HELLO EVERYONE I GO ON HOLIDAY TOMORROW FOR TWO WEEKS I AM SO EXCITED I MIGHT PROLAPSE! Yes, fine, I know that you personally couldn't give a flying one about my plans, but it's my blognewsletterthingy and I will open it however I like so  there . Welcome to the final Curios til 28 September, the last, wheezing gasp of Summer before we usher i...

Hello from a sunny Oxford. We have been busy in recent months with this site, not that you should really notice that. 8 years of content has been moved from an old CMS to a new one; the site has moved hosts; the mobile web version has been completely reworked; and the newsletter system, for Web Curios , has been given an awful lot of back-end ...

​Fifty years ago the Beatles released a single that sold over 8m copies – their highest selling 45rpm – Hey Jude . While Hey Jude made the greater impression, it was the B-side – Revolution – in which John Lennon addressed the global political upheaval of 1968 that has the more interesting story. Rare as it was for a pop song to address politics, t...

So, I went to Leeds. And I survived, but dear GOD am I glad it was only a day and that I am not 16 any more. WHY ARE YOU ALL TAKING SO MUCH KETAMINE, FESTIVALGOING CHILDREN OF THE UK? WHY DO YOU ALL SHOUT 'WHOOMP THERE IT IS'  EVERY TIME THE DJ DOES SOMETHING GOOD? WHY AM I SO OLD AND CONFUSED? Anyway, I felt old and baffled and basically like...

Is he going to be impeached? IS HE? Stop getting excited, nothing's going to happen for AGES and in the meantime there's still plenty of stuff that could get worse. Don't worry, though, because over here we've finally got a plan for No Deal Brexit! It involves evertything being incredibly fcuking sh1t! But! Don't worry though! Because Jezzus is goi...

Neville Southall Adult Baby Twitter Takeover. Take those words; taste them; roll them around your mouth and revel in their juicy savour. So rich! So DENSE!  I'm choosing to focus on the ridiculous rather than the awful in the intro this week, seeing as the past couple have been pretty frothy with fear and rage and seeing also as it's my girlfr...

Can we all agree that whilst Boris Johnson may himself not be a racist he's spent this week behaving in a manner designed explicitly to appeal to racists and that that's not really that much better? Good! Now we've got that cleared up, let's crack on with the REALLY IMPORTANT STUFF. Given that Summer is now over (bet you wish you hadn't complained ...

Wife-beating, justice-perverting peddler of race-hate Stephen Yaxley-Lennon is out on bail! HUZZAH FOR FREE SPEECH! I am exercising mine right now in order to call all his fans and supporters intellectually moribund racists at worst, or credulous idiots being puppeteered by actual proper fascists at best! Isn't free speech great! BUT! None of you c...

HOT! SWEATY! DAMP! MOIST! SUPPURATING! ROTTEN! FETID! SEETHING! TURGID! All of the above - and frankly there would me more were I not, as ever, so desperately pressed for time - can be used to describe the sensation in our great capital this week as we edged ever closer to a full-on, heat-induced brainmelt.  Even worse, you've now clicked on t...

 I...I don't know  whats  going on. Do you? Can you tell me? Can you explain? Honestly, I seem to have totally lost the run of things this week, and am utterly confused as who to believe and what to think about  anything .  Do I believe Donald? Do I believe Vlad? Do I believe T'reese, or peaky-looking Jacob, or 'funny' Bori...

 E very ten years, governments around the world conduct their national census: a count of the resident population. This is no easy task. The 2011 Chinese census, for instance, was a vast operation relying on six million enumerators taking census questionnaires from door to door. Knowledge of a population's composition is crucial for government...

NY-based research group Data and Society has released a comprehensive report on how the media should report on the far right, called  ​The Oxygen of Amplificiation: Offering extremely candid comments from mainstream journalists, the report provides a snapshot of an industry caught between the pressure to deliver page views, the impulse to cove...

Oh Christ. What a MESS.  Look, let's focus on the positives - the kids got rescued!  What else? Eh? Oh.  Sorry everyone, I have literally NOTHING else today - it's all just TOO MUCH (and I have a lunch to get to, then theatre with a godchild, and then dinner with my girlfriend and then Fat Bob's birthday tomorrow and then, doubtless,...

​Google Pay has been improved, with new support for both mobile ticketing and peer-to-peer payments. We've always rather liked GPay; it still seems behind Apple Pay in terms of general adoption, but the fact that it works with any contactless terminal makes it much easier to use. The tradeoff is that Apple Pay has greater functionality - something ...

This piece on the ; in  ​The Millions ​ magazine,  is lovely.  Stylistically, the latter half of the 20th century (and the 21st) has seen a general shift toward shorter sentences. This seems understandable on two fronts. First—and this is total conjecture—MFA writing programs came to the cultural fore in the 1970s and over the last f...

Whether you're 6, 16 or 46, the row of game cabinets in an amusement arcade tempts, distracts, and delights. While all human life may not be here, there are certainly characters - both in the games and out of them - whom one can remember, and paint a narrative upon. Whether your era was  ​Gorf, Out Run  ​or the  ​Virtual Fighter...

 The older and more jaded among you will look at this and think  ​"Huh, that's just how the web used to be" ​ but to the less savvy, the manifesto for Brutalist Web Design should be a compelling and rational call for designers and digital agencies to strip the crap out of their websites. The BDW guidelines are: ​ Content is readable on al...

Luke Rhinehart's 1971 novel  ​The Dice Man ​ has been updated of sorts: software developer Max Hawkins has been living his life based on events suggested by a set of algorithms. He's done it in a pretty considered way: rather than just be completely random, he has overtly chosen to reject advice which the algos have suggested ("Kill a dee...

An April 2018 survey by the Pew Research Centre has found that fewer people believe that "the Internet has been mostly a good thing for society" as compared to four years ago. This worsening perspective on the social benefits of the Internet contrasts with the view that these same respondents believed that the Internet continued to be a good thing ...

Pride! Pride in our country! Pride in Gareth's Plucky Young Lions! Pride in the idea of IT coming home (what is 'it'? Have you considered the idea that maybe the 'it' whose return you're all so joyously anticipating is, I don't know, a horrific monster borne out of irradiated Chernobyl isotopes, temporarily disguised as 'football'? HAVE YOU? I don'...