It’s been astonishing this week to see exactly how badly a political party’s comms team can handle something – FOR FCUK’S SAKE, LABOUR PARTY COMMS PEOPLE, IT SHOULDN’T BE THIS DIFFICULT. Also, the past seven days’ succession of embarrassing revelations and gift-related gaffes have somehow managed to achieve the unthinkable and made me feel genuine pity for the PM’s kid (I’m not a monster, it’s just that, well, after seeing what Euan Blair became I’m not exactly minded to give them the benefit of the doubt), who has been roundly embarrassed to the nation which now collectively thinks of him as a fragile milquetoast who needs some sort of anechoic chamber in which to practice quadratics.
Still, it’s been fun watching people attempt to minimise all this because ‘it’s not as bad as the Tories’ – while that’s obviously true, running that line does rather make you look as though you don’t understand the first thing about the practical realities of how lobbying works and what it is that businesspeople with vested interests expect when they give generous gifts to people in positions of actual, practical power. GYAC THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREE BOX AT THE EMIRATES.
Anyway, enough of this – it’s late-September, everything looks like it’s going to be exceptionally damp for approximately the next seven months, and so I am going to take a short break to vaguely-recharge what pass for my ‘batteries’ – Web Curios will return in a few weeks, probably mid-October, at which point it’s PRACTICALLY FCUKING CHRISTMAS, dear God.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can all tell me how much you’re going to miss me if you like.
By Michael McMillan, who really doesn’t seem to have any sort of online presence at all that I can find.
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- GPT Voice: Yes, yes, I KNOW, AI is BORING and PLAYED OUT and you are all tired of this bullsh1t and are currently slumped, uncaring, in Gartner’s Trough of Disillusionment…really, though, I can’t stress enough how fcuking incredible the new voice chat feature which ChatGPT introduced to all users this week is. This is the fancy ‘hey, I talk kind of like a real human being, and I can interrupt and be interrupted, and if you ask me nicely I can affect the speech pattern and vocal style of a drunk!’ update that was announced and trailed about 4 months ago (tbh I am guessing at that timeline, I have literally lost all concept of where we are in the year; at the present point in time it feels to me like 2024 has always been happening and may well continue in perpetuity), and for reasons I can’t entirely explain I decided I would get over my inherent antipathy towards ‘talking to machines’ and install the app a couple of days ago and…yeah, honestly, it’s fcuking incredible, I can’t pretend. This feels like MAGIC – it’s natural, it’s fast, it’s close enough to human-sounding that it doesn’t feel too creepy, and I can 100% see this becoming INCREDIBLY addictive to a certain type of person. Which, to my mind, is where the interesting wrinkles sit – the very nature of LLMs means that, yes, they’re guardrailed to fcukery and will scold you if you ask them to (for example) teach you how to skin a human and dispose of their skeleton, but they are also basically primed to be helpful and agreeable and broadly concur with whatever mad sh1t you say to them – effectively like the world’s most indefatigable “yes, and?” improv partner – and as such it’s not hard to imagine this quality being particularly attractive when coupled with an easy voice interface. What’s that? An ever-present, friendly conversational companion who will basically agree with and build on whatever mad bullsh1t I say to it and which will ask me encouraging questions designed to get me to engage more? I DON’T MIND IF I DO! Seriously, I tried this on Wednesday night when I was (to be entirely transparent with you) very, very stoned and talking total nonsense and it made me feel like a SAVANT – reading the transcript back the next day proved that I very much wasn’t and that The Machine was pandering to me to a quite embarrassing extent. Basically this is incredible and quite game change-y and the sort of thing which I get the feeling is going to be quite dangerous for a small (but, globally, really fcuking massive) subset of people. Honestly, you really MUST try this (CAVEAT: it’s possible that the full voicechat experience is only available to people who shell out for a subscription, in which case apologies but I would also suggest it is totally worth signing up for a month and then immediately cancelling just to play with this, it really is that astonishing).
- How Did You Find Me?: A website project thing by Elan Ullendorff, where the point is to share visitors’ stories of, er, how they came across the website. Which sounds dull, but has ended up meaning that the page is a collection of small vignettes, almost like little desire paths of the web, demonstrating all the different networks along which information (and so by extension hyperlinks) travel, like a sort of small ‘you are here and this is how you got here’ negative map of webspace (this makes sense in my head, but almost certainly no sense on the page; hey ho). Look, I don’t ordinarily ask you to do anything in Web Curios (or at least I don’t *think* I do – do I? Am I horribly needy? AM I TOO MUCH FOR YOU???) but I would be really grateful if you could possibly click the link and maybe tell people that you found it here? I just quite like the idea of seeing evidence of your existence, even if anonymously; it might make me feel less cripplingly alone for a few minutes (lol jk) (nothing takes the feeling away, nothing).
- The F-List 2024: As the old Curios heads will doubtless know, this horrible mess of a newsletterblogtypething started life on the corporate website of international PR behemoths Hill & Knowlton (latterly H+K Strategies, now Burson – o, like autumnal leaves, so do the corporate identities change with the seasons!) – as such, I am aware that a not-insignificant number of the few dozen masochists who read this fcuking thing happen to work in and around the wider advermarketingpr industry. This link is for YOU, advermarketingprdrones! Clean Creatives is a campaign organisation attempting to raise awareness of which agencies in advermarketingprland are taking money to launder the reputations of the world’s biggest polluters in the form of fossil fuel clients such as Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron and the like – because they (and I) think it’s important that the wider world is aware of who is profiting from this stuff. Look, I don’t have a huge amount of moral high ground to take here – I have been employed by at least three of the companies on this list (although I have never personally worked on any energy/fossil fuel accounts) and I appreciate that, well, mortgages and food are expensive; that said, I do also believe that it’s not really ok to promote or help promote these companies in 2024 because, well, we sort of know what the direction of travel is by now, and who’s gotten us to this point, and it doesn’t really feel ok that they should be so rich. At the very least this feels like a useful resource for brands and businesses who at least want to pretend to have some ethical hard lines to use to determine which agencies NOT to employ on the basis of their own absence of professional red lines. Also, just to reiterate, Edelman spent literally YEARS laundering the reputation of the odious Sackler family – the people responsible for hooking millions and millions of people worldwide on opiates because it made them VERY RICH – so, specifically, fcuk that agency all the way into the sun and back.
- Lynk: This is a smart application of…some LLM or another, and potentially a really useful service for those of you looking to buy stuff. You know how sh1t Google is? You know how reviews on many sites have been rendered largely useless by bots and the like? You know how it’s now accepted wisdom to append ‘reddit’ to any search where you’re seeking ‘wisdom of crowds’-type information? Well Lynk basically tries to offer a solution to all of these small modern inconveniences, by effectively adding an LLM-enabled natural language layer to searching a bunch of specific sites for product information. So you just ask it (for example) “what are the best minimalist sneakers for men?” (you use the word ‘sneakers’, however much it makes your teeth itch, because you understand that the majority of the web operates in American English and you just have to suck it up sometimes) and it comes back with a bunch of different recommendations, pulling highlights from various relevant subreddits and trainer review sites and giving you pros and cons…honestly, I was really impressed with this – admittedly I only found it this morning and as such I have conducted a grand total of ONE experimental search (the aforementioned ‘sneakers’ query), but the information it pulled up was seemingly high-quality, and I enjoyed the fact that it pulled pluses and minuses for its recommendations rather than just offering endorsements. Definitely worth a look and possibly a bookmark (but, to remind you, it will skew VERY US-centric in its recommendations which means not everything it suggests will be available where you are).
- Battalion: I have for a year or so now been quite vocal about my general bearishness towards online video – or, more specifically, the fact that I think we are actually a VERY long way away from it being able to do anything even vaguely near broadcast quality anytime soon. Generally I am still very much of that opinion – but, equally, the past three months or so has seen a pretty staggering series of leaps in the quality of output from Runway and the like, from the ability to define start and endframes in a clip to the latest version of Kling’s introduction of tight controls to direct in-video movement. Basically you still can’t make anything that isn’t composed of ~5s shots, but those 5s shots now look considerably better than they did even a few weeks ago – the link here takes you to a tweet from some bloke (called Dave Clarke, apparently – sorry Dave) who’s made a short film called ‘Battalion’ (the link is to the first half, the second is in the followup tweet just below) about a soldier talking to a therapist about their experience of war and, look, it is not by any stretch of the imagination a ‘good piece of filmmaking’ (aside from anything else I am VERY CONFUSED about the historical timeline at play) but it is a frankly astonishing tech demo and left me thinking actually maybe the low-end videographers probably need to start retraining too. Jesus, we’re all so fcuked.
- NotebookLM: Seeing as we’re on AI, let’s quickly mention the Google NotebookLM thing – this is Google’s ‘feed The Machine documents and interrogate them!’ service, which recently launched a feature which sounds like a gimmick and, well, sort of is, but which is equally kind of magical – you can feed this any doc you like and, if you so desire, it will create a podcast out of it, in which two ‘presenters’ will discuss the contents of the text and ‘explain’ it to you in pleasingly conversational fashion. Which, obviously, is really useful for anyone who finds it easier to ingest information aurally rather than via the medium of text/eyeballs, but also is just weirdly, surreally sort-of fun to play around with – seriously, it’s worth spending a bit of time playing with this and seeing what happens when you feed it different things; apparently if you feed it nonsense The Machine will still try and make sense of it, which can lead to some interestingly-surreal musings (but which, if you think about it too hard, leads you to some NOT ENTIRELY GREAT PLACES – hm, a conversational machine which will attempt to see patterns in meaning in anything you feed it regardless of whether any such pattern or meaning exists? WHAT COULD POSSIBLY BE DANGEROUS ABOUT THAT). Seriously, try it with whatever deadly-dull corporate w4nk you’re currently being forced to pretend to care about, it’s fun. Oh, and if for whatever reason you don’t fcuk with Google, there’s an open source version of the same sort of thing here.
- The US Election Game: Deep breath everyone, only a few short weeks to go until the Americans FINALLY SHUT UP ABOUT THEIR FCUKING DEMOCRACY (or, er, possibly consign that democracy to the dustbin of history!). If you’ve managed to maintain your interest and enthusiasm in the Presidential race to this point then, well, I salute you and your indefatigable appetite for policy-light campaigning – and, also, this link is for YOU! The Financial Times has created a small interactive ‘experience’ which they call a ‘game’ but which, I’m sorry to say, fails singularly to embody one of the core elements of any ludic pursuit, specifically ‘being any fun at all’. THIS IS SO SO SO SO SO DRY FFS! The ‘game’ element here is restricted to you, the player, deciding exactly how to prioritise campaign spending in various states so as to maximise your likelihood of gaining an overall majority – so you’re literally just stacking your metaphorical chips against Georgia or Pennsylvania or wherever and then hitting ‘VOTE!’ to see how it plays out; there’s a bit of leaderboard competition whereby you can see how well you’ve performed compared to everyone else who’s played the game and how your allocation of resources differed from the mean, but, honestly, this is pretty thin gruel from the usually-excellent FT digital team (or at least it is for someone who is bored senseless by the whole ‘electoral college’ thing; I appreciate that if you have a deep and nuanced understanding of the US electoral process and the weighting given to different States this might be HYPER-COMPELLING, but I’d still argue that it’s about as ‘fun’ as grating your own shins).
- Shelf: This feels like something of a throwback to…I don’t know, maybe 2011? Certainly a more hopeful time, when the idea of ‘sharing information about what we’re into with people online’ was a fun way of engaging in shared cultural experience rather than simply contributing to the the ravening algorithm swallowing the world whole. Still, if you’re feeling hopeful and positive and like maybe you can just about be fcuked to once again give the whole ‘new social platform’ thing a go here in 2024 then maybe you’ll like Shelf, an iOS-only app which hooks up to all your extant streaming services (Spotify, Netflix, etc) and posts updates about the culture you’re consuming – what TV shows you’re watching, what albums you’re streaming, etc. I quite like the realtime, no-filter nature of this – you can’t lie about exclusively listening to early period Animal Collective when your Spotify’s snitching about your repeat plays of The Thong Song – and I do like the light touch ‘oh, that looks interesting, I might check that out too if so-and-so likes it’ recommendation engine possibilities, but, equally, I can also appreciate that it feels a bit, well…open and I don’t know whether we’re really into sharing like this anymore in THE MODERN ERA. Are we?
- Ray Cathode: I don’t have the first idea what is going on here, but this YouTube channel seems to be collecting a wonderful trove of VERY ODD videos – we have a bunch of recent uploads of Divine David vids, a 1969 experimental film called ‘The Perils of Priscilla’, an arthouse short about ‘a cat lost in the big city’ (no, really), and a TERRIFYING-looking Japanese (I think) sketch show (I think) called ‘Vermillion Pleasure Night’ which I am 100% going back to watch when I am finished writing this because it looks frankly insane. None of these vids have more than 100ish views, and I am VERY curious as to what is going on with this channel and what the overall curatorial vibe is beyond ‘weird’, because the vibes are all over the place.
- Food Reference: You know how foodie newsletter/website Vittles is basically the ultimate culinary hipster signifier (at least in the UK)? Well Food Reference is basically its antonym; this has been going since 1999(!) and is…a very unpretentious and VERY oldschool site featuring information and, oddly, ‘trivia’ about food, and it has over 20,000(!) pages, and it’s all compiled and maintained by one person, the ASTONISHINGLY DEDICATED James T Ehler (THANKYOU JAMES!) and as ever with these things this is some proper web history and I am thrilled that it still exists.
- Blocked In China: This is really interesting – a project which shows you sites that are being blocked by the Great Firewall. “GFWeb is a measurement platform capable of testing hundreds of millions of domains monthly, enabling the continuous monitoring of the Great Firewall’s HTTP(S) filtering behavior. The newly censored domains discovered by GFWeb provide a useful insight into China’s information control policies. This project is a result of an academic collaboration between researchers from the University of British Columbia, University of Chicago, the Citizen Lab at University of Toronto, Carnegie Mellon University, SRI International, and Stony Brook University.” It’s the very definition of ‘unappealing’ – the design is…not exactly engaging, it’s fair to say, and the UX isn’t exactly pleasant – but it’s worth having a dig because there’s something fascinating about seeing exactly what domains the Party currently deems unsuitable for the good citizens of the people’s republic; you can read a bit more about it on Rest of World if you’re interested. By the way, as I just discovered by curiously typing in a url and unexpectedly finding myself on what appears to be a modern-day Polish version of Ogrish, there are some BAD WEBSITES on that list so, er, don’t do what I just did unless you want to possibly see some really really really horrible things Jesus Christ my EYES.
- Godchecker: Via Blort, whose site turned 20 this week which is a fcuking incredible anniversary and puts by 14-ish years of webspaffing to shame frankly, comes this database of deities – a DEITIBASE, if you will!!!! Sorry. Anyway, if you want to know about Gods then, well, this is the website for you! Another one that’s been going a preposterously long time, this is actually rather fun – I particularly like the search function which allows you to find out which Gods in the pantheon are associated with specific things and which just informed me that there is in fact a Roman goddess associated with door hinges, which is just perfectly ludicrous and has made me momentarily very happy indeed.
- A Year In An Instant: I love this. A project from 2015/2016 by one Nunho Coelho Santos, who documented a year of his life in photographic form, one photo a day, on this website. “Between the 29th of September of 2015 and the 28th September of 2016, I will capture an instant photo and describe the every day occurrences while living in Japan. Up until day 64 the camera used for this diary was a Fujifilm Instax 300 Wide and from that day onwards all photos were taken with a Lomo’Instant Wide. Both these cameras use Fujifilm’s Instax Wide Film (86 by 108mm).” Each photo is accompanied by a small caption giving a tiny bit of context for the shot, but otherwise this is just a year in one person’s life, told in photos, and I adore it.
- Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2024: Amazing photos of space. No, really, these are INCREDIBLE. It’s worth clicking through into each individual category to see all the nominated entries rather than just the winners, because these are some truly astonishing images. WE ARE SO SMALL AND INSIGNIFICANT, as if you needed telling. LOOK AT THE GALAXIES FFS!
- Meta Leaks: I am…a touch conflicted about this one; as a general rule I try not to include links by people who are obviously dealing with one or two ‘issues’ or which present symptoms of schizophrenia, but, equally, sometimes there are things so bizarre that it feels appropriate to bring them to the attention of a wider audience. So it is with MetaLeaks, which is either a collection of…somewhat delusional conspiracies encompassing a quite dizzying array of topics and sources, or someone who is perhaps the only person in the world right now who REALLY understands what’s going on. YOU DECIDE! “The name Metaleaks is an obvious play on the name Wikileaks. Wikileaks is an organisation which, as we know, uncovers documents which are not particularly revelatory and which do not add substantially to the public’s knowledge of the crimes of government and which it then leaks. Metaleaks on the other hand pertains to the leaking of a series of communications by the British government which: a) Are based upon a collation of metadata which, for the most part, is geographical in nature; b) Form the basis of international events which are entirely criminal in nature. The word criminal encompasses crimes against humanity. As a result of collating such metadata, one can uncover information which is far more significant than anything that has been provided thusfar by individuals such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.” Seriously, this is QUITE the thing.
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- The Social Web Foundation: Ok, this is a bit roughage-y, but if you’re interested in the concept of the Fediverse and all that jazz then you should probably be at least aware of this newly-launched organisation. It’s self-defined mission is “growing, healthy, financially viable and multi-polar Fediverse”, and it’s going to work on a bunch of initiatives designed to help educate people as to what the Fediverse is and how to get involved with it, as well as a bunch of more technical/operational stuff around making the ecosystem better; if you’re That Sort Of Person, then they would probably appreciate you getting in touch and offering to help out.
- TinkerCad: “Tinkercad is a free web app for 3D design, electronics, and coding” says the site blurb – which is entirely true, that’s exactly what it is. It also, though, features a ‘physics’ mode which lets you build things in the designer and then apply the laws of nature to them, meaning you can actually use this as a weird little kinetic sandbox toy and which is how I found myself wasting a good 15 minutes yesterday when I was meant to be writing about AI and jobs (lol, we are SO FCUKED!) and instead spent the time making an elaborate domino rally-type experience in virtual space and repeatedly knocking the dominos over and laughing like some sort of vaguely-troubled, massive child.
- Social Communication: This is really interesting – a resource produced by Truman State University in the US and designed as a series of resources for people who perhaps have difficulty with ‘normal’ social interactions and communication and may therefore need some assistance in parsing the cues and mores of what passes for ‘polite society’. Per the ‘about’ section, “This site is written directly for you, the person with social communication challenges. We hope you find it useful. (If you are someone else, please see the notes intended for different audiences below.) It’s not just people with autism or nonverbal learning disorder or social anxiety disorder who have social communication problems, but lots of intelligent people who have spent their lives with their noses in books or faces fixed firmly on the computer screen or doing other solitary activities. Most of the people who get labeled “nerd” or “geek” have social communication challenges. So we’re not really interested in whether you have any sort of diagnosis, or if, like Sheldon, your mammas had you tested.The only assumption we tried to make about you is that you’re a competent speaker of English, reasonably intelligent, not a young child, probably somewhat frustrated by persistent miscommunications and therefore interested in learning more about how most Americans interpret social signals. (A lot of what is written here will be relevant for other English-speaking countries, but there will be some cultural differences.)” Now, I am not for a SECOND assuming anything about the potential likely readership of a massively-overlong weekly newsletter about ‘quite geeky stuff on the internet’, I’m just leaving this here for ENTIRELY-UNRELATED reasons.
- Bird Photographer of the Year 2024: I feel I ought to open with a slight warning here, because while you might expect the winning image in a contest entitled ‘bird photographer of the year’ would be one celebrating, I don’t know, the beauty of avian flight, say, or the glorious plumage and colours of a tropical species, this year the judges have decided to award the big gong to what is a photo of several thousand very dead birds, and as such the first thing you’re confronted with on clicking is, well, DEAD THINGS. Ngl, bit jarring (although it is a very striking image – on reflection, an infelicitous choice of word on my part as you will realise when you click through and see exactly what the image is depicting). Anyway, scroll past the corpses and you’ll see LOADS of nice pictures of birds in happier, significantly less dead, times – there’s one shot of a penguin inside a wave which is particularly impressive.
- Jamstart: This is a nice idea; Jumpstart hooks up to your Spotify account and presents you with guitar tabs for whatever you’re listening to, the idea being that you can play along as you listen – there’s a subscription layer to this, but there’s also a free tier meaning you can play around with it a bit and see what you think; I am, per previous Curios, completely musically talentless and as such have no idea if this works or is any good but, well, what the fcuk do you want from me? I just bring you the links ffs, you want me to chew your food for you as well? Jesus.
- The Bellingcat OSINT Toolkit: This is quite the resource – pioneers of the whole ‘anyone can investigate anything thanks to the web’ thing, Bellingcat, this week launched the latest version of their online investigation toolkit designed to offer anyone the tools they need to…well, investigate stuff. You want tools to help you find information on individuals and businesses? You want stuff to help you identify location data from images? You want a frankly slightly-terrifying selection of tools to help you track people down across every single platform you can possibly conceive of? GREAT! Per their writeup, “Have you ever struggled to find a tool that does exactly what you need? Do you know the feeling of spending hours trying to figure out how to use a tool just to realise that the key features you are interested in are not working anymore, or that the previously free product has turned into a paid one that is more expensive than you can afford? You are not alone. More than 80 percent of open source researchers that participated in two Bellingcat surveys indicated that finding the right tools can be challenging. This is where our new Online Investigations Toolkit comes in: it not only helps you discover tools in categories like satellite imagery and maps, social media, transportation or archiving, but is also designed to help researchers learn how to use each tool by providing in-depth descriptions, common use cases and information on requirements and limitations for each toolkit entry.” This is, broadly, A Good Thing, though I couldn’t help but think as I was writing the description that many of these tools could equally be used for…potentially quite creepy purposes. Still, let’s not think about that, it will make us sad.
- Francesco D’Isa: I’ve used one of this artist’s images in Curios this week, but wanted to include a specific link to their website and work because this is one of the more interesting examples of AI art I’ve seen in recent years; while the images are generated by Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, they’re then manipulated in such a way that they don’t *quite* have that by-now-typical ‘AI image’ sheen/vibe to them, and as such these work as artworks in a way in which I don’t typically feel that the machine ‘originals’ do; your mileage will of course vary, but I do rather like these.
- Panels: You may have seen this week that the world’s most famous ‘tech influencer’, YouTuber Marques Brownlee, has this week LAUNCHED AN APP! You might also have seen people clowning on it because, well, it’s fcuking dogsh1t! This is the app – Panels is a very odd throwback to c.2011, offering you the opportunity to, er, subscribe and receive WALLPAPER IMAGES FOR YOUR PHONE! Yes, that’s right, you can pay an already-rich man a monthly stipend in order to access a selection of bland-looking vaguely-abstract digital images which are seemingly indistinguishable from every single other tasteful, HD image that comes up when you just put ‘hi res phone wallpaper’ into Google. WHO IS THIS FOR? WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT IT? And yet, as Garbage Ryan pointed out this week, people are downloading this quite a lot, which suggests that a) there are a lot of people who really don’t understand how ‘searching for stuff’ online works, which I find baffling; b) who don’t realise that this is one of the usecases where AI image generators are actually pretty good; c) really, really love Marques Brownlee and want to keep him in boxfresh kicks. I did for a moment this week try and imagine what sort of app I might make for YOU, loyal reader of Curios, but the resulting ideas got VERY dark very quickly and I think it’s probably best if I don’t share them with you for all our collective sanities.
- Tripmates: This is a PR/promo/linkbait thing by money saving portal HotDealsUK – which has evidently worked as I am linking to it here! Well done, HotDealsUK! Still, this does look legitimately useful and is the sort of thing that if I were in my 20s and of an age where I still went on holiday with friends (rather than in my 40s and of an age where all my friends have selfishly had fcuking children and for some reason seem less keen on me tagging along and smoking at their darling progeny) I would probably find really useful. This basically lets you send an anonymous survey to everyone who might go on a group holiday, letting them specify what they want from the experience (amenities, facilities, pricepoint, etc) in a SAFE SPACE, without getting into a p1ssy argument with Tracey about whether or not ‘300 inflatable flamingos’ is a non-negotiable; it also helps with tricky conversations around budgets without anyone having to feel like the embarrassing povvo in the room, which feels like A Good Thing.
- Gobi: This week’s “Oh, an AI product that made a small part of my soul wither and die when I first saw it!” link is Gobi, which bills itself as “your lifelong well-being partner”, a phrase so utterly miserable that I just had to take myself to the bathroom and give myself a pep talk in the mirror before being able to come back and continue typing. This is exactly the sort of service that is going to be steamrollered by a big LLM model in the next year or so – why the fcuk do you need a separate app when you can do exactly the same thing by voicechatting with ChatGPT (or Claude, or Nazi Nick your personally-trained on-phone instance of LLama!) – but I am more interested in what it’s promising and what the offer is. Per the blurb, “Gobi works as your AI companion, continuously learning from your daily interactions to support your overall well-being. It checks in with you regularly, engaging in conversations to understand your current state, track your moods, activities, and challenges. Using this information, Gobi provides 24/7 personalized support by offering wellness tips, and real-time insights. Over time, Gobi evolves with you, adjusting its recommendations and insights to better fit your needs, ensuring you always have the right tools to enhance your well-being.” On the homepage there are a series of ‘real world usecase examples’, one of which shows the app asking ‘how is your date going? Need any help?’ which is SO FCUKING RIDICULOUS – I mean, what’s the app going to do if you tell it your date is a cnut and you hate the sound when he chews? – but I can’t help but be slightly discomfited by how obviously this tech is being sold to us as ‘the friend we never knew we needed’ (more of which in the longreads, should you be interested in this particularly miserable line of enquiry).
- Spotlist: This is an interesting adjunct to the boom in CURATION which I have read a frankly tedious amount about in the past year – you’re doubtless aware that people giving their recommendations for EVERYTHING is the new hotness in newsletterland; well Spotlist is an web version of that, which encourages you to make your own personally-curated lists of ‘stuff I think is good’ across any number of categories, share them with your network and, possibly, monetise them! There’s something quite horrible about this, to my mind – not the ‘recommendations’ thing but the fact that this is very clearly coming at it from the point of view not of ‘share things you like’ but of ‘monetise your interests! Become an influencer!’ which, honestly, is miserable. Also, this wants you to pay a fee to make your recommendations public, which suggests to me it’s doomed to failure and irrelevance, and I have to say I’m not exactly sad about that.
- Meco: This is interesting – not wholly novel, but I can imagine some of you might find it of use/interest. Meco is an app (web and iOS, Android coming soon) which basically acts as a separate home for all your newsletters, sparing your inbox from clutter and creating a digital space for ‘ignoring web curios every seven days’ – all your newsletters sit in one place, you can make notes and clip bits from them in a dedicated ‘notes’ bit of the app, it will do audio summaries of that day’s missives should you so desire, and there’s a bit of recommendation engine stuff in there too; personally I don’t need another fcuking platform to look at, but for those of you who don’t mind having to open 37 different apps to manage your life then this might be of interest.
- 15 Minute Cities: Presuming you’re not some sort of chemtrail-bothering, Soros-hating microchip conspiracist (and if you are, how the fcuk did you end up here?), you will probably appreciate the broad concept of the 15-minute city as a sensible approach to urban living; this site is a really useful resource which offers information about cities worldwide and how closely they cleave to the 15 minute ideal. You can search for a specific city or instead navigate using the map view; the data’s surprisingly granular, so if you’re looking at (for example) moving to a new place, this is a really useful way of gauging how convenient or otherwise access to essential amenities will be (or how much you’re going to be controlled by the NEFARIOUS, CONTROLLING SUPERSTATE, either/or).
- What Came First?: A little game from Google which basically slightly rips off a bunch of other, slightly more fun, timeline-based games from years past, but which I’m going to give a pass to because, well, I sort of love Google Arts and Culture a bit. You’re presented with two things, and you just have to pick WHICH CAME FIRST in history – you get three lives, and you have to try and get as many points as possible. Some of the juxtapositions are quite nice – was Hugh Jackman born before or after All About Eve was released in cinemas? – and generally this is a nice, gentle way to spend five minutes while you wait for the kettle to boil or contemplate your own inevitable senescence.
- Guess The Game: This is, to my mind, fcuking IMPOSSIBLE, but you may have a better and deeper knowledge of videogames than me. You’re presented with six details from a game screenshot in turn, and with each one you’re invited to guess the title – each wrong guess sees you given a new screenshot and a new nugget of info (metacritic score, release year, genre, etc) to theoretically help you along, but, honestly, the details you get shown are so zoomed-in that this is far too hard for my simple, non-visual brain.
- Alphaguess: Guess the word each day by narrowing down its position in the dictionary – each guess sees you get told whether the actual word you’re looking for comes before or after your guess in the dictionary, and you use this to slowly narrow down your options. This is surprisingly fun, although today’s is proving irritatingly hard and so I am in something of a sulk with the site at present.
- Echo Chess: The final game this week is this excellent little daily puzzler loosely based on chess – thankfully for me, though, the world’s least-competent chess player, you don’t actually need to be any good at the game to be able to play this. I can’t be bothered to try and explain it – yes, ok, in part this is laziness on my part, but it’s just easier to play and pick up, honest – but I promise you it’s fun and you might want to add it to your daily rotation.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS EMPTY!
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Riders NYC: A newish Insta feed, via Kottke, where photographer Adam DiCarlo snaps bike riders as they emerge from one end of the Williamsburg bridge in NY. So far only one of the photos depicts someone who looks EXACTLY what you’d imagine someone cycling over the Williamsburg bridge to look like, but give it time.
- Aurore: Smut! Actual smut, on Insta! Aurore is, I think, an ‘erotic magazine’ or journal or something – I have just checked, it is! You have to pay $70 a year but there seems to be loads of filth on there if ‘literary erotica’ is your thing, and it seems very femme-focused – and this is its Insta feed, which I am including mainly because I didn’t realise you could get away with this sort of stuff on a Meta-owned platform. Not QUITE full nudity, but definitely a bit closer to it than most of what you see there. TASTEFUL PROTOBONGO!
- Synthetic Pink: Via former editor Paul comes this Insta feed of genuinely unpleasant – no, really, I am not joking, this stuff is really quite viscerally horrible – AI-generated images, which you will OBVIOUSLY recognise from last week’s longread from Sean Monaghan about the new AI aesthetic. I can’t stress enough, these are REALLY REALLY NOT NICE TO LOOK AT (obviously I love them).
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age: I am pretty sure I have bored you all with my broad ‘one of the major problems of the past few years has been the general trend across every single aspect of human life to prioritise the quantitative over the qualitative’ rant at various points over the past few months, but let me once again point you towards an article that I think neatly-encapsulates what we lose when everything is data and everything can and should be optimised. Here Thea Lim writes about how it feels when everything is data, and what it does to human experience when we quantify every aspect of human experience. “What we hardly talk about is how we’ve reorganized not just industrial activity but any activity to be capturable by computer, a radical expansion of what can be mined. Friendship is ground zero for the metrics of the inner world, the first unquantifiable shorn into data points: Friendster testimonials, the MySpace Top 8, friending. Likewise, the search for romance has been refigured by dating apps that sell paid-for rankings and paid access to “quality” matches. Or, if there’s an off-duty pursuit you love—giving tarot readings, polishing beach rocks—it’s a great compliment to say: “You should do that for money.” Join the passion economy, give the market final say on the value of your delights. Even engaging with art—say, encountering some uncanny reflection of yourself in a novel, or having a transformative epiphany from listening, on repeat, to the way that singer’s voice breaks over the bridge—can be spat out as a figure, on Goodreads or your Spotify year in review. And those ascetics who disavow all socials? They are still caught in the network. Acts of pure leisure—photographing a sidewalk cat with a camera app or watching a video on how to make a curry—are transmuted into data to grade how well the app or the creators’ deliverables are delivering. If we’re not being tallied, we affect the tally of others. We are all data workers.” I really do think that this speaks to a fundamental truth; that data-led living and optimisation HAS MADE US LESS HAPPY. Sometimes an unoptimised life is a better life, is all.
- The Sam Altman Blogpost: I don’t know about you, but I can’t bring myself to care about corporate drama at OpenAI – that said, I did find this week’s blogpost by Sam Altman interesting and worth sharing. This is basically his latest rallying cry and feels very much designed as a ‘hey potential investors, the magic AGI woowoo is DEFINITLEY COMING!’ pitch, but there were a few other points of interest. The whole ‘we’re getting to AGI in a few thousand days’ line is interesting, mainly because if you stop and think for 0.3s you realise that that’s at least 5-6 years, which is NOT SOON and also is a promise that means literally nothing because, well, it’s just speculation and even Altman then caveats it with ‘it might take longer actually lol’ – it does rather feel like Elon Musk confidently predicting full self-driving every year since 2014. The other thing that caused me pause as I was reading was the airy, almost throwaway, line about the carnage that this tech is going to inflict on the global jobs market (not to mention all the other potential ways in which the tech could go wrong, be misused, etc etc) – “It will not be an entirely positive story”. OH REALLY SAM, TELL ME MORE ABOUT ALL THE WAYS IN WHICH YOU CAN CLEARLY SEE THAT IT WILL FCUK PEOPLE AND THINGS. He then goes on to say that, effectively, any form of short-term pain will be worth it for the longer-term gains that AGI will DEFINITELY bring – and there’s your effective altruism, longtermist philosophy, kids! I really, really don’t want this man to become one of the world’s richest and most powerful people, but, equally, I worry that that ship sailed a few years ago.
- The Zuckerberg Interview: Your second ‘genuinely chiling set of pronouncements from a tech billionaire’ piece of the week! This is Mark Zuckerberg doing his annual interview with The Verge to accompany the big Meta announcement day – it really is worth reading all of this because FCUK ME is it miserableand chilling. In case you weren’t paying attention, yesterday was about two things – the future of AI wearables, specifically glasses and a whole bunch of other AI stuff coming to all of Meta’s platforms whether or not you give a fcuk. The interview, though, is far more interesting from a ‘Zuckerbergian worldview’ point of view – there’s a bit of continued pushback against the idea of Meta having any responsibility for, well, anything really, specifically teen mental health (and look, I don’t buy the Jonathan Haidt hysteria but equally I think the position here – that this is all rubbish! Insta makes people, especially young girls, feel great! – is fcuking bullshit and directly contradicted by previously-leaked bits of Meta’s own research), but to my mind the REALLY miserable bit is when he talks about the introduction of AI features and the move to introduce more AI-generated content into your various feeds. “The average person, maybe they’d like to have 10 friends, and there’s the stat that — it’s sort of sad — the average American feels like they have fewer than three real close friends. So does this take away from that? My guess is no. I think that what’s going to happen is it’s going to help give people more of the support that they need.” Am I the only person who finds this vision of the future – lonely people tapping on their phones, sharing their fears and hopes with bots because they simply don’t have enough human connection in their lives – incredibly fcuking sad, and something that perhaps we might want to NOT run towards at a million miles an hour? Not Mark, evidently. I have said it before, but fcuk geeks all the way into the sun, you have been in charge for decades now and you are making it worse, can we have the fcuking jocks back in charge please?
- Why Mars Needs A Creative Director: A palette cleanser for you now – thanks to Alex Burley for bringing this to my attention. It’s on the website of that ‘creative technology VC’ outfit I linked to last week, and is…fcuk, it’s ASTONISHING, this, one of the most ridiculous things I have read in YEARS and a wonderful example of something which from a distance looks almost like it makes sense but which when you get up close you realise is actually just words arranged in a formation that looks like it means something but which really, really doesn’t. I quite want to quote all of this to you, but I think you should just go in with the premise that this is literally all about how one might go about ‘creative directing’ the planet of Mars (yes, I know), and contains many, many paragraphs like this one: “Mars, and the vehicle-of-thought-that-is-Mars, is going to look far more like a string of Vatican cities tied to Singapores than it’s going to look like, you know, the United States plot on Mars with Little Italy next to Tokyo Town. Those aren’t the structures we’re going to orient spatially around.” These people administer MILLIONS OF DOLLARS of investment budget. They are, evidently, fcuking morons. WHY IS THE WORLD LIKE THIS???
- My AI Lover Cheated On Me: Not ‘mine’, you understand, but instead a number of people in China, interviewed for the Southern Weekly newspaper and here informally-translated into a GDoc by Jeffrey Ding. This is SO interesting – the translation’s not always perfect (no shade to Jeffrey, my Cantonese isn’t up to much so glass houses really) but it’s fascinating to read the accounts of the relationships users have formed with the bots and the evident distress they feel when the bots decide, for whatever reason, that they’re not that into their human lovers any more. This feels very much like the premise for a Tingler – “Cucked By My AI Top!” – and I really liked the section where they talk to tech people about why this might be happening and conclude that it’s basically a sort of engagement hack on the part of the software. UNEXPECTED WRINKLES IN THE MACHINE.
- Corporate Psychedelia: Ok, this is a BIT dry, but I found it an interesting look at the way Big Pharma has leapt on the evidence that ketamine and other psychedelics can be useful tools in the treatment of depression, and how in so doing is systematically making treatments more expensive and less-efficacious. THANKS, BIG PHARMA!
- A Deep-Dive Into Balenciaga: I am basically anti-fashion and as such this was a *bit* alien to me, but this is generally a really interesting exploration of the Balenciaga brand over the past few years, and the wider cultural landscape within which it sits in terms of fashion brands, and, more generally, about how crossovers and the like function in terms of meaning, signifiers and semiotics (sorry, but): “Erewhon, Ebay, Offset, Arca, Skinheads – anything could be frictionlessly interpolated into Balenciaga. At peak relevance, the brand’s instagram was essentially a collection of random clouted individuals wearing self-styled looks sent to them in the mail. These selfies produced a cast of characters and presented an exceptionally laissez faire form of clout bombing. This was meme logic, using a brand as a deep fryer that could add a layer of ironic detachment to everything. In doing so, Balenciaga was tuned to the internet, using these new codes to attract the hyper culturally literate and illiterate alike. For the illiterate, the end results were simply fire. For the hyperliterate, it was like being let in on a secret, a dynamic.”
- A Timeline of Fashion Online: Vaguely-related to the above, this is a really interesting look back at the evolution of online fashion commentary and coverage presented in timeline fashion and covering all of the beats you’d expect, from The Sartorialist to the emergence of Tavi Gevinson and everything inbetween, spurred by the sensation that there’s a bit of a ‘we’re back where we started’ thanks to the proliferation of FashionStacks. “To properly address the question, “Is blogging back?” though, it felt necessary to go back to the beginning. Below is an attempt to follow a line from where it all started to where we are now, speaking to key players along the way to fill in the blanks. The result is a brief, relatively incomplete history of online fashion fandom. It’s also a picture of how we’ve always been, and perhaps forever will be, at the mercy of constantly evolving technology. New platforms emerge, and for better or worse, they allow for new voices to be heard—and new ways to make money. Were online fashion stans—the Youtubers and the TikTokers and the meme-makers and the Twitterati—the ones who ousted Virginie Viard from Chanel this summer? Maybe. The answer’s not “No,” which would have been unthinkable ten years ago. Fashion fans have arguably never been more powerful. They overtook the machine. But they’re also arguably still stuck inside it, trying to blog and post their way through it but never quite out.”
- Branding Food: Fascinating piece on Its Nice That about the challenges of creating a brand for food products that are from a particular nation or culture, and how to do so in a way which feels authentic but not cliched, representative but not patronising, that signifies a place or people without at the same time descending into tropes. This is all stuff I had obviously never thought about before what with being an almost-entirely non-visual person, but it’s properly interesting. “Even when first-generation immigrants, rather than big corporations, are the ones selling, and branding, the traditional foods of their culture, they often face the challenge of expressing their personal experiences alongside broader cultural motifs. Significant difficulty lies in the expectation that a single individual can accurately represent an entire culture. For example, an individual from Ghana might struggle to represent not only their specific experience but also to encapsulate the diverse cultures of West Africa or even the entire continent in a way that resonates with both those outside and within the region. During a chat with the founder of Super Spicy Studio, designer Badal Patel, she shares how much pressure she feels trying to “do justice to your culture”. As she puts it: “I am human. I’ve never asked to be a token South Asian designer. It does freak me out — and it’s not something I take lightly.””
- Why Do Men Comment On Bongo Sites?: I mean, do we? Apparently so, according to this article (and also according to this subReddit), which speaks to some of the people leaving their considered opinions under videos such as ‘seven way anal buffet’. There is a lot to love about this, but I would particularly like any journalists reading this (I KNOW SOME OF YOU DO EVEN THOUGH YOU DON’T LIKE TO ADMIT IT) to PLEASE pitch a longform interview with UK-based commenter ‘Sir C0ck Connoisseur’ because, honestly, I really want to read it and I can’t be the only one. Seriously, read this extract and tell me that you don’t want a whole interview with this man – there is a LOT to unpack here: “ The Connoisseur started commenting on Pornhub in 2021, shortly after he lost his job during the pandemic. “I had a passion for writing, but what form it would take I wasn’t sure. I could never find something that fully engaged me,” he says. “Then I found this.” He’s since reviewed 185 videos on the website, including a clip called “Group Blowjob Racing” (which leads with the opener: “I tell you lads, it is a rare day indeed when I come across a piece of filth so entertaining that I simply forget to have a w4nk!”), and “Big-T1ttied Japanese teenager sucking on a c0ck” (which he ranked a 5/10 due to the male performer being, in Sir C0ck Connoisseur’s view, “woefully underequipped”). He estimates he leaves a comment about two or three times a week, spending about 30-40 minutes on each one.” I MEAN SERIOUSLY THIS IS A PULITZER-WINNING PIECE WAITING TO BE WRITTEN SOMEONE PITCH THIS IMMEDIATELY.
- Looks Matter: This is unrelated to the week’s unhinged Rooney discourse (no, you can look it up yourself, I am too tired and it is too annoying) but feels sort of tangentially-linked to it in a way – in the New Statesman, Amelia Tait writes on the way in which, to quote her, “we live in a world where self-care and skincare have becoming synonymous” and in which it’s increasingly hard to find women in their 30s who haven’t already leapt on the botox train, and in which, despite the fact that we’re seemingly significantly more accepting of physical difference and diversity than we were in the bad old days of the 80s and 90s, we’re still imposing beauty standards mandated by a massive capitalist machine – just slightly different ones is all.
- Clowns: No, not the sort that people pretend to be afraid of – this is about the wave of classically-trained clowns who are expanding the medium into comedy, theatre and other forms, changing the definition of what ‘clowning’ is and what it means. This is super-interesting, and features Natalie Palamides who is 100% one of the funniest and most talented performers I have ever seen, and who I have even forgiven for that time I went to see her show ‘Nate’ at the Soho Theatre and she got me up on stage and made me wrestle her, which ended with me basically bodyslamming her onto the floor and feeling INCREDIBLY guilty about it for the rest of the evening (Natalie Palamides, to be clear, has no idea who I am and will have no clue about this weird guilt memory of mine).
- Round The Table: Tassos Stevens is a friend of mine and a hugely-talented man; he runs a theatre company called Coney, who make…experiences, I suppose is the best way of explaining them (although I should probably just go with their website which says ‘interactive theatre, games and adventures’) – this is a post on Tassos’ newsletter about how he set up and ran an ‘experience’-type thing which involved recruiting people to be secret agents and getting them to go on a SECRET MISSION in a central London location. It’s both a rough explanation of how you might go about logistically organising something like this, and an exploration of the things that you can do with play as a mechanism, the things that get unlocked within and between people when you give them a ludic environment to explore.
- An Interview With Piers Morgan: Piers Morgan is a cnut and I hate him and ordinarily I wouldn’t bother linking to an interview with the man because, well, give a fcuk what he thinks about anything, but this is written by Oli Franklin Wright who’s a very good journalist and whose profiles are always excellent, and while I can’t pretend I didn’t spend the majority of my time with this article imagining what it would be like to repeatedly slap Piers across his fat chops with a trout, it also contains a lot of really interesting talk about the media industry, about ragebait, and about the colossal, almost planetary ego of a single very pink human being.
- Dad In The Machine: This is fascinating and weird and very sad and SO MODERN AND SO FUTURE. Imagine you’re looking at some AI-generated images and all of a sudden you realise that one of them includes your dead father – that would be weird, wouldn’t it? Well, actually, yes it would, as Sara Burningham writes in Slate. “Our place and our rights in this new world of artificial neural networks lie beyond certainty, inflected with the unknowable. We are not wise. We do not know where it all comes from. I can’t even prove this picture of my dad is a picture of my dad. There are some minor differences, like the line of the beard, the shape of the glasses—but when I texted the picture to my brothers, each responded, “WTAF,” or words to that effect. This is unmistakably him. And at the same time, I’m pretty sure that’s not enough evidence to sue anyone, if there even is anyone to sue. Is there anyone to sue? To whom should I address the cease and desist?”
- Eating at Alchemist: One of those wonderful ‘we review an insane restaurant that you are probably never going to go to so that you can imagine how batsh1t it is’ pieces – this is about Alchemist in Copenhagen, very much a ‘restaurant as performance space’ kind of vibe; you can get the measure of it from the intro para (it only gets odder): “Rasmus Munk, the celebrated Danish chef, has such memorable eyes—they are a piercing blue, and often bloodshot—that when a waiter at Alchemist, his restaurant in Copenhagen, served me an eyeball, I recognized it immediately. The iris was flecked with brown and rimmed with red, and the eye stared up at me unwaveringly, at least until I picked up a long-handled spoon and dug in. It had a gleaming gelatinous surface and was both salty and creamy, with a surprisingly nubby texture and a distinct taste of—what was it?—shrimp.” It’s interesting that I came to the end of this thinking that it sounded fascinating but also that there was not a single dish described in the piece that I actually wanted to eat.
- I’m in Bed With a Man and a Cat Named Hussy and I Miss My Wife: Weirdly this is the second piece in as many weeks about polyamory (this is coincidental, I promise you) – I enjoyed this a lot, even though it’s very much not my normal sort of thing, as a piece of writing about love and desire and the ways in which we can’t really legislate for either.
- Contraband Marginalia: I adored this piece, by a librarian working in the US correctional system, about the ways in which books are repurposed within prisons to act as diaries, methods of communication, sites of protest…beautiful, sad and not-sad at the same time.
- About Lucy: Finally this week, a short story by Emily Waugh, about…actually, no, just read this one, it’s gorgeous and worth ten minutes of your time, I promise.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: