I can’t see this particular variant changing that, but I can’t help but think that we might be at a point when you might finally be able to do something sort-of fun with this. Even if there’s no mass-adoption it feels like a group of people could have quite a lot of fun with the functionality here, building it in to treasure hunts or mystery games, and (if you are a very particular type of person) you could propose using this stuff, or take someone on a surprise tour of a city…I don’t know, it feels like there’s a really underexplored ‘fun and frivolous and slightly-surprising, and leading to Actual Real-World Events and Rewards’-type set of applications to this sort of tech which perhaps might be easier to explore in the VASTLY DIGITAL era of 2024 vs the significantly-less-online years of 2014ish when I last remember this stuff getting attention in any meaningful way.
- Sun vs Moon: I am slightly in awe of Neal Agarwal’s productivity – this is his latest, an entirely-pointless but oddly-compelling battle between the sun and the moon. WHO WILL RECEIVE THE MOST CLICKY SUPPORT??? Basically you open the site and click in support of either one celestial body or the other, with a running tracker of which of the two is receiving the most overall support, which has a higher points-per-second at the time…presuming this is all real , there is a…frankly staggering amount of clicking going on at any given time, and I do think there’s something interesting about the psychology of stuff like this and the compulsion it seems to engender in people to get into low-stakes ‘one side vs another side’ battles, and how that might be usable in various, probably slightly nefarious, ways. Still, who cares – CLICK FOR THE MOON (you have to pick a side, and that, it turns out, is mine).
- Teletubbies: So, er, who owns the rights to Teletubbies these days? I ask only because this is a very fcuking odd, and yet seemingly ‘official’, TikTok account which presents videos of the legendary little weirdos in a peculiar and off-brand ‘very online surrealism’-type style. Are these the original costumes being used? It all feels a bit janky and knockoff, but when you go to the Linktree from the bio you get a dizzying series of additional TubbyProperties – loads of millennial/GenZ-friendly brand crossovers, along with the ‘official’ YouTube and Insta channels, which suggests that this is simply a case of a brand that has basically become part of some sort of equity portfolio and is being rinsed incredibly hard in as many places as possible, because, well, that’s how everything works these days! Basically this made me slightly sad, but your tolerance for slightly-forced “It’s the Teletubbies…BUT WEIRD! AND CAMP! AND POP CULTURE!” lols may be higher than mine.
- Shimmer: This is oddly-soothing – Shimmer is an image search engine which isn’t really a search engine at all (SO WHY DID YOU JUST CALL IT ONE MATT FFS YOU AWFUL FCUKING HACK? I am so sorry), where instead you’re presented with a selection of images in the now-classic ‘infinite scroll’ style, and by clicking on one you’re taken to a wall of images which share the same sort of general aesthetic or composition – it’s not a million miles away from that vibes-based image based search thing from a few years back, but what’s interesting/weird about this is that…I can’t tell what is AI and what isn’t, or rather I can’t tell if it’s ALL AI, or whether some of the pics are real, and there’s no indication where any of this is from, and I suppose it’s just another general indicator of direction of travel, because this is it, isn’t it, the inevitable endpoint of the AI slop boom and the improvements in the imagegen tech, and the degradation of search and the death of the attributory trail, and the presentation of everything in a flat, contextless carousel, and I find this distressing in ways I can’t really quite articulate but which I nevertheless feel quite deeply.
- A Massive Auction of Fairground Stuff: You know the tedious, internet-facilitated ‘I’m SO SCARED OF CLOWNS!’ thing that people with no real personality of their own have been using as a substitute for ‘character’ since approximately the mid-2000s? GYAC COULROPHOBIA IS NOT SOMETHING THAT ANYONE ACTUALLY HAS. Ahem. Sorry. Anyway, I am personally of the opinion that, while clowns are not in fact any scarier than anything else, there IS something inherently sinister about the carnival aesthetic, fading letterwork on ageing planks and stained tarps and tired-eyed acrobats and alcoholic firebreathers and sad-faced animals gazing from between rusting bars, that sort of thing (on which note, semi-related, if you’ve never read Geek Love then you really, really must). Presuming, though, that you like this sort of thing, you will LOVE this forthcoming auction at Bonhams where you will soon be able to bid on all manner of vaguely-carny memorabilia, from old painted signs to carved figures and wooden animals from the carousel…honestly, this is a hell of a collection and for people with A Very Specific Domestic Aesthetic there could be a lot to entice you in here. Honestly, I will be very disappointed if not one of you can find a home in their lives for “An English carved and painted double-seated juvenile galloper figure of a Boy Scout centaur” (no, me neither).
- The iPhone Photo Awards: Is it actually possible to take a non-AI-enhanced image on a phone anymore? Like, is there any way of literally shutting off the automatic ‘life enhancement’ tech that seems to kick in whenever you hit the ‘shutter’ button regardless of whatever ‘no filter’ options you might have selected? This is possibly exacerbated by my penchant for cheap Chinese Android variants, but I swear it’s not been possible to take a photo that looks like real life for several years now. Anyway, that’s by way of slightly-grumpy introduction to the iPhone Photography Awards, which as ever contain some really impressive images but which I find it hard to get that excited about anymore because everything just looks digitally enhanced to the point of slight-surreality. I do worry that our sense of aesthetics for things like this are set to be absolutely banjaxed in the not-too-distant future, and that we’re rapidly approaching a period where it will be impossible to remember online imagery that *didn’t* have that slight sense of CG about it.
- Ellipsis: What sort of traveller are you? Do you like to plan and itinerarise (whatever spellcheck might want to tell me, that IS a word (or at least it is now)) and generally KNOW WHAT THE FCUK YOU ARE DOING? If so you might find Ellipsis genuinely useful – it’s AN Other holiday/travel planning app, but with a bunch of nice quality of life features which I think might elevate it for some users; its main draw is that everything’s visible on a map interface, so you can easily see what sort of travel burden you’re committing to by adding all those additional churches to your Tuesday list (for example), but it also allows for multi-user editing and all sorts of other stuff besides. Basically, if you’re the sort of person who REALLY enjoys the planning part of a trip – let’s be honest, probably more than the actual travel with its PEOPLE and HASSLE and UNPREDICTABLE HAPPENINGS messing up your lovely, clear schedule – then you might find this invaluable. Oh, and as far as I can tell it’s a free service, which is a nice bonus.
- BlockParty: This might be really useful, though I sort-of hope none of you feel the need to explore it too deeply. BlockParty is basically a one-stop-shop to help you ensure that all your privacy settings across all your online profiles are set up in the optimal way to give you the privacy you feel you need – it’s designed specifically, I get the impression, for people who are experiencing a degree of online harassment and would like a quick and easy way of covering off all the basic ways to guard against it. This was established by a former Facebook person – thanks, poacher, you make an excellent gamekeeper! – and, per the ‘About’ section, works as follows: “Privacy Party works by navigating and clicking for you right before your eyes — finding all the hidden controls, toggles, and audience selectors it might take hours to sleuth out otherwise. And not just for privacy controls, but for Notifications too. Anything that intrudes on our minds is fair game. Anything that makes us feel surveilled and unsafe online.” Hope you don’t need this, but just in case you do.
- Minute Cryptic: A different cryptic crossword clue each day for you to try and solve. I am bitter about this, because cryptic crossword clues are one of those things I like to think I should be smart enough to get my head round but which I have singularly failed to ever be able to do, however often I have tried. The thing that really boils my p1ss about this (sorry, but it does) is that IT DOESN’T EXPLAIN HOW THESE WORK. Like, ok, today’s clue is “Red and White triumphs, clinching home final (5)” and I can sort-of arrive at an explanation for the answer but there’s one bit that baffles me and I WANT TO KNOW HOW IT WORKS and I don’t, and frankly I just feel sort of stupid and grumpy now and quite want to sit and sulk for 5 minutes or so. Anyway, there’s a new one of these each day so maybe if I keep banging my head against the metaphorical brick wall of cryptic puzzle it will all one day click for me (or I will get an unpleasant metaphorical cranial fracture, either/or).
- Word Associations: This, though, I rather like – it’s both ‘game’ (you can play word association vs the computer, although obviously it’s an infinite game as the computer will never be stumped) and resource, with all the associations made by humans over the course of the hundreds of thousands of plays logged in a database, meaning you can search any word you like and find those other terms which have most-often been correlated with it by previous people to visit the site. I find this really interesting, and there’s something quite pleasing about spending 5 minutes playing Mallet’s Mallet with the computer and knowing that in some small way you’re contributing to a database of actual human knowledge.
- Gisnep: Oh God this is fiendish. Do you want a Wordle-type game, but one which will take you about 15m every day rather than <30s? No, of course you don’t, you have SH1T TO DO, but I’m going to dangle this in front of you anyway like some sort of terrible temptation. Gisnep is…a bit complicated to explain, but it feels a little bit like literate Sudoku (you’ll see what I mean), and while I can’t personally claim to have fallen in love with it I think there are some for whom it will scratch a very particular itch (are you the sort of person who enjoys those massive grandmotherly ‘BIG BOOK OF WORD PUZZLES’-type things (no shade, my friend Mo has been into them since her mid-20s)? In which case this is for you, basically).
- Snakebyte: Play Snake in your browser. Except, after a while, you will realise that this is Not Your Ordinary Snake. Fun, if a bit fiddly, and I very much like both the ASCII-ish aesthetic and the vaguely ‘malware in the machine’ feel of the whole thing.
- Diablo In Your Browser: Do YOU remember the original Diablo? Do YOU want to play the whole thing for free in your browser? OH GOOD HERE IT IS!
- We Play Dos Games: Finally this week, another ABSOLUTE MOTHERLODE of old videogames, playable in full in your browser via the magic of the web. You know the score by now – this is a host of titles from the 90s and 00s, many of which you’ll have seen on other, similar sites in the past, but others which I’ve not seen as freely playable versions before. XENONII (with a soundtrack composed by actual, proper dance music people Bomb The Bass)! Odd 7-UP promo game Cool Spot! TIE FIGHTER!!! Jesus, I’ve just looked and this appears to have ALL OF THE ULTIMA GAMES, which for a very specific type of middle-aged nerd could well end up being career/marrage-threatening propositions. BE CAREFUL, OLD NERDS! Seriously though, there really are some absolute classics here – if nothing else you owe yourself to check out the classic Lucasarts ‘point and click’ games they have here – Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island I&II, Indiana Jones – because, honestly, they are design classics and SO SO SO GOOD. Honestly, this one’s a fcuking GOLDMINE, you will not regret bookmarking it. OH MY GOD IT HAS CHAMP MAN 97/98 I MAY NEVER FCUKING EMERGE FROM THIS.
By Yoshitomo Nara (this one via Blort, for which thanks)
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Inside Insides: Not in fact a Tumblr! Still, it feels like one, and, as we have agreed, all taxonomy is a preposterous confection! This is a collection of MRI scans of various different foodstuffs, and, well, what else do you want from me? This is it, this is PEAK INTERNET.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Adam Hale: Very cool little animations. Not quite sure how else to describe these – there’s something very ‘design’ about them, is probably the best I can do (sorry, this is fcuking shameful, I am going to make a cup of tea before the next bit and see if I can improve).
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- An Age of Hyperabundance: This could honestly gone at either end of the longreads section this week – it’s ‘literary’ enough in style and approach to sit comfortably with the short stories, but, given the subject matter, we’ll lead with it instead. Laura Preston writes in n+1 about her trip to speak at this year’s Conversational AI Conference in the US, where she’s been booked as a ‘contrarian’ speaker designed to offer a small note of provocation in amongst all the backslapping and salesmanship. This is SO SO SO GOOD, and, having spent a bit of time over the course of the past year working on projects that are vaguely-adjacent to this space, captures the particular blend of mad snake oil and complete lack of any sort of deep engagement with the BIG ETHICAL QUESTIONS which is pretty much the hallmark of any conversation you’ll have with anyone attempting to flog you generative AI. Even if you feel you never want to read another piece about FCUKING LLMs ever again, I promise you that this is worth your time – it really is perfectly-pitched, of a similar tone and style to the bits of reportage that emerged from the big NFT hypefests of c.2020-1, while at the same time doing a better job of detailing the contours of the industry than a lot of ‘straight’ reporting I’ve read over the past year or so. Here are a couple of representative paragraphs to entice you in – but, really, this is superb and deserves your attention: “A woman named Olga was giving a talk about charisma. I listened, hoping to gain some last-minute wisdom for my own remarks. Olga represented a German firm that puts chatbots through some sort of charisma boot camp. According to Olga, here is how a chatbot can show charisma: First, it can remember the customer’s name. That is very charismatic. “A charismatic assistant might have a quirky sense of humor, a soothing voice, or a nice and friendly tone,” she said. “A charismatic assistant can remind you to take your medicine.” Olga had an important message about charisma. In our pursuit of charismatic AI, we must avoid dark patterns. Dark patterns are manipulative design tactics that steer people toward decisions they wouldn’t normally make, and these patterns often resemble charisma. A chatbot using dark patterns might mimic your mannerisms to gain your trust. It might lead you to believe it is a real person. It might have enough data on you to flirt with lethal precision, and then, just after delivering a dopamine hit, ask you to provide a credit card to continue. Better not do any of that, said Olga.” See? Brilliant.
- Intellectual Menopause: By contrast, I didn’t enjoy the style of this piece anywhere near as much – which is odd, as normally I find Venkatesh Rao a pretty pleasant read – but I found that the points it contains make it worth persisting with. Here Rao explores the broad concept of the ‘intellectual menopause’, a term to describe the particular form of stagnation of thought which he has observed in his peers (and, to his credit, in himself). It’s not Rao’s own coinage, but he arrives at his own composite definition based on reading various other thinkers, which can be summarised as folllows: “Intellectual menopause is an individual disease that men of particular temperaments and a particular age range (40-50) are particularly vulnerable to. It is especially liable to be triggered if they’re part of a paradigm that’s beginning to exhaust itself when they begin their careers, and is likely to infect entire cohorts. It is likely to manifest through behaviors like a focus on abstract values, manifestos, bestowing advice upon younger people, “attitudinizing” one’s own past, or retreating from frontline creative endeavors to supervisory and managerial ones. It is is a symptom of a phase in the lifecycle of complex social systems.” Which, I imagine, sounds…not unfamiliar (can’t lie, felt a *bit* seen). My frustration here lies in the way Rao takes…quite a roundabout way to get to the discussion of the concept and its meaning, application and impact, but once he does it’s an interesting framing which you might find useful (or which might make you feel bodied into the sun, either/or).
- Dark Corners of the Web and US Politics: Caitlin Dewey at Links conducted a fascinating interview this week with Elle Rive, an expert in online extremism who’s recently published a book detailing what she’s learned from a decade or more hanging out in some pretty unsavoury places with some pretty unsavoury people. Their conversation basically covers ‘so, how to explain How We Got Here in terms of explaining the weird and very-post-Gamergate nature of much of right-wing politics in the US (and as a result elsewhere), and how that intersects with actual proper fascists and the whole weirdly misogynistic thing that the Republicans have going on’, and it’s a really cogent, clear explanation of some of the ways in which stuff from 10-15 years ago has infiltrated the social water table in some unexpected and quite weird ways. I particularly appreciated her making the explicit link between white supremacists and the traditionalist movement (and her invocation of PT, my white whale), but the whole thing is properly interesting. As an aside, I really do think that someone somewhere should commission the definitive ‘So, Who The Fcuk Was Milo Then?’ lookback for the UK press because I feel that it’s been long enough and people should probably be prepared to tell their stories by now. Anyone?
- Digital Archivists: Or, to give it its correct title, “The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age”. Long-term readers may have noticed I have slight obsession with digital decay and the general sort of ‘lossiness’ of our current media age, and that I firmly believe that the preservation of digital culture in all its forms is a project which should be pursued at a global, society-wide level as part of the preservation of our species’ cultural patrimony – if you happen to share these obsessions then a) congratulations, you’re probably exactly as fun at parties as I am (have…have the invitations dried up for you too?); and b) you will find this very interesting. In part it made me worry that we don’t have a single gold standard medium for long-term digital storage, and that the proliferation of different solutions will end up with a whole bunch of stuff being lost forever because it was encoded on what ends up being 2076’s version of the Betamax.
- Soviet Sabotage Doctrine: I am not really one for the conspiracies, as a rule (my tedious PT obsession aside), and I remember being generally quite sniffy about Carol Cadwalladr’s ‘IT’S THE RUSSIANS WOT DONE BREXIT’ obsession, and in general I tend to roll my eyes at those of us who see RUSSIAN BOTS as the explanation for any political opinion they don’t like on the internet (HI CENTRIST DADS HI)…but, that said, as part of One Of My Jobs, I have had to spend more time than I would ordinarily like to in the weeds of the miserable racist chat on Twitter in the past few weeks and…yeah, look, it’s impossible to look at this stuff up close and not thing ‘hang on, there is no way in hell this isn’t being coordinated and automated to a certain extent – so, er, by who? And from where?’. It’s more complex than ‘just Russia’, obviously – see the excellent work of Marc Owen Jones if you want a more detailed look at how mad some of this stuff gets when you lift enough rocks – but it seems plausible that there’s SOME sort of Kremlin-y stuff going on. Anyway, the link here goes to a piece about how Soviet mis- and disinformation used to work in the mid-20thC, and why it was employed, and is an interesting historical counterpoint to the more modern techniques being deployed now for reasons which, strategically at least, are largely similar.
- Back to ObamaCore: This piece nails something I’ve been thinking about for a week but which I wasn’t able to articulate – that there’s a certain familiarity of tone and vibe, if you will, to the Harris campaign at the moment. I’d mistakenly pegged it to Hillary, but here Nate Jones makes the far more successful comparison to the slightly-cringey excitement of the immediate aftermath of the Obama election, all HOPE and ‘the end of history’. The whole piece is worth reading – aside from else, it’s very funny – but the thesis and the parallel can be seen in these couple of paras (an aside – I read something this week which basically said ““Obama will save us” is basically hard-coded into a certain generation of millennials” which made me laugh): “Collectively, we are conjuring the ghost of the Obama era — that earnest, optimistic, energized, celeb-obsessed, self-conscious, cringeworthy time. It was an age that seemed dead and buried as recently as mid-July, when Katy Perry’s “Woman’s World” sought to revive the sound of the mid-2010s then promptly flopped. Two days later, Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt and appeared, for the moment, an indestructible electoral force, barely challenged by the sclerotic octogenarian in the White House. The nation seemed to be sleepwalking toward autocracy until the sudden ascent of presidential hopeful Kamala Harris changed everything. She has, as running mate Tim Walz crowed, brought back “the joy.” Within hours of Harris taking over the Democratic ticket, Fire Island twunks posed in matching Kamala crop tops. CNN panelists debated the question of whether Kamala was brat. Barbie-themed “Madame President” signs sprouted on lawns. Megan Thee Stallion twerked at a rally. Cynthia Nixon sipped from a coconut. A campaign has been constructed around a mood, rather than the other way around.”The mood is Obamacore — the outburst of brightness and positivity that took over pop culture upon the election of our first Black president in 2008, and that continued until the wheels fell off eight years later. This was the age of Glee, Taylor Swift’s 1989, and Hamilton, seemingly disparate art born out of the same impulse: the feeling of a new dawn, a generational shift, a national redemption.”
- Reviewing the Grimes-Designed AI Toy: I think I’ve mentioned in here before that the author of The Neverending Story, German author Michael Ende, wrote another, less-heralded but imho far better novel for children called ‘Momo’, a highly-allegorical story about imagination and play and the importance of giving kids the space to think and make things up and basically have unstructured ludic time (it’s…a lot more fun than I make it sound, honestly – it features a talking tortoise called Cassiopeia, ffs!), and one of the central points is a dastardly new type of doll that’s released onto the market which talks to kids and which therefore removes the need for imaginative play…anyway, that’s basically what was in my head throughout this writeup of Grok (no, not Elon’s ‘comedy’ AI), a soft toy imbued with THE POWER OF LLMs to, seemingly, have desperately unsatisfying conversations with an increasingly-underwhelmed young person. Obviously, as per, THIS IS THE WORST IT WILL EVER BE, but it’s also yet another example of this stuff being baked into tech which simply isn’t ready and with seemingly nowhere near enough thought given to how this sh1t is actually going to function in real life. I don’t think any of you will be rushing out to pick up a Grok, based on this.
- Ryan’s World: It was slightly odd reading this, not least because the titular ‘Ryan’ here – of the Ryan’s World YouTube channel, which was a huge story in the Early Days of YouTube, being as it was the first ‘kid unboxing stuff’ channel to go massively stratospheric and make a proper, eyebrow-raising amount from ad revenue and, subsequently, endorsements and merch and and and – is someone who I hadn’t thought about for years (obviously) and who I’d sort of assumed had just sort of aged out of the YouTube grift…but no! He has a film out! He is now obviously a teenager! He…doesn’t appear to have any agency at all in any of this! Honestly, it’s impossible to read this and think ‘I don’t really like your parents very much, Ryan’ – it seems eminently clear (to me, at least) that this is two adults rinsing their kid’s fame for every single penny they can, regardless of whether or not said kid appears to have any interest in doing this any more. It doesn’t feel *bad* per se so much as just deeply, deeply icky and a very strange way of relating to your progeny.
- Snapchat and Teen Friendships: Someone I know used to work at Snap back in the very frothy days, and they recently mentioned that they predict there is a coming BIG BACKLASH to the platform and all the ways in which the tricks it employs to maintain stickiness are also doing fairly terrible things to kids’ relationship with their phones and, more broadly, their conception of what ‘friendship’ means and what value to ascribe to it. A lot of this is based on ‘streaks’ and the base-level fact that Snap effectively gamifies the idea of friendship with the end goal of boosting dwelltime and engagement…which, when you write it down like that, doesn’t sound *wholly* benign. ““You send streaks to people or you snap them, then you have this idea in your head that you’re friends now. It’s like, No, you’re freaking not, man. They’re just on this app, and you are, too.” Well quite.
- The Rise of No-Edit YouTube: On the growing trend towards ‘creators’ posting RAW AND CANDID AND UNEDITED VLOGS as an antidote to the hyperkinetic, fast-paced Mr Beast-style content trend of the past few years. Posted mainly in the hope that this will see a similar rise in popularity of No Edit Newsletters in which some lazy pr1ck sh1ts out 10,000 words of totally unfiltered and unedited stream of consciousness because they’re too selfish and lazy to properly value their readers’ time (asking for a friend).
- Game Rules That Changed Me: OK, ostensibly this is an account of one man’s memory of playing a roleplaying game with friends several years ago, but ACTUALLY it’s a really interesting exploration of how framing and design can change a user’s experience of an event or process in very fundamental ways, and I personally think there’s some quite interesting thinking you can arrive at from here if you squint.
- A Weekend At The Larp Festival: I don’t suppose I need to explain LARPing to any of you, do I? This is Adrian Hon, writing up his experience of attending the annual Immersion festival of live action role playing in Finland – I wasn’t hugely familiar with the nuances of the LARPing world, but it turns out that not every style of game involves pretending to wield the +2 Vorpal Blade of Tharg and smacking someone repeatedly with a styrofoam buckler (or tossing coins to see who has to be the Nazis this time). Instead this festival focuses on what’s called ‘Nordic Larp’, which has more of a focus on story and ideas and is more akin to improv/immersive theatre (from what I can tell) than ‘tw4tting a middle manager from Croydon with what you are all pretending is a morningstar’ – Adrian spent a couple of days there, playing three different types of game, and offers a really detailed and considered writeup of each, explaining how they work and what the player experience was. This is very much NOT MY SORT OF THING, but, regardless, there’s so much in here that’s interesting to the curious reader, from questions of experience design to group dynamics, and while I think I would turn fully inside-out from embarrassment were I ever put in a position to have to participate in something like this I very much enjoy reading about it and think that you might do too.
- The Lab Mouse: OH GOD THIS IS SO INTERESTING. Did you know that there’s a whole genetic lineage thing to the generic ‘lab mouse’? That basically there’s a whole history of what you might well describe as ‘mousey eugenics’ underpinning the small, doomed rodents currently being visited with all sorts of unpleasant indignities in the name of science? I personally did not – this really is SO interesting, if very obviously the sort of thing that, should you be a big animal lover, you will probably find *quite* distressing, and which will make even the casual reader hope that the scenario envisaged by Douglas Adams in Hitchhiker’s isn’t actually the case because MAN will they visit some revenge on us, based on some of the stories in here. To be clear, this is quite a scientific and dispassionate writeup, whose broad vibe you might summarise as ‘fcuk’em, they’re only mice’, so probably bear that in mind if you’re of a more sensitive disposition – “Mice also fall into an ethical goldilocks zone. They are similar enough to us to be scientifically useful, but dissimilar enough—partly owing to size bias and their history as pests—that we are not squeamish about using them for research in the same way that we are for cats, dogs, and monkeys. However, there’s a shallower reason for the ascent of the mouse that probably dominates these post hoc justifications: mice, in both volume and variety, were historically easy for scientists to get hold of.” No sentimentality here, just COLD HARD SCIENTIFIC ENQUIRY (poor the meese, though).
- Camping In Extreme Heat: Have you ever wondered what it feels like to be out in a desert in 120 degree heat? No, me neither, but it turns out that it makes for a good read. Leath Tonino spends 24h in the Mojave desert with a friend to see what it feels like to be really, really hot – turns out, it feels…not loads of fun. Tonino and his companion are obviously reasonably pro at this sort of thing – DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME, KIDS – but I like the way the piece’s tone and pace reflect the deadening effects of extreme heat on every aspect of your existence and the particular odd mental debilitation that you get above a certain temperature. Welcome to the rest of your lives, kids!
- The Bad Literary Friends: Look, this is very much a DISCOURSE PIECE – it is not, personally, My Sort Of Thing, but I get the impression that for some of you it will be almost indecently compelling. It is VERY LONG, and you will need a lot of patience for ‘he said, she said’, and for a lot of people who (ok, this is my personal opinion but COME ON) struck me as fundamentally fairly dreadful on almost every conceivable level, but if you like the idea of an EXTREMELY MESSY BREAKUP in which all four parties affected are also novelists with a very relaxed attitude to the whole ‘anything’s fair game for an author’ thing then you will very much enjoy this. I came away from it feeling exhausted and like I never, ever wanted to hear from any of the people involved ever again, but if appreciate my response may not be representative – ENJOY!
- Dr Infinity: This is a…very odd story, about a man called Mr Infinity who attained notoriety for his exceptional ability as an autofellator (I am going to take a punt and presume that that won’t get flagged as obscene), and who spent a significant proportion of his life attempting to bring news of this singular talent (and his belief that it could have INCREDIBLE SPIRITUAL BENEFITS) to the world via all sorts of doomed schemes. This is in-part just VERY ODD, in parts quite funny (in a ‘wow, the 70s and 80s were a different time, eh?’ sort-of way), and in parts quite sad, as it’s clear that Dr Infinity was perhaps not *wholly* mentally well. The throwaway mention about him briefly being Sean Lennon’s babysitter was quite a jawdropper, mind.
- Gloves On: A short piece in the LRB by Anne Carson, on developing Parkinson’s and how her handwriting has changed as a result, and about identity and self and representation and and and. Beautiful, and of course not a little sad.
- Femcels: I can’t remember where I came across this, but it’s a really curious piece of writing and a perspective I can’t recall reading before. It’s less, really, about the concept of the ‘femcel’ per se, and more about the shifting ways in which womanhood and femininity show up online, and how, per the author, everything is defined in relation to loneliness. I thought it was fascinating, maybe you will too – there’s definitely *something* here: “In my first draft of this piece, I proposed that the defining characteristic of the woman involved is rage, but now I think it is much simpler and sadder: it is loneliness. Loneliness can, of course, be aestheticized. As rage or desperation or sex, or some combination of the above. Femcel has been connoted as such through many internet eras, its public personae and inner rules shifting with generational trends. Each iteration of “femcel” retains just enough credible feminism to stay defensible. And there is always just enough chaos to keep the subculture appealing to those girls weak to the siren song. First there was the misanthropy of early Internet femcels, whose alienation closely mirrored that of involuntarily celibate males. There is, most recently, the “femcelcore” rage of Gen Z, encapsulated in TikToks of a small girlish hand brushing prescription pill bottles and hair pins from a stack of books: My Year of Rest and Relaxation, The Bell Jar, Girl, Interrupted, etc. In both, there is a shared language of disillusionment, a despair at once performative and deeply felt.”
- Windows: A short story, a small reminiscence, by Michael A Gonzales, about his first ever crush, on a girl who he watched from a window across the alley from his childhood bedroom in New York. This is so redolent of mid-20th-C NYC that you can practically see the stereotypical men in vests and see the steam rising from manhole covers, and I mean that as a compliment.
- Abject Naturalism: A short story by Sarah Braunstein in the New Yorker, about a child and a telescope and, maybe, a love affair, and strangers and suspicion and and and. I was personally affronted when this ended, I was enjoying it so much.
- Terminus: Finally this week, a piece from the LRB way back in 1997 – a short story by Hillary Mantel, called ‘Terminus’, which is not only superb but also is a lovely stylistic counterpoint to the link above and which I think (personally speaking) makes a lovely post-script to it. If nothing else it’s a wonderful reminder of what a terrifyingly good writer Mantel was; this is *crafted* and polished and almost sharp-edged in its precision, and I adore it.
By Andrew Hem
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: