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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
Inglenook

https://www.inglenooklit.com/
Inglenook: It would be quite hard for this to be any further away from my personal area of interest, but I figure there might be a few of you for whom this is catnip – are YOU into witchery? Are YOU a lover of the occult? Do YOU want to pen your very own grimoire through which to UNCOVER THE SECRETS OF THE GLOAMING? Yeah, alright, fine wevs you weirdo, in which case you might enjoy this, a NEW MAGAZINE about MAJICK (I think, actually, they spell it ‘magic’, in case that makes some sort of category difference for you). “Inglenook Lit is a resource and literary magazine for magic. We review and recommend nonfiction, magical realism, and speculative fiction, publish and promote short stories, and share insights about the occult.” They’re accepting submissions, so should you have some THOUGHTS about, you know, CAULDRONS AND STUFF, get involved.
November 13, 2025 at 7:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
Interesting Bars

https://www.interestingbars.com/
Interesting Bars: A website collecting, er, ‘interesting bars’ in cities worldwide. I wouldn’t normally include something like this but, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t *seem* to be AI bullshit – instead it’s drawing it’s recommendations from user submissions and as such it might actually end up being halfway-useful. I checked it on London just to see whether it’s any good and…look, the recommended places are very much Not My Sort Of Thing, but, equally, felt a *bit* less like standard tourist guide stuff than you might normally get, so I would cautiously say that this might be worth a try should you be travelling somewhere unfamiliar and want some non-standard recs for places to get battered on overpriced liquor (you know what my problem with cocktails is? THEY TAKE FCUKING AGES TO MAKE, and as such cocktail bars tend to be approximately 10% actual drinking and 90% waiting for the poor barperson to finish floating a layer of curacao over someone’s horrible concoction. That…that makes me sound like an alcoholic, doesn’t it? I mean, if the cap fits).
November 13, 2025 at 5:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
FcukLAPD

https://fucklapd.com/
FcukLAPD: I have to say that I am very much enjoying the use of various public records and open source tech solutions to create pushback against the current US administrations increasingly-fascistic approach to immigration policy; this latest creation allows you to upload a photo and cross-reference it with the database of current LA police officers so you can, should you have cause, report their conduct and hold them to account. What I found interesting when playing with this was a) how many LA police officers look a bit like me, which, honestly, given my general shape (skeletal) and muscletone (nonexistent) struck me as…surprising, and b) how much fcukng MONEY these guys earn; ok, I know that the risk of being shot is significantly greater as a police in the US, but all of these people earn six-figure salaries which feels like…a lot, honestly, and does rather give lie to the whole ‘pay good salaries, get the best people’ argument which, I concede, I’ve often made about public servants. Anyway, I hope none of you ever have cause to use such a website, but, well, just in case.
November 13, 2025 at 3:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
The Vera C Rubin Observatory

https://skyviewer.app/
https://rubinobservatory.org/gallery/collections/first-look-gallery
The Vera C Rubin Observatory: The Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile, named after a pioneering US astronomer, apparently, houses a MASSIVE telescope which this week released its first images of the galaxy – you can look at them via this site and JESUS GOD THAT IS A LOT OF STARS I FEEL SO INCREDIBLY SMALL AND INSIGNIFICANT (plus ca change, innit). I highly recommend you taking the 10 minute ‘tour’ of the image as it will help explain what the fcuk you are looking at among all the spangly cosmic dust – per the blurb, “The Virgo Cluster is the nearest large collection of galaxies to our own Milky Way — about 55 million light-years away from Earth. Home to over a thousand galaxies, including a mix of spirals, ellipticals, and faint dwarf galaxies, it’s like a cosmic dance floor. The Virgo Cluster offers a vivid, nearby example of what galaxy clusters look like and how they evolve.” Honestly, this is DIZZYING and incredible and will, unless you really are dead inside, fill you with awe and wonder. BONUS AWE AND WONDER! You can see more of the telescopes shot on this page, should you want to feel even smaller and more insignificant.
November 13, 2025 at 1:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
You’re Never Lonely On Wikipedia

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youre-never-lonely-on-wik/mifpgcnccpdmgooakbdgbbgkjnlhfhcg
You’re Never Lonely On Wikipedia: Ooh, I like this – a small webproject that exists to remind you that however alone you may feel there are others who are JUST as alone as you are! Er, that’s what this is saying, right? You’re Never Lonely On Wikipedia is a Chrome extension which does a single, simple thing – install it, navigate to any Wikipedia page you like and it will tell you how many other people have visited the same page – today, yesterday and since 2015. Will this make you feel like you’re part of something bigger than yourself, or will it simply make you feel small and futile and like you’re indistinguishable from all the other lonely, anonymous websurfers seeking meaning and connection and some sort of answer to the WHY DEAR GOD WHY of all of this? I have no fcuking clue, why not click and install and find out for yourself?
November 13, 2025 at 11:30 AM
curiobot.bsky.social
Weird Spotify Playlists

https://old.reddit.com/r/weirdspotifyplaylists/
Weird Spotify Playlists: Whilst obviously I don’t fcuk with Spotify per the brief rant above, I appreciate it’s the world’s premiere streaming platform and that lots of other people do – as such, it is a GREAT place to enjoy The Oddity of Man, and this subReddit collecting people’s odd playlists is a nice example of the strange. Playlists composed exclusively of ‘songs about being stoned in supermarkets’; playlists featuring nothing but ‘Chinese artists singing about land formations’ (this is, seemingly, A Thing), a playlist called, for reasons known only to the person who compiled it, ‘Your Dog Is An Albanian Spy’…ALL OF HUMAN (MUSICAL) (WEIRD) LIFE IS HERE!
November 13, 2025 at 9:30 AM
curiobot.bsky.social
VIDEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7h3PTMioAU
I’ve really enjoyed Danny Brown’s renaissance arc this year and he’s been putting out some bangers to boot – this is his latest, it’s called ‘Copycats’ and it’s…almost commercial!  
November 12, 2025 at 7:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
VIDEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XD6VHR_6G7U
I’m not, as a rule, one for pop music, and I don’t tend to listen to music by teenage girls (this isn’t sexism or ageism, honest, it’s just that I am a middle-aged man and I think it would objectively be weird if I was really into someone who only recently stopped being on the Disney Channel), but this floated across my radar this week and…it’s good! The track is called ‘Laugh It Off’ and it is by one Kayla Rain, and the video really does look like it was shot by a mate of hers in her house and edited together on Capcut, and overall I thought this just felt…fun! See, it’s not ALL horrible links and doomy commentary! I can do ‘light frivolity’! LOOK AT MY RANGE, YOU FCUKS.
November 12, 2025 at 5:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
All Girls But One

https://winningwriters.com/past-winning-entries/all-girls-but-one
All Girls But One: Katherine Dykstra writes about being young and stupid and having friends who at the time mean everything and who become nothing, and the reasons why that happens. This is very, very good: “That summer, I moved out of the sorority house and rented a room off campus. A meth lab had burned to the ground in the unattached garage next door and the blinds on its side of the house all sagged like Dali’s melting clocks. I slept on a mattress on the floor of an otherwise empty dining room with windowed pocket doors that opened to the living area on one side, the kitchen on the other. In order not to be seen by any of my five roommates, I’d crouch in the corner to dress. For these accommodations I paid $73 a month, which I earned serving pub fare to fraternity alumni while wearing a forest green polo shirt and khakis. This sounds bleak, I realize, but I’d never been so happy. During that brief time in my life—when suddenly I found myself able to hold my head up as I entered a room and when those things that interested me, music, photography, words, began to crystallize into possibility—everything felt like ease and open arms.”
November 12, 2025 at 3:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
A Prostate Cancer Story

https://www.waiterrant.net/2025/10/patent-pending/
A Prostate Cancer Story: A man writes about having treatment for prostate cancer, and his subsequent recovery, and, specifically, what that did to his penis. This isn’t anything I am personally familiar with, and I am not usually a fan of this tone of writing (American, a bit fratty, and far too eager, for this reader at least, to wax lyrical about his previously-stupendous penile performance), but it’s genuinely interesting to read what I presume to be a reasonably-honest account of what it’s like to go through the experience, and the humiliations required to get your penis back into working order again afterwards. You may want to skip this one if you don’t want to read about injecting things into your junk, though.
November 12, 2025 at 1:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
London’s Early Birds

https://www.the-londoner.co.uk/meet-londons-earlybirds/
London’s Early Birds: A brilliant piece in the Londoner speaking to some of the people who are up and about in the capital before the tube start, using the night bus network to get to and from work and whose labour in many cases underpins the fabric of the city. Beautiful, human vignettes, and as a bonus it also contains a photo of the bus stop at the top of my road.
November 12, 2025 at 11:30 AM
curiobot.bsky.social
What It Feels Like To Be A Deep Sea Diver

https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a68041583/what-it-feels-like-oil-rig-diver/
What It Feels Like To Be A Deep Sea Diver: Specifically, one of those people who goes to the bottom of the ocean to weld and cut the pipes and structures that the oil industry uses to procure the black stuff; this is EXCELLENT, and I would honestly have read something twice as long because I have SO MANY QUESTIONS (not least HOW DOES THE OIL GET INTO YOUR SWIMSUIT (it will make sense once you’ve read the piece, promise). In the main, though, the whole thing sounds utterly terrifying and like the sort of profession that only the certifiably-insane would ever contemplate.
November 12, 2025 at 9:30 AM
curiobot.bsky.social
The Apes Are Back!

https://archive.is/20251025034533/https://www.theverge.com/tech/806492/bored-ape-yacht-club-bayc-crypto-metaverse-otherside-yuga-labs
The Apes Are Back!: I had to spend an hour or so last Sunday writing a ‘whatever happened to NFTs?’ piece and, honestly, it’s worth going back through old Curios c.2022 to remind yourself of how fcuking STRANGE it all was, those times when everyone and their dad was releasing their own poorly-designed PFP project riffing off cryptopunks; anyway, as you will no doubt FONDLY RECALL, Bored Apes were for a period the very apogee of NFTs, trading for preposterous sums and being touted as some sort of badge of ‘cool’ by people who had never, ever been ‘cool’ in their lives (whichever definition you care to choose) – Paris Hilton even went on Jimmy Kimmel to chat about how exciting it was that they both ‘had apes’, which feels hallucinatory to type at a distance of three years. Anyway, the project managed to siphon off enough idiot money to persist after the initial NFT buzz died down, and is now BACK, launching its ‘long-awaited’ metaversal experience called ‘Otherside’ and, well, per this writeup it sounds exactly as sh1t as every single other metarversal project that isn’t ‘Roblox’ – but, you know, YOUR NFT CAN BE YOUR AVATAR, JUST LIKE YOU WERE PROMISED IN 2021!!!!!!
November 11, 2025 at 7:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
Trying Out The Domestic Robot

https://archive.is/20251029030325/https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/i-tried-the-robot-thats-coming-to-live-with-you-its-still-part-human-68515d44
https://archive.is/o/n39ee/https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/world-models-ai-evolution-11275913
Trying Out The Domestic Robot: The Neo by robotics company 1X got a reasonable amount of hype this week, almost none of it justified based on the fact that for the thing to actually DO anything it basically needs to be remote-piloted by a human being in an office somewhere wearing a headset and guiding its movements – which is, er, obviously not going to scale! Still, it’s interesting to read about the scifi future being peddled by its manufacturers, which is neatly sold to the reader in this WSJ article which manages to still read like a PR puff piece for the company despite neatly demonstrating over the course of a few thousand words why this tech is in no way anywhere near consumer readiness yet. Also, I did laugh a little at the fact that not only do you have to pay thousands for the robot (that doesn’t work without remote control operation) and for the subscription programme that goes with it (robotic servants as a service!), but you are ALSO effectively providing the training data for a future version of this that presumably actually does what they say it does, and doing so unpaid! What a deal! The endline here is priceless: “for Neo to autonomously tidy up your kitchen in the future, it needs a smarter brain. Its AI neural network learns from real-world experience. That’s part of why 1X is sending early versions into homes: to capture videos of every dishwasher load and laundry fold—and feed them into its world model. While large language models are trained on the text of the internet, the model that underpins Neo is trained on the real world. I didn’t see Neo do anything autonomously, although the company did share a video of Neo opening a door on its own.”
November 11, 2025 at 5:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
Nobody Knows What’s Cool

https://unbrandedculture.substack.com/p/nobody-knows-what-cool-means-anymore
Nobody Knows What’s Cool: ANOTHER new newsletter (ffs everyone can you just fcuking STOP, Curios is the only newsletter you will ever need), this one by an actual, IRL friend of mine. Alex Wilson does ‘strategy’ (but he’s not a cnut, I promise) and here writes about the vexatious question of what the word ‘cool’ even means in 2025, and how that pertains to stuff like ‘brands’ and ‘flogging people things’; even if you’re not interested in the branding and selling side of things, though, this is an interesting read which makes some good points about some ways in which ‘cool’ could usefully be thought of in 2025: “No one agrees on what “cool” means anymore Instead I think the term has gradually drifted (mutated?) into two distinct concepts: The old concept: cool as outsider charisma (e.g. Steve McQueen and Samuel L. Jackson); The new concept: cool as possessing large amounts of cultural capital aka hipster cool (e.g. whoever the 2025 equivalent of 2015 Zane Lowe is). You could fairly say that cool-as-outsider-charisma is dead, or at least outmoded. But cool-as-possessing-cultural-capital is very much alive.”
November 11, 2025 at 3:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
The Job Search as Humiliation Ritual

https://archive.is/20251027234047/https://www.thecut.com/article/job-search-unemployment-stories.html
The Job Search as Humiliation Ritual: I’ve been lucky enough that I haven’t had to apply for a job since…Jesus, since about 2009, but I am aware that the recruitment process in modernity is a fcuking sh1tshow, between rampant demand and the inevitable introduction of AI into the process; this piece is from New York Magazine and as such is US-centric, but the stories it tells feel like they are probably pretty universal, and the summation line at the end (“I feel like I am just getting my machine to talk to their machine”) is a bleak precis of Where We Are Now.
November 11, 2025 at 1:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
AI Post-Bubble

https://archive.is/20251027180951/https://www.wired.com/story/ai-normal-after-ai-plateaus/
AI Post-Bubble: WIRED put out a whole bunch of pieces on AI this week (just in case you hadn’t read enough about it over the past few years), but this was the pick of the bunch imho; it’s a sensible, clear-headed look at what might practically happen should the financial bubble surrounding the tech finally pop, and what the next evolution of the technology, post-froth, might look like, and how and where it might be applied. The basic premise here is ‘it will be better, because all of the hypemerchants will stop shouting and instead people will quietly get on with making this stuff better and implementing it more effectively, and we will get the benefits without the annoyance’, and I for one am happy to believe this take.
November 11, 2025 at 11:30 AM
curiobot.bsky.social
Acid Patriotism

https://britishchaos.substack.com/p/acid-patriotism
Acid Patriotism:  Perennial Web Curios favourite Clive Martin has launched a newsletter (ffs Clive, must you?!) and his inaugural dispatch is a typically-Martin-esque piece on the current weirdness of the flags’n’fury brigade and the way intersects with the remaining vestiges of rave culture; this is effectively an evolution of the ‘cosmic scallie’ stuff that got a bit of attention during lockdown as Liverpool became something of an epicentre for conspiratorial thinking and ‘5g Bill Gates’ memes, but now writ national, and I think that Martin nails a lot of smart things here, not least ‘protest against the government’ fulfilling the need for communal hedonism that is no longer necessarily met now. A useful lens for Britiain Right Now, I think: “Some days later, I was sent a video from a colleague who is part of an England away supporters ticket group. It shows a group of young men (and one very old man), gathered outside a community centre in Portsmouth, all decked out in body warmers, caps and calf tats, with Union Jacks and St George’s flags draped over their shoulders like Crusaders’ tabards. From a PA system pumps the immortal meme-trance anthem ‘Sandstorm’ by Darude, while red, white and blue flares burst into the drizzly sky. As the track builds to a crescendo, a man with a microphone starts ranting about a “show of dominance against Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana.” He seems angry but ecstatic, wired for havoc. The overall effect falls somewhere between an Identitarian flash protest and a Gatecrasher party from 1997. “We need to take it to the politicians, local and national,” read the message underneath. Although they were slightly more ‘with it’ than the man at Waterloo, he and they were clearly getting stuck into the same Kool-Aid, a new version of that age-old union of euphoria and rage, the missing link between mobile disco and the kettling pen – a rave culture-infused take on right-wing bile. Acid Patriotism, if you will.”
November 11, 2025 at 9:30 AM
curiobot.bsky.social
Egg

https://terrycavanagh.itch.io/egg
Egg: THIS IS FUN! Would you like to play a surreal, nonsensical, oddly-funny 3d platform game in which you play, er, an egg? YES OF COURSE YOU WOULD! This is tricky to get the hang of, but it’s also very forgiving – there are no limited lives, just the continued attempt to jump your oeuf to the end of the trail. This is an EXCELLENT way to waste the last 30 minutes of your working day.
November 10, 2025 at 7:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
FeetGen

https://www.feetgen.com/
FeetGen: You know how AI is going to take all the jobs? Yeah, well that includes ‘people making a few quid off feet pics on OnlyFans’. Sorry, I don’t make the rules here.
November 10, 2025 at 5:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
NoFrilldos

https://www.funkittoys.com/nofrilldo
NoFrilldos: On the one hand, I am including this because I think it’s a generally good idea – a range of no-frills sex toys aimed at people who maybe can’t afford something fancy but who still want a functional, high-quality way of getting off; on the other, I am also including it because ‘nofrilldos’ is a legitimately-hilarious name, and I am now slightly obsessed with the concept of a Tesco Value range of masturbatory aids.
November 10, 2025 at 3:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
The Golden Demon Miniatures Painting Contest 2025

https://www.warhammer-community.com/en-gb/articles/n4tadgwz/golden-demon-2025-winners-at-spiel-essen-revealed/
The Golden Demon Miniatures Painting Contest 2025: When I was a kid, expressing an interest in anything like Warhammer or Blood Bowl would have gotten you ripped limb from limb by the more…aggressively-normal children, which is one of the reasons why I never got into the whole ‘miniatures’ scene (that and my total lack of artistic skill and limited patience, fine); still, now that Games Workshop is one of the few legitimate British business success stories of the modern era (that and OnlyFans – WHAT A NATION WE ARE!) it’s safe to presume that there are actually an awful lot of people who REALLY like wearing a loupe and meticulously rendering the rust on a Space Marine’s boltgun (I am not judging, honest). If that is your idea of fun then prepare to feel MASSIVELY inadequate as you gaze upon the winners of this annual contest to reward the most talented miniatures artists in the world.
November 10, 2025 at 1:30 PM
curiobot.bsky.social
All Of The Old Film Posters

https://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll84/search
https://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll84/id/1586/rec/8
All Of The Old Film Posters: An astonishing digital collection maintained by the University of Texas, this has seemingly THOUSANDS of old film posters spanning years and genres, running up to the late-70s as far as I can tell…seriously, if you’re interested in poster design or the history of cinema or (look, I know my audience) if you just want to look at 100-odd ‘erotic’ film posters from the golden era of cheesecake bongo then WOW are you in luck (and if anyone has any idea where I might be able to buy an original of this then PLEASE LET ME KNOW).
November 10, 2025 at 11:30 AM
curiobot.bsky.social
Fondfolio

https://fondfolio.com/
Fondfolio: This is a lovely idea but MAN is the name unpleasant – it reads like ‘fondle’ which, well, isn’t a word anyone likes I don’t think, and if you try saying it out loud it feels quite a lot like attempting to speak with a mouth full of sand and tissue paper (it does, try it!), but leaving those frankly minor and unimportant quibbles aside I also think it’s a potentially cool idea which some of you might rather like; basically it’s a print-on-demand service for books of tributes and testimonials, which, when you sign up, gives you a questionnaire link that you can share with anyone who you’d like to contribute. The platform gathers all the responses, formats and compiles them, and then prints them into a one-off personal “YOU ARE FCUKING AMAZING!” texts (unless of course everyone filling out the form decides instead to share the reasons you will likely die alone and unloved! No reason it couldn’t be a hate book!). Rather beautifully this is seemingly a one-person business and the resulting books are handmade by someone called Fiona and, honestly, I think this is a rather lovely idea and could be a perfect gift for someone (or a really, really elaborate way of telling someone how much you and a whole bunch of other people despise them, and all the reasons why!).
November 10, 2025 at 9:30 AM
curiobot.bsky.social
Conversation Starters

https://conversationstartersworld.com/
Conversation Starters: There was a wonderful bit of clickbait feature writing in the Guardian the other day about how someone had ‘given up smalltalk’ and it had ‘transformed their life’ – what this practically meant was that they hadn’t in fact given it up at all, but had just replaced ‘what have you been up to then?’ with ‘tell me about your relationship with your mother?’ (I am paraphrasing, but you get the idea) as an opening conversational gambit and how this had TRANSFORMED THEIR SOCIAL LIFE (the article was…less vocal about whether the other people in said reporter’s life were as enamoured with this HARD PIVOT into BIG CHAT, but, well, who cares?!); anyway, if you too have problems with finding ways into conversations but don’t quite feel ready to go full-existential on first meeting someone, you might find this website of potential interest. Per the blurb, “Hi, my name is C.B. Daniels and I started Conversation Starters World. I’m from the USA. Florida to be specific. But I taught English in South Korea for many years. I used conversation questions a lot to help my students practice and learn English. But I noticed something interesting. I looked around for conversation questions for people who speak English as a native language and noticed there weren’t many sites around. And the sites that do exist didn’t have many questions to choose from. So I decided to remedy that by creating Conversation Starters World.” I personally think that some of these options are maybe a BIT high-risk – I worry, for example, that ‘have you ever saved an animal’s life?’ is potentially an immediate trauma-gateway – but on the other hand I am 100% going to try out “what’s the strangest place you’ve defecated?” on a stranger before the year is out.
November 9, 2025 at 7:30 PM