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CurioBot
@curiobot.bsky.social
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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.
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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
curiobot.bsky.social
The Pi Clock

https://dwaksi.com/thereisnotime/pi/
The Pi Clock: A clock! Which shows the time, pulled from the digits of Pi! Or at least that’s what it’s purporting to do – obvs noone has all the digits of Pi committed to memory and so I can’t imagine anyone’s able to ACTUALLY check whether the site is accurate or whether it’s making it all up, but let’s presume good faith!
January 29, 2026 at 3:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
70s Paris

https://paris1970.jeantho.eu/index.html
https://bibliotheques-specialisees.paris.fr/ark:/73873/FRCGMNOV-751045102-LAY
70s Paris: I never went to Paris in the 1970s, what with not having been born, but I imagine that the image in my head (intense glamour! Everything in black and white! Beautiful people!) would be somewhat eclipsed by the reality (an intense and overwhelming smell of Gitanes everywhere! Unconscionable quantities of dog faeces!) – still, thanks to this photo project I can just revel in the imagined version without having to confront any of the olfactory peculiarities! This is a site which…oh, look, just have the translation, it’s easier: “In the spring of 1970, the City of Paris and FNAC organized an amateur photography competition aimed at producing comprehensive photographic coverage of the Parisian territory, divided into a grid of 1755 squares, each 250 meters on a side. 15,000 candidates registered, and 2,800 of them submitted a complete application. These photographs were then given to the Historical Library of the City of Paris, which digitized them and organized them into a collection, available on their website . The site you are on allows you to view all the photos of a square at a glance, before consulting the high-definition versions on the website of the Historical Library of the City of Paris. There you will find 30,225 digitized photographs of 6,918 candidates.” Honestly, this is such a wonderful time capsule – you’ll get more out of it if you know Paris a bit and if there’s a specific part of the city you want to explore, but even as a casual observer it’s so interesting to see just how…well, how Parisian and 70s it looks (these are the sorts of insights you can look forward to more of in 2026!), and, honestly, how incredibly shabby and dirty and sort of run-down the whole city appears. Guys! Guys! THE PAST WAS SH1T ACTUALLY, TURNS OUT!
January 29, 2026 at 1:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
UK Roads Simulator

https://sim.roads.org.uk/
https://roadsorguk.substack.com/p/hello-heres-my-ridiculous-side-project
UK Roads Simulator: I honestly can’t tell you how much I adore that this exists. Have you ever wanted a website which will let you simulate, in slow and very lo-fi fashion, the experience of taking a journey on a UK road? Would you like this website to render said journey in a manner that means the only possible interaction is to click ‘carry on’ to ‘keep driving’? NO OF COURSE NOT THAT WOULD BE MENTAL AND YET IT EXISTS! Honestly, this is SO SO SO pointless and wonderful that I love it more than words can express – it’s apparently been in existence for a while, and despite it being at best a…curious and niche pursuit, I can’t tell you how happy I am that it is possible to take a poorly-rendered digital trip around the M25 (clockwise OR anticlockwise! TRULY, IT SPOILS YOU!) via the medium of the web. You can read a bit more about the project here, should you wish (and I think you really should), but I want to reproduce this bit of creator Chris Marshall’s essay because it’s an ethos I can really get behind and which I think is worth celebrating – MORE THINGS LIKE THIS, PLEASE: “The Simulator is not just ridiculous because it took so much time to make something so utterly pointless. It’s ridiculous because the modern internet is commercial and demands your likes, your clicks, your subscriptions, your money. I am not doing this for the likes. I’m doing it because I think the internet should have fun, purposeless, engaging things and they shouldn’t always be asking you for something in return. The new Simulator carries no adverts and it earns me nothing. I haven’t even got analytics running on it so I don’t know – I don’t want to know – how many people visit or how long they stay to play with it. I just like that it’s just there, for whoever finds it, for fun, for free.”
January 29, 2026 at 11:30 AM
curiobot.bsky.social
Frontier of the Year

https://frontier2025.netlify.app/
Frontier of the Year: This is interesting, and made me feel in small part…hopeful? Looking at scientific research and discovery over the past year, the site seeks to answer the questions “How did the world change this year? Which results are speculative? Which are biggest, if true?” – it basically lists 202 different areas and ranks them based on whether they are positive, neutral or negative changes, and how ‘big’ they are in terms of their likely impact, and might make you feel…less bad, maybe? I mean, look – Extreme poverty drops from 27% of India to 5% in one decade! Murder rates worldwide have fallen 25% since 2000! Ok, fine, maybe ignore ‘Artificial chimeras of bat coronaviruses, with up to 100% lethality, produced, on purpose, under BSL-2 conditions’ – think of the good stuff! This is really interesting overall, and you can get more information and links back to cited studies in each case, should you wish to delve more.
January 29, 2026 at 9:30 AM
curiobot.bsky.social
TV Guessr

https://www.tvguessr.garden/
TV Guessr: Weirdly video heavy selection in this first edition of 2026 – not in fact weird if you bother to take into account the fact that EVERYONE APART FROM YOU LOVES VIDEO MATT YOU PR1CK – to which this is a wonderful addition. TVGuessr is a simple game which asks ‘what random country is the website currently showing you a TV show from?’ and WOW is this a great way of both getting some interesting insights into other cultures and of testing your own prejudices. Seriously, you won’t know what the fcuk is going on 99% of the time – unless you’re a very impressive linguist or have spent a LOT of time watching obscure cable – but it is so so fascinating to skip between countries and see how they are presenting the world to their viewers. These are all livestreams, so you get a proper feel for the here and now, and, honestly, fcuk the ‘game’ element of this, this is just really, really interesting and I could honestly watch this for hours just navigating from country to country. Also, MAN does South American TV play some banging tracks during the middle of the night (just after 3am, Colombia time).
January 28, 2026 at 7:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
Poms

https://poms.fun/
Poms: It’s only January 9th, but I can confidently predict that you won’t see another website this month which pleases you quite as much as this does. No, really, I mean it. Click and ENJOY. Oh, and this was made in part with AI – if that makes you hate it per se, if that makes you froth and seethe and fills you with bile then maybe, just maybe, you should stop being a miserable, joyless cnut. EMBRACE THE POMS FFS.
January 28, 2026 at 5:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
Airloom

https://objectiveunclear.com/airloom.html
Airloom: I love this! Pick an airport – any airport! – and get a…live? Anyway, get a maybe-live visualisation of all the planes currently flying around its airspace, which you can rotate to get an idea of the density of traffic around a specific hub, and how exactly all the planes manage to manoeuvre without crashing into each other (ngl, this is…quite stressful if you think about it too hard). Real planeheads will enjoy the fact that you can even click the little plane iconsto get the flight number and a photo of the plane in question (this is…slightly amazing to me, on reflection), but the rest of us who have never stood at the end of a runway with a clipboard and pair of binoculars (no judgement!) can just marvel at the balletic display which as far as I am concerned doesn’t make any physical sense at all HOW DO THEY STAY UP IN THE AIR LIKE THAT???
January 28, 2026 at 3:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
Sunlight Optimism

https://dracos.co.uk/made/sunlight-optimism/
https://seasonscomeandgo.com/
Sunlight Optimism: Ok, look, I am sorry, I will stop going on about The Bad Things and instead attempt to provide you with some NICE, LIGHT FUN. Would you like something to look forward to? Plug a postcode into this website and it will give you some details about when it might maybe stop being INCREDIBLY DARK AND COLD where you are – per this, we’re only a short month or so away from the sun rising at 7am! And not setting til after 5! IT IS PRACTICALLY SUMMER, KIDS! Come 17th April I will be getting up to write this at the same time as the sun is peeking above the horizon, and that is no time at all. IT IS ALL GOING TO BE OK! Lol. BONUS SEASONS: this is a nice little seasonal visualiser, should you want one.
January 28, 2026 at 1:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
The 90s Festival Generator

https://www.monkeon.co.uk/90sfestivalgenerator/
The 90s Festival Generator: Look, I promise that Curios isn’t going to become some sort of miserable nostalgiahole – but, well, it’s January, it’s dark, it’s cold and everyone in charge of the world is a cnut, and maybe it’s ok to just hunker down and watch some nice videos from the past. This is a superb bit of work by long-running creator of Fun Internet Things Monkeon, which not only produces imaginary lineups for a 90s festival on demand – click the button, spin up a new lineup! – but also makes every single band name on the poster clickable; click the bandnames and you will be taken to a video featuring a full set by said band at a festival somewhere, so that YOU TOO can imagine that you’re having fun in a field rather than shivering in a garret flat somewhere. So so good, and another really nice example of building on top of YouTube to make something fun.
January 28, 2026 at 11:30 AM
curiobot.bsky.social
I Want My MTV

https://wantmymtv.vercel.app/
https://wikiflix.toolforge.org/#/
https://vole.wtf/voleflix/
I Want My MTV: While it would be nice to be able to enter into the New Year with eyes fixed firmly on the glorious new horizons awaiting us over coming months, it does rather look like any light at the end of the current tunnel might in fact be not just one but a whole fcuking host of oncoming trains, and, as such, you could be forgiven for wanting to hunker down with a bit of nostalgia during the first, miserable, cold months of the year – which makes this webproject a PERFECT link with which to kick off 2026. This is a frankly incredible labour of love by…some mysterious web user, which basically lets you go back and watch MTV from ANY era you choose. Click the decade (70s-20s), or select specific content streams (MTV Raps, say) and then sit back and GLORY in the infinite-stream of era-appropriate videos pulled in from YouTube and played through a lovely MTV-branded webwrapper, time-traveling back to when things were BETTER (or, more accurately, when you were young). This is so so so good, and, if nothing else, is a prettymuch perfect time capsule – if you want any YOUNGER PEOPLE in your life to experience The Culture from back in the day, this is a pretty decent way of explaining to them Why The [INSERT DECADE OF YOUR CHOOSING] Were Better Than Whatever Sh1t You Have Now (definitely a great way of bonding). Basically just turn this on and wait for March to come around, is my advice. BONUS VIDEOS! WikiFlix is a platform that lets you browse and watch all the old films that form part of the WikiMedia commons – so a whole bunch of stuff from the 20s and 30s (LITERALLY A CENTURY AGO) which might tickle your fancy should you wish to see what sort of entertainments we were enjoying last time we decided to accelerate ourselves towards multinational bellicosity. BONUS BONUS VIDEOS! I’ve featured it on here before, but, seeing as we’re doing ‘places where you can watch loads of video for free’ then I would be remiss not to mention Matt Round’s excellent VoleFlix project, compiling a bunch of out-of-copyright films which are floating about YouTube in one place (tell me you’re not intrigued by ‘The Brain That Wouldn’t Die’).
January 28, 2026 at 9:30 AM