CurioBot
LightNews LightNews
curiobot.bsky.social
CurioBot
@curiobot.bsky.social
250 followers 1 following 1.7K posts
A bot posting links from the Web Curios newsletter (www.webcurios.co.uk), because, weirdly, not everyone wants to read 10,000 words at a time. Unlikely to reply to you.
Posts Replies Media Videos
curiobot.bsky.social
Ragecheck

https://www.ragecheck.com/
Ragecheck: With ‘ragebait’ having been declared ‘word of the year’ for 2025 (or at least it was by one of the competing dictionary brands, there are approximately 73million words of the year as far as I can tell), a tool which purports to tell you whether copy you see online is drafted in a manner designed to inflame is ostensibly a good idea. Except it feels like EVERYTHING you read online at the moment is designed to raise your blood pressure – is…is that me? Have I finally reached a point in middle-age where I simply shake my fist impotently at the sky and shout imprecations at an unknown and uncaring God, regardless of the content of what I am reading? No, the problem is LIFE, not me! Anyway, this site is generally a good idea – plug in a link to an article or a social media post (X, Threads or Bluesky) and it will analyse it for inflammatory framing. “RageCheck uses a two-stage analysis pipeline: rule-based pattern detection followed by optional AI-powered contextual analysis. This hybrid approach balances speed, transparency, and accuracy. The system analyzes text for linguistic patterns commonly associated with manipulative framing—language optimized to provoke high-arousal reactions over understanding. It does not assess factual accuracy or political bias.” This is, as a far as I can tell, a personal hobby project by one Andrew Goldberg, to whom huge thanks – this is both a smart idea and something which I think would work really well as a Chrome extension should it be possible to spin it into one, and something which it would be nice to have as an automatic in-browser flag for…honestly, for everyone.
February 2, 2026 at 7:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
Holiday On The Moon

https://www.gru.space/
https://www.gru.space/wp
Holiday On The Moon: I think mention on here every so often how biblically, terribly bad I am at predicting anything whatsoever and how often I get things catastrophically wrong when it comes to guessing ‘what will happen next’ (did I mention I have consultancy hours available? DO NOT ALL RUSH AT ONCE!), but, even with that in mind, I feel REASONABLY confident in saying that despite what this website says, not a single person will be holidaying on the moon in 2032. AND YET! That is exactly what this company is promising – say hello to VERY shiny and obviously massively-funded space startup GRU Space (the founder is, by all accounts, 21, and so I am pegging the name as a Despicable Me reference and nothing anyone can say will disabuse me of that notion), which is promising that within 6 short years it will be accommodating 4 guests at a time on its, er, INFLATABLE MOON HOTEL! It really is worth spending some time with this one – the website is very shiny, and the scrolly parallax stuff is as-ever pleasing to observe, but it’s in the details where this shines. So much of the timeline is dependent on…somewhat dicey assumptions; that the test landing in 2029 to do tests on the environment all goes well, and the tests say ‘yep, go right ahead!’ rather than ‘no, what the fcuk are you doing, building an inflatable hotel on a dead, lifeless satellite is objectively insane, why are you even thinking about this?’, that ‘inflatable systems deployed’ is a combination of words that means something, that the phrase ‘modular inflatable habitats are enclosed by structures made from lunar material’ is less laughably-mental than it reads…God, ALL OF THIS IS SO SPECIAL! Or at least it would be were it not for the fact that people (investors, VCs) are throwing money at this rather, I don’t know, SOME OF THE MORE PRESSING PROBLEMS FACING US RIGHT NOW. There’s a white paper on the website which employs the same sort of tooth-grindingly-irritating ‘homesteaders on the frontier’ language increasingly deployed by the US administration, all about ‘striking out and fearlessly building’ – although, lads, let’s be clear, you’re building a suicide Travelodge for billionaire cnuts, you’re not exactly saving the species here. Anyway, this is either silly or infuriating depending your mood – I am choosing to see it as funny, and an inevitable precursor to the most delicious set of plute deaths since the submarine farrago a few years back. Also, should this ACTUALLY HAPPEN by 2032 then please do not try and find me to tell me, I hope to be dead.
February 2, 2026 at 5:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
Game Poems

https://www.gamepoems.com/issue01/
Game Poems: Should you feel as though the first few weeks of 2026 have left you in need of some sort of calming soul balm then, well, I suggest you consult your priest/therapist/dealer, because, honestly, there is nothing for you here. BUT! Should you be someone who find small solace in poetry and who, like me, is convinced that the work compiled in publications like the HTML Review is a beautiful and occasionally-moving combination of prose and poetry and code, then you will, like me, adore Game Poems. This is the first edition of what will hopefully become, like the Review, a regular publication – in it, a selection of designers and coders and makers of small games present a selection of…’games’ feels like a big word here, so let’s call them ‘small interactive poetic experiences’ (and then wish that we’d just gone with ‘games’ because fcuking hell that was clunky). Per the blurb, “Game Poems is an interactive magazine dedicated to exploring the artistic and poetic potential of short-form videogames by publishing new work directly in a playable format. The magazine foregrounds the convergences that exist between videogames and poetry, highlights “born-videogame” poetics, and champions videogame creation as a legitimate (and accessible) form of poetic practice.” In practice, what this means is that you can explore 13 different digital…things, each lasting a couple of minutes (except one which is a little more involved) and each of which is a small meditation on…something. There are actual poems accompanied by graphics which emphasise the verse, requiring minimal user input; there are interactive, semi-ludic vignettes which are wordless but which communicate emotion in weirdly-evocative ways…all of these are beautiful, or at least all of the half-dozen or so I have so far tried, and all of them will make you think or feel…something. Oh, and there are several of my favourite digital artists included too, which is a bonus. Basically this is wonderful and exactly the sort of thing that I love, and so the least you could do is to love it too you fcuks.
February 2, 2026 at 3:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
VIDEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnbgEcJlhi0
Cracking bit of hiphop now, this is Hit Boy with ‘Crow Bars’, a track all about his studio being broken into which he apparently turned around in <12h which, honestly, is insane.
February 2, 2026 at 1:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
VIDEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqzhE6tz10w
This came to me via the excellent Good Music newsletter, and it’s by Chinese American Bear and it’s called ‘No No Yeah Yeah’ and it is just a fun piece of guitarpop which ALMOST makes me want to dance, no mean feat right now.
February 2, 2026 at 11:30 AM
curiobot.bsky.social
VIDEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLAZubEa6X4
We’ll kick off with a short film made with AI – the script and v/o are written and recorded by people, but the video’s all machine, and this is…not bad! It’s a decent horror/scifi short, and does a good job of showcasing where the tech is at at the start of 2026, and, for all the whingers, a) you can skip it! Go on, fcuk off!; and b) this is not stealing work from anyone! This would literally not exist were it not for AI! No special FX artists would have been hired by a bedroom filmmaker to make this had AI not been a thing! Anyway, it’s called ‘Woodnuts’, take a look.
February 2, 2026 at 9:30 AM
curiobot.bsky.social
In The Mist

https://hazlitt.net/longreads/mist
In The Mist: Rider Alsop writes, in Harper’s, about lesbian sex parties and the queer scene and cruising and and and. This is about sex but weirdly not in any way titillating or salacious; it’s just good, clean, dirty writing about good, clean, dirty fun: “The parties come and go, as do the spaces. My anonymity flags. I know you from Ida, from the afters, from Folsom, from Sunday School, from Summer Scum, from Silent Barn, from the alley, from last night and on into the morning. A friend asks another friend to pull her hair. We are feeding each other water from puppy bowls now. We are choking (just a little) on the water now. There is a chain across your neck. Your lover is getting fcuked by three on a massage table across the room. She is ecstatic and so, so loud. I am biting the inside of your thigh until a bruise blossoms. Then I slap it and mark it with my nails. Someone else brings your tied-up lover poppers and holds them softly to her nose so she can take more fist.”
February 1, 2026 at 7:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
American Tourists In Rome

https://www.thedial.world/articles/news/american-tourists-rome
American Tourists In Rome: A Roman writes about the plague (sorry, but it is) of American tourists in the city, and how it feels, and the very peculiar way in which tourists from the States (sorry but it is true) seem to seek to bend the fabric of reality towards them wherever they travel because, I supposed, so much of their lives have been characterised by the world doing exactly that to varying degrees. I felt this bit particularly strongly, not least in the context of the point I made up top about neither the future nor the present belongs to us any more: “The cold brew order is no new behavior. We know what it is. The American empire is just the fourth incarnation of what started as Roman, became Christian European, and then predominantly British. We know what it is. We still have it in our veins, the disdain these tourists are showing. Their carelessness and abstraction. They are the rulers, the ones who believe they are giving meaning to reality for the first time. They have put something in motion. Now that they have asked for cold brew, a set of invisible quakes and rumblings will bring about a moment, very soon, when someone like these three smug yuppies will stop by the dive bar to find that somebody has, in fact, steeped ground coffee in cold water the night before. If they stop by. And eventually some company or fund, maybe even one owned by a relative of these 30-something Americans, will buy both the business and the building. That’s what the elite naturally do. They put the territory in a chokehold.”
February 1, 2026 at 5:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
The Sentence Diagram

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/nothing-ever-happens-mister-squishy-and-the-year-of-the-sentence-diagram/
The Sentence Diagram: I am well aware that the vast majority of people reading this will apply what might at best be described as a…loose reading of the prose in Curios, but you will possibly still have noticed my deep, lasting and unshakeable love of an overlong sentence, the sort, like this, full of nested parenthetical clauses which, if left unchecked, might well end up ourbourosing itself into a proper, inescapable gordian knot (but which in this specific instance I will allow you to escape). Anyway, this is an excellent article about one specific sentence in a David Foster Wallace short story, and the author’s attempt to map it diagrammatically, and on how sentences and clauses *work*, and how language works to both convey and obfuscate meaning, and, generally, if you like words and writing then you will love this I think. SLightly annoyed with myself now that I didn’t write that whole entry as a single sentence, hack that I am. BONUS WRITING ABOUT WRITING! This is a lovely, funny and very stylish little essay about the act of editing and, specifically, the use of the ‘comma splice’ as an authorial device – honestly, this made me laugh a lot as well as simultaneously making me jealous of how elegantly it was all constructed, so well done Benjamin Dreyer (you bstard).
February 1, 2026 at 3:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
Optimising Love

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/style/love-symposium-artificial-intelligence-keeper.html
Optimising Love: I continue to be slightly amazed that my BIG THESIS for the modern age – to whit, ‘an overreliance on data has made literally every aspect of life marginally-but-noticeably worse than it used to be’ – hasn’t caught on yet, but I would like to present this article, all about people in San Francisco attempting to create BETTER AND MORE OPTIMISED ways of finding ‘love’, as an excellent example as to why I am right. PEOPLE WHO THINK LIKE THIS SHOULD NOT BE IN CHARGE OF RUNNING THE WORLD, OR EVEN A FCUKING COMPANY IMHO! “I told Mr. Zervas that when I looked him up online, I found a link to a request form titled “Anonymous feedback for Cody,” as if he were a customer service experience or a Burger King location. I asked him what the form was for. “Anything. Any encounter you have with me,” he said. “Collecting and improving based on feedback is an important part of any process in life. If you’re trying to make a good product —” “But you’re not a product,” I said. “I’m reasoning by analogy,” Mr. Zervas said. “The worst thing would be to go through your life, having your life be shaped by forces that you don’t understand.””
February 1, 2026 at 1:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
What An Unprocessed Photo Looks Like

https://maurycyz.com/misc/raw_photo/
What An Unprocessed Photo Looks Like: Ok, this is technical and not exactly a longread, but I thought it was interesting both because, if I am honest, I literally had no idea how the fcuk a digital camera actually worked prior to reading this, and also because it will go some way to explaining to you why you shouldn’t really trust any image that you see produced by a phone anymore – because, per this, everything is inference and everything is a software choice.
February 1, 2026 at 11:30 AM
curiobot.bsky.social
New Arteries of Power

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/new-arteries-power
New Arteries of Power: I am endlessly fascinated by the fact that so much of the world’s infrastructure and day-to-day functioning is based on massive, fcuk-off lengths of cable just sort of sitting at the bottom of the world’s oceans, which at any second could be snipped by a bad actor or two and thereby plunge us all into some sort of febrile sea of mad chaos – this is a really good article looking at How The Cables Work and Who Regulates Their Maintenance and the fac that, perhaps astonishingly, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of coherent and coordinated global oversight of this INTENSELY IMPORTANT set of massive wires. There’s an intimation throughout the piece that to create such oversight would require a degree of leadership and global coordination which, well, in the second week of 2026 elicited quite the hollow laugh from me oh god we are so fcuked.
February 1, 2026 at 9:30 AM
curiobot.bsky.social
The Delivery Hoax

https://www.platformer.news/fake-uber-eats-whisleblower-hoax-debunked/
The Delivery Hoax: A good piece by Casey Newton at Platformer, who admirably admits to nearly being taken in by a Reddit post the other week – you might have seen the one, purportedly from an engineer at a delivery app ‘blowing the whistle’ on the unethical approach the company took to assigning jobs and money to drivers, which did the rounds all over socials because it TOLD PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANTED TO HEAR about ‘Big Tech Bad’, with a sprinkling of ‘AI also bad’…and which wasn’t, as Casey found out, true in the slightest. This is interesting on the ‘how’ of the debunking, but I am including it mainly because this is where we are now – you simply cannot believe anything you read, anywhere, unless it’s sourced – and you have to check the source closely, and even then check your prejudices and priors, because the barrier to now spinning this sort of thing up is now basically nonexistent and there are many, many incentives in place to motivate people to seek virality in exchange for creator pennies, regardless of the truth value of anything they post. Is this good? NO IT FCUKING IS NOT! And yet, as ever, here we are!
January 31, 2026 at 7:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
The Rise of the Troll State

https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-rise-of-the-troll-state
The Rise of the Troll State: Ryan at Garbage Day on the mad first weeks of 2026 in the US (and this doesn’t even cover the murder of that poor woman by ICE the other day). Honestly, it’s staggering to me the degree to which the best reporting on the US political establishment and its relationship to the web (and the symbiotic nature of that relationship) is being undertaken by individuals like Ryan rather than newsrooms, and says nothing good about the future of media – anyway, if you would like a depressing read about the state of America (IT’S ONLY FCUKING JANUARY FFS) then, well, here! “The closest description I’ve seen to world we’re now watching take shape is the idea of “the network state.” In 2013, investor and Bitcoin evangelist Balaji Srinivasan coined the term to describe his utopian vision of new cities and countries being formed by what he called “cloud formations,” or the “infinity of subcultures outside the mainstream” that find each other online. Srinivasan, like every other guy in Silicon Valley blinded by naked, unregulated greed, didn’t account for how stupid this would all be in practice, however. And it turns out the end result isn’t some exciting patchwork of new communities. Instead, it’s a handful of poster regimes, rogue troll states, fueled by internet clout, where nothing matters unless it becomes content.”
January 31, 2026 at 5:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
Dan Wang’s China Letter

https://danwang.co/2025-letter/
https://www.couldabeenatthe.club/p/my-year-of-rest-and-chinesemaxxing
Dan Wang’s China Letter: Kicking the longreads proper off this year with Dan Wang’s near-annual missive about what he thinks about China and geopolitics – he missed 2025, but this year’s edition is a cracking and insightful piece of writing covering both the state of play in China and the US, the relative geopolitical positions of both, the Wang’s loose predictions about What Is To Come in the year ahead, and all sorts of general observations about The World We Live In that will make you smarter than you were before you read it. Seriously, ALL of this is fascinating, but here’s a bit about AI to whet your appetite: “Silicon Valley has not demonstrated joined-up thinking for deploying AI. It would help if they learned from the central planners. The AI labs have not shown that they’re thinking seriously about how to diffuse the technology throughout society, which will require extensive regulatory and legal reform. How else will AI be able to fold doctors and lawyers into its tender mercies? Doing politics will also mean reaching out to more of the electorate, who are often uneasy with Silicon Valley’s promises while they see rising electrical bills. Silicon Valley has done a marvelous job in building data centers. But tech titans don’t look ready to plan for later steps in leading the whole-of-society effort into deploying AI everywhere. The Communist Party lives for whole-of-society efforts. That’s what Leninist systems are built for. Beijing has set targets for deploying AI across society, though as usual with planning announcements, these numerical targets should be taken seriously and not literally. Chinese founders talk about AI mostly as a technology to be harnessed rather than a fickle power that might threaten all. Rather than building superintelligence, Chinese companies have been more interested in embedding AI into robots and manufacturing lines. Some researchers believe that this sort of embodied AI might present the real path towards superintelligence.We might furthermore wonder how the US and China will use AI. Since the US is much more services-driven, Americans may be using AI to produce more powerpoints and lawsuits; China, by virtue of being the global manufacturer, has the option to scale up production of more electronics, more drones, and more munitions.” WE IN THE WEST ARE NOT THE FUTURE OR INDEED THE PRESENT AND IT FEELS VERY IMPORTANT THAT WE ALL KEEP THIS FRONT OF MIND IN 2026. Oh, on which note, this is a different-but-adjacent piece about the rise in popularity and ‘cool’-ness of ‘Chinese signifiers’ in Western culture – ChineseMaxxing, per the piece – which, again, feels worth noting.
January 31, 2026 at 3:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
The American Museum of Natural History

http://tumblr.amnh.org/
https://linkmoltobelli.substack.com/
The American Museum of Natural History: Posting excellent nature images and facts every day, in 2026! TUMBLR LIVES, incredibly! Every year I fear I will have to kill this section and every year Tumblr proves itself to be a genuine unkillable thunderchrist of the web! Via Pietro, btw.
January 31, 2026 at 1:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
Frost and Furious

https://alambik.itch.io/frost-and-furious
Frost and Furious: DRIVE! DRIVE THE TRUCK! DO NOT CRASH! This is very, very more-ish, trust me.
January 31, 2026 at 11:30 AM
curiobot.bsky.social
Flickle

https://www.flickle.co/
Flickle: Another creator submission! Ilhan writes that he created Flickle “for a specific kind of nerd: the ones who obsess over lighting, composition, and color grading. It’s a daily movie & TV guessing game, but here is the “Curios” part: Each puzzle is paired with a Cinematography Analysis (on the blog section), breaking down why that specific shot works visually. I also included a full Archive Mode because I hate it when daily games lock you out after 2 minutes.” You will have to REALLY know your cinema, be warned, but the film and telly buffs amongst you might find this compelling.
January 31, 2026 at 9:30 AM
curiobot.bsky.social
Enclose The Horse

https://enclose.horse/
Enclose The Horse: This is very simple but also VERY HARD, and significantly more knotty than a game whose entire premise is contained in its title/url ought to be. WHY AM I SO BAD AT ENCLOSING THE HORSE???
January 30, 2026 at 7:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
Touch My Belly Button

https://playpupok.com/
Touch My Belly Button: This game was sent to me by its creators and, honestly, it made me SO HAPPY – it is very silly, but it made me laugh lots (the voice over is genuinely perfect) and, seriously, that is no mean feat right now.
January 30, 2026 at 5:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
Bird Radio

https://bird-radio.pages.dev/
Bird Radio: Would you like to replace the constant, whirring sound of the future and all the horror it brings with the relaxing sound of birdsong? OH GOOD! This site presents a small radio player – pick your continent and then stream a variety of different birdsong in a desperate attempt to take yourself away to somewhere bucolic and rural and SAFE.
January 30, 2026 at 1:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
FuzzyGraph

https://fuzzygraph.com/
FuzzyGraph: “What if graphed equations, but beautiful?” is a question that has been occupying the minds of mathematicians for, ooh, no time at all (they already think graphed equations are beautiful, I guess), but if you’ve ever thought ‘wow, I would really like a very pretty version of that quadratic parabola to hang on my wall’ then this website will be PERFECT. Basically you feed it an equation and it will plot that, but with FANCY COLOURS and stuff – you can remove all the grid lines to create semi-abstract works of luminescent, maths-based line art which are honestly rather beautiful, and if there are any of you out there with favourite equations (on the one hand, this strikes me as…improbable; on the other, I have one or two ideas about what you lot might be like) then you will ADORE this.
January 30, 2026 at 11:30 AM
curiobot.bsky.social
Barry’s Border Points

https://barrysborderpoints.com/
Barry’s Border Points: Do YOU like the borders between countries? Do YOU feel a faint, tumescent stirring when confronted with a TRIBORDER or, even more erotically, a QUADRIBORDER (NB – these may not in fact be the correct terms, but, well, come at me Barry)? I bet you don’t like them anywhere near as much as Barry, who has, I think for years, been maintaining this blog detailing Curious Borders and his Travels To Them with photos and writings and while I might scoff (but only a little, promise) this is actually a pretty good resource if you’re interested in arbitrary territorial boundaries – and, well, who isn’t? NO FCUKER, etc!
January 30, 2026 at 9:30 AM
curiobot.bsky.social
Tiled Art

https://tiled.art/
Tiled Art: Do YOU like tesselation? OF COURSE YOU DO YOU ARE ONLY HUMAN! Explore every single facet of tesselation you could POSSIBLY dream of via this excellent website, which has a couple of very cool features, not least the one which lets you make your own tesselating tile set using a rather neat interface which explains helpfully and visually How This All Works, and the fact that you can pick any tesselating tileset and get a little animation explaining to you how the symmetries and flips work, and, basically, if you are someone like me whose spatial awareness can best be described as ‘partial’ and ‘sporadic’ then you will find yourself staring at this with the same sort of awe as one might encounter in a cat observing an astrolabe.
January 29, 2026 at 7:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
Tweet-to-Magazine

https://covers.aesty.ai/
Tweet-to-Magazine: I think this might have been the fortnight during which ‘actively using X’ stopped really being OK – I have for the past couple of years been continuing to post a weekly link to Curios there, but only through muscle memory and I think 2026 is the year when I finally stop because, well, there’s no fcuking point, is there, and while I personally don’t see anything gross unless I actively look for it (guys, just want to say that…you don’t actually have to turn on the algofeed, you know? Like, you can just…not?) it feels too grubby to even post links on any more. Still, should you still have access to your Twitter account you might find this momentarily amusing – plug it in and you will be presented with a selection of magazine covers based on your output, which is moderately-amusing in a slightly-2012 way (you can do this with Insta too, but I haven’t tried that re not in fact having an active Insta presence). Amusingly (lol!) my covers all involved me complaining about writing Curios which, well, METHINKS HE DOTH PROTEST TOO MUCH, etc.
January 29, 2026 at 5:30 PM