Webcurios 17/05/24

Do you ever get the feeling, maybe, that you perhaps don’t quite have the same…checks and balances as other people? That perhaps your moral compass is somewhat askew?

I ask only as a I did a thing this week which involved standing up in front of people and talking about Things I Did In The Past, and there were various points when…well, let’s just say when it became clear that things that *I* found funny, or at the very least examples of ‘well, the past was a different country!’, were seen by others as examples of what might best be described as ‘severe moral turpitude’ (to be clear, NOTHING CRIMINAL).

Am…am I a cnut?

As with so much of Curios, dear reader, that is a rhetorical question and I really, really don’t need or want to hear your opinion on it. Just know that I occasionally ask myself, and let’s leave it at that.

Anyway, this week’s edition is, if you’ll excuse the momentary autofellatio, quite a good one I think, so why don’t you get on with reading it and I’ll go back to enumerating all my many failings to seven decimal places.

I am still Matt, this is still Curios, and you really should make sure to check out the video at the end this week because it is EXCEPTIONAL.

By Charlie Tallott (images nearly all lifted from TIH, for which thanks)

OUR FIRST MIX THIS WEEK IS A CRACKING SELECTION OF EARLY HIPHOP (WE’RE TALKING 80s AND EARLY-90s HERE) COMPILED BY FORMER-EDITOR PAUL! (AND YOU CAN READ SOME WORDS ABOUT IT HERE IF YOU LIKE!)

THE SECTION WHICH MIGHT HAVE TO LEAVE LONDON IN THE UNLIKELY EVENT ARSENAL DO IN FACT WIN THE LEAGUE, PT.1:  

By Molly Bounds

NEXT UP, HAVE SOME SLIGHTLY-MANIC JAZZ COURTESY OF THE FABULOUS SOIL AND PIMP SESSIONS! 

THE SECTION WHICH MIGHT HAVE TO LEAVE LONDON IN THE UNLIKELY EVENT ARSENAL DO IN FACT WIN THE LEAGUE, PT.2:    

• Rap Feud: Now that the dust has seemingly settled – at least momentarily – on The Great Beef, take a moment to enjoy this really nicely-made site which takes you through the timeline of HOW and WHY and WHEN it all went down. This is really, really good – obviously it’s interesting if you’re interested in the story and the people and the music, but also as an explainer project and as a piece of webdesign in its own right. As you scroll, you pass through each individual track – you can listen to it, get information on the backstory as to why it was written, read the lyrics, get information on the artists and the targets… regardless of your interest in Kendrick, Drake or the whole thing, this is just really good webwork. Also it taught me that one of the samples on the Metro ‘BBL Drizzy’ beat was in fact AI-generated, which had totally passed me (and I imagine lots of other casual listeners) by, and which feels like a Rubicon of sorts has been crossed here.
• The Most Horrible Advert I Have Ever Seen: I’m not exaggerating here. This really, really upset me – not joking! Made me really really sad! – and I would honestly take steps to actively harm the product in question were I ever to see it in the wild (but I think it’s only in North America, and I can’t imagine the brand is going to exist in a few years’ time). Seriously, watch this and see what happens when you take ‘ironic detachment’ far too far.
• Birdify: By way of a palate-cleanser after that horrid ad – SO HORRID – have this lovely project, by one Thomas Newlove, which simply lets you listen to the sound of birds. That’s it! Search for your favourite, or simply browse through the list – it’s simply pleasant to hear birdsong, but it’s also nice to have a listen to some of the more common British varieties to see if you can start to recognise them in the wild; I am back in leafy South London and it is SO NICE to be able to hear birdsong again (although I am probably going to have to revise that opinion if the pigeons obviously living on the roof directly above my bedroom don’t start shutting the fcuk up).
• Words About War: Not really a Curio, this, so much as a serious and useful project (there’s that whiplash thematic sidewindering again, really must try and address that one day) – Words About War is a document which is designed to act as a language guide for people writing about conflict to seek to ensure that the words they use are fair and accurate. From the homepage: “From George Orwell’s critique of the language of totalitarian regimes to today, discussions of war and foreign policy have been full of dehumanizing euphemisms, bloodless jargon, little-known government acronyms, and troubling metaphors that hide warfare’s damage. Think of “collateral damage” (civilian deaths), “overseas contingency operations” (wars), and “bug splat” (killing human beings with drone-fired missiles). This guide aims to help people write and talk about war and foreign policy more accurately, more honestly, and in ways people outside the elite Washington, DC foreign policy “blob” can understand. We encourage you to use this guide, to share it with others, and to adapt it as necessary to local contexts. The guide should be especially helpful to journalists and other writers, podcasters and vloggers, policy analysts, teachers, scholars, and people involved in public education projects.” Leaving aside the slightly-irksome reference to the ‘foreign policy blob’, this is a useful and interesting project, and it’s worth having a look at the short version, even if you can’t be bothered with the whole thing, and then bearing what it says in mind next time you read reporting about, for the sake of argument, Gaza.
• The Desktop Cat Cursor: Inspired by an idea floated by legendary internet geek Foone, this is a small download (which costs a quid) which will turn your computer cursor into a long cartoon cat’s paw, reaching in from outside the boundaries of your screen to move and manipulate things on your desktop. Why? BECAUSE IT’S FUNNY (sort-of, if you’re a particular type of person).
• Digital Art From the Era of Japanese PCs: Ok, so, again, an upfront warning – this is a decade-old forum thread collecting examples of pixel art from Japanese videogames in the 80s and early-90s, and as such it features QUITE A FEW EXAMPLES OF PIXELART NUDITY, almost all, inevitably, of women, because Hentai. Still, it’s not ALL slightly-tawdry pseudo-bongo, and, honestly, this is aesthetically fascinating, I promise (as well as there being some really beautiful work in here). From the person who started the thread: “So over the past few years I’ve been saving pictures from old Japanese games that I really liked and I thought I’d share them with you all. Most of these pictures come from Japanese PCs from the 80s to mid 90s like the MSX, PC88, PC98, X1, X68000, FM Towns and a bunch of others. They’re pretty impressive because they display a level of graphical quality that Western computers just weren’t capable of producing until much later. Take a look at the intro for the PC88 RPG The Screamer. It’s hard to believe that this game came out in 1984; there was nothing remotely comparable coming from Western computers at the time.” There is a LOT in here – there are 4 full pages of screenshots – and if you’re interested you can read a little more about the technical ‘why’ of this stuff on this page (but, again, apologies for the nudity on this one – it turns out that the venn diagram of ‘people who are minded to collect screenshots of old Japanese videogames’ and ‘people who like looking at pixelart representations of anatomically-improbable women’ is a circle).
• Shund: This is one of those links that is very much Not For Me – mainly because I don’t speak a word of Hebrew, or Yiddish – but which I like to think will for ONE READER be genuinely fascinating and useful. Shund is a searchable database of Yiddish popular fiction from down the years, searchable and readable on-site, and while it’s intended for linguistic and cultural scholars I would imagine that, if you can read the texts, there’s something in here for the more casual historian. “A Woman’s Honor, The Lost Daughter, It’s Hard to be a Mother, The Masked World—these are just a few titles from the thousands of Yiddish pulp novels published during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Serialized as stand-alone pamphlets or in the pages of the Yiddish press, novels like these are twisting tales of murder and infidelity, adventure and political intrigue. Though labeled by critics as “trash” (shund in Yiddish), they were central to Jewish daily life throughout the global network of Ashkenazi Jewry. Today these texts remain largely unstudied even as scholars assert their importance to understanding Yiddish culture and its afterlives. This project aims to bridge this gap by producing a collaborative, open-access database that will synthesize shund’s varied and disparate archives and facilitate new scholarship. With a better understanding of what exactly constitutes shund, a group of scholars can together produce comparative histories of the genre while theorizing it as a paradigm for how marginalized cultures confront the modern world.” The site’s not the most user-friendly in the world, but it does work – I just couldn’t understand a word of the content, but that’s my problem not theirs.
• Pasta Guide: A guide to pasta! As it says right up top, this is not a recipe guide or a cookbook (although there is a recipe for making actual pasta) – it’s just a guide to what pasta is, how it’s made, some of the shapes…Look, I fcuking LOVE pasta (obviously) and I genuinely don’t understand the slight air of shock and horror that people in my life have occasionally exhibited at my ability and indeed inclination to eat it multiple times a day, and I am very much in favour of this sort of technical appreciation of one of the world’s greatest-ever foodstuffs (fight me) (don’t fight me, I am weak and sickly)…and if you click through the ‘Experiments’ tab you’ll be taken to Adriana Gallo’s Are.na page where she documents her experiences of making the stuff…this is not the most comprehensive pasta resource on the web, but I love it precisely because it’s just one person’s celebration of something they really like, which is basically what the very best of the web is all about.
• Dupe: Look, let’s get this out of the way – I don’t approve of buying stuff just for the sake of it, I don’t approve of consumption in general (yes, I am fun at parties, and no I don’t get invited to many, why do you ask?) and I’m increasingly feeling like some sort of ascetic preacher of doom in the face of the world’s ceaseless attempts to dull the pain with shopping. THAT SAID, I am equally aware that sometimes you do actually need things, and that you might find it useful to have a way of finding stuff that looks like the expensive version you really want but can’t afford, at half the price. Thus, Dupe – a service in beta which lets you plug in the url of any product you care to mention and which promises to find you a selection of knockoff versions of said product from around the web. I can’t vouch for how well or otherwise this works, but it’s worth a go I think. This is firmly focused on home decor, before you get all excited about getting couture knockoffs, but if you’re decorating then this might be useful.
• Il Campionato Mondiale di Umari: This is a project by one of my favourite niche newsletters (Scope of Work, which I’ve featured in here a few times before, which is mostly about building and construction and the process of making stuff), and I’ll let Spencer, who runs it, introduce the concept to you: “Umari is the plural form of umarell, and umarell is a jocular Italian [AUTHOR’S INTERJECTION – it’s actually dialect, Bolognese iirc. God I’m a prick] term for a person – classically a man of retirement age – who pauses to observe work in progress. The term might be used as light-hearted mockery, but I think more people ought to umarell.  To umarell is to take an interest in the built environment – the environment that our species creates, and in which most of us spend most of our time. An umarell turns their attention to that environment’s creation, taking time to appreciate the materials, machines, and muscles from which it emerges.” Isn’t that a wonderful concept? Anyway, Spencer is running a small contest, to celebrate people who are observing work in interesting ways – whether in sketch form, or in writing (whether technical or creative) – and I think this is SUCH an interesting concept and potentially a source of some really interesting work, and I wondered maybe one or two of you might think it the sort of thing you might want to have a go at.
• Open Glass: I imagine the number of people reading this who might be interested in cobbling together their own homebrew version of AI-enabled glasses is a round zero, but, just in case, here are some instructions on how to do so. You remember 12 years ago when Google Glass came out and the world wasn’t ready, and the term ‘glasshole’ was coined? Trust me, you would need to invent whole new words for people wearing these. Still, pretty fcuking scifi (NB – I think this is the second of these projects I’ve featured in here, but this one’s managed to strip the hardware costs to about £25 which is…frankly insane).
• The Black Games Archive: “Black Games Archive is a multimedia, public-facing database of games, digital resources, accessible scholarship, and designer interviews that are relevant to the intersections between Black culture, games, and play.” This is a great resource, both for people seeking titles that feature better representation of black people than was often traditional (although thankfully the industry’s come on leaps and bounds since I worked in it in the mid-00s) and for anyone interested academic readings around race, society and representation in the medium – there’s also a section focused on essays and scholarship, which is useful for anyone wanting to delve into this further.
• While We’re Talking About Games, I Did A Talk: The link takes you to the (terrible) slides, and you can read my (terrible) notes here, should you be interested. I am genuinely sorry to everyone who listened to it for all the swearing and for using a Bad Word Which Is No Longer Acceptable In The 2020s when describing the Daily Mail’s reaction to God of War II’s launch party.
• Fanzine World: This is a nice idea which I don’t think *quite* works, but you might find something in it – Fanzine World is designed to let anyone pull together a list of 5 ‘creators’ based on a theme of their choosing, the idea being that anyone can say ‘Hey, I’m really into haberdashery, here are the 5 creators I think are most interesting the haberdashery space RIGHT NOW’ for anyone else to find and peruse and enjoy. Basically it’s a way for people to share their passions, and it’s potentially not a bad way of finding creators within a certain vertical should you need one.
• Campane Marinelli: Are any of you in the market for a church bell? I mean an actual church bell, massive and sonorous, to hang in a church tower, made in a foundry and weighing tonnes? No, of course you’re not, but I was so pleased with the fact that PEOPLE WHO MAKE CHURCH BELLS HAVE WEBSITES that I felt compelled to include this one. Campanologists, this one is for YOU!
• Digitiser: Now this is one I really can’t believe I haven’t featured before – those of you who a) grew up in the UK; and b) are old, like I am, may have fond memories of TeleText, the text-based internet precursor (it was nothing like the internet) which basically let you read pages of text on your telly, and which was arranged into various sections, not unlike a weird sort of TV-based magazine, and which was where people used to buy cheap holidays and keep track of the football scores as recently as about 1998. One of the BEST things about TeleText was its coverage of music (honestly, I bought SO many great albums based off their recommendations in the early-90s) and videogames – the games section in particular was a genuinely-hallucinatory mix of off-kilter humour, tips, properly good reviews and some VERY STRANGE low-res 8-bit pixel art, and some utterly baffling (to anyone who wasn’t already immersed in the lore) in-jokes and running gags…and the archive is online! YOU CAN READ DIGI AGAIN! Honestly, if you remember this stuff then I can’t tell you what a treat it is; if you don’t, it’s worth clicking this link and having a dig around because a) you will be amazed by how genuinely strange so much of it is, and how odd it must have been to find it just a button-press away from the aggressively-normie confines of ITV in 1993; and b) you will get an idea for how incredibly bored teenagers were , when we would literally sit and wait 20s at a time for the pages to automatically turn so we could read a comic review of Prince of Persia.
• AntARctica: Sorry about the bad joke sorry sorry sorry. This is genuinely great, though – an (I think) educational portal for the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust with a bunch of AR experiences that let you ‘experience’ the magic and mystery of being VERY COLD on the tundra, with your huskies – you can do these on your phone, and there are six different experiences including swimming with the penguins, running with the sledding dogs and freezing to death, alone and cold and frightened (one of these is in fact a lie).
• The Labyrinth: This is by no objective standards ‘good’, but, equally, it’s a game that was made by a team of forty ten year old kids in Croatia – it’s a small platformer, which uses the children’s drawings as the source art, and while it’s very simple and very janky it’s also weirdly charming, and I have to say that if it was a bit more polished I like the aesthetic enough to play for longer than the 45s I actually lasted.
• PixoGuess: Can you guess what the pixellated thing is? CAN YOU? Pick from various categories – logos, pokemon, videogame characters, etc – and see how quickly you can guess what they are as they go from HUGELY PIXELLATED ABSTRACT MESSES to recognisable images. This is…moderately fun, and you can create local lobbies so you can spend the afternoon challenging your colleagues should you not have anything better to do with your life.
• EyeSpy: Play I Spy in your browser with what I presume ae Google Earth images – you’re plonked somewhere in the world, and given an option of 3 objects which appear somewhere in the 360 image – all you need to do is select the correct one. This is…quite hard, but you get the feel for it after a couple of goes and it’s a not-terrible way of killing time while you wait for timesheet-o-clock.
• Showdown: This is ‘rock, paper, scissors’, but more fun than you’d think – you play against a moustachio’d cowboy figure, which responds to your strategies, and there’s a betting mechanic which keeps it compelling, and this is FAR shinier and better-made than it needs to be, and, honestly, I really enjoyed this and I think you might do too.

By Not The NoName

THE FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK TAKES YOU THROUGH LOUNGEY DISCO ALL THE WAY TO SOME SORT OF PROTO-HOUSE VIA A VARIETY OF SLIGHTLY-80s SOUNDS WHICH I CAN’T DESCRIBE ANYWHERE NEAR AS WELL AS I WOULD LIKE, AND IT’S BY SI KURRAGE AND MR SHIVER AND IT IS GREAT! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Art Deco Society NY: Via Blort, this is a lovely Insta feed featuring, er, art deco stuff in New York. But, you know, not just the Chrysler Building – OTHER art deco stuff. Look, it’s good, you’ll enjoy it, have a click.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Jeremy Hutchison (via Blort)

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: