CurioBot

‘Rather Right Wing’: Speaking of ‘ominous signals’, this piece about Bumble in Germany and its recent changes to how one can designate one’s politics on the platform felt…not great! It’s a German article, but right-click to translate it in Chrome and you can enjoy learning about the fact that the dating app quietly introduced a new way of describing one’s politics in the Germanic world, one which exists to seemingly soften and euphemise and, well, normalise a host of potentially QUITE HORRIBLE viewpoints. What do you think designating oneself ‘rather right wing’ (an option which has replaced ‘conservative’ when selecting one’s political orientation) might mean, in a country with the AfD continuing to poll strongly and the, er, particular history which Germany is burdened with?

‘Rather Right Wing’

https://vliestext.cc/texte/bumble-eher-rechts-rechtsruck-dating-app-politik/

Slow Trains, Fast Country: More ChinaChat, again thanks to Alex, this is a piece featuring translated interviews with people travelling vast distances across China to reunite with family over the New Year celebrations, and offers another interesting corrective to to the ‘all urban, all the time!’ picture presented by the majority of the past few years’ sinohype. “For years, high-speed rail has been held up as one of China’s proudest achievements. In this piece, I simply hope to turn the spotlight, for a moment, towards the more than 300 million migrant workers whose labor keeps Chinese cities running. We rarely see them in headlines, but no city could function a single day without them. Instead of boarding the sleek, ubiquitous bullet trains, millions of migrant workers choose the slowest options still running: old slow trains, hard-seat carriages, overnight journeys that leave your back aching and your legs numb. Each of them has a reason for choosing this route. Most of those reasons have to do with children and parents, with saving every possible yuan for the people waiting at home.” These are, in many cases, very poignant indeed – the contrast between the very human worry and exhaustion you hear described in these accounts and what Alex termed “all the dancing robot tech pr0n” is stark.

Slow Trains, Fast Country

https://www.yuzhehe.com/p/slow-trains-in-a-fast-country
https://www.linkedin.com/in/adjwilson/?originalSubdomain=uk

Why AI Writing Is Still So Sh1t: So the actual title of this is ‘semantic ablation’ which, honestly, what the fcuk? Despite that horror, this is actually a very good, clear and comprehensible piece about all the reasons why AI models are, and continue to be, absolutely dogsh1t prose stylists – the short answer here is ‘because of being anchored to the linguistic mean, where nothing stylistically interesting happens’, but there’s a far more nuanced explanation in the full version which I really do recommend you click. Not long – in fact mercifully short – but probably the most helpful text I have yet read on why you should never, ever get The Machine to write copy for you (unless your readers are clueless morons who don’t deserve quality prose – which, you know what, they might well be, fcuk those cnuts).

Why AI Writing Is Still So Sh1t

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/16/semantic_ablation_ai_writing

The People Who Resist AI in China: Anothe really interesting dispatch from China via Jeffrey Ding, who this week has collated a bunch of writing from people who are actively resisting AI adoption, contrary to the oft-conceived popular opinion that everyone in the country is embracing this with both hands. An interesting degree of nuance and a nice counterpoint to the prevailing ‘the West might hate AI but everyone else loves it’ narrative that I have been guilty of peddling at times. A note of caution, though, which links to the previous piece; as the accounts suggest, the meaningful degree to which it’s possible to ‘resist’ this technology is lessening by the week. “Escaping AI and finding a job less susceptible to its replacement is the first thought for most people worried about AI affecting their work and livelihoods. However, as AI capabilities continue to improve, like playing a battle royale game, the safe zone is shrinking.”

The People Who Resist AI in China

https://docs.google.com/document/d/12NMhOY9jgvVdir442cFdslns_HrOBl2dHFQDobgB3yM/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.gdldbzbpb16n

AI & Jobs: Some Scenarios: One day I am going to stop wanging on about this, but only when either a) AI vanishes or b) when it feels like governments have started looking this problem squarely in the face rather than staring up at the sky and just sort of humming a vague refrain about ‘economic recalibration’ and ‘reskilling’ whenever it’s mentioned’. Derek Thompson is reliably smart on this stuff, and the various outline scenarios that he posits here are clear, sensible and, to my mind, non-hyperbolic, not always the case with this stuff. Here he sets out a world in which AI *won’t* destroy all the jobs and the economy and one it which it *will* (pick your fighter! Obviously midpoints on this continuum are very much available) – and, look, I know which one my money’s on, but let’s all hope I’m as wrong about this as I have tended to be about every single big political call in my lifetime!

AI & Jobs: Some Scenarios

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/568334c2-4122-4fe9-9435-5b2bdedae769

Listless Liberalism: The journey undergone by the term ‘liberal’ over the course of the past century is a semantically-interesting one, from the classic Rawlsian position of the mid-20thC to the current version which, whatever you might think of Rawls, has travelled…some distance from the place you end up if you take the ‘state of nature’ thought experiment in any way seriously. This piece takes broadly defines liberalism in its most modern, American and derided incarnation – which, you know, is fine, set your terms and all that – and assesses its failings through the prism of two books, the much-discussed ‘vision for the future’ described in ‘Abundance’, and ‘Liberalism: In Defence of Freedom’  by Cass Sunstein. While this is annoyingly myopic in its focus on the US – GUYS THIS IS A GLOBAL CONVERSATION WE ARE HERE TOO YOU KNOW – the conclusions it draws about the reasons for the ‘failures’ of liberalisms’ current shape feel accurate in the extreme: “The problem with the aesthetics and the problem with the politics are, it turns out, one and the same. Both display a hall monitor’s love of rules and regulations; both wish to reduce the gnarl of a person to the simple purity of a plot on a graph. As Trilling put it in a passage about a similarly blinkered worldview, “what is meant negatively is that man cannot be comprehended in a formula; what is meant positively is the sense of complication and possibility, of surprise, intensification, variety, unfoldment, worth.” The sort of art and argument that could make its audience want to be liberal would have to begin by regarding its audience as agents. It would have to enlist them as equals instead of demoting them to the role of pupils; it would have to demonstrate just what form—or, more appropriately to the liberal sensibility, forms—the beautiful abrasions of communal self-determination might take.”

Listless Liberalism

https://archive.is/20260201181708/https://thepointmag.com/criticism/listless-liberalism/

Idle Civ: Another of Lynn’s recent picks, this is a GREAT little Civilisation analogue – rather than having to micromanage stuff it just sort of happens in the tab, with you ducking in to select knowledge tree upgrades and what to build and occasionally where to move units, and, look, just open this up and check in every five minutes during the working day as a ‘reward’ for, er, having typed three lines or read an email, I guarantee it will improve your professional existence no end (if not, admittedly , your output – but, honestly, fcuk that, who cares, it’s all pointless anyway).

Idle Civ

https://bitmagic.ai/games/idle-civ/game.html
https://arnicas.substack.com/

Cover Story: Via Lauren’s ‘Essential Ephemera’ newsletter comes this cute little game – select 10 tiles to uncover at random and, based on what’s revealed, guess the album title and artist. The difficulty here very much depends on whether you uncover the text of the album’s title which is often included on the artwork, but it’s a generally fun little mechanic.

Cover Story

https://rockhall.com/cover-story/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-epstein-4893b44

Scoundrel: This is a little roguelike played with a deck of standard playing cards – this doesn’t *quite* work (there are a few too many obvious failstates that I’ve encountered which block you arbitrarily based on the luck of the draw), but there’s something interesting about the baseline idea and mechanics here which are worth exploring further I think.

Scoundrel

https://scoundrel-vanilla.netlify.app/

World Claimed: Another year, ANOTHER version of the Million Dollar Homepage! This time it’s a whole globe you can mark with whatever you like – it’s divided into a fcuktonne of different squares, and you can choose to buy one or more of them to graffiti with whatever you like. Astonishingly, and despite the fact that this must be the 300th variant on Alex Tew’s insanely-influential project that I have seen over the years, this has sold over 9,000 ‘plots’ of virtual land, suggesting that someone is actually making money out of this, suggesting that a) there’s nothing new under the sun; b) just because I have seen something a million times doesn’t mean anyone else will have seen it once; c) man, people will spend money on some weird sh1t.

World Claimed

https://worldclaimed.com/

The Museum of Money: Do you ever think that society’s relationship with lucre is somewhat…well…unhealthy? Do you ever wonder whether our millennia-long veneration of COIN is a good thing? Well cast all those questions and concerns aside as you prepare to experience the MUSEUM OF MONEY, an actual, honest-to-goodness, real-life ‘attraction’ (lol, America, this is what you have instead of culture, SHAME) in Dallas, Texas, whose website I here present for your enjoyment and delectation. The Museum of Money is one of those DEEPLY EXPERIENTIAL setups which seemingly exists solely as a backdrop for people to ‘create content’ against – so, for example, you can sit in a BATH OF MONEY like some sort of Temu Scrooge McDuck, ‘dive into the vault of Money Magic!’, chat with, er, AI 80s Patrick Bateman-analogue ‘Dex Diamondhands’ (WHAT THE FCUK IS THIS HODL BULLSHIT IS IT 2021 AGAIN???) about money (also, why?), or – and I feel the need to quote this in full, because it made me feel quite queasy I don’t see why I should suffer alone – “step into our low‑key luxe zone, where the stakes feel high, the fantasy runs richer, and every photo cashes out as pure boss‑level bragging rights.” This is, let’s be clear, FCUKING HORRIFIC, but also a quite perfect act of entirely-unintentional satire. “Through playful, hands-on exhibits and data-driven storytelling, we trace money’s journey from minting presses to blockchain nodes. Laugh, learn, and leave richer in every sense because every dollar holds a story, and here, you’re the storyteller.” Tickets start at $30 – EVERYONE LEAVES RICHER!!! You know what? We fcuking deserve everything that’s coming to us, honestly.

The Museum of Money

https://www.museumofmoney.com/

Slow Ways: I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings – LOL I FCUKING LOVE IT – but, for those of you, like me, stuck on Damp Brexit Racism Island, winter is still with us for a few weeks longer yet; I know that it’s late-February and you *think* spring is on its way, but it’s important to remember that we are set for approximately one week of illusory warmth before it gets sh1t again for a bit – IT HAPPENS EVERY YEAR AND WE ARE ALWAYS FOOLED BY FAKE SPRING FFS, how is it that we can never, ever remember? Anyway, this link is one for when the weather picks up a bit and things like ‘going for a nice walk’ become legitimate options rather than cruel taunts; Slow Ways is a crowdsourced map of the best walking routes around the UK, a BRILLIANT resource for anyone outdoorsy. “Slow Ways is our citizen-made national walking network, connecting all of Britain’s towns, cities and national landscapes. It is enjoyed and made by people like you. Use Slow Ways for the everyday and the epic: to discover local walks, create challenges and plan long-distance journeys. We are a not-for-profit initiative created by thousands of citizens. Together we are making it easier to walk from A to B because we believe that if people know they can walk somewhere, they will! Here you’ll find over 10,000 walks that have been shared by people across the country, including thousands of reviews with practical advice and friendly guidance to support your adventures.” Honestly, SUCH a good idea – bookmark it, send it to your walking friends, make plans to hike the Ridgeway in the Summer, or alternatively enjoy the warm glow you get from the concept and then close the tab and get back to browsing like the internet-poisoned webgoblin we both know you at heart are.

Slow Ways

https://beta.slowways.org/

The Stamps of Mt. Fuji: So I was ignorant of this, but I *think* this is about climbing Mount Fuji and the fact that, at the various staging posts and huts that exist on the trail, one can collect various stamps marking one’s ascent The site’s made by a design studio called PixelJam; per the blurb, “In 2022, I climbed Mount Fuji via the Yoshida trail, a humbling experience that left a lasting impact. The simplicity of iron-branding on walking sticks fascinated me, as did the warm hospitality of hut owners. Motivated by these encounters, I began an art project to share Mount Fuji’s stations and stamps with people worldwide. Please welcome this special edition of the ½8 journal, where we navigate from the 5th station all the way to the summit.” This is lovely – calm and meditative and, oddly, the autoplaying ambient soundscape is in no way irritating, which is a small but noteworthy point considering how grating I usually find ‘THE SOUNDS OF NATURE’ in these sorts of projects. I still don’t really understand the ‘stamps’ thing, though.

The Stamps of Mt. Fuji

https://fuji.halfof8.com/

Infinite Terrain: A small, silly, beautiful, pointless little procedural generation toy, via Lynn, which lets you guide a small red ball around an initially-empty landscape; as you move, so a natural landscape springs up around you, with grass and trees and flowers and rocks appearing to mark your path. You can tweak the procgen settings in a sidebar to adjust the fecundity of the landscape, and while this is basically just a little tech/coding demo, there’s something genuinely very relaxing about just sort of rolling through a meadow that gets created as you pass, like some sort of non-stressful version of Monkeyball (which, if you missed it the other week, SLAPS in-browser).

Infinite Terrain

https://mesq.me/infinite-terrain/
https://arnicas.substack.com/
https://monkeyball-online.pages.dev/

Women’s Sizing: One of the easiest ways in which to be reminded of one’s privilege as a man is to take a fleeting look at the general insanity of women’s fashion – capricious, often actively-harmful to its wearers (I refuse to believe that the people who design women’s shoes aren’t malevolent sadists; it is 2026 ffs! They shouldn’t hurt you that much!) and with sizing protocols that are at best batsh1t insane and at worst an act of determined psychological cruelty (“what’s that? You expect a size 10 to be a consistent measurement rather than an arbitrary designation that could apply to anything from a thimble to a circus tent? YOU IDIOT! YOU RUBE! YOU MORON!”) – here, the dataviz geniuses at The Pudding apply their dedicated craft to exploring the ways in which women’s clothes sizing (in the US, at least – this is very much working of American population and clothing data) tends to fit adolescents more than it does actual grown adults, and how widely-divergent sizing is across brands, and how, objectively, mental this is when you look at it as a phenomenon across the industry. Of course, none of this matters given we’re all going to be reduced to stitching our own smocks out of burlap come the eventual collapse of the labour market, but, still, it shouldn’t be this way!

Women’s Sizing

https://pudding.cool/2026/02/womens-sizing/

The AntiFreeze Gallery: Very much one for those of you currently ‘enjoying’ life in North America, specifically the USA, and who would like to contribute to an archival project recording the, er, Very Specific Times you are currently enduring. Day Lane wrote to me, saying “My new project is the Antifreeze Archive (antifreeze.gallery/), an attempt to archive all the pieces of paper that are produced by communities in response to federal occupation of American cities. Things like: flyers, posters, Know-Your-Rights cards, ice hotline cards, etc. We’re asking people in American cities to mail in submissions to be preserved for future generations.” This feels like a useful and important project – so much of what is being done at an on-street and grassroots level to protest ICE is analogue, and it feels significant somehow to seek to document and preserve actions taken by people in the face of fascism – should you be in the US, or know people who are, and be in a position to contribute materials to the project then you can find full details about how to do so on the site; it’s a newish initiative and so the archive’s limited at present; spread the word and help it grow.

The AntiFreeze Gallery

https://www.antifreeze.gallery/
http://antifreeze.gallery/

Bet on CCTV: I am not quite sure where Roobet, the gambling site on which this is hosted, is based, but you can’t access it from the UK – VPN yourself in, though, and you will be confronted with what feels like a VERY 2026 digital pursuit, a stream of…a crossroads! Per this writeup, for anyone who doesn’t fancy spoofing their IP address in order to, er, watch traffic, “it offers a break for online bettors from traditional gambling games and classic slot experiences by leaning into real-life street traffic by way of CCTV footage. That simple mechanic has the game going viral. In this online betting game, players will be watching licensed camera feeds while an AI counts the number of vehicles that cross a set detection zone. The count is shown with on-screen overlays, and everyone watching that round sees the same footage at the same time, so the outcome is clearly evident.” I am, honestly, slightly agog at this – I know that thanks to Polymarket, Kalshi and the algolottery of THE CREATOR ECONOMY (lol) we have never lived in a more gamble-y culture, but the idea that people will just sit at a desk and bet actual cashmoney on the number of cars that will pass an intersection in the coming 30s is…well, I suppose it’s not technically any more mental than betting on how many throw ins there are going to be in the second half of a third-tier Chinese football match, but it FEELS worse, somehow. How long do you think before someone works out where these intersections are and figures out how to rig the system by bulk-booking Ubers to drive past en-masse to beat the odds? Er, asking for a friend.

Bet on CCTV

https://roobet.com/casino/game/155io-cctv-game-rush-hour

Current: This has been VERY BUZZY this week – Current is a new RSS reader, iOS-only, which has some neat design gubbins baked in, including a feature which removes the inbox-style ‘unread’ counter from your incoming feeds, thereby, per the designer, eliminating the unnecessary sense of pressure that comes from all those unread issues of Curios piling up (I know, you know, let us never speak of it). This all looks very nice and might well be very useful for all of you Cult-of-Mac people looking for an improved RSS setup – I have to say my goodwill for the project was slightly dented by its homepage, which, while beautiful, has a scroll-reveal design which…forces…you…to…read…at…the…pace…of…a…not…particularly…gifted…six…year…old, and which as a result really got on my tits.

Current

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/current-reader/id6758530974
https://www.terrygodier.com/current

Link Bouquet: A cute idea, this – send someone a bundle of links, where each separate url is represented by a different flower in a bouquet. I mean, it’s functionally pretty useless and a bit of a bugger to actually add and arrange the links, but I quite like the idea of thinking of links as a gift bundle. After all, what is Web Curios but a present, conceived of and crafted and presented to YOU each week, like the fundamentally-unwanted and unpleasantly-visceral leavings of a an old and increasingly-incontinent cat? It is NOTHING.

Link Bouquet

https://www.linkbouquet.com/

Fantasy Herd: OH GOD I LOVE THIS IDEA! Never let it be said that life in New Zealand works at a slower pace than elsewhere in the world – but, well, they are doing ‘fantasy cow herding’ as a game, so make of that what you will. This is a SUPERB bit of promo work by NZ dairy Meadow Fresh, via Elle – they’re basically tracking the milk production of their cows, and letting punters create fantasy, er, milking squads from them in the manner of fantasy football; each week (I think – I confess to not having delved into the exact mechanics) the stats will be tracked (milk production, etc) and the cows allotted scores, and the rankings determined, and there will be POINTS and PRIZES and possibly a deep sense of national pride at stake as…some Kiwis compete to be the BEST virtual cow selector of all! This is a really fun idea and feels like something that could very much be picked up and replicated by the Right, Enterprising Brand, or just a local farmer looking to make a few quid. Can we expand this? Can we gamify the entirety of the food chain? Fantasy Battery Hens? Betting on which calves will render the greatest quantity of sellable meat when finally brought to slaughter? Have I…have I just sullied this whole thing? I have, haven’t I?

Fantasy Herd

https://www.fantasyherd.co.nz/

Fictional Inbox: OK, technically this is called ‘Unread’, but my title’s more descriptive and I am sticking with it. Neat little LLM-based site, this, which on landing asks you to nominate anyone you can imagine and then spins up a Gmail account for them, ‘imagining’ their inbox, their sent items, their drafts…Per all of these sorts of things, the LLM’s textual output is always a little thinner and less impressive than your ideal imagination would want it to be, but it’s quite a fun distraction to run through a laundry list of characters from your favourite books or films and get a glimpse into another potential dimension of their character; I just got it to spin up the inbox of Richard Papen, the cipherlike narrator of ‘The Secret History’, and it gave me a nice, imagined set of backchannel comms between him and the other protagonists (something which would no doubt cause Donna Tartt no degree of psychic pain, but we can probably assume that she is never going to know about this, so it’s probably fine), and it’s worth a play with your own personal longstanding favourites. Oh, it will also do ‘real’ people too, although there are limits (for some reason I just decided to try ‘Katie Price’, and, perhaps thankfully, it demurred on ‘safety’ grounds).

Fictional Inbox

https://unread.ooo/

Sandboxels: Well this is an absolute JOY. Friend of Curios, TinyAwards judge and prolific creator of Fun Internet Toy Things Neal Agarwal is back with a NEW TOY (not one of his own; he’s bought and badged it, I think), and it is a GOOD ONE. Sandboxels initially looks like one of those pixellated material simulators, which let you create geological landscapes by dropping various digital ‘elements’ into a box and seeing how they accrete, basically like those old ‘paint with sand’-type souvenirs that were seemingly everywhere in the 1980s (this…this won’t mean anything to anyone but me, will it?), but then you start to play and you realise it is VERY interactive. You can drop a DIZZYING array of things into the box – elements and animals and flora of various sorts, and, er, WEAPONS, and then sort of just see what happens. Create a mountain! Create a valley! Fill the valley with people! DROWN THEM IN A RIVER OF FIRE! This, honestly, goes DEEP – there are all sorts of hidden interactions you can discover depending on how you combine various elements, and it all gets VERY chaotic very quickly, and it’s quite hard to restrain yourself from visiting Biblical-style (Old Testament, to be clear) pixellated horror on the tiny homunculi. Except, well, they’re not real, so why exercise restraint? BE THE SADISTIC GOD YOU KNOW YOU HAVE ALWAYS DREAMED OF BECOMING!

Sandboxels

https://neal.fun/sandboxels/

Would you like a kinetic, slightly chaotic track that veers between hiphop, d’n’b, industrial and hardcore? YES YOU WOULD! The artist is Lip City, the track is called ‘Legs In A Snare’ and what is it with this whole ‘seven genres in one song’ thing at the moment? I quite like it.

VIDEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyqnjGmY3Nk

Chinese American Bear make reliably FUN music, and this is no exception – from the tune to the puppets in the video it is impossible to listen to this without a grin on your face (or it is for me, at least, I can’t speak to you, who the fcuk are you, etc etc). This is called ‘All The People’.

VIDEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1qWWVvICjI

Progressives: A short story in Granta, by Saadat Hasan Manto, about a ‘progressive’ writer in 20thC India and about the anticipation, and then the reality, of a visit from one of his heroes. This is funny and sinister and has a certain tonal quality that reminded me of reading RK Narayan when I was younger, and I enjoyed it very much indeed.

Progressives

https://granta.com/progressives/

The Feeling of the Old World Fading Away: Tonally this is something of a companion piece to the last one; Heather McCalden writes about the weird sensation of living in the between times, or perhaps it’s simply a factor of everything being so fractal and fractured that there’s no sensation that it would even be possible to gain a snapshot image of the whole, or even a part of it, with any meaningful clarity. “For a long time, I’ve been experiencing something I can only describe as the feeling of the old world fading away. It’s as if some deeply embedded internal architecture is slowly dissolving and leaving in its particle wake a sorrow, for which there is no name. The causes are spoken of: the global conflicts, the ecological catastrophes, the social injustices—but the actual, visceral, experience of losing a coherence that held reality together, remains under examined. To be clear, this sorrow is not about nostalgia or “getting older”, this is about living in a moment when the question, “Has the world changed or have I?” is irrelevant because the separation of the self and the world no longer makes any sense.”

The Feeling of the Old World Fading Away

https://dirt.fyi/article/2026/02/the-feeling-of-the-old-world-fading-away

The Truth About The LongevityMaxxers: You know what? I think this might be true. Machiel Reyneke is a South African man who works in investments, so exactly why he has ended up writing a few hundred words on, er, the fact that people who are looking to extend their lifespan to infinity are probably in actual fact vampires who are preparing to out themselves to the wider world is something of a mystery to me. That said, YOU DO YOU, MACHIEL! He opens with “I recently wrote about what the longevity experts don’t tell you. Since then, I’ve been thinking about why so many of the people in this space are obsessed with blood transfusions specifically. It seemed like a strange fixation — until I looked at the evidence properly. I think they’re vampires. Not metaphorically. I think the modern longevity movement is a vampire disclosure program. Let me explain.” AND THEN HE DOES. This is the best free prompt for a super-successful new series of vampire fictions I have seen in years, and you’d best believe that there are dozens of people working on the thinly–veiled Peter Thiel/Lestat fanfic crossover that, presumably, will make them millions. IT COULD BE YOU, GET SCRIBBLING!

The Truth About The LongevityMaxxers

https://machielreyneke.com/blog/vampires-longevity/
https://machielreyneke.com/blog/longevity-lessons/

Cycling Mikey: I think the whole ‘cyclists vs motorists’ debate, which rages in I presume every city in the world but which feels particularly pointed in London, is perhaps the greatest example of how the web has made us all a bit worse in some respects.While I know which side of the argument I come down on in theory as a non-driver and someone who generally believes that the world would be better with fewer cars in it, I am also aware that a lot of cyclists behave like total and utter cnuts, don’t know the rules of the road and possess a degree of self-righteousness that would feel out of place on a fcuking nun, let alone a middle-aged accountant called Dave who earns six figures and is kitted out in head to toe Rafa and who can’t stop at traffic lights because he has a big call with the team in Bangalore, pedestrians be damned (Dave, if you happen to read this I promise it is NOTHING PERSONAL) – basically, as I was discussing with Rob Manuel earlier this week, everything is now a binary fight and there is nothing in between, and, inevitably, both sides are awful, leading to situations where you basically want EVERYONE to die in the pileup. Anyway, this is a piece about an infamous chronicler of the inequities of London motorists, who goes by the name ‘Cycling Mikey’ – I think it’s fair to say that Mikey is…quite unusual, let’s say, and doesn’t deserve the repeated attempts on his life that motorists seem to increasingly be making, but I don’t think anyone comes out of this hugely well.

Cycling Mikey

https://www.the-londoner.co.uk/jeremy-vine-loves-him-motorists-hate-him-is-this-londons-most-controversial-cyclist/

Searching For Birds: This is a really beautiful bit of interactive webdesign, which also happens to be a really good essay about birdwatching (specifically in North America) and how people get into it – honestly, though, this is one of the nicest bit of informationally-rich longform webdesign I have seen in years, it’s very special indeed.

Searching For Birds

https://searchingforbirds.visualcinnamon.com/

The San Fran March For Billionaires: Among all the other STUFF HAPPENING, you might have missed the news that a small group of San Franciscans came out to march in favour of billionaires the other week. This is a short writeup of the event in the Mission Local, which I am including solely because it made me laugh out loud on more than one occasion. THE PHOTOS!  THE QUOTES! Honestly, this is short but beautiful.

The San Fran March For Billionaires

https://missionlocal.org/2026/02/sf-march-for-billionaires-bust/