Study At Newspeak House: My friend Ed has been running Newspeak House – the College of Political Technologists – in East London for…Jesus, years now. It acts as an incubator for people who want to develop their skills around using tech for civic good, a meeting hub for people interested in how tech and government intersect, and it’s been a place where lots of now-successful people doing interesting things have started their careers. Newspeak House is currently accepting applications for students for the next academic year, and I figured it’s not impossible that some of the weirdos reading this might also be the sort of weirdos who are interested in taking a non-traditional academic path towards ‘fcuking around with computers and data to help things work and run better’. ARE YOU THAT WEIRDO??? Click the link, find out more, email Ed, get qualified.

Study At Newspeak House

https://newspeak.house/study-with-us

Geograph: I LOVE THIS! But also, how the fcuk have I not seen it before? I feel like a failure (not, it must be said, a novel experience, but one I would prefer to experience with slightly less regularity than seems to be the case). This is like Google maps, but crowdsourced (ish) – “The Geograph® Britain and Ireland project aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of Great Britain and Ireland, and you can be part of it. Since 2005, 14,132 contributors have submitted 8,254,695 images covering 283,417 grid squares, or 85.3% of the total squares.” Honestly, what an incredible collaborative work, and how wonderful that people have just…joined in, and to this extent! It’s also a really interesting picture of changing urban geographies – depending on where you explore, there are photos from across the past 20 years which offers a fascinating temporal patchwork of Britain and which I think you could do something really interesting with given the time and a bit of modern code (this site has many qualities but it is…avowedly oldschool in terms of design and functionality). This is really is weirdly heartwarming, well DONE people of Britain and Ireland!

Geograph

https://www.geograph.org.uk/

Krita: I am very much not an artist; I can’t draw, I have no creative impetus and the sole imprint I am going to leave on this world when my carcinoma-riddled corpse finally gets burnt to ashes is the millions of words on Curios – OH WHAT LEGACY! – and as such I have literally no idea whatsoever whether this painting tool is any good. BUT! It is FREE! It is OPEN SOURCE! It works on Windows, Mac and even LINUX (which is how you know it’s proper geekware)! It probably isn’t malware! If you want to draw on your computer but would prefer not to give money to one of the worst companies in the world for the privilege (hi Adobe! WE WILL NEVER ADD THE ™ TO ‘PHOTOSHOP’! IN YOUR FACE) then this might well be of interest.

Krita

https://krita.org/en/

GB AI: FINALLY THE UK HAS SOVEREIGN AI! PRAISE THE LORD! Or at least that’s what this purports to be – I am…slightly iffy about some of the details here, but apparently this is a model adapted from best-in-class open source tech and which is trained on UK data, complies with copyright (everything beyond the base models it’s been trained on is apparently either non-copyrighted or synthetic – the latter part of which doesn’t hugely encourage me in terms of its performance and utility, I have to say) and which runs on ‘100% renewable energy’ (again, not 100% certain about the validity of this claim, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt). This is…look, I don’t feel hugely-positive saying this because it’s new and it’s trying, but this is going to die on its ar$e, isn’t it? Noone has covered it at launch, the model simply isn’t anywhere near as good as any of the big boys, and no fcuker is going to use it. STILL, SOVEREIGN AI!!!!111eleventy

GB AI

https://gb1.ai/chat

Ban Ray: It does rather feel that, given the…not-exactly-universally-positive impact so much technology has had on people and society over the past couple of decades we might perhaps want to think a little quicker about developing a regulatory framework to manage the use of smart glasses and the ways in which they are used – it doesn’t entirely feel like anyone’s paying quite enough attention to what it’s going to be like should a significant proportion of people start wondering around the world with AI-enabled cameras strapped to their faces. Anyway, this is a campaign site set up by one Mateusz Pożar which looks to build a groundswell of support for the broad idea of regulating the tech – there are a series of good arguments for maybe *not* letting them become entirely widespread, and you can download stickers that indicate that smart glasses are banned in specific areas, though imho it ought also to have a basic ‘email your local representative about this’ function (but that’s me quibbling). Fcuk Meta glasses, basically (and maybe tell your MP).

Ban Ray

https://banray.eu/en/index.html

Sleepy Hollow: THE EPISTOLARY NARRATIVE BOOM CONTINUES! Is it a boom? Well I reckon this is now the third ‘pay actual cashmoney to receive a story in the post via the medium of letters and stuff’ project I have featured in here in the past year, which by the p1ss-poor standards of modern trend consultancy (or indeed all trend consultancy) probably warrants its inclusion in a ‘deck’ (you cnuts) – this one is, per the description, “a cozy, nostalgic reimagining of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, delivered to your mailbox as letters, sketches, and artifacts from the era of cassette tapes, flip phones, and zines”, and leaving aside the almost-visceral degree to which I have come to hate the term ‘cozy’ when applied to media (can we fcuking stop with the twee, please? Or if we must do twee can it at least be of the ‘twee as fcuk’ variety?) and the extent to which this is zeroing in on a very specifically-zeitgeisty obsession with the late-90s/early-00s media landscape, I can imagine this doing well – the people behind it have some real writing chops, it seems, and a background in the ARG space, and it you can sign up to find out when the Kickstarter launches should you want to get in early. Expect to find ‘personalised postal marketing campaigns’ cropping up in presentations soon, if they’re not already there.

Sleepy Hollow

https://stampact.co/
pitchfork.com/features/article/6176-tw...

UK Coke Prices: NOT THAT SORT OF COKE YOU BAG FIEND, YOU HORRIBLE LITTLE SESH GOBLIN. No, this is the horrible brown sugarwater, and, specifically, a running tracker of which particular UK supermarkets currently have the best bulk-buy deals for the stuff. Which, OK, fine, may not be a thrilling pull for you to click on the link (unless you have a particularly-troubling rate of soft-drink consumption), but given the likely hike in the price of everything coming down the line in the next year or so it offers a teasing glimpse of exactly the sort of fun microanalysis we’re all going to be indulging in in a few short months. Also, I am pretty sure (although details are sparse and I might of course be wrong) that this has been coded with AI and as such it struck me as an interesting example of something genuinely useful which can be spun up using public datasets and The Machine – should anyone want to do this for stuff that *I* like (cornershop rates on rolling tobacco and terrible white wine, thanks for asking) then I will be very grateful, ta.

UK Coke Prices

https://cokeprices.uk/

365 Days: I’ve always been something of a sucker for year-long artistic projects, not least because of the punishing degree of commitment it requires to ACTUALLY make a new thing every day for a whole year – this is one such project, in which Japanese artist Masayuki Kamimae made, er, a different abstract work each day, and then built this BEAUTIFUL website to house them; there’s something genuinely lovely about the way in which the ‘gallery’ space is presented as a circular area in digital space, which curves around your field of vision as you explore it and gives a very real sense of the scale of work involved in producing this volume of canvases; I also personally very much like the pieces, though your mileage will vary depending on the extent to which you are moved by Japanese calligraphy as a style, but even if the works don’t excite you there’s something quietly gorgeous about the presentation and the idea here.

365 Days

https://kamimae.com/365days/

The Covid Sound Map: Yes, yes, I know, they were BAD TIMES and they are IN THE PAST and you just want to forget all about the couple of years in which everyone was dying and it slightly felt like the world might be about to end (or at least the bits of it that concerned us) – what a radical departure from the world right now, eh kids? LOL! Anyway, I wouldn’t normally drag you back to the pandemic, but I somehow missed this at the time and discovered it this week and, with the distance of a few years, I think it is sort-of wonderful; the project, which compiled crowdsourced soundfiles from around the world during Covid and mapped them onto the globe using Google Earth, is by one Peter Stollery, and it is GORGEOUS – zoom around the globe and click into the individual soundfiles to hear people clapping for carers in Lowestoft, birdsong in Venice, public service announcements in Australia, a genuinely-odd sensation each time, taking you back to the past in eerie fashion in the way that only audio can. I was honestly transfixed by this, and the snapshot vignettes it provides of a(nother) time everything felt mad and jagged and weird.

The Covid Sound Map

earth.google.com/web/@7.15167276,26.56556...
https://www.petestollery.com/covid

Another song from Chinese American Bear, whose album I am properly excited about – this one, called ‘Turn Up The Radio’, won’t win any awards for lyrical excellence, but the sound and production hurtled me back in time about 18 years with some startling precision, and I think this is just a fcuking GREAT tune.

VIDEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTfjjjrg2yc

A brand new Baby Dave song is a TREAT, and this – ‘Am I Clean?’ – is no exception. For a ‘novelty’ side project the music here is far, far better than it needs to be, and the video made me laugh a LOT.

VIDEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A4K-5FmqXM

Since discovering them earlier this year I have become slightly obsessed with Codefendents, and they have a new album out and this is the lead single and while it is undoubtedly HUGELY UNCOOL I can’t help but love it immoderately. This is called The Fix.

VIDEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE5IlniS8Q8

Funeral for an AI: I know, I know, ‘people ‘falling in love’ with AI stories are OLD HAT and PLAYED OUT’ – this is slightly different, though, as Chandler Fritz attends a funeral for a woman’s AI…companion being held in New York. This is less about someone going loopy thanks to The Machine (although it is) and more about the experience of the funeral itself, the oddity of memorialising something that never existed…this is strange and weird and sad and poignant and, again, doesn’t punch down in a way that would have been easy; there’s no sense that the author pities the subject, just a sense of curiosity about the how, why and what that sits behind a Buddhist service for the memory of some code.

Funeral for an AI

dispatch-media.com/she-fell-for-an-ai-then-...

Desi Italian: When I read this Vittles piece about ‘Italian’ food in India I confess to having about seventeen different conniptions at the dishes being described and I can’t pretend that I was anything other than appalled at the concept of pasta in ‘pink’ sauce – but, equally, I appreciate that Italians are incredibly fcuking annoying about food, that there really are no rules when it comes to what tastes good (or what you *think* tastes good), and that one of the lovely things about living in a global village (this analogy really doesn’t work anymore, does it? Fcuk it, I can’t be bothered to think of a new one) is the cultural osmosis that you get through the meeting of peoples and cuisines…anyway, this is really interesting but I would suggest that my Italian readers take several deep breaths before clicking because, onestamente, checazzo fanno questi pazzi?

Desi Italian

www.vittlesmagazine.com/p/a-brown-peoples-versio...

Secrets of the Granny Shelf: I LOVE THIS SO MUCH. Tim Hayward in the FT takes a tour along the ‘granny shelf’, the bits of the supermarket that house all the foods that you know in your heart of hearts are only eaten by people who have been alive for 65+ years and which you would NEVER consume – sandwich spread, tinned chicken breast, Fray Bentos pies, the whole smorgasbord – and unexpectedly finds himself repeatedly singing the praises of tinned produce. This is funny, and fun, and a really nice idea for a piece, and will generally please anyone with even a passing knowledge of the horror that was the UK food landscape prior to about 1990 (a cultural hill I will die on – Italia90’s greatest contribution to British culture was nothing to do with men crying or football becoming less terrifyingly violent and racist but instead more to do with the range of foods stocked in supermarkets as part of the tournament tie-ins and how those changed mainstream British palates forever).

Secrets of the Granny Shelf

archive.is/20260404062725/https://w...

How The Spreadsheet Changed Everything: The actual title of this is ‘how it changed America’, but, well, fcuk the US-centrism of that perspective, THE WORLD IS BIGGER THAN YOU YOU SELF-ABSORBED FCUKS. Anyway, this is another ‘far more interesting than you might think’ piece, and a good series of arguments as to why the quantification of everything is not, necessarily, a net good in every single instance.

How The Spreadsheet Changed Everything

davidoks.blog/p/how-the-spreadsheet-re...

Building A Family Memory Encyclopedia: I thought this was a lovely idea and a really nice instructional post – Jeremy (no surname, apparently, like Madonna) writes about using Claude to help them build a Wiki of their family memories, including photos and text, built from fragments, interviews with family members and the remaining recollections of those who can still cast their minds back far enough to recall shared moments from decades past. I thought this was a wonderful usecase for AI, and the sort of thing which I can imagine people whose families are less catastrophically-decimated than mine might reasonably enjoy playing with.

Building A Family Memory Encyclopedia

https://whoami.wiki/blog/personal-encyclopedias

The Serbian Student Movement: All of the excitement about the student-led revolution in Nepal has pulled the focus away from the also-student-led revolution still going on in Serbia – this is a really interesting and illuminating essay in the LRB, in which Vincent Bevins summarises What Has Happened to date, and tracks the difficulties inherent in the shift from ‘student protest movement’ to ‘coherent group with agreed policies that might be ready to contest elections’. “When a student uprising unexpectedly toppled the government in Kathmandu last autumn, a meme circulated on social media urging Serbia to ‘do a Nepal.’ If there was a moment last spring when that might have been possible, it seems to have passed. Some of the students I interviewed knew that I’d written a book about mass protests which ended in disappointment. ‘If you are here, that is already a bad sign,’ one of them joked. But I wasn’t there because I thought they’d fail, and it’s not as though they’re confident they’re going to succeed. Some of the students asked whether I thought their movement could serve as a model for others. But it’s hard to think of other countries where ‘the students’ could stand in for the entire political opposition. In the US, university students are now seen as an elite class committed to a specific form of radical politics. If Serbia is an exception, it’s one explained in part by the history of Yugoslavia. The Socialist Federal Republic had its own student revolt in 1968, when protesters called on the government to tackle inequality and provide more jobs for graduates. Tito eventually said that ‘the students are right’ and gave in to some of their demands, promising a renewed commitment to socialist ‘self-management’ and improved living conditions for students, though in the end little changed. Most Serbian universities are public and almost half of students attend for free. Educational institutions are seen as belonging to the country as a whole, and many Serbians regard students as the children of the nation.”

The Serbian Student Movement

archive.is/20260325204024/https://w...

Prediction Markets and Fake Influencers: Not to say ‘I told you so’ but when the Polymarket x Substack linkup was announced however many weeks ago, I seem to recall saying something along the lines of ‘wow, what a wonderful ecosystem this is going to provide for grifters who want to pretend to have insider knowledge to BEAT THE (poly)market and who will happily charge for said ‘info’!’ AND LO! Ok, fine, this isn’t about Substack per se, but the ‘insider grift’ is well and truly here.

Prediction Markets and Fake Influencers

www.theverge.com/business/905466/polymark...

Industrial Policy for the Machine Age: Yes, yes, this is a document by OpenAI – I KNOW AND I AM SORRY. That said, I do think that this – published this week, and featuring a selection of ideas from literally nobody’s favourite company as to how governments might want to respond to the growing threat of AI to, well, all sorts of stuff – is worth reading, not least because its existence does rather highlight the fact that, whatever you might think of some of the ideas in here, SEEMINGLY NO FCUKING GOVERNMENT IS APPLYING ANYWHERE NEAR THIS DEGREE OF (TO BE CLEAR, MINIMAL) INTELLECTUAL RIGOUR TO THE QUESTION. You might think, for example, that there might have been some consultations around this, some Departmental position papers, but…nope! Anyway, some of this struck me as not-actually-dumb (for example, the concept of applying differential tax burdens to businesses dependent on the extent to which they deploy AI to replace human workers, say, and using the proceeds for broadly-redistributive ends), some of it is risible (are you saying, OpenAI, that governments should…invest in AI companies and then share the profits of those investments with the populace? Are you…suggesting that governments prop you up? HMMMMMMMMMMMMM), but, honestly, it was genuinely refreshing to see SOMEONE asking questions or positing ideas because fcuk me is there a paucity of serious thinking about the actual, practical steps we are going to need to start taking soonish should this stuff continue on its current trajectory.

Industrial Policy for the Machine Age

cdn.openai.com/pdf/561e7512-253e-424b-9...

The Moral Dyad: A short-but-smart (and useful) piece by Arnold Kling on the concept of the moral dyad, or, in layman’s terms, “The moral dyad is a phenomenon where we attribute agency only to one side and feeling only to another side. This is the villain-victim mindset.” As Kling points out, this was most recently visible in the reaction to the lawsuits against Meta (and Google) in the US last month, in which the claimant in the LA case in particular was depicted as entirely without agency and defenceless in the face of the AWESOME POWER OF BIG TECH which, I don’t know man, feels…reductive and wrong? Anyway, this is NOT LONG (praise be!) but does do a good job of introducing you to a helpful way of analysing any binary debate you happen to come across.

The Moral Dyad

https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/the-moral-dyad

Reform Vs Green: Non-anglos, and those of you who are English but who are somehow not GRIPPED by local election fever, can probably skip this, but for the rest of you I thought this piece in Prospect by Carys Afoko was a very good look at the respective status of the two ‘challenger’ parties in UK politics right now (although given they’re both polling consistently above the traditional two main parties I suppose we ought to call them the NEW FRONTRUNNERS) and how their approaches to campaigning differ – I’m personally not convinced by a lot of the current discourse from the trad liberal left about the supposed equivalence between the two in terms of the oddity of their membership base and the paucity of policy, but there’s something interesting about the contrast presented here.

Reform Vs Green

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/72849/are-refor...

The Anti-Muslim Agenda: Hussein Kesvani, who I have met a couple of times and who has always struck me, both online and off, as not only a nice man but a very, very smart one, writes here about the seemingly-accepted climate of Islamophobia which now maintains in the West (specifically the UK and US, but frankly you could extrapolate this to much of Europe as well imho) – there’s a lot in here, but Kesvani’s a very readable writer and the thesis is compelling, and you’d have to be something of a moron not to notice the way in which the appeal to ‘Christian values’ has become a popular dogwhistle amongst the racist right-wing over the course of the past couple of years. “Speaking to Muslim family and friends who have seen a marked rise in anti-Muslim hostility and attacks, both in the news and in their personal lives, all while existing on an internet where anti-Muslim content, misinformation and Islamophobic AI slop have become so common as to be unremarkable, a common sentiment emerges: Yes, we’ve been dealing with Islamophobia for a long time, and for many of us who grew up in the shadow of 9/11, it has lurked in the background of our formative years. But this time something feels different. We’re now dealing with an Islamophobia that’s far more abstract, fixated on Western civilizational collapse as an opportunity to instill racial purity, and far more sinister in its intentions. Its key influencers and figureheads, backed by millions of dollars in dark money and cryptocurrency, have taken to calling for the return of concentration camps and mass human trafficking under the guise of deportations, all accompanied by hacky AI hallucinations depicting crusades and civil wars. Indeed you’d be hard pressed to watch or listen to any right wing podcast or media outlet of late and not find that pretty much every conversation they have – be it on the economy, on healthcare, or even on pop culture, comes back to their singular fixation on the existence of Muslims. (That is when they take a break from fearmongering about trans people.) Islamophobia isn’t just a feature of Britain’s Conservatives or the Republican party, part of a package to sell endless austerity and open markets to predatory capital, it now occupies the entirety of right-wing political thought.”

The Anti-Muslim Agenda

www.welcometohellworld.com/a-pernicious-anti-muslim...

Title Scream: Type and graphic inspiration from 8-bit games! SO AESTHETIC! In a blocky way, but stilL!

Title Scream

https://titlescream.cameronaskin.com/

Strange and Luig: The final game this week is this BEAUTIFUL and very, very fun (if involved) little puzzler – I don’t want to explain too much as part of the joy is the surreal strangeness of the whole thing, but basically it harks back to a specific genre of title from the mid-00s in which you basically had to work out the order in which to interact with different elements across a large, multiscreen map, taking objects back and forth to unlock different areas and ‘story’ beats (I use the word ‘story’ advisedly here because, honestly, this is VERY WEIRD), and it is SO CUTE and nicely-animated and drawn, and generally it feels beautifully handmade and it’s a real pleasure to spend time with. So, er, I suggest that’s what you do RIGHT NOW.

Strange and Luig

https://dialobic.itch.io/strange-and-luig

Conservation of Bass: This little physics-y platformer does a very bad job of explaining itself, but is fortunately quite intuitive and is VERY smart once it gets going – you need to guide your little fish friend to the glass of water in each level, but the challenge comes from how you manipulate the environment around you to do so. If you don’t immediately ‘get’ how this works, please stick with it as once it clicks it is very satisfying indeed.

Conservation of Bass

https://emlise.itch.io/conservation-of-bass

Nounsense: Ooh, this is fun and all you wordcels will very much enjoy I think – the game in this daily puzzle game is to ‘guess the most common noun that follows the adjective’, which is simple and quick and a nice potential addition to the morning gamecycle. Mind you, I am embarrassingly sh1t at it and so am never going to play it again – see how you get on.

Nounsense

https://daily.gametje.com/nounsense/

Orange Ocean: A short (five mins or so) little game riffing on Snake, but with a surreal narrative layer which I rather enjoyed. EAT THE FRUITS, follow the story.

Orange Ocean

https://jakeonaut.itch.io/orange-ocean

Mr Breakfast: Breakfast, you may have heard, is the most important meal of the day – and noone is more convinced of this fact than the owner of this site, one Mr Breakfast. The site’s strapline is ‘All Breakfast, All The Time’ and MY GOD is it not joking about that – if you want breakfast-related information then you will find it here, all presented in the charmingly-retro fashion you might expect from a site whose heyday was very much 20 years ago. The site doesn’t appear to have been updated for 6 years – I really hope Mr Breakfast is ok – but there is SO much to love in here and I can’t help but adore the…unique enthusiasm that the owner has for the meal. The media endorsements are FABULOUS by the way – not least because they hark back to a time when the media reported on things like this rather than, I don’t know, how we’re all being driven mad by the web and the apps and the scroll. “September 30, 2003 – Bay News 9 TV of Tampa Bay, Florida chooses MrBreakfast.com as “the best the web has to offer”; airs an informative segment about the website.” CAN WE GO BACK, PLEASE? BREAKFAST RETVRN!!!!

Mr Breakfast

https://www.mrbreakfast.com/

Magnified Sand: Who wouldn’t want to explore a whole website dedicated to showing you what sand looks like when magnified about 10million times, to, per the blurb, “explore the world of sand”? NO FCUKER!

Magnified Sand

https://magnifiedsand.com/