Look, I need to be honest with you – I am VERY VERY TIRED. For reasons literally none of you need or want to know about, this has been a week of relatively-minimal shuteye and as such I have written what follows through a general fug of insomniac incomprehension – can we all pretend that it’s usually better than this, and that ‘normal service’ will be resumed next week?
THANKS EVERYONE! Although actually given that I am meant to be going ‘clubbing’ tomorrow, specifically to see a set that runs 230-4am, there’s every possibility that I’m going to be trotting out the same excuse again next Friday so, well, apologies in advance and I am sorry that this isn’t, er, better.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can probably get through this week’s car-crash of an issue if you squint and just ignore most of the words.
By Muretz (once again, credit and thanks to TIH for the images)
THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY OF THE OPINION THAT THE RELATIVE AVAILABILITY OF AMPHETAMINES VS COCAINE IN THE UK IN 2024 EXPLAINS MUCH OF OUR EXISTING NATIONAL MALAISE, PT.1:
- YouTube TV: I was reading something the other day which posited that the current boom in ANXIETY amongst seemingly every fcuker currently alive can perhaps in small part be explained by the fact that we (by which ‘we’ I obviously mean ‘people who are privileged enough to be sitting at a computer reading this pointless crap rather than worrying about where the next meal is coming from or what that unpleasant and increasingly-close-seeming bomb-like droning sound is’) are constantly assailed by CHOICES everywhere we go – often pointless choices, fine, and not ones that bestow anything resembling ‘meaning’, but, well, CHOICES! What social rabbithole to fall down? What to fill our £15 brown cardboard bowl with at the food court? What album to stream, game to play, series to binge or dating app to stare at, slack jawed, pachinko-ing our way through serried ranks of potential paramours…Which, perhaps, is why I’m seeing an increasing number of products and services which seek to replicate the feeling of scarcity one had in slightly-less-digital times, through realtime unarchived broadcasts, say, or limited edition drops, or a return to the necessarily-space-limited use of physical media…or this BRILLIANT idea, which is, put simply, ‘a series of 12 TV channels made up of stuff pulled through from YouTube’, but which is also, thanks to some smart design decisions, significantly more interesting than that. The channels are all hand-curated and themed – so one is ‘nature’, one is ‘sport’, and so on and so forth – and pull from what I assume is a pre-approved selection of existing channels or curated videos, they play back-to-back so there’s no downtime, and they are all synced centrally, so if you switch channels and then come back to what you were watching before you will miss stuff…JUST LIKE TELLY USED TO BE! The videos all stream in pleasingly HD quality, and you can find the individual YouTube code for whatever you’re watching displayed onscreen so you can go to the source material and explore their channels in more detail if you so choose, and basically this is a) fcuking great; and b) still better than actual UK television in the 80s and 90s.
- Letters Anonymous: ‘Digital Correspondence Oubliettes’ are, fine, not exactly a rarity online (or, on rereading, is that a term that’s ever going to catch on – sorry about that), but I am a big emo and therefore a total sucker for stuff like this. Letters Anonymous is a site on which anyone can write a letter about anything they like and post it online for anyone to read as some sort of…what, catharsis? Performance? The desperate hope that its intended recipient will one day stumble across it and read it and somehow recognise the sender? No idea. Regardless, letters are submitted and vetted by the team behind the site to ensure there’s nothing obviously criminal or lunatic therein, and then are posted online to be read by anyone who happens across them. This is basically crack for me – which I acknowledge probably says something…unpleasant about certain aspects of my personality, but wevs – and I could honestly quite happily sack off the rest of this edition and spend the next couple of hours drifting through the words of the variously hurt, jilted, heartbroken and hopeful (but, perhaps unsurprisingly, rarely happy) that make up the assorted correspondence. All of human life is here – letters to lost loves, to old friends, to the dead, the lost and the abandoned, past selves and future selves and selves who might have been, letters where you can practically feel the tear-soaked paper and letters where you are quite glad that the intended recipient will probably never read it because the words are knives – and there are a few I’ve stumbled across which feels like they contain novels’ worth of backstory hidden between a few lines. The quality of the writing is…uneven, fine, but if you cared about that then, frankly, you wouldn’t be reading me, so.
- Try Flux: The latest, shiniest text-to-image model to emerge in recent weeks has been Flux, out of Germany, a new open source system which has also been integrated into Twitter’s newly-launched ‘Grok2’ AI (which I am going to presume no Curios readers have tried yet because Curios readers are not the sort of people who want to pay That Fcuking Man a monthly stipend, but whose lack of apparent guardrails at launch feel like, possibly, one or two lawsuits waiting to happen). Anyway, the link at the top here takes you to an in-browser version of Flux that you can try for yourself – it’s better than OpenAI’s best model, although the version you get access to here is necessarily not as good as you would get downloading the full thing to use locally with all the various additional mods and things which make it look REALLY fancy. As far as I can tell, if you really get to grips with it it’s basically comparable with Midjourney in terms of output quality – but, like every other one of these fcuking things, it appears to be being used exclusively for the purpose of ‘making pictures of conventionally-attractive Western women who still don’t quite look like real people so much as a 14-year-old boy’s idea of ‘sexy’’. Still, worth a look, and worth being aware of as the current best option for anyone looking to make something with image-gen tech.
- The Hiroshima Archive: It was the 79th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6th August, which is presumably why I stumbled across this website this week – I think it’s actually been around for a while now, but it feels timely to share it with you this week. On loading (slowly), you’re presented with a 3d relief map of the city of Hiroshima, overlaid with icons which represent photographs and landmarks and individuals and personal stories – clicking them will various show you a photograph of the city in the aftermath of the blast, or an eyewitness account, or a survivor’s story, and it’s a beautiful way of bringing the (frankly horrible) history to life (also I am a sucker for the 3d model of the city which they use here, which is largely unnecessary but aesthetically very cool).
- The Spotify Lottery: Ooh, this is clever (in an exceptionally geeky way) (and also, look, I should probably be clear from the outset that the maths/probability stuff here goes almost entirely over my head) – UK-based software person Oli Rowan (HELLO OLI ROWAN, should you be the sort of person to Google yourself!) has made a website which every 5 minutes searches for playlists on Spotify which contain EXACTLY 100 songs. Except it does this search in a very specific and silly way, by generating random strings which correspond to playlist IDs, which means that it’s effectively just plucking playlists out of the ether every 5 minutes in the hope that it will eventually get one with the magical 100 tracks (or at least I think that’s what’s happening), which means, based on Oli’s calculations, that there’s a 0.000000000000000000000000000000665% chance of finding one each time (that’s apparently ‘a nonillionth’, so don’t say Curios never teaches you anything), which means that you and I will probably be dead before this thing ever lucks out. Which is either an excellent illustration of how MASSIVE really big numbers are, or of something about probability, or of the insane volume of music on Spotify…I don’t know, you pick your own high concept, my head is hurting from the numbers.
- The Lumen Prize 2024 Finalists: Pretty sure I have covered these in previous years, and if I haven’t I really should have done. “The Lumen Prize champions the innovative possibilities of technology-driven creativity. We provide the pre-eminent platform showcasing artists who are pioneering new visual languages at the intersection of art and technology“ – so this is this year’s finalists across a variety of different categories, all united under the general banner of ‘creative digital work’. Sadly a significant proportion of the works here are installations or temporary digital commissions, and so rather than being things you can ‘experience’ they’re instead writeups and explainers, but this is still a wonderful selection of works running the gamut from situation-specific apps to large-scale public installations, featuring a broad selection of artists (many of whom you may recognise from previous Curios, turns out – MindW4nk (of whom more later), Chia Amisola, etc etc). Honestly, if you’re looking for ‘creative inspiration for digital things’ then you could do significantly worse than spending some time looking through these – there’s some really nice high-concept stuff in here, particularly around interesting (no, really!) uses of AI which might spark something.
- Pudding: Would YOU like the opportunity to slap a cat-shaped blancmange with a digital spoon and watch it wobble and jiggle in pleasing fashion on your screen? Don’t lie to me. There’s a certain angle at which the cat just gets repeatedly nailed in the face which, I can’t lie, I found almost TOO compelling.
- RateLoaf: Regular readers – or at least those who don’t just skip past any links whose description mentions the initials ‘A’ and ‘I’ – will be bored sh1tless by my neverending whinging about the lack of ‘creative applications of generative AI for fun and frivolous means’. It’s good to see that SOME people are making appropriate use of The Machine, though – witness this superb application of multimodal AI in the form of RateLoaf, a website which exists for one purpose and one purpose alone, to tell you the extent to which your seated cat (or in fact any seated cat, although probably best not to steal one explicitly for this purpose) in fact resembles a loaf of bread. Upload a photo and the site will give you an exact, scientifically-determined score out of 10 to determine your cats…loafiness? The guy behind it has gone to the trouble of explaining the workflow too, should you care exactly which bits and pieces are being plugged together to achieve the results…but you probably don’t care about that, you probably just want to gauge the breadness of your chonky boi (dear God, I appear to have slipped into a wormhole back to 2017). Any of you working for Mars Petcare or similar – THIS IS WHAT YOU OUGHT TO HAVE BEEN DOING WITH AI WHAT THE EVERLIVING FCUK IS WRONG WITH YOU YOU JOYLESS PR1CKS??? Is…is stuff like this why the brand consultancy work’s dried up? Asking for a friend.
- The Atlas of Surveillance: One for North American readers who want a bit of dystopia in their lives – lol! Like you have a choice about the quantity of dystopia you get! – this is an interesting-if-slightly-unnerving platform which offers you a mapped view of the different surveillance tech being used by different police forces across the US. So, for example, you can see all the places using ‘predictive policing’ as part of the law enforcement package (197!) or face recognition (389!) or the ambiguously-sinisted ‘3rd party platforms’ (584!). This is both interesting and a potentially-useful dataset for research – if you look at the geodistribution of the predictive policing stuff, for example, it is VERY geographically concentrated, which immediately made me think about regional lobbying spend and the like. It does rather feel like it would be A Good Thing for this sort of information to be openly available for every country.
- Entertrained: No, not a typo (for once – I know Curios is riddled with them, and I am SORRY, but, equally, you think I can be bothered to reread this when I have finished typing the fcuking thing? Lol mate no), this is instead another platform that does the whole ‘get better at typing by typing along with the classics!’ thing, which, yes, I know isn’t original but which is still a good idea and which I figure some of you might still find useful or interesting. This has all the standard public domain texts you’d expect – so Little Women, Jane Eyre, and, for the masochistic, Anna Karenina and THE COUNT OF MONTECRISTO, which feels like the Everest of this sort of endeavour and the sort of thing which if you decided to actually go through with it would render you an almost-perfect touch typist by the end, or mad, or both.
- Arecaceae: This is a page of information all about palms – the arecaceae of the url, apparently – which, ok, isn’t hugely exciting on its own, but I am slightly in love with the (to be clear, utterly-pointless) interface, which rather than presenting the copy on a static scrolling page, instead gives it to you on some sort of weird digital signpost which you have to rotate to be able to read all of it. And then there are the ants that follow your cursor, for no discernible reason whatsoever. Why is any of this happening? What is it for? I have no idea at all, but I would very much like more sites to take this incredibly overelaborate approach to information delivery.
- Furl Clock: This is one of the most pleasing digital clock displays I’ve seen in years – honestly, it’s quite mesmerising to watch and I could quite happily just gaze at it for a while (did I mention how fcuking tired I am? I am very fcuking tired). This would look lovely on a high-res display – also, the root url takes you to a wordsearch type game, which is a nice little bonus.
- Post-Growth Entrepreneurship: I confess to almost having bounced off this on landing, when confronted by the legend: “Business is one of the most effective forms of activism. Business is one of the most expressive forms of art.” Er, lads, I think that’s b0llocks, sorry! But then I read on, and while a lot of the language used here makes my teeth itch and gives me quite strong ‘terrible idiots’ vibes, I think the underlying idea behind the site and the theory it’s espousing is…good? “Post Growth Entrepreneurship (PGE) reframes business as a form of activism, art, spirituality, and creative expression [EDITORIAL NOTE – OK, SO THE LAST BIT WAS W4NK TOO]. This business model embraces flat growth curves and rejects the need for investors, scaling, and exits. PGE questions entrepreneurial “common wisdom” and re-envisions business as a vehicle for pure positive impact.” What this means in practice is attempting to create – or at least consider – a new approach to entrepreneurialism which rejects the demand for 10x returns and hockey stick growth curves in favour of something less extractive and a bit more realistic and ‘sustainable’…which, as someone who has spent much for the past decade writing here that ‘actually maybe VCs are sort-of the problem with a lot of how capitalism currently works’, feels vaguely-positive? Of course, one might argue that this does sort of rather ignore the elephant in the room – to whit, ‘the purpose of a system is what it does’ – but if you’re someone who works in the startup space this might be worth a look, with its links to resources and its own incubator which you can apply for.
- Sound Ethics: It feels to me that the coming spate of copyright suits against the text-to-video and text-to-audio models have a slightly better chance of succeeding than the ones against OpenAI – but I am both not a lawyer and notoriously bad at predicting anything, so, well, what the fcuk do I know? – and this site is the home of a collective seeking to galvanise musical artists into coming together to create frameworks through which AI can be used ethically and responsibly for composition rather than the more standard ‘nakedly exploitative’ way in which it appears to be working right now. “Sound Ethics champions the rights and interests of artists at every turn. Our core mission is to ensure that the creative copyright of artists is respected and protected as artificial intelligence becomes more integrated into the music industry. Through partnerships with educational institutions, legal experts, industry stakeholders, and policy makers we are setting new standards and advocating for policies that protect artists’ rights.” This is set up by ACTUAL MUSICIANS, and the broad ethos set out in the ‘About’ section seems broadly positive, so if you’re a muso or adjacent-type-person this might be worth a look.
- Carabiners: Would you like a website where you can lovingly stare at photographs of carabiners? No, I can’t imagine you would, but when has that ever had any bearing on the links I put in here? Still, given the apparent rise of the carabiner as a keyring for a Certain Type Of Post-Hipster (I SEE YOU) perhaps this is now a very trendy fashion vibe and so EXACTLY the sort of thing you want. What DO you want? Tell me! You won’t get it, obvs, but it’s nice to know exactly HOW I am disappointing you each week.
- Deep Live Cam: Ooh, this is a clever little bit of spoofing code – it’s on Github, so you’ll need to be able to run this yourself, sadly – which creates a fake webcam livestream featuring a deepfaked version of whoever you so choose. Feed it a photo and, according to the demo on the page and a few clips I’ve seen floating around, and it’ll generate a pretty-convincing-looking short clip as though filmed from a screentop webcap, letting you mock up a realistic-seeming short video of anyone using a single photo. The disclaimer on here is a BEAUTIFUL example of the genre, by the way: “Users of this software are expected to use this software responsibly while abiding by local laws. If the face of a real person is being used, users are required to get consent from the concerned person and clearly mention that it is a deepfake when posting content online. Developers of this software will not be responsible for actions of end-users.” Any lawyers want to comment on how likely that is to cover the devs? As I personally remain unconvinced.
- Robot Vall: The TikTok account of a guy who moves like an android, but I mean REALLY moves like an android – like, SO MUCH like an android it’s genuinely slightly upsetting to watch. You know when you were a kid and there was a brief vogue for people doing ‘robotics’ dancing (I am going assume that this is a pan-generational phenomenon, that at basically any point since the 1970s there will be kids in playgrounds doing terrible, vaguely-breakdancing-inflected robostyle dance moves)? This is that, but done by someone who has a degree of fine motor control that makes me feel like a lumpen collection of wooden blocks by comparison – there are bits of these clips where they get so weirdly uncanny valley that my stomach goes a bit funny (which, to be clear, is a compliment!).
- Twitter 95: I have no idea who made this or why, but if you have ever wondered ‘what would Twitter have looked and felt like in 1995?’ then this is perhaps the answer you needed. This is an LLM-led project with a nice, era-appropriate skin to it, and conversations between suitably-mid-90s celebrities like Michael Jordan and, er, Princess Diana (sadly unaware of the terrible fate that is set to befall her in a few short years) – there’s a certain sort of weird fascination to the dialogue pairings and what the LLM chooses to waffle on about, and there’s obviously something happening in the background that tries to inject some ‘on this day in history…’ type context to what’s being discussed, which means, at the time of writing, you can see a bunch of machine-imaged celebrities ‘discussing’ the Bosnian conflict on a Geocities-inflected version of Twitter from a past that never existed. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT???
THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY OF THE OPINION THAT THE RELATIVE AVAILABILITY OF AMPHETAMINES VS COCAINE IN THE UK IN 2024 EXPLAINS MUCH OF OUR EXISTING NATIONAL MALAISE, PT.2:
- Victor’s Way: This is rather wonderful. Victor’s Way is a sculpture park in Ireland, specifically devoted to a collection of works made by Indian sculptors and commissioned by the titular Victor to sit together in the verdant splendour near the Wicklow Mountains National Park which lies South of Dublin. The sculptures may be great, but, honestly, that’s not what we’re here for – we are here for the website, which is a classic piece of late-90s/early-00s html with a…very particular vibe. Victor is not shy about telling you what the park is, and what it very much isn’t: “Victor’s Way is a contemplative space for adults. (It is not a fun park for families)”, says the homepage, and in case that were not specific enough the ‘About’ Page goes on to elaborate that, specifically, it is “designed as a contemplation (or meditation) space for adults between the approx. ages of 28 and 65 who feel the need to take some quality time out for R&R&R (i.e. rest, recovery & spiritual reorientation) in order to find a way out of the mid-life life (purpose transition) crisis.” The whole site is basically a joy, and the fact that the park apparently still exists and still accepts visitors (for the low, low entry fee of 10 Euros!) is just a lovely little bonus.
- TheoGuessr: ARE YOU SMARTER THAN AN AI? On the one hand, of course you are! On the other, you are so, so much worse than it at so, so many things! Here is just one of them – TheoGuessr is a somewhat scope-reduced play on Geoguessr in which you’re tasked with guessing where exactly a photograph was taken inside the apartment of a bloke named Theo. You get presented with two views – one of the room as photographed, the other a top-down map of the whole apartment space. Your task is to look at the image, work out where exactly you think it was shot from and what angle and then make your guess – you’ll then be told how close you got to being exactly right, and exactly how much closer the AI got than you did. Quite a nice use of tech, and an equally good demonstration of ‘stuff The Machine is significantly better at than us ambulant meatsacks’.
- Horror Film Locations: Are you the sort of person who has to watch films through their fingers, for whom even relatively-light-touch scares are A Bit Too Much? Or are you instead the sort of person who laughs in the face of jumpscares and stunt blood and who yawned their way through A Serbian Film thinking ‘not sure what all the fuss is about mate’ (NB – if that is in fact you then you are a sociopath and I no longer desire your readership)? If the former, this probably holds little interest for you; if the latter, then welcome to your next big holiday planning tool. Horror Film Locations is, basically, a Google Map that’s been tagged with, er, the filming locations of a fcukload of horror films, sorted by genre – given a significant proportion of horror movies are low-budget, it means that a not-insignificant proportion of said locations are in central and Eastern Europe, meaning you could plan a pretty interesting route through some fascinating places while ALSO visiting the place where they filmed THAT scene with the bats and the amateur tracheotomy from ‘Blood Sister IV: The Murder Superior ’ (not in fact a real film, to the best of my knowledge).
- The Counties Game: Football fans in the UK will be aware of the concept of ‘doing the 92’, or, more prosaically put, ‘visiting every single football league ground in the UK as some sort of obsessional pilgrimage’ – well, for people who like that idea but think that it lacks scope and ambition, why not take on a more substantial one? This is a site that lets you see how many of the individual counties of the US you can visit, or of Canada, or Mexico, or even the UK, tracking your progress, finding Geocaches, entering your progress on a leaderboard…Incredibly, to my mind at least, there are people who claim to have ACTUALLY DONE THIS for all of the counties in the States which is, frankly, an insane amount of traveling – but I reckon the UK is probably doable without TOO much hassle, over the course of a lifetime. So, er, depending on how old you are, you may or may not be able to fit this in before your inevitable demise – WILL YOU TAKE ON THE RACE AGAINST TIME?
- ReMediate: It feels like a bit of a minor boomtime for digital magazines, particularly ones exploring writing around the intersection of tech and AI and art – ReMediate is another, recently-launched and found via Kris, whose mission statement is as follows: “At remediate, our goal is to contribute to an active conversation about what good Computer-Assisted Writing, or C-AW, can look like. remediate is anti-gatekeeping. The mission of remediate is to make a home for informed experimentation and conversation in the field of computer-assisted writing. Regardless of form and genre, all of the pieces included in our magazine serve a dual purpose: 1. To be computer-assisted art or criticism; 2. To inform and inspire readers to make computer-assisted writing or criticism about computer-assisted writing.” If I’m being wholly honest I wasn’t hugely whelmed by any of the pieces in the inaugural issue, but it’s equally possible that I caught this on a particularly tired day this week (did I mentionzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz?) or that I am simply just a bit too overexposed to this sort of stuff at the moment and have lost a small sense of wonder – see what you think.
- Film Frontier Latest: THE GREAT AI CONTENT SLURRY FLOOD CONTINUES! This is a YouTube channel which, even by the standards of the people peddling this crap, has a quite breathtaking production cadence – this is dropping what looks like between 6-20 new clips each day, every single one purporting to be a trailer for a film. Except they’re not – they’re about 3 seconds of trailer footage followed by a poorly-cut series of stills, with an LLM-generated script describing the theoretical movie, alongside AI-generated stills. Some of these are for ‘real’ films, some of them are for imagined sequels (Sonic the Hedgehog 5, coming next year apparently!), some of the thumbnail images are ripped from real movie marketing materials and others are AI-generated slop with accompanying textual fcukups, and occasionally there are moments of hallucinatory high comedy (I would personally not be UN-interested in ‘Twilight Saga 7: Unraveling The Mystery of Forks’, for example), but this is all utter dreck and none of the videos have more than 600 views…can this be making meaningful ad revenue? Per the Facebook slop factories story from last week, I imagine this is all being run from a part of the world where an extra $40 a month makes more of a meaningful difference than it does in London. Still, WELCOME TO THE GLORIOUS PRESENT! Does make you think that the Flux+Runway workflow I’ve been seeing a lot of this week is going to make this sort of problem significantly worse.
- The Postcard Printing Press: It’s been a while since I’ve featured a Kickstarter in here, so let’s break that trend with this LOVELY (if not exactly cheap) project which is fully-funded with a couple of weeks to go – it’s basically a small, perfectly-appointed printing press, designed to let you craft your own handmade postcards to a pleasingly-high standard. This is obviously aimed at people with at least a passing knowledge of ‘how printing works’ and with, presumably, enough baseline artistic/crafty ability to sort of get the process, but, equally, they say it will ship with detailed instructions and a dedicated series of training videos, and, honestly, there’s something really charming about the idea of being able to make your own cards and notices and flyers with your own printing setup. That said, the entry-level price here is £200 so, well, you probably need to be committed to make a reasonable number of postcards to make this worth the cash.
- Stuck In The Scroll: Ooh, this is good, and made me think that there must be a bunch of ways this could be flipped or extended – this feels like something you might be able to have fun with, perhaps in a ‘buddy system’/accountability kind of way? Hang on, I haven’t actually told you what the fcuk it is – here: “This site reveals, in real-time, whether I—artist and professor Ben Grosser—am currently scrolling TikTok. Think of it as a last-ditch effort, a sort of public confessional as therapeutic tool aimed at defusing the intense compulsion I feel every day to endlessly scroll the world’s most popular video app. It’s also a way of asking questions about the designed effects of the TikTok platform and related social media apps. Why do I keep on scrolling even when the videos on my For You page are boring, annoying, or unrelated to my interests? How is the app clouding my sense of awareness, frequently leading me into a sort of trance state propelled by infinite swiping? What is it about the TikTok interface that leaves me forgetting what I saw and losing track of how much time I’ve spent? By making my compulsions public, I aim to not only break free of the engagement loop this app has trapped me in, but to also challenge the prevailing narratives about how and why we stay stuck in the scroll.” At the time of writing, Ben is not currently scrolling – but he has done so for just under 180h since 1 July. Which I was initially horrified by, but then realised was probably a fraction of my own time spent just generally STARING INTO THE WEBBY ABYSS and so I should probably just wind my neck in. Anyway, I think there’s definitely something you can do with this (but, er, I don’t have the time to think about it any more so am leaving it with you to take forward, ok? OK!).
- Skate Oregon: I do not skateboard, despite what my aspirational shoes and silly trousers might tell the casual observer (lol, literally noone observes me and thinks ‘that man skates’ – at best they might wonder ‘does that man eat?’), and I have never been to Oregon and, in all likelihood, I am probably never going to go. BUT that didn’t stop me really enjoying this website which basically collects photos and short descriptions of seemingly every skatepark in the State (and, inexplicably, a few in California and a couple of other places), and which presents an interesting parallel geography of the area as told through small, often community-built, concrete skating arenas. I don’t know why but there’s a certain sort of weird narrative beauty to this (/pseud).
- Third Friend City: It is very rare to be presented with a completely new way of considering urban space and the built environment, but this is JUST SUCH A THING! Third Friend City is a very small and very simple website which does one thing and one thing only – it tells you which streets in Manhattan can comfortably be walked down by two, three or four people abreast, the idea being so that you can plan group walks in areas where one of you isn’t forced to walk behind the others. Obviously this is a bit silly, and OBVIOUSLY insisting on walking shoulder-to-shoulder with your friends, when there are more than two of you, is COMPLETELY SOCIOPATHIC BEHAVIOUR (I mean this very strongly and I will fight you), but, equally, I very much like the hyperspecificity of this.
- Shmupulations: This is a pretty amazing, if VERY niche, archive – would you like to read an incredible selection of translated interviews with Japanese developers of shoot-em-up games (‘shmups’, in the vernacular)? OH GOOD! This is VERY much a fan service site, born out of a Patreon, and unless you’re the sort of person who really wants to get into the weeds about the item drop rate in Galaga (I am making this up, but you get the gist) or someone with aspirations to make this sort of thing yourself then it might be of limited appeal, but for the ONE PERSON reading this for whom that applies, know that I do this all for YOU.
- The Ghost and the Golem: This is a fragment of a whole game, but WHAT a fragment – I really enjoyed this, and you might too. Self-described as “a Jewish historical fantasy of bandits, betrothals, klezmers, and kabbalists!”, this is basically a massive piece of interactive fiction/roleplaying, set in Central Europe and featuring liberal lashings of period character and Yiddish (which you can helpfully ask for hints and explainers on at the outset, for those of you, like me, who don’t necessarily know your schmuck from your schlemiel. The browser version contains three chapters of the whole game, which is an app download on iOS or Android, but there’s LOADS to explore and it’s well-written and funny and properly interesting in terms of the history and the Judaic lore than runs through it, and I think it’s definitely worth a look.
- Wordlike: This is basically ‘Scrabble, but turned into a single-player game with levels’ – there are multipliers and bonuses and challenges and modifiers and all sorts of other things going on which I could try and explain but which, honestly, you’ll pick up as you go along. This is FUN, although I have been annoyed at my inability to get past level 13 so please don’t tell me if you clock it first time as I will feel inadequate.
- Conan Throwbrien: You know what? I slightly resent the amount of knowledge I have of US late night talkshow hosts. I have never watched any of these fcuks, ever, and yet I am forced to be aware of the existence of Jay Leno and John Oliver and James Corden (ok, fine, he’s our fault, but still) and Trevor Noah (also not American, but wevs) and Conan O’Brien, and, well, NO! I DO NOT WANT TO! Anyway, this is a game featuring the last of those, red-headed human jawline Conan O’Brien, and basically this is ‘blackjack, but twisted slightly’, and the game is all about having to deliver setups and punchlines in a monologue to keep the audience adequately entertained and, look, I bounced off this one slightly but am including it because the visual style is actually pretty cool and I figure there might be some of you who like this (although be warned that it has the single most irritating soundtrack to a browser game I have ever heard, ever – seriously, it’s almost aggressively-unpleasant with some really, really nasty crackle – and you might want to mute the tab in anticipation).
- Sokoblox: A simple Pico-8 game in which you have to roll blocks around a maze to get them to specific positions. This quickly make me VERY ANGRY, but only with myself and how fcuking appalling my sense of spatial awareness is – it’s very clever and rather satisfying when it clicks.
- Tramsterdam: Last of the miscellaneous webspaff is quite possibly my favourite link of the week – Tramsterdam is not a million miles away from ‘cosy browser-based town creation toy Townscaper’ except with the added brilliance of TRAMS (I have a slightly obsessional love of trams, no idea why)! It’s super-simple – you’re presented with a blank canvas, onto which you can plop individual units of land – trees, houses, paths and TRAMLINES! Everything just slots together seamlessly, and whatever code magic is happening below the hood ensures that whatever you do just looks incredibly cute and well-put-together, and, honestly, the tram animation is SO CUTE and, er, should anyone whose opinion I particularly value be reading this and wondering ‘hang on, is this cnut into train sets?’, please be reassured that the answer is very much ‘no’. Still, this is gorgeous and soothing and will not fail to make you smile, I promise.
By Tyedied
OUR FINAL PLAYLIST THIS WEEK IS WEATHER-APPROPRIATE SUMMERY TECH-HOUSE MIXED BY ISLE OF WAX!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Retro Lesbians: I mean, you probably don’t need me to explain this one, do you? Completely SFW – the sapphism here is of the relatively chaste, occasionally implied, variety rather than the more overtly-labial sort.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Thomas Connelly: I had no idea who the fcuk Thomas Connelly was until the ‘Kanye’s dentist has him hooked on laughing gas, says disgraced UK tech journalist Milo Yiannopoulos’ story broke (a brief aside – it is genuinely astonishing, and not a little upsetting, to me that that fcuking cnut has been cropping up in my life for NEARLY 20 YEARS now, ever since he was an appalling tech hack getting repeatedly fired from the Telegraph, to the days he was making my life a professional living hell c.2011, to The Kernel, to the Gamergate years…honestly, are you aware of Vonnegut’s concept of the ‘karass’? It feels very much like he is part of mine, ffs), but now I do know and WOW does his Instagram look EXACTLY what you’d expect the Instagram of a man who provides incredibly expensive grills to the hiphop elite to look like. SO MANY TATTOOS! SO MANY TOOTHY GEMS! SO MUCH LATENTLY-RAPEY ENERGY! Honestly, it’s like a can of Monster Energy was granted a genie’s wish and asked to become a REAL BOY.
- Tales of AI Cats: AI-generated cartoon cats in the vague Pixar-adjacent style. Some of these are fcuking mental – I slightly lost it at the image of the sad kitten weeping whilst observing an exam paper that has clearly been graded ‘F-’ (in fact, a lot of the cats are crying – WHY? WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO THE AI CATS???).
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- How The Pandemic Radicalised Britain: The Manchester Mill digs into the links between the pandemic and the UK riots with an excellent piece of writing which links Cosmic Scallies with the chemtrails movement and the right-wing grift empire to excellent effect, and which does a decent job of explaining how a certain unpleasant faction of people realised that people ‘asking questions’ about the pandemic and the government’s response to it, and subsequently the extent to which the degree of control exerted by the state was necessary, were also likely to be quite receptive to follow-on arguments about ‘what else are they not telling you?’ focused on more depressing, traditional tropes about people with different religious heritage or skin colour. This paragraph does a neat job of summarising the piece’s overall thrust, but it’s worth reading it in full – the Mill and its sister publications continue to do God’s work, and if you’re anything like me you will know at least one person, possibly more, who has gone through this exact pipeline and who is now ‘asking questions’ about whether or not anyone in fact SAW any rioting or whether it was ‘just presented by the MSM’: “It wasn’t just about how much time people were spending online. Lewis now recalls that period as a moment when he could feel the presence of the state up close. “It was the first time in our lives we’d seen the government say: ‘You’re gonna do what we tell you to’”. He says his group included lots of young mums who were frustrated by the lockdowns, cooped up at home watching their bored children “playing up”. To people like that, neat theories about who was to blame were appealing. Ordinary people were being drawn into online networks that they would never have been part of before the pandemic, spaces that very quickly filled up with messages that had nothing to do with lockdowns or the much-hated Rule of Six.”
- Digital Ads: Another excellent piece in the increasingly-essential London Review of Books, this time on the current digital ads landscape, cookies, targeting, user-identification, Apple and all the rest. If you’re an industry expert then this won’t tell you anything you don’t know (but it’s worth reading anyway because it’s just a really well-written article), but if you’re less familiar with the technical ins and outs of ‘how exactly my phone knows it’s my wife’s birthday and I am yet to buy her a present or even think about it yet’ then this is a very good, and very readable, primer.
- The Chatbot Logs: The Washinton Post reports on what users of a specific LLM, Wildchat, asked The Machine over 40,000-odd conversations – the results aren’t hugely surprising but offer an interesting overview of user behaviour and habits, and confirm a few suspicions you might have had. Yes, a persistent coterie of users are desperate to get sexy with The Machine, even when The Machine does not want to get sexy back; yes, homework; yes, CVs; yes, vast amounts of theoretically-sensitive data thrown into the system with no care whatsoever about its ingestion and eventual incorporation into the corpus…and yes, there’s the racism and the anger and all that jazz. There are also one or two surprising things – the people who just seem to like to ‘play’ with the system, asking it to just ‘imagine’ things, seemingly for the fun of it, for example, or the fact that a significant proportion of people were using it as part of general life workflow (‘write this boring email to the DVLA’, etc etc). Perhaps most interesting, though, is the detail about the fact that the vast majority of users try it once and never go back – the interface problem, and the related open-endedness problem, are still very much a thing.
- VoiceChat: Another article exploring the experience of using the new ChatGPT voice functionality, still not rolled out to everyone – again, the author is amazed by the natural-feeling conversational interface, but here they give some very specific usage examples which I found particularly interesting, not least the ‘I basically just vented at the machine and got it to summarise my grievances and subsequently realised that it was in fact I who was being a petty little b1tch’ section, and the ‘using it as a quick Q&A companion while reading a book’ usecase. I still don’t have any interest whatsoever in using this myself, but I can absolutely get the appeal for people who are maybe more invested in optimising themselves and their existences (I do not understand these people).
- The Replika CEO Interview: This has been getting a lot of traction this week because of the section at the end in which she goes off on a bit of a tangent about how ‘of course people will one day have relationships with their AI!’ which is, if you think about it for more than 2s, exactly what you would expect the CEO of a company whose business is the creation of digital companion software to say in a big-ticket corporate profiling piece. Far more interesting, to my mind, was the bit towards the middle in which she talks about the baseline economics of the business and how the tech/cost thing works, and how they think about the service model – but obviously all the headlines went to the ‘MARRY YOUR AI!’ lines because we are fundamentally incapable of thinking of things outside the prism of Hollywood/scifi, turns out. It genuinely amazes me that I first featured Replika in Curios in…hang on…2017! Jesus fcuking Christ I have been doing this for TOO LONG.
- Minority Report For Influencers: I mean, I’m paraphrasing but that’s basically it. Another WaPo piece, this time about technology being developed which uses AI (OF COURSE IT DOES!) to seek to predict the likelihood that any given influencer, currently being anodyne and apolitical and shiny of hair and tooth, will at some point in the future start spouting politically-motivated cant about ‘the woke mind virus’/’Project25’ and cause problems for your avowedly-apolitical branded content. “A tool recently introduced by Captiv8, a marketing firm that helps advertisers like Walmart and Kraft Heinz connect with influencers, uses artificial intelligence to analyze mentions of social media stars in online articles, and then determines whether they are likely to discuss elections or “political hot topics.” The firm also assigns letter grades to creators based on their posts, comments and media coverage, where an “A” means very safe and a “C” signals caution. The grades incorporate categories like “sensitive social issues,” death and war, hate speech or explicit content.” I like this a lot, because a) it reminds me of all those times I was asked by people to deliver a ‘red/amber/green’ threat assessment system for social media crisis management, despite repeatedly telling them that this was a fcuking facile and largely pointless exercise; b) at no point in the piece is there any discussion or explanation of exactly HOW this is meant to work. Is this total b0llocks, sold by an opportunistic agency or two to gullible clients with more money than sense? Not for me to say (yes, yes it is)!
- Change Blindness: Curios favourite Professor Ethan Mollick returns with this blogpost which does a decent job summarising the extent of progress in genAI over the past few years – it’s quite arresting when you see it laid out like this, although it’s equally possible that we’re reaching some sort of plateauing point with this particular generation of tech (per his points on LLMs). Still, if you presume continued growth and improvement based on this pace/trajectory (which, to be clear, you shouldn’t, it probably isn’t going to work like that) then it becomes a bit dizzying.
- The Substackification of Everything: This one’s very much gotten the newsletterers (yes, it is the official term) talking this week – Emily Sundberg writes (in her own Substack, obvs) about the end-point effect of the Substack business model and where it seemingly-inevitably leads: “the point of Substack — unlike Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok — is to get you to monetize your content, and/or get you to spend money on other people’s content. Creating content with the goal of making money off of it is different than creating content with the goal of getting likes, is different than creating content with the goal of being creative and connecting with other people. Seems to me, the obvious attraction of being able to monetize your taste—over putting out a probably-more-interesting letter about your actual life—is leading to a lot of very, very similar Substacks.” I Have Thoughts on this, but will try and keep them brief because, well, life is too short: 1) I subscribe to a LOT of stuff, as you can imagine, but also churn through a lot because I often find new things and try them out for an issue or two before realising they’re not quite my thing, and FCUK ME is there a certain homogeneity within the ecosystem, specifically clustered around ‘things I like’, ‘my recommendations for x/y/z’, ‘my thoughts on viral thing du jour’, that type of idea; 2) I appreciate someone who writes a linkblog, literally the most derivative and least-original format of all time, is in no position to start casting aspersions as to other people’s originality or otherwise; 3) nonetheless, there really is some truly atrocious writing out there (again, trust me, this is written with a degree of self-awareness here); 4) THIS IS THE PROBLEM WITH ‘THE CREATOR ECONOMY’ THERE IS NOT ENOUGH MONETISABLE DIVERSITY OF TASTE AND HENCE EVERYONE ENDS UP CIRCLING THE SAME METAPHORICAL CONTENT/THEMATIC PLUGHOLES WITH EVER-DIMINISHING RETURNS.
- The Spotify LatAm Podcast Crash: A piece on how Spotify’s support, and subsequent removal of said support, for the podcast market in Latin America effectively led to the creation and subsequent destruction of an entire industry ecosystem, and a general cautionary tale about what happens when the free/VC money runs out, and about what possibly underpinning culture with rickety, transient capital maybe isn’t the smartest idea long-term.
- Counting in Japanese: Numbers in Japanese will always hold a particular place in my heart as a result of the Summer I spent working at Buckingham Palace, during which I had to interact with a LOT of Japanese tourists and as a result learned a smattering of words that were occasionally useful when attempting to communicate things like ‘no, you need to give me more coins for that sub-Beanie Baby corgi toy you’ve inexplicably chosen to take back to Osaka’. So it was that I learned that ‘one pound’ in Japanese is the INCREDIBLY PLEASING ‘ichi pondo’, and that ‘one, two’ is the equally-pleasing ‘ichi, ni’, and that Japanese people will be incredibly impressed when the malnourished, dead-eyed alcoholic behind the till manages even a word or two in their native tongue. Anyway, this is all about the oddity of counting in Japan, and how when you get past the very basic ‘1-20’ type stuff (which I obviously never did) it gets VERY ODD: “It turns out that, on their own, those beginner-friendly words you learned above are only good to communicate abstract numbers, like “the number 2” or a rocket launch countdown. When you want to refer to numbers of things—arguably the most common use case—you need to attach something called josuushi, or “counter word”, after the number. For example, to count books, you have to add the kanji 冊 satsu after the number, so that the “two” part of “two books” becomes “ni-satsu” instead of just “ni”. Satsu is a word specialized for counting books, and nothing other than books. To say “two magazines” the number part will become “ni-bu”, and for “two carrots”, “ni-hon”.” Fascinating.
- The Oddity of Reels: Katie Notopoulos writes on the oddity of Instagram Reels – part of me does wonder whether her status as an official beat reporter on weird and quirky internet culture means that her algos might be a bit more skewed than the average user, but I very much enjoyed her description of the odd, context-free videos that the platform throws up, thanks presumably to its odd demographic mix of people who have grown up with video and are therefore comfortable with shooting and editing and presentation, and those that very much have not.
- The Disney Animation Process: Ok, so this isn’t so much an article as it is a link to Disney’s actual website – BUT! This is also a GLORIOUS exploration of how Disney does animation in 2024, and it is full of beautiful clips and sketches and animation, and you can genuinely learn stuff about How Cartoons Get Made, and if you have any interest at all in animation or Disney, or if you or someone you know would like to get into it, this is just brilliant.
- How New LEGO Sets Get Made: This is, I concede, a total PR puff piece for LEGO, but it’s also interesting, particularly given the fact that the company’s not always hugely open to ‘behind the scenes’ stuff. The article looks at how you go from ‘submitting a theoretical design through the LEGO Ideas Programme’ to ‘having that actually become a product that goes on sale worldwide’, and it’s a lot more interesting than it sounds, honest (even if you’re not a LEGO person).
- Having A Tough Fringe: It’s that time of year again, when thousands of people head to Edinburgh to, as far as I can tell, bankrupt themselves AND give themselves cirrhosis, all in the space of a month or so. It is, famously, increasingly hard to do the Fringe as a performer – prices for accommodation is insane, the competition is insane, the amount of work you need to put in is insane, and you could do all that to find yourself playing to audiences of three people, two of whom spend the entirety of your set giving you the most devastating heckle in the world (to my mind, “you’re not funny” is impossible to come back from when delivered with feeling). This piece, in Chortle, is written by Vix Leyton (who, full disclosure, I used to work with many years ago and who I like) who decided to ‘do comedy’ a few years ago and is now remarkably on her nth Fringe as a less-storied comic, and who writes about what it’s like to be one of the people who are perhaps struggling a bit more than thriving, and how to find the joy when it is p1ssing it down and you are broke and in tears and haven’t eaten a vegetable in three weeks.
- The Katsuification of Britain: Vittles – of course! – does a deep-dive into the how and why of katsu curry becoming an inescapable food profile in modern Britain, a kind of ‘premium mediocre’ of cosmopolitanism. Typically great, on the history of the dish and its spread through the culinary canon and, if you will, THE SEMIOTICS OF KATSU (I told you, it’s Vittles!). Super-interesting, although you do rather wish it was a more interesting flavour profile that had achieved such crushing ubiquity.
- We Created A Fake AI Delivery Company: A warning to anyone reading this who works in any sort of ‘creative’ industry and does things like ‘pitching’ and ‘attempting to surprise and delight an incredibly-jaded client who has seen it all’ – you cannot fail to come away from this story feeling INCREDIBLY INADEQUATE and like you’re basically rubbish compared to these two fcukers. Serhii and Oksana are ‘creative problem solvers’ looking for work in London, but with no network or contacts. Their solution to getting their foot in the door with their dream clients? A series of cold mailings using some of the most brilliant stunt/theatre/ARG-ish type moves I have seen in YEARS. Honestly, you will read this with a mounting sense of awe at how involved this gets, and you will then feel very, very ashamed of all the lacklustre pieces of ‘pitch theatre’ you’ve halfheartedly indulged in over the years. This is AMAZING, and I expect these people are fighting off the job offers right about now.
- How To Write Sex Scenes: I’ve always thought I would make a passable writer of smut, for some reason – I realise this is possibly one of those classic instances of ‘the ineffable arrogance of the middle-aged man’, whereby we’re all secretly convinced that we’d be able to turn our hands to basically anything, given the opportunity (“no, Kamala, it’s no trouble at all, of course I’m happy for you to pick my brains on campaign strategy”), but, equally, I’ve always thought that the combination of ‘being able to type really quickly’ and ‘having a reasonable vocabulary’ would stand me in pretty good stead as a churner-outer of ‘erotic’ potboilers. This piece in the Times features author Kate Weinberg talking to her peers about their approach to fcuking in their books, and it’s interesting throughout, from the ‘everyone assumes you’re talking about what YOU like’ problem, to David Nicholls’ observation about the inherent ‘ickiness’ of the male gaze – although I would say that their list of ‘best sexy books’ at the end is garbage (fwiw, Lila Says which is not only FILTHY but utterly heartbreaking and has a fascinating mythology around it).
- The Cocaine Kingpin Who Wanted To Play Football: Ok, so this is a two-part bit of crime reporting in the Washington Post and it suffers a bit from, well, reading very much like a stereotypical ‘piece of longform crime writing in a prestige US publication’, but equally the baseline story here (massive narco kingpin realises that small football clubs in South America are in fact an EXCELLENT way of laundering large sums of filthy money and, if you invest enough money and the club is pony enough, will also let you, narco kingpin, fulfil your longstanding dream of playing actual professional football despite not actually being very good) is great, and by the end of the second part you will have developed a VERY SMALL degree of grudging admiration for Sebastián Marset and some VERY BIG questions about exactly what the fcuk you have to do to get arrested for this sort of thing in South America.
- Bama Confidential: I remember when the whole ‘Bama Rush’ thing blew up a few years ago and I realised I couldn’t really engage with it on any serious level because it would basically involve me having to watch a lot of videos of identikit blonde girls approximately 25 years younger than me just sort of basically dancing and parading and, well, it didn’t feel like the sort of thing I ought to be, or indeed wanted to be, doing. Thankfully, though, Ann-Helen Peterson has now done the ULTIMATE DEEP-DIVE into Alabaman sorority culture, of which this is the first part – she’s published several others this week, focusing on various different aspects of the Greek system, initiations and the like, but this intro piece gives you all the background on the culture and class and history and general madness of the whole thing, and, as ever with this stuff, it exerts a strange and terrible fascination to Brits whos universitarian experiences do not, as a rule, involve living in insane multimilliondollar McMansions and having several hundred people intimately judge you before you’ve even been fingered at Fresher’s Week yet.
- The Tail End: About the death of a pet, specifically a cat. I wouldn’t ordinarily include this based on the subject matter, but this is a really beautiful piece of writing by Sloane Crosley in the New Yorker. Two things, though – 1) if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t have a lot of time for people getting very upset at the death of their pet, this one might not be for you (although I’d still suggest giving it a try, it really is gorgeous prose); and 2) If you’re the sort of person who finds reading about dying animals in any way traumatic, DO NOT READ THIS. The rest of you, though, ‘enjoy’!
- The Crush House: Videogame reviews don’t ordinarily get a look-in in the HIGH QUALITY, OH-SO-LITERARY tail end of the longreads, but this – a review of new game The Crush House, all about filming contestants in a fictitious reality TV show – is SUCH a good piece of writing about fiction and presentation and narrative and WHAT IS TRUE, and it repeatedly references Guy Debord, and basically this is 100% the sort of intensely-pretentious (but totally appropriately, I promise) writing about games that I love and would like to read more of.
- To The Senora On The First Floor: Evelyn Folk writes about a woman who lives in her apartment block in Mexico City – honestly, this evokes the very specific feeling of sharing an apartment block with people in such an incredibly-specific way that it immediately flashed me back to the various nonagenarians I would spend my days conversing with while I was living in Rome and shuffling between my apartment and my mum’s, and the particular feeling of slow heat and time winding itself down that you get…I have no idea if this will speak to any of you, but I adored this.
- Inner Light: Finally this week, a short-ish piece by Jack Hanson in the Paris Review which I loved and which made me want to read about another 100,000 words of it – see what you think: “There is enormous pleasure to be had in maintaining at least two, if not several, parallel lives. Of course, there are the pleasures of concealment and control, but the true indulgence is in occupying the vast reaches of interior space, populated by all the aspects of yourself that don’t end up in any social circle, any relationship, any reputation, and so don’t really get expressed at all; a big, sumptuous, light-filled nothing, the real you. You find it especially at the age of, say, twenty-five, on an airplane between two major cities, one in which you live and the other in which your girlfriend lives, the latter being where she carries on flings she takes little trouble to conceal, and the former being where you’ve discovered the cover afforded by being mistreated and have decided to carry on a fling of your own. Up there, between clouds, the contradictions don’t really clash, they just float beside one another. It’s useful to float along with them, becoming comfortable with the illogic and the fabrication, particularly when, for example, you are seated beside your new fling at a dinner party, trying not to let on.”
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: