CurioBot

This is VERY DIFFERENT –  although now I play them back-to-back I could probably draw some sort of comparison between the vocal if I really reach…anyway, this is modern and YOUNG and, I think, from Malaysia, some sort of hyperpop-ish vibe, and while it’s a BIT rich for my blood I quite enjoy what it’s doing (but probably only for one song). This is called ‘Locket’ and it’s by ira4ma.

VIDEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D49iQsLA2I

Ashes to Pistachios: The final longread of the week is this one, by Golan Haji, a Syrian Kurd who now lives in Paris and writes here about…Christ, you know what, it doesn’t matter what this is ‘about’, it is BEAUTIFUL; I tend not to enjoy writing that people describe as ‘poetic’ but this really is astonishing throughout, lyrical and rich and evocative and funny and sad, and if these paragraphs speak to you in any way then read the whole thing, it is honestly gorgeous: “We walked together on the endless plains, reciting the old poets. We trod the boundary lines between fields and waded through wheat until our trousers turned patchwork, blotched with green. The lucky one got to hold a china box we called “the plumb line of innocence”. It held milk teeth. When you shook it on those still spring afternoons, amid poppies in bright sunshine, its rattle was the music that accompanied the recital of a young poet seated on the ground beneath the sky. But the Kurds’ spring is bloody; their March is a month of joys and disaster. On the night of 24 March 1993, another great fire at the Hasakah Central Prison consumed (among others) 25 Kurdish inmates. The following morning, still unaware of the event, I had propped my motorbike by the bakery on the west side of the town, and was securing it when I heard a scream. At first, I thought nothing of it; I imagined one of Sculptor’s relatives clutching at his side, mouth gaping, caught short by renal colic. You would sometimes catch sight of them in the distance, flipping in agony down a hillside, the cylinders of their bodies rolling like gas bottles, maybe accompanied by their donkeys: tipped on their back, hooves lifted to the heavens”

Ashes to Pistachios

https://www.equator.org/articles/ashes-to-pistachios

Big Red Daughter: Ok, so the title of this piece is actually ‘A Woman Enters the Gooniverse’, but I prefer my nod to DFW and, well, IT’S MY NEWSLETTER. This is Allie Rowbottom, visiting the AVN Awards in Vegas and writing it up for Playboy. Rowbottom acknowledges the DFW debt early on, and this is a good piece, distinct in itself while still acknowledging the canonical weight of the original and framing itself, and the industry, in terms of what has changed in the intervening 30+ years since it was written. You won’t learn anything you don’t know here – although, once again, I feel the lack of interest and discussion devoted to the perennial growth in popularity of hentai with younger generations in particular is a blindspot – but it’s an entertaining, if slightly grubby, read; I couldn’t help but feel that the final section, in which author and her husband are transported to heights of erotic transport on their final night in Vegas, was a sop to the publication she was writing for and certain…expectations, shall we say, of the likely readership, but it’s a good piece of writing.

Big Red Daughter

https://playboy.substack.com/p/a-woman-enters-the-gooniverse

The Century of the Maxxer: I confess that I didn’t expect Clavicular to be so happily embraced by the normiesphere – or at least pored over to this extent – so quickly, but, well, I suppose it’s the ‘our mad future!’ antonym of ‘paedo elites and the perennial threat of WWIII’. Here, Sam Kriss writes typically-entertaingly – and well – about What It Means, and while it’s all worth reading (and I promise you, it is very funny), I quite liked this as a lens for it all: “The difference between a maxxer and an ordinary striver or optimiser is infinity. Ordinary people have broken themselves apart into a bundle of miserable attributes, but all of them are contingent. At any point, the rationalised factory worker can be moved to a different station and subordinated to a different set of motions. But the maxxer only has one thing. Everything is on the line and nothing is in reserve. No cracks in the maxxer’s surface. They are whole and complete in a way the fractured masses are not; they’ve burned off everything about themselves other than their obsession. All that’s left is the need to be the most, to touch the furthest point of excess. When someone is under the spell of infinity, there’s an electricity about them. We might love them or despise them, but we’re obsessed with maxxers. Few people agree with Clavicular, but he’s got more people furiously thinking about the meaning of beauty than anyone since Kant. We write essays about maxxers; we blunderingly ape their behaviours; we spike their cortisol while they’re jestergooning at the club. This has nothing to do with what they merely are. If someone just happens to be extremely tall, that’s briefly interesting, but only for a moment. Every village has its gangly man. But if someone keeps undergoing surgeries to make themselves taller, if they’re constantly breaking and resetting their femurs, if they’re injecting black-market somatropin directly into their spinal column, suddenly we’re transfixed. The appearance of something superlunary in the world.”

The Century of the Maxxer

https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-century-of-the-maxxer

Brillat-Savarin: A wonderful profile by Ruby Tandoh in Vittles all about French chronicler of gastronomy – and all-round polymath, turns out – Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a man whose name I knew and whose legend I was vaguely aware of, but the richness of whose life was previously-unknown to me; this is, honestly, such a lovely piece of writing, from which I learnt a lot while feeling increasingly peckish. If nothing else it’s a portrait of a true hedonist and sensualist – someone who obviously reveled in the senses and saw it as almost a duty to pursue their pleasures, which, while doubtless exhausting in practice, is a lovely sort of worldview to dip into every now and again.

Brillat-Savarin

https://www.vittlesmagazine.com/p/the-professor-of-the-lower-senses

Which Other Olympic Mascots Could This Years’ Kill?: So apparently the Winter ‘Lympics mascots this year are a pair of stoats – which, as the opening to this piece points out, are famously-murderous and bloodthirsty little fcuks. This article asks the question ‘which previous winter olympics mascots would the stoats be able to murder?’ – sadly it doesn’t explore what would happen were they to be confronted with the greatest mascots EVER, London2012’s pair of terror sperm, Wenlock and Mandeville, who would have absolutely fcuking EVISCERATED the stoats, no question. Anyway, this is silly but I have been sick and it made me laugh, so there.

Which Other Olympic Mascots Could This Years’ Kill?

https://defector.com/which-other-olympic-mascots-could-italian-stoats-tina-and-milo-slaughter-in-cold-blood

Agronejo: An essay about the specific genre of Brazilian music that lauds the lifestyles of the country’s agricultural workers, and the extent to which it’s been (and is being) coopted by the large industrial conglomerates that dominate the country (and the continent)’s industrial farming landscape. This is culturally fascinating, some of the tracks are ace (honestly, suggest looking them up as you read, it really adds to the experience), and I am always personally interested by stories about the intersection of capital and culture (and the former cultivating the latter) like this.

Agronejo

https://www.thedial.world/articles/news/brazil-agronejo-music-genre

Alien Assumptions: A short, but interesting, piece of writing, about some of the ways in which our traditional imagining of What It Might Be Like When The Aliens Arrive might be wrong. I like the bleakness of it – the basic underlying theme here is ‘yeah, if there are aliens and they do wish us harm we will be so dead before we even realise it’, which I found…oddly reassuring!

Alien Assumptions

https://www.mindlessalgorithm.com/alien-assumptions/

The World of Shortform Vertical Video Series: Or, ‘why Quibi was apparently almost half-right, ish’. This year as you will doubtless have heard is THE YEAR IN WHICH SHORTFORM EPISODIC VERTICAL VIDEO DRAMAS EAT THE WORLD – this piece looks at how they are produced, the sorts of topics they cover and why they are so popular. The numbers here are INSANE – the detail about people paying literally 10-20x more to watch an episodic cutdown of a 70m film is staggering, and there’s a nice INSIGHT there about how people are willing to pay to have things tailored to their attention spans (you can have ‘The ADHD Premium’ for free if you like) – as are the details about how terrible the plots, the acting, the cinematography and the production values are. Still, these people are COINING it in; a friend of mine knows of a couple of writers earning…decent enough bank writing for an Indian company churning these out on a weekly basis. The thing is though, per the novels bit above, if you don’t think this stuff is going to get AI’d to fcuk VERY VERY SOON then, well, you obviously haven’t watched any of this stuff (I have, and let me tell you that The Machine really can write stuff that is at least as good as this tripe).

The World of Shortform Vertical Video Series

https://www.avclub.com/vertical-dramas-style-popularity-cost-reelshort-dramabox-exploitative-addictive

Why Modern Chinese is Just English: Thanks to Alex for sharing this with me – I have to say this slightly blew my mind and I am not enough of a scholar of Chinese (lol, obviously), English (lol, equally-obviously) or linguistics to be able to offer any sort of opinion or analysis on the accuracy of this take, but the whole piece is SO interesting in terms not only of language but also of the link between linguistics, ideas, permissible/conceivable thought…honestly, this really is quite incredible: “Learning Chinese is widely sold as the ultimate linguistic challenge. Students are warned that they must rewire their cognitive faculties entirely to grasp an alien logic. But there is a reality that few textbooks admit: The Chinese language has been Europeanized. Beneath the intimidating surface of the Chinese Characters (汉字, Hanzi), the operating system has been quietly swapped out. If one strips away the characters and the tones, what remains is not the mysterious, ancient syntax of the Tang Dynasty poets. It is a structure that is shockingly familiar. While linguists technically classify Chinese as an “isolating” language, a century of Western influence has pushed it to adopt “inflection-like” syntactic and rhetorical patterns. Conversely, English has shed much of its historical inflection and behaves as the most analytically simplified European language. As the two have moved toward one another, Modern Chinese can read as English in Hanzi camouflage. This is an invisible revolution. Most modern Chinese speakers cannot truly comprehend Classical Chinese (文言文, Wenyanwen); the texts of their ancestors are nearly as alien to them as they are to a foreign learner. Modern Mandarin is effectively a creole, a hybrid tongue born from a collision between East and West.”

Why Modern Chinese is Just English

https://jingyu1623.substack.com/p/why-modern-chinese-is-just-english
https://bsky.app/profile/adjwilson.bsky.social/

Replacing Reporters With Bots: Another interesting datapoint from the first 10-15% of the year has been the shift in mood around AI, from ‘THE BUBBLE IS ABOUT TO POP’ to ‘hang on, this stuff appears to have gotten really good all of a sudden’, to ‘SHORT ALL THE SAAS STOCKS THE LAWYERS ARE DEAD I AM HANDING THE KEYS TO MY LIFE TO AN AGENT’ (to be clear, ALL EXTREME POSITIONS IN THIS DEBATE ARE HELD BY EITHER MORONS OR PEOPLE WHO ARE TRYING TO SELL YOU SOMETHING, WITHOUT EXCEPTION). While I continue to 100% believe that Agentic AI is not ready for normal people and businesses to use, and that there is a big financial corrective coming, it’s also been…quite fun watching a lot of the ‘oh it’s just autocomplete and it makes things up, lol you fell for it’ crowd being forced to accept that their opinions based on GPT3 probably don’t hold water anymore. ANYWAY, that’s by way of longwinded preamble to this piece, in which Casey Newton and his team at Platformer experiment with building AI newsroom colleagues from the latest kit and…they work. Like, well enough. Not exciting, not perfect, but…not a janky, broken mess, and certainly useful. To all of you who still don’t think this stuff is coming for you, I strongly encourage you to read this and reconsider. Oh, and this is from someone I know in a groupchat, fwiw, who is not selling anything and has no reason to lie – does this feel like good news, advermarketingpr people? I would posit that it does not: “I’ve built a custom gpt at work that literally can do 50% of my team’s work. It takes the brief from another part of the business, clarifies all the relevant questions, builds the assets and campaign (email and CRM stuff in my case) and sends it to me to deploy with a justification and expiration. I’m now working on the api integration so it doesn’t even need me to deploy just tell me and get a yes. I did this in like 2 weeks with no one else. Used it in anger first few times this week and it really, actually worked.” OUCH.

Replacing Reporters With Bots

https://www.platformer.news/journalism-job-automation-claude/

Sinophobic Sinophilia: Six weeks into the year (ahahahahaha I genuinely thought, despite knowing what the date is, that it was twice that; at this rate I am going to be in my 60s by 2028) it is clear that one of the BIG CULTURAL DISCUSSION VECTORS of 2026 is the twin poles of China and the US, how they are currently orbiting each other and which is exerting the most – and most significant – gravity on the other; this is a very good piece in n+1 which examines David Wang’s writing on China and the US (you will recall I linked his annual ‘letter from China’ in the first edition of the year) and tries to derive a picture from it and the wider cultural commentariat’s outputs of What Is Going On. The answer in part is, of course, ‘noone has the faintest idea because everything is being recalibrated very quickly and at a scale that defies human understanding’, but the feeling of poles shifting is unmistakable: “The range and depth of sectors that China now dominates form an almost mind-defying totality. Hence the flourishing genre of what could be crudely called stat porn or, more loftily, the statistical sublime. We can’t see the truth of China whole, so we reach for figures to quantify and tabulate our dazzlement. Nine of the world’s ten highest bridges are in China, all but two of them built in the past decade. In just 2018 and 2019, the country produced almost as much cement — 4.4 billion tons — as the US did during the entire 20th century. China’s solar-power capacity is nearly double that of Europe and the US combined. It produces thirty-three Golden Gate Bridges’ worth of steel every day. By 2030, China will be home to close to half of the world’s entire manufacturing capacity. The historian and Substack power user Adam Tooze has become our most prolific stat-porn star, heralding the dawn of Chinese hegemony with near-daily compilations of revealing data and off-the-dome analysis. A recent edition of Tooze’s Chartbook newsletter included a word cloud titled “The Great Wall of China Worries/Hopes/Fears.” Nothing better bespeaks both the conviction and the confusion of the wide-eyed left-liberal China watcher than this visual poem of floating phrases in clashing colors: “Bilateral surplus deficit” here, “repressed consumption” there, “dedollarization” dangling in a corner. How does it all fit together? What makes it go? Where does it end?”

Sinophobic Sinophilia

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-52/the-intellectual-situation/sinophobic-sinophilia/

Cars That Never Made It: I know nothing about cars – well, almost nothing, I know that they will turn me to paste if I let them hit me at speed – but, should the following description do something for you then CLICK AWAY: “Dead brands, cars that were developed but never put into series production, sales disasters and other motoring curiosities.” My main thoughts? ‘Wow, there are some fcuking ugly vehicles on this page’.

Cars That Never Made It

https://www.tumblr.com/carsthatnevermadeitetc

Typkning: OH GOD THIS IS HELLISH (but also very fun). An excellent little typing tutor-type game – you play a medieval scribe attempting to Get The Manuscript Done, typing away to clear the words as they appear. So far, so standard typing game. The twist is that every time you fcuk up, the calligrapher’s demon, Titivillus, will chuck typos into new words coming down the chute, gently fcuking your shit up and rendering the whole thing that little bit harder. The pace at which the words come, and the BASTRD DEMON, make this very hard, very frustrating and very fun – also, this has reminded me of one of my favourite ‘not good, but immensely-readable’ novels of the past couple of decades, ‘The Calligrapher’ by Edward Docx, which despite being derivative as all fcuk and, er, probably a *bit* cancellable in 2026, is also a book I have definitely read more than 10 times.

Typkning

https://chromokun.itch.io/typning
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Calligrapher-Edward-Docx/dp/1841155446

Simon Slung: Simon Slung has a prehensile tongue. Help him eat the good things and avoid the bad things, in this very silly but momentarily-distracting pico-8 game, which is basically ‘Snake, but…mouth-ier’.

Simon Slung

https://grumblebunny.itch.io/slimon-slung

The Garfield Oracle: Ask a question, hit the button and get given a Garfield strip which will REVEAL YOUR FUTURE. Surprisingly whenever I tried this this week it seemed to be trying to tell me that my future would mainly involve lasagne, indolence and literally no laughter whatsoever, bet perhaps your stars are better-aligned. BONUS GARFIELD!: This Random Garfield Generator will produce a new three-panel comic each time you click refresh; perhaps unsurprisingly, these are occasionally a lot funnier than the actual comics have ever been.

The Garfield Oracle

https://gammacorrection.com/
https://www.bgreco.net/garfield/

How It Wears: OH THIS IS SUCH A CLEVER IDEA! A project by Casa Branda (a newly-launched initiative which has been “founded to establish a new standard for this trust, as an independent source revealing how designers and brands work and how those practices translate to integrity, quality and value over time”) which lets you scan the label of any garment you own and which will then you give you information about said garment, its likely longevity, tips for its care and repair, etc – there’s a light LLM layer to it so you can ask the site specific questions about the garment based on the info on the label. Honestly, this is SO smart and the sort of thing you’d think any major clothing retailer with a focus on sustainability and anti-fast-fashion would want to get on board with (or, er, TAKE INSPIRATION FROM). Except, on reflection, it probably wouldn’t make them look too good if the scans all said ‘this will fall apart as soon as you look at it too hard and definitely after three washes because noone seems to be able to make anything anymore’.

How It Wears

https://tools.casabranda.com/

Spark: Another in the growing – and there are more to come! – number of ‘little digital guys’ that we are going to see proliferate with AI, this is a ‘sign up to get more updates’ webpage and as such I feel a BIT of a cheat for including it. That said, there are a few things here that I think are interesting. First, the eventual product being showcased here – a digital/AI cartoon canine companion called ‘Spark’ – is interesting in a number of ways; it’s presented as existing within a frame, creating a sense of it as a boundaried ‘tool’/toy; secondly, Spark is very much being touted as ‘a family companion’ rather than an ‘outsource the tedious job of playing with and hanging out with your spawn to The Machine’ solution, with the idea being that it’s something that the whole family can interact and play with, and which is designed to facilitate and encourage interfamilial communication (this may sound dystopian to your ear and, well, I can’t help but agree with you slightly). Finally, the company behind this is called…ILLUSION OF LIFE! Isn’t that chilling and horrid? Anyway, look, isn’t Spark cute?

Spark

https://illusionoflife.inc/

Is There A Film On?: A few weeks ago I featured a link by Rob ‘B3ta’ Manuel which was his vibe-coded attempt to make a service which would tell him whether there was a film on UK terrestrial TV that evening; that link freaked the FCUK out of Google, which decided it was MALICIOUS and which therefore I think ghettoised Curios to the extent that I imagine that it now goes directly into your Spam folder and means that…oh God, it means that I am writing this to even fewer people than normal. HOW LIBERATING! Anyway, fcuk you Rob – but also, he’s turned it into a Bluesky bot which each day will post the details of if there’s a film on in the UK that evening, what it is and where you can find it. Public service coding at its finest. BONUS BLUESKY BOT: this one posts old Windows clipart files. Why? Fcuk knows, man, fcuk knows.

Is There A Film On?

https://bsky.app/profile/isthereafilmon.bsky.social
https://bsky.app/profile/wmfbot.bsky.social

Free Books To Download: On the one hand, this is literally true! Free ebooks! To download! Thousands of them! On the other, did I say these were ‘good’ books? I DID NOT! Ahem. So this, unlike many of the other platforms offering similar volumes of free words, doesn’t focus on stuff that is long out of copyright – no Twain here. Instead, there’s a selection of what seem to be…modern novels? Mainly in the romance/horror/suspense genres, and, based on my cursory analysis, all of them being largely garbage. Look, I know that the current vogue is for saying that ‘ALL READING IS GOOD’ and that being snob about people’s tastes is just being a cnut and…no, that’s fcuking b0llocks, sorry, if you can’t see a qualitative difference between reading, say, Austen or Baldwin or Lockwood or Smith or whoever and reading something called ‘Her Dragon Master’s Bond’ then you are a fcuking moron (or you’re being wilfully perverse). SOME BOOKS ARE BAD AND SOME WRITING IS BAD, AND THERE WHILE YOU MIGHT ENJOY IT AND DERIVE PLEASURE FROM IT THAT DOES NOT MAKE THE ACT OF READING SAID BAD WRITING AN IMPROVING OR IN ANY WAY ‘MORAL’ ACT. I mean, seriously, look at the blurb here: “Miriam Cait seeks love, or rather, her friend seeks it for her. Her friend’s latest date suggestion is refused on account of his dark eyes. There’s something not quite right with them, and Miriam soon finds out why when he comes knocking on her door, and knocking her out. Miriam wakes up from the confrontation with more than just a headache. Shackles cover her ankles and wrists, and she’s on her way to being auctioned off to a bunch of self-proclaimed dragon lords.” As it happens, I just downloaded the PDF while writing this and WOW it really is fcuking tripe. Is this all AI? I don’t know, it feels bad enough to be actual human prose. Anyway, there’s LOADS of it here, so if you want a near-infinite quantity of femme-focused w4nkfodder then MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Free Books To Download

https://www.obooko.com/

The Camel Fabric Game: The second digital ‘game’ from luxe fashion outfit Max Mara I have featured in the past six months, suggesting they have at some point in the past year either hired a new head of digital marketing or a new agency and have decided to GO BIG on some pointless, shiny, utterly-disconnected-to-the-sales-funnel webwork – and I LOVE THAT STUFF! This is, apparently a GAME, all about, er, camel fabric (I know, not the most prepossessing of setups, but…maybe it gets better?) which involves, er, you watching a short presentation videothing about the ways in which Max Mara’s camelhair coats are made (they take camelhair! They weave it! Then they flog it to you at a 6,000x markup! That’s it!) and then answering some questions about what you just watched. Is…is this a game? I mean, yes, just, if you’ve been staved of ludic joy for the past decade, it might just pass muster. As always, this is very shallow but PREPOSTEROUSLY shiny – I think my favourite bits are the occasions when the ‘game’ (lol) asks you to ‘compile the various elements of the signature Max Mara coat into a coherent pattern’ and the ‘elements’ consist of…two sleeves and the coat’s body! SUCH A CHALLENGE! I know I always say this, but in the unlikely event that anyone who had a hand in making this should see these words could you PLEASE drop me a line and let me know how much it (lol!) ‘cost’? Promise it will be our secret.

The Camel Fabric Game

https://thecamelfabricgame.maxmara.com/

Elsewheres: Ordinarily I might just embed these in the vids section, but I like the project overall and wanted to put it up here for those of you who ordinarily skip the vids because you think my taste blows (entirely fair). Friend of Curios Matthew Carrozo has been quietly Making Art over the past few years since moving home to Lisbon, attempting to force himself to push past inertia, self-consciousness and the need for an audience and to focus instead on just…making. Elsewheres is a triptych of short films, vignettes (semi-narrative but also just…vibe-y) about gay life in Portugal and, honestly, these are SO beautifully-shot I want to recommend them to you just for the gorgeous colour and depth of the video here. Seriously, there’s something both very modern and very 20th Century about the grain of the film here (I know it’s not shot on film, bear with me), the colour-grading and the general feel, and (and I mean this as a huge compliment) it’s almost impossible to feel cold, miserable and February-ish while watching this. All three films run a total of about 15m, so this is a perfect accompaniment to a quick lunch, or just something to sit with and relax. Honestly, gorgeous.

Elsewheres

https://www.carrozo.com/elsewheres

Wordamour: I think that this is my only concession this week to the imminent Hallmark Holiday, but I think this is rather cute – Wordamour is a free tool that lets you create wordsearches for anyone you like, inputting the words you would like to be hidden, the idea being that for the AMOROUSLY-INCLINED you can create a puzzle that speaks to your SPECIAL AND UNIQUE BOND, featuring all your pet phrases and nicknames and the sickening in-jokes that only the two of you (and maybe the rest of the polycule) understand…alternatively (and sorry about this, but I have just been reminded of a guy I once knew who dumped his girlfriend on Valentine’s day after coming home and finding she’d done the whole ‘rose petals from the front door to the bedroom, here I am in my underwear’ thing for him…oh Liam, you cnut!) it would be very cruel but also, I’m sorry, objectively VERY funny to hide a regretful ‘it’s not you, it’s…oh, no, actually it IS you!’ message in one of these. Or, er, you could use this to propose. That would be nicer, wouldn’t it? Up to you really.

Wordamour

https://wordamour.com/

Boomerang: WeTransfer recently(ish) became yet another previously-good service to have been swallowed up by a gigantic digital conglomerate and which, as a result, is slowly seeing the quality of the service it offers get hollowed out in favour of maxing profitability (God, I love it when they do that!). If you’d like an alternative, Boomerang looks worth a look – made by a former WeTransfew dev, this appears to be a bare-bones, no-bullsh1t file transfer service that doesn’t appear to want ANYTHING from you at all – bookmark this, hold it close, because, well, this sort of stuff is going to become scarcer and scarcer in the next few years, I fear.

Boomerang

https://bmrng.me/

The Adventure Game Aptitude Test: Ooh, this is interesting/fun – should you be planning to have a spare 4h on Saturday 28th Feb, and should you be of a vintage where the idea of ‘80s-style adventure games’ means something to you, you might want to sign up for this: “The AGAT (Adventure Game Aptitude Test) is a standardized examination designed to assess if anyone can still complete an 80s adventure game without a walkthrough. To ensure no walkthroughs or other outside sources are consulted during play, we will be utilizing college exam proctoring software, which will monitor your smartphone usage and browser activity. The exam will be held on February 28th, 2026 between the hours of 1 and 2 PM, EST. Desktop only. You are free to start at any point in that one hour window, but once you do you will be expected to complete the test in one sitting (and within 4 hours). The game will be an adventure game of our choosing. Successful completion of the test will garner you an AGAT certification.” What does a certificate get you? I mean, the square root of fcuk-all I would imagine, certainly not ‘laid’ (lol!), but you might feel a small warm glow of minor achievement, and, well, let’s be realistic, in this era of shrinking horizons and evaporating hope we should probably take all we can get!

The Adventure Game Aptitude Test

https://theagat.co/

The Moby Dick Big Read: Everyone has their own White Whale – mine is, increasingly, ‘writing a profile about how famously-unlikeable failed UK tech journalist Milo Yiannopoulos became one of the most surprisingly, upsettingly, influential figures of the early-21st-Century’, but if yours is ‘finally getting round to reading Moby Dick’ (lol!) then perhaps this will be the impetus you need (not least because we seem to have all collectively decided that ‘listening to books’ is the same as ‘reading books’ – is it? Not convinced, personally). I think I was vaguely aware of this when it launched, but it has been a LONG TIME COMING – finally, after…many years, Plymouth Univeristy’s enormous project to create audio recordings of all 135 chapters of the book, read by famouses and non-famouses alike, with the voices of people such as Tilda Swinton, James Naughtie and Sir David Attenborough each taking on a section. This is an INCREDIBLE project, now available in full to download or stream in parts, and this could be a really nice thing to get into should you be after some LONG, IMPROVING LITERATURE for 2026. “In the spring of 2011, artist Angela Cockayne and writer Philip Hoare convened and curated a unique whale symposium and exhibition at The Levinsky Gallery, the dedicated contemporary art space at The Arts Institute (formerly Peninsula Arts), University of Plymouth, under the title, Dominion. Inspired by their mutual obsession with Moby-Dick and with the overarching subject of the whale, they invited artists, writers, musicians, scientists and academics to respond to the theme. The result was an enthusiastic response which evidently could not be contained within the physical restrictions of a gallery space and a three-day symposium…Out of Dominion was born its bstard child – or perhaps its immaculate conception – the Moby-Dick Big Read: an online version of Melville’s magisterial tome: each of its 135 chapters read out aloud, by a mixture of the celebrated and the unknown, to be broadcast online in a sequence of 135 downloads, publicly and freely accessible.”

The Moby Dick Big Read

https://www.mobydickbigread.com/
http://www.angelacockayne.co.uk/
http://www.philiphoare.co.uk/

City Roads: Ooh, this is GREAT – give this site any city in the world and it will pull you a rendering of ALL OF THE STREETS in a sort of black-and-white, minimal style, which you can navigate and zoom into, creating, if you would like such a thing, a very specific, very stylised streetmap of wherever you like in the world. You can alter the colours of the roads and the backgrounds, export the resulting maps as SVG or PNG for subsequent editing, and, generally, if you want to do something design-y with the streets of a place you love then this is a pretty perfect resource.

City Roads

https://anvaka.github.io/city-roads/

AI Via Fax: I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to have discovered this – have YOU ever wanted to experience cutting edge technology via the medium of another technology you’d have sworn blind had in fact been discontinued at some point in the past decade or so? OH GOOD! This is a German service (of course it is! ICH LIEBE DICH, MEINE NEUGIERIGE KLEINE WÜRSTCHEN!) which, er, lets you fax questions to an AI and get your answers back, also by fax! “Fax AI, offered by simple-fax.de, is an experiment that uses artificial intelligence to respond to your fax requests. Simply send us your question or task by fax to 0531-490590019, and Fax AI will analyze your request to send a detailed answer directly back to your fax machine. Whether it’s providing information, translating documents, or solving math problems – Fax AI is your reliable assistant in various areas.” SO MANY QUESTIONS, NOT LEAST WHY??? Still, I think that with a bit of creative thinking you could create something sort-of fun with this, even if only as part of a wider IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE, so if anyone wants to go and do something with this wafer-thin fragment of an idea then, well, that’ll be £50 please (I could use the money tbh).

AI Via Fax

https://simple-fax.de/fax-ki

The UGC Army: It’s taken us a few links, but here’s the first ‘oh for fcuk’s sake, modernity!’ url of the week! The UGC Army is, honestly, a horrifying platform, offering (basically) tools to enable anyone who so chooses to spin up 1:1 clones of any video you choose to feed it, except featuring ENTIRELY NEW virtual humans! Basically (I am paraphrasing here, and, thank fcuk, am reasonably-certain that it won’t work nearly as well in practice as it is sold as working in the promo materials) you can plug in any ‘creator talks to camera’ TikTok you like (presumably this also works with Reels, Shorts and any of the rest of the seemingly-infinite number of vertical video variants we are all increasingly attached to – LIVE GIVING SHORTFORM VIDEO, HOW DID WE EXIST WITHOUT YOU?), specify the avatar you want to sub into it (from generic selections to ones you have created/imported) and BANG, it will spin up a clone of said vid, exactly the same except with a completely new (virtual) person fronting it up. Which, as you can imagine, has HUGE potential implications for both marketing (A/B testing of different presenters for different products/demographics at huge scale and zero cost!) and scams (find an ad/promo that works, rip it off infinitely with different faces for different markets, coin it in!) and, well, Other Stuff Besides. It is…quite terrifying how good the top end of video style transfer has gotten in the past 6-9 months. BONUS SCARY FRONTIER AI VIDEO THING! You may have heard that the NEW HOTNESS in text-to-video is Seedance2.0, the new model from Bytedance which lets you do all sorts of terrifyingly-impressive things with shots, multiangles, etc, with an impressive degree of consistency and fidelity – check out some of the examples here and take a moment to think about how likely you would be to spot these as fakes (ok, leaving aside Ethan Mollick’s persistent obsession with otters flying planes) were they to pass through your feed. YOU WOULD NOT, is the upshot here.

The UGC Army

https://ugc-army.com/
https://bsky.app/search?q=seedance

Taper 15: While we’re doing ‘digital/code-type art stuff’, take a look at the latest edition of Taper, the bi-annual ‘online literary journal for computational poetry and literary art’ which exists in the same sort of ballpark as the HTML Review. Per their description, “Our usual constraint was applied: The core part of each poem—the HTML on the page after the header—can be no more than a tiny 2KB (2048 bytes). The work in this issue is written in HTML5, using ES6….We encourage readers to view the source code (Ctrl/Command + U) in order to read the artists’ statements as well as the code itself. Be creative when exploring the pieces; some of them are interactive, which you can discover through experimentation or by reading the source code.” There’s a WIDE range of stuff here – from a procedurally-generated maze-type design thing, to visual poems, to this word-by-word procgen ‘life’ simulator which momentarily had me in tears just now, in case you were wondering how things are progressing over here…These are all worth exploring; some will only take you a few seconds to experience, others you might want to sit with for longer, but you will find something in here which will make you feel…something, I promise you.

Taper 15

https://taper.badquar.to/15/index.html
https://taper.badquar.to/15/its_a_wonderful_life.html