On Saturday night I went to the pub for my friend Nick’s birthday, and happened to meet a group of football fans who supported Swindon Town FC, the team of the town where I grew up (but, to be clear, I WAS NOT BORN THERE). When asked why they supported the team, despite not being from there or having any connection to the place, they replied that they were all from the South, and that they just wanted a team to support that was a) near enough to London to allow them to go to home games cheaply and easily; and b) amusingly sh1t; they then asked me if I did in fact grow up there, and, when I replied in the affirmative, dropped into a genuinely serious register as one of them solemnly said to me, with a look of real pity in his eyes, ‘I am so, so sorry mate’.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure that it’s thanks to those cnuts that I’ve had a horrible chest infection all week, so fcuk them and fcuk Swindon too, the place and the football team. They’re right, it *is* a sh1thole.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can rest assured that I wiped all the phlegm off this before hitting ‘publish’.
By Min Ding (most images this week from TIH, for which thanks!)
THE SECTION WHICH WAS THRILLED THAT ORBITAL WON THE BOOKER AND WOULD LIKE TO ADD ITS SMALL RECOMMENDATION TO THE CHORUS BECAUSE IT IS A GORGEOUS PIECE OF WRITING AND I SAY THAT AS SOMEONE WHO REALLY IS MOSTLY DEAD INSIDE, PT.1:
- Tiny Troupe: Couple of caveats to this one: a) it’s AI, I AM SORRY (but I promise it’s interesting AI, honest); and b) this is technical and unless you’re someone who feels comfortable parsing phrases like “you will need to set the AZURE_OPENAI_KEY and AZURE_OPENAI_ENDPOINT environment variables to your API key and endpoint, respectively”, then, well, you won’t really be able to do anything with it. Ok, so with those caveats aside I think this is super-interesting – Tiny Troupe is, (very) basically, a new experimental AI agent playground developed by Microsoft specifically for the purpose of ‘testing’ ideas and concepts for business. How? Well effectively (and, again, I am…somewhat flattening what’s going on here because, well, I only understand bits of it, leave me alone) this lets you spin up a sandbox populated by various AI ‘personas’ with qualities that you, the creator, can define, and then put various scenarios/options to them to see how they respond – so, for example, you could use said personas to evaluate the performance of different marketing messages, or product lines, or TV show ideas…Per the blurb, ”TinyTroupe is an experimental Python library that allows the simulation of people with specific personalities, interests, and goals. These artificial agents – TinyPersons – can listen to us and one another, reply back, and go about their lives in simulated TinyWorld environments…The focus is thus on understanding human behavior and not on directly supporting it (like, say, AI assistants do)…TinyTroupe aims at enlightening productivity and business scenarios, thereby contributing to more successful projects and products.” This end of AI feels, much as with autonomous browser-access, like an area that’s going to blow up in the next year or so, and I am fascinated to see a) the sort of things that people are going to use sandboxes like this to assess; b) whether the stuff it models bears ANY relation whatsoever to how things then happen in the real world because, well, I HAVE SOME DOUBTS, Still, it’s all fascinating stuff – although we’re now getting into the sort of odd, dark territory where if you start to think too hard about the ‘little computer people’ and how much you’re making them suffer by using them as an infinite focus group then you very quickly get into quite unpleasant psychological scifi territory. I can’t help but imagine a not-too-distant future in which we’re offered the opportunity to use systems like this to model consequences and reactions to potential actions, like some sort of predictive assistant to determine the likely reaction if we wear *that* dress to the party or send *that* message to the groupchat. Is that good? No idea! BONUS AI MAGIC LINK: there’s some quite impressive animation transfer going on in this new paper by Bytedance.
- Defeat The Spotify Algorithm: I understand that, for many people, their relationship with the various algorithms that govern their lives, largely unseen and unbidden and sort-of-unknowable, is a benign, symbiotic one – we feed them with our data, and in return for this gentle care, they guide us down paths that they know will scratch our pleasure centres in *just* the right way (can I just say that writing that in such a way that vaguely-anthropomorphised the algo made me feel…wrong, and quite genuinely unsettled? Just for the record) – and that in particular Spotify’s internal maths tends to be judged quite positively by many, who find its personalised daily selections to be almost uncannily attuned to THEM…I get all of that, I do, but, equally, sometimes it’s good to throw the machine something rogue, something UNEXPECTED and possibly to allow serendipity, non-mathematically-optimised chance, back into your musical life. And so, welcome to Max Hawkins’ Daily Random Playlist, which every day will present you with 30 songs selected (apparently) at random from the Great Spotify Pile – the idea being that every day your audio stream will get queered with 30 songs which have come entirely out of leftfield, allowing you to maybe take a step or two off the well-tarmacked path The Machine has laid in front of you. Aside from anything else this feels like a good way of discovering GENUINELY new music – based on a few days of seeing what this spits out, I am reasonably confident that there’s neither rhyme nor reason behind the selections – and, given we are soon to enter The Season of Wrapped, you’ve probably got about, ooh, 10 days or so to mess with your data and render your selection marginally less basic, and this can DEFINITELY help with that.
- The Mushroom Colour Atlas: Being as I am a largely urban person I am not up on mycology, seasonality, and the whole question of ‘what time of the year is it appropriate and safe to go and try and pick psychedelics in a field?’, but I am broadly aware that the rough answer is ‘now-ish’. This link won’t help you pick liberty caps – and they won’t make anything better, they’ll just make the horror VIVIDLY PIXELLATED – but it is a really interesting and rather beautiful site, presenting a lovely, watercolour-ish pantone chart of all the different hues that fungi can take, along with information on the various types, their habitats and the like. Just…nice (and, for a certain type of middle-class household, also your new Farrow and Ball palette-matching tool).
- A Group That Makes Small Decisions For You: This one comes via Caitlin at Links and I am…slightly in awe of it, if I’m honest, because it’s one of those things where I look at it and am once again reminded of the sheer insane diversity of human experience and proclivity. Are you the sort of person who, when confronted with a minor decision in your life – what to wear, say, or what to have for lunch, or what shade of Le Creuset to buy – will mutter to themselves ‘it doesn’t fcuking matter, give a fcuk’ and just pick something, or are you the sort of person who would MUCH rather get a DEFINITIVE ANSWER from someone as to which the BETTER option is? If the latter, then why not become a member of this Facebook Group where you can, at any time of the day or night it seems, drop a question into the chat and have one of the 185,000(!!!!!) people worldwide who participate offer up their thoughts on what your preferred course of action should be. ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-FIVE THOUSAND PEOPLE. How many ‘so, mash or new potatoes?’ questions? How many ‘hair up or down?’ posts? I AM IN AWE. Who…who lives like this? How TIRING must it be? HOW DO YOU CARE SO MUCH ABOUT THINGS???? I can’t work out whether this is a weird side-effect of a constantly rated and quantified life, where it’s assumed that there is always a ‘best’, or at least ‘better’, option, or whether instead it’s just born out of a simple desire for community and connection, but, either way, I am agog (you can read more about these maniacs here should you so choose).
- Butterfly Superhighway: This was sent to me by one Toby Barlow (HI TOBY BARLOW!), who is Creative Director at US agency Lafayette American – as far as I can tell this is a non-commercial project that’s just about celebrating the journey of the monarch butterfly as it migrates across the US (and about raising awareness of the plant they need access to – milkweed, apparently – as they make their trip), and it’s just a really nice, gentle, Google Maps-based trip across North America. Click one of the different journey-tracks on the homepage and it just sort of whisks you along from destination to destination in a pleasing digital analogue of the monarch’s flight.
- Bluesky Starter Pack Directory: People really are fascinating. It’s been genuinely interesting this week watching a certain section of Twitter finally decide that ENOUGH IS ENOUGH and they need to MAKE A STAND and LEAVE THE CESSPIT (a question to those people – I appreciate that the tenor of conversation in certain parts of Twitter has declined significantly in the past couple of years, and there’s just SO MUCH HORRID STUFF ON THERE…but, equally, guys, have you tried…just not looking at the algorithmic feed? Because it turns out that if you don’t, you only see stuff from people you follow…which you control! Like, have you tried just, well, not pressing the button that says ‘show me all the mad, horrible stuff!’?), and then arriving on Bluesky (also, can I personally express a vehement hatred for the skullfcukingly-twee ‘I am going where the sky is blue/to the blue place/to [insert emjoi combination indicating bluesky]’ – JUST NAME THE PLATFORM WHAT DO YOU THINK IT’S GOING TO HAPPEN JESUS FCUKING CHRIST – and immediately doing the ‘oh my god this place is growing SO MUCH, watch out Elon the RESISTANCE STARTS HERE, Twitter will be dead in months, it’s all over for them!’ thing…look, I know you’re excited and it’s just like getting the post-Brexit band back together again, but, well, let’s look at some numbers shall we? Bluesky’s put on a couple of million users this week. Threads, which at the time of writing has over 13x Bluesky’s numbers, added over 15m. GYAC YOU ARE ALL SHOUTING EXCITEDLY ABOUT THE FACT THAT THERE ARE SOME PEOPLE AT YOUR PARISH DISCO, GET OVER IT. Ahem. Anyway, despite the fact that the platform continues to prove to me that, at heart, I really hate quite a lot of people who broadly share my politics (SAD!), Bluesky grows and is becoming more useful, and one of the reasons is that Starter Packs – which allow you to bulk-follow a bunch of users, arranged by topic into groups with one click – are really useful network builders. The link up there takes you to a searchable directory of ALL the starter packs currently out there, so just plug in terms you’re interested in and work from there. CAVEAT – the problem with starter packs, I’ve come to learn, is that while useful they can also clog up your feed with a LOT of cruft, so worth being discriminate before you find that you’ve accidentally followed the world’s 3000 premier newt sexers and can see nothing but amphibian mating chat across your TL. BONUS BLUESKY TOOL!: this webtool lets you enter your Bluesky handle below to find people followed by lots of the people you follow (but not you), another useful way of reconstituting at least some of the network you might have had on other networks.
- Bluesky Deletions: My misanthropy aside, one of the nice things about Bluesky is that once again people can build and create on top of a text-based social platform, which is how you get things like this – a website which presents a constantly-updating, vanishing and ephemeral stream of posts that have been deleted from Bluesky. The site spits out a few at a time in a constantly-scrolling feed, and they fade in 2-3 seconds meaning that you can’t quite read all of them, so everything you see has a suitably transient, evanescent quality. This has the feel of a gallery installation, in a good way.
- The Golden Dryer Sheet Awards: A nice initiative by one woman media empire in waiting Taylor Lorenz (so impressive, but whose hunger and drive I find quite honestly terrifying), who has come up with a great little idea to celebrate pieces of journalism which, through no fault of their own, get buried by the days news avalanche. Seemingly open to any piece published in 2024 (not, note, SELF-published), the full blurb is as follows – any journalists reading this will almost certainly have at least one piece from the past 11 months that fits the bill here: “The day Biden stepped down. The day Trump got shot. The day Eric Adams was indicted. The day the Brat album was released. Great days for the internet, horrible days for your article to go live. This category of The Golden Dryer Sheet Awards is for stories that were published on days when the world was preoccupied. About the Golden Dryer Sheet Awards: There’s hundreds of journalism awards and they all ask for one thing: impact. They want work that speaks volumes, asks big questions, makes giant waves. This award isn’t that. I’m not looking for impact. I’m not looking for fancy bylines. I’m looking for work that you’re proud of that set nothing in motion. Like the award’s namesake, your submission should have made a barely perceptible improvement to society. You know that it happened, you put in the work. Maybe one other person caught a whiff of your efforts. But that’s it. The Golden Dryer Sheet celebrates all the journalism that no one cared about. Except you. And possibly your mother.”
- Elisium City: No, it’s not a typo (or if it is, it’s not MY typo) – this really is called ‘Elisium City’, ‘just like paradise, but, well, a bit off!’. It seems appropriate in the second week of the new world order, after a few days in which we have been reassured that, yes, this version of Trumpland will be just as venal, selfish plute-weighted and mad as the last one, that we feature yet ANOTHER attempt by a bunch of rich people who seemingly think that all it takes to crack civics is ‘a fcuktonne of money’ and ‘large gates and possibly some well-paid private security personnel’ to create their own exciting new urban vision. For reasons known only to the web devs here you can’t copy any of the text from the site, which is a shame because I wanted to bring you more prose along the lines of ‘cognitive net-zero sponge luxury resource city’ (no, really, that is a direct quote) because FCUK ME is this utterly nonsensical. It is going to be in Florida! It is going to be…a city? For very rich people? There will be flying cars! It seems to exist in a post-scarcity society in which people will simply be free to ‘pursue their passions’ across 14 specifically designed districts! It appears to be some sort of proof-of-concept thing for…smart cities tech? WHO KNOWS??? This is like what would happen if someone looked at NEOM and went ‘that, but on a shoestring’, and is quite bafflingly irreal.
- Network of Time: This is kind of incredible, and it feels a *bit* like magic or witchcraft or something. This is basically the ‘six degrees of separation’ game, except done with photos – select any two people from the (very, very long) drop-down lists of notables from post-photography history and the site will in no time spit out a selection of pictures from its archives which take you from person A to person X, via images. So for example you get from ‘Nelson Mandela’ to ‘Jeffrey Epstein’ in three steps – a photo of Mandela with Kofi Annan, then Annan with Bill Clinton, and then WOOP THERE’S JEFF! This is a lot of fun, sort-of-amazing, and made me think that there’s probably something bigger and shinier and more clever that you can do with this idea that, well, I am not currently smart enough to conceive of.
- Deflock: This is interesting a global map of cameras equipped with license plate recognition technology, theoretically letting you see exactly where you might want to not drive if you don’t want your numbers taken. Depending on where in the world you look there’s also data about which way they’re facing so you can do your utmost to avoid prying eyes – why might you want to do that? NONE OF MY BUSINESS.
- Hangout FM: This is interesting – built by the people behind much-loved shared listening site turntable.fm from all those years ago, Hangout FM is basically…well, it’s another shared listening platform, and, per the blurb, “Welcome to Hangout FM, where you can DJ live on a virtual stage in avatar form. Better than a discord bot, Hangout FM is a virtual space for DJs and artists to share music and connect with fans anytime, anywhere. Our mission is to create the music metaverse through our app and website (hangout.fm), provide DJs for every social gathering (virtual and in real life), and drive fame to artists. No camera or microphone is necessary, we’ve built the perfect virtual music venue just for you with this app [it’s both Android and iOS, fyi]! Get on stage and start DJing with your friends right now from anywhere in the world. We feature hundreds of hangouts where DJs are currently playing all kinds of music. Anyone can hop on stage to DJ by creating a playlist or uploading their own music.” Which sounds both quite fun and also weirdly 2020-coded, but also comes with the added benefit of the ability to listen in to anyone else’s broadcast – you can see live ‘hangs’ here, which you can drop into and listen to – and it’s launching with record label agreements which mean there are over 100million licensed tracks to play with in the app…this could be really fun for a certain type of person, and maybe that type of person is YOU.
- The Real Hotels: It may not surprise you to know that I have never experienced an episode of ‘The Real Housewives of…’ in any outfits incarnations, and yet, thanks to the osmotic nature of memes in 2024 I feel like I can trace the broad contours of the show regardless (the shouting, the tears, the shouting and the tears, and the oddly-inexpressive faces…is that basically right?) – for those of you more invested in the HousewifeVerse, though, you might enjoy this site which celebrates all the many, many hotels which have apparently featured across the various franchise instalments. Want to live vicariously? Want to zoom around a world map and see all the various different luxury palaces these people have stayed in while pretending to live, laugh and love for the cameras? Want an insight into what it looks like when it ALWAYS looks and feels like Dubai or Miami, wherever in the world you might be? OH GOOD! This is a fan project made by ‘hotel marketers’, which strikes me as quite a nice calling card so well done them.
- Love Songs: Undisputed kings of the dataviz The Pudding are back with an analysis of how ‘love songs’ have evolved as a genre over the past century, specifically looking at the vexatious question of ‘are there fewer love songs in the Billboard 100 than there used to be?’. Lovely vizwork, and interesting subject and, at heart, some GOOD LESSONS about how taxonomy and nuance in data clustering and evaluation can reveal more, better information from a dataset than might immediately be apparent (or, depending on your perspective, how you can make data say anything if you fcuk with the labels enough).
By Moonassi
THE SECTION WHICH WAS THRILLED THAT ORBITAL WON THE BOOKER AND WOULD LIKE TO ADD ITS SMALL RECOMMENDATION TO THE CHORUS BECAUSE IT IS A GORGEOUS PIECE OF WRITING AND I SAY THAT AS SOMEONE WHO REALLY IS MOSTLY DEAD INSIDE, PT.2:
- The Manchester Digital Music Archive: On the one hand, it’s true that the tedious music-based BRAND IDENTITY that Manchester’s had wrapped around it by a couple of successive generations of entrepreneurs and grifters is…annoying, frankly (YES WE KNOW ABOUT BAGGY AND THE SALFORD BOYS CLUB CAN YOU FCUK OFF NOW PLEASE?); on the other, it’s also true that the city has a pretty incredible place in the UK’s musical pantheon and has been responsible for some genuinely influential genres and people and places over the past 50-odd years (longer, I know). The Manchester Digital Music Archive “is an online community archive established in 2003 to celebrate Greater Manchester music and its social history. We are a crowd-sourced archive, a place for people all over the world to share Manchester music ephemera and memories, be they fans, musicians or involved with the music industry itself.” What this means in practice is that you can browse an INSANE list of artists associated with the city and see whatever’s in the archive associated with them – from flyers from A Guy Called Gerald’s earliest club appearances to a whole bunch of zine reviews of the late, lamented Vibrant Thigh (no, me neither). This is SO INTERESTING.
- Save Wisdom: One of the things you learn as you age is that you will at some point or another really, really regret not asking the old people in your life more about said life while they are still in a position to respond with anything other than emphysemic wheezing or a whispered ‘switzerland…now…please’. Save Wisdom is a project designed to address this, offering 1000 questions which can be used as a guide or template for conversations with people whose memories you want to preserve or archive – all of these are intended to help draw out information about a person, their wants and desires and their memories, and, honestly, if I were a) the sort of person who was sentimental enough to start a memorialisation project for an elderly relative; or b) had any relatives left to memorialise, I would be all over this.
- VeloPlanner: ARE YOU A LYCRA DAD? Not a sex thing, honest – I am talking about lycra in the cycling context. Should you be one of the baffling number of men (sorry, this feels horribly sexist – I am of course aware that cycling is very much a gender-neutral pursuit, it’s just that I can’t help but associate it with ‘men in their 30s and 40s who have realised it’s a legitimate excuse to spend literally hours away from your family and maybe fit in two pints’) who think ‘getting on a bike and pedalling in the cold and wet and rain’ is a fun way of spending time, you might find this website super-useful – VeloPlanner is basically an all-in-one repository of all of the world’s cycling routes, allowing you to do useful things like plot a route from London to Shenzen (I am speculating here, no idea if that is at all possible). Why not spend the rest of the day imagining the sort of road trip and real ale tour that you and the Bike Lads could go on if you hadn’t instead chosen to procreate?
- Animations: Geometric, maths-y (TECHNICAL!) animations by Etienne Jacob (whose work I featured here back in 2019 via Twitter – this links to his website, so I am allowing myself the revisit DO NOT JUDGE ME), sent to me by my friend Tom who wrote ‘these make my ganglia feel nice’ and, while that may make my friend Tom sound like some sort of intensely-weird brain pervert, you will also know EXACTLY what I mean when you look at these. It’s like some sort of weird, visual-only ASMR, seriously.
- Particle: Another week, another app seeking to DISRUPT NEWS CONSUMPTION – going to be honest, this doesn’t feel like a great time to be launching such a service given that the reaction of a not-insignificant portion of the world to last week’s news is likely to be ‘yeah, not really going to look at the news for a while thanks’, but, well, good luck nonetheless! Particle’s gimmick is that it aggregates different sources into topic-based feeds for a wide-ranging overview of opinions and perspectives on any issue, and that it offers varying degrees of AI summarisation/interpretation to give you quick overviews of a given question alongside AI-enabled interrogation of a concept, but, well, neither of those seem like enough of a hook to bother with this, if I’m honest (but I say that as someone who has realised this week that their relationship with information is, on some pretty deep level, utterly, utterly broken, and as such probably isn’t worth listening to). Still, if you’re on Apple and want another, differently-shaped window into the horror that is everything then, well, here!
- The St John Prints: APOLOGIES THIS LINK TAKES YOU TO THINGS THAT COST ACTUAL MONEY. Ahem. St John, for those of you who aren’t familiar, is a very famous restaurant in Farringdon, London – I’ve featured writing about it before lots of times in Curios, and it holds a special place in my heart because not only is it a fcuking amazing place to eat but also because I worked literally next door to it for a couple of years, and going down to the bakery every morning to buy doughnuts for me and the woman I was having an affair with at the time was a moment of genuine daily joy. Photographer Jason Lowe took the photographs that accompanied the restaurant’s 30th anniversary cookbooks, and is now making prints of those photos available for sale on his website and these are AMAZING. Seriously, whether or not you have personal history with the restaurant these are some top-quality photos of food, cookery, meat fish and viscera (quite a lot of viscera), and they would make SUPERB gifts for someone.
- The Best Inventions of 2024: As is now seemingly tradition, Time Magazine has once again published its rundown of what it considers to be the best inventions or innovations of the past 12 months – I confess to feeling a bit ‘meh’ about quite a few of these this year, perhaps because, in contrast to previous selections, these seem a bit more ‘product’-y rather than ‘general innovation-y’, but, as in previous years, it’s worth having a look through the list as there will be at least a couple of entries which are new to you and which might elicit a spark of inspiration as to how you might take them in different directions, or which might make you think of the stories they create. This, for example, is sort-of brilliant and heartbreaking at the same time.
- Transit: I know, I know, you *have* a travel app, you like your travel app, you don’t want to change your travel app – and to be honest I haven’t tried this and so I’m only recommending it on spec, but it *sounds* interesting. Transit is basically a ‘wherever you are we will tell you how to navigate the urban transit environment’ service, but it’s ad-free and seems, as far as I can tell, to have a pleasing community layer to it allowing realtime user feedback about how the service is performing to be integrated into the information fed to others. Oh, and there’s something REALLY clever that it launched the other week which uses your phone’s vibration-sensing tech to determine how many stops on the underground you’ve travelled so that you can track your relative map position even without signal which, honestly, is SO CLEVER that I am slightly in awe.
- Stretch Timer: A little timer app for Macs only, but which is, I promise, one of the most innately-satisfying bits of design work you will have seen in ages. I promise you, if you’re the sort of person who regularly wears those annoying little too-small fisherman’s caps and the sort of square-legged, slightly-too-short ‘artist’s trousers’ at work because you have ‘creative’ in your job title (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE) then you might have some sort of involuntary pleasure reaction to this. It really is that simple and beautiful and amazing.
- Towns: Do you need or want another community or messaging app? No? What if I told you this one was ON THE BLOCKCHAIN????? Yes, I know, that changes EVERYTHING! This is a new app developed by one of the people who created HouseParty (don’t worry, I didn’t remember that either and had to look it up) and who has received what I presume is an unconscionable amount of money from investors to create another digital product which, I confidently predict, will have exactly the same degree of lasting impact as his previous one. Here’s some explicatory blurb from a recent profile of the product: “Group chats on Towns can be configured in such a way that only people who fulfill certain criteria—who have specific expertise, say—are allowed to post messages, while everyone else watches from the sidelines. In this scenario, Rubin hopes, large group conversations will no longer be polluted with ill-informed takes and scam posts. He believes the ability for someone to prove that they are a real person using blockchain-based credentials, meanwhile, could help to minimize the opportunity for malicious actors to manipulate public discourse with bots.” So, basically, the ‘blockchain secret sauce’ here is ‘everyone participating this has their credentials encoded on the blockchain which then act as a passkey to certain communities depending on said credentials and the community’s own entry/participation requirements’ – which, you know, in theory doesn’t sound too bad, until you start thinking hard about how the fcuk that would work (how these creds get verified, and who by), and you quickly realise that, as with a lot of other blockchain stuff, this only really makes sense if EVERYTHING ELSE IS ON THE BLOCKCHAIN TOO, and, well, lol, no.
- Nudols: Have you ever wondered how one might go about marketing Pot Noodle to an Italian market? WONDER NO MORE! This is a quite astonishing new brand of instant cup noodle, apparently launching now-ish in Italy – there is SO much to ‘love’ here! Let’s start with the name, a BEAUTIFUL phonetic-Italian rendering of the word ‘noodles’ (let’s…let’s gloss over the fact that the rest of the brandname is ‘Banzai’, shall we)! The website homepage features a lovely voxel rendering of a noodle stand, in a design and style SUSPICIOUSLY REMINISCENT of something I featured in Curios about three years ago (I am not suggesting that these people read Curios so much as someone on the design team here has, I think, taken some QUITE HEAVY INSPIRATION from someone else’s work)! The…questionable approach to ‘pan-asian culture’ that sees the product referred to as ‘gnam gnam style’ (‘gnam gnam’ being phonetic Italian vocalisation for ‘the act of happy eating’)! Honestly, there is a LOT going on here – if nothing else, let’s notch this up as another datapoint to prop up my personal ‘maximalist webdesign is back!’ thesis.
- Antique Microscopes: Would you like an online museum collecting examples of antique microscopes throughout history for your enlightenment and delectation? I DON’T KNOW I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE INTERESTED IN I AM NOT FCUKING PSYCHIC. On the offchance, though, that is exactly what this link will take you to. I am charmed by this line from the homepage, mind: “An antique microscope is a work of art as well as science.” EXACTLY.
- Strangers On A Bench: This is such a good idea and it feels a bit like it might take off and become very famous indeed – not sure why, just has a certain VIBE about it (so, remember, WE FOUND THE CONCH). Strangers on a Bench is a podcast project which started a few months ago in which Tom Rosenthal strikes up a conversation with someone he doesn’t know who he finds sitting alone on a park bench- he asks them about them, and their life, and they just have a chat. The listener doesn’t know the person’s name, so these are entirely-anonymous little slices of life, vignettes describing the odd mundanity of everyone’s existence and the ways in which everyone contains multitudes and universes and, honestly, this is the sort of thing that normally makes me want to set fire to a teashop by way of anti-twee rebellion and yet it is SO LOVELY (and I say this as someone who really, really hates podcasts). Honestly, I think this is quite special and I think lots of you will really really like it a lot.
- Videogame Weather ASMR: I confess to not being wholly clear as to what the audience is for this YouTube channel, which features nothing but videos of videogames being played slowly, gently and with a real focus on in-game weather systems. Then again, though, who wouldn’t appreciate, say, an 8-hour-long drive around Los Santos with no shooting, no violence, just the sound of the storm raging outside? NO FCUKER, etc!
- Geography Help: I am slightly astonished by this. You know that game Geoguessr, right, where you get shown a random streetview pic and are tasked with working out where in the world it is? This is a site that’s seemingly been created for the sole purpose of making you better at that game – it includes information about local identifiers for seemingly every country in the world, from ‘what are the road markings like?’ to ‘what colour are the road signs?’ to ‘what special characters might I spot on signage which could give me a clue to the country I am in?’, and this is amazing to me because it’s INSANELY comprehensive and weirdly incredibly sort-of useful for all sorts of different purposes, and it’s all born out of a desire to help people get marginally better at a very silly, very online game, and fcuking hell people are amazing.
- Amstrad: There’s a whole generation of people for whom Alan Sugar is just an irascible TV caricature with some absolute all-time Tweets to his name, but, for those of us with a few more miles on the clock, he’s ALSO the man responsible for some of the worst home computing products of a generation in the shape of Amstrad, briefly (risibly) touted in some corners of the UK (probably corners of Sugar’s house tbh) as ‘Britain’s answer to Microsoft’. Anyway, for reasons we can only speculate at, a new website has appeared celebrating the history and legacy of the Amstrad brand – look, this is only really of interest if you’re old enough to remember this stuff, or if you’re a peculiarly-rigorous scholar of ‘now-defunct electronics brands from decades past’, but I personally got some quite strong nostalgiapangs from these cream plastic monoliths (and some PTSD responses to the fcuking Amstrad mouse, a genuinely evil piece of design with some of the worst driver software ever committed).
- Games To Play While The NYT’s Games People Are On Strike: As I mentioned the other week, the New York Times’ games people are on strike – to keep you occupied while you’re boycotting Wordle (OBVS), they’ve posted up a bunch of other games they’ve made which won’t direct traffic to the NYT and which are also LIGHTLY-SATIRICAL COMMENTS ON LABOUR RELATIONS, lol! In fairness a couple of these are very good and worth your time.
- Nightfall: An EXCELLENT browserpuzzlegame which, you will discover, is actually surprisingly deep and quite massive and which contains many, many hours worth of gameplay should you be willing to lend it the time. This is basically a full, in-browser remake of an old 2002 game called ‘Spybotics’, which, per the era, is all about HACKING NETWORKS and that sort of jazz, and which, if you can look past the slightly-of-its-time cyberpunk styling and writing, is actually a surprisingly-involved series of little puzzles which get knotty reasonably fast. This is a GREAT afternoon-killer, should you desire one.
- Asterogue: A cute little roguelike which gives you three levels for free and which then asks you to pay $5 to get the rest and, honestly, this was so good I paid the price of a cup of coffee to pay more. Good, clean, simple roguelike fun, and 100% worth the price of a London half.
- Shogun Showdown: Our final game this week is this BRILLIANT little (also) roguelike puzzler – kill all the enemies, reach the end of the gauntlet, picking up powerups and bonuses along the way; die, repeatedly, and try again and again. Four different unlockable characters, each of which plays slightly differently, a varied moveset which makes different runs feel genuinely distinct…this is free browsergame GOLD and you will thank me for pointing you at it, I promise (except you won’t, will you? You’ll just click the link and forget me you FCUKING INGRATES).
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Horrible Luxury: You remember that Tumblr from last week with the powerfully-horrible aesthetic? Well I think this one may be…actually, no, I don’t want to say ‘worse’ – let’s instead say ‘equally violent’ and leave it at that.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Neil Staines: Via Kottke, this is the Insta feed of one Niall Staines who does a variety of different styles of visual art but whose pixel-extension images – basically where you take a point in a picture and extend all the pixels from that point in a line to the edge of the canvas – are really rather wonderful and the main reason why I’m featuring the work.
- Gully Tattoo: One the one hand, this guy works out of Brighton and so if you’re in the UK then there’s the theoretical possibility that you could get his stuff inked on yourself; on the other, his work is INSANELY good and I imagine has a waiting list of YEARS, so good luck. Still, if you want to see some pretty astonishing trompe l’oeil work – the shadowing and depth in this is jaw-dropping, seriously – then click away.
- Amon Silex: Yes, ok, fine, this is another ‘odd AI images’ account, but this person is mining a bit of latent space that feels unfamiliar, far more furry and feathery and Babadoook-horror-style-adjacent to what I’m more used to seeing, and I very much enjoy how basically unsettling everything on this page is. TOO MANY EYES AND KNEES!
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The End of the 20th Century: We start this week with a piece by Jason Steinhauer to makes the argument that we can perhaps conceive of 2024 as the end of the ‘long’ 20thC (if you’re unfamiliar with the concept of ‘long’ and ‘short’ centuries, “the argument rests on the premise that centuries are not solely defined by dates, but also by the interconnected technologies, institutions and ideologies that shape people’s decisions and world events”), a period stretching from 1919 which is characterised by largely linear media and processes, and which has now been finally overtaken by the non-linear media and processes birthed by the digital age which have only now been said to have come to full maturity (the point being that we have had all this stuff for a while, but it’s only now that you can fully say that we have switched from 20thC models to 21stC models). You really do have to read the whole thing – it doesn’t lend itself to pull-out paragraphs or neat summarisation, sadly – but it’s worth every word and struck me as an interesting and potentially-helpful way of characterising How Things Work. This is obviously stimulated by the US election but is not, strictly, ‘about’ it, and as such I would recommend it even if you’re general reaction to reading any more analysis about What Happened Last Week is ‘fcuk off no more please just make it fcuking stop can we talk about that medically induced coma idea again please?’.
- Labour and the Budget: A very good overview of the current economic picture in the UK (insofar as such a thing is possible, given we should all have realised by now that ECONOMICS IS NOT A SCIENCE) and the budget announced by Rachel Reeves last week, and its relationship to ‘classic’ supply-side economics, and what some of the (big picture, economic and political) positives and negatives of the various decisions made might be. Excellent as ever in the London Review of Books, although it does rather give weight to the horrible fear that’s been growing within me since approximately July 5th thata) everything is going to feel rubbish for four years because all of the spending’s on infrastructure; and therefore that b) these people will get voted out at the next election because of aforementioned a), and as a result of that all the capital spending will be stopped and as such there won’t have been enough of it, and that as such nothing will actually get better, but, well, here’s hoping I’m reliably wrong about that.
- All Of The Various Bits About The US Election And The Fallout From It In One Place: Ok, given I appreciate that there are a not-insignificant number of you who are almost certainly VERY SICK of hearing about the US election (fcuk knows, I’m one of them!), I am taking the unusual step of collating all the links about it in a sub-section so that everyone else who’s not a total masochistic sicko can choose to skip to something less tediously overplayed. For the rest of you, though…:
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- Why The Democrats Lost: Adam Tooze, again in the LRB, gives what to my mind is one of the better, more balanced post-mortems that does the dispassionate job of looking at the numbers and the campaigns and concludes that, to give one example, “In modern America, neither economic self-description as articulated in polling nor political identity are independent variables. It is likely that in the coming weeks, large numbers of voters who in early November declared themselves in such surveys as the monthly Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index to be miserable about their financial circumstances will feel better about their affairs. Nothing will actually have changed in terms of jobs, prices or incomes, but because ‘their guy’ is back and Harris is out, they will feel more optimistic. Business confidence among small businesses – one of the Republicans’ core constituencies – will probably see a similar leap. To chase these votes through fine adjustments in macroeconomic policy, as though there were some optimal point on the trade-off curve that would have flipped enough of them in swing states into the Harris camp, was folly. What was needed was not a conservative shift in macroeconomic policy, but a more comprehensive political effort to acknowledge, address and neutralise the inflation issue.” Excellent.
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- Exit Right: Gabriel Winant offers a more in-depth party-focused analysis, arguing that it’s the Democrat’s failure to articulate a forward-looking rather than retro-nostalgic centrist vision that cost them. There are some interesting parallels made here with the post-Thatcherism Labour party that I…wasn’t wholly convinced by, but as piece of (VERY) in-depth coal-raking about party campaign strategy and positioning I found it fascinating and worthwhile (if LONG).
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- The TikTok Electorate: I think this might be one of my favourite bits of analysis of the whole think – Max Read asserts that one of the potential reasons behind the appeal of Trump across wide demographic swathes often untethered to race or agebracket lies in the new economic reality for many, many Americans (and not just Americans). Specifically (and I paraphrase), ‘this is the logical outcome of an economy where everyone is hustling and grifting and monetising, where thanks to creator fund payouts and drop-shipping opportunism and and and you have whole swathes of the country who now think of themselves as ‘small businesspeople’ and ‘entrepreneurs’, and that necessarily affects and impacts their outlook on economic policy and what is ‘fair’ and ‘necessary’ in ways that were perhaps underappreciated’. Honestly, this feels like SUCH a smart way of thinking about quite a lot of things from hereon in, US politics aside.
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- Shame on the Elon Enablers: Ok, fine, this is less ‘you need to read this’ and more ‘this article basically says what I think and I think you should all read it and agree with it’ – specifically, this is Paris Marx writing about how perhaps it would have been nice had the media not spent much of the past two years writing about Elon Musk in that ‘lol, mad maverick techbro!’ style that it so loves, and might instead have been better served by instead writing about all the fcuking iffy sh1t he was quite obviously getting into online. On which note, by the way, I would like to point out with a small degree of personal pride that that is exactly what Private Eye has been doing for the past 3 years, so well done me.
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- Why The Work Still Matters: 404 Magazine now with an impassioned editorial plea on why funding investigative journalism, particularly in and around tech, is more important now than ever; this doubles as an excellent rebuttal to all the morons who would like to consign journalism to the dustbin of history because lots of people listen to podcasts now. GUYS IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE A BINARY CHOICE FFS.
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- The Fury Gap: Another interesting perspective, this time offered by Jennifer Valenti, pointing out that it’s not implausible to imagine that the gender divide observed in voter habits in the US last week are…not likely to be improved by the result of said election and some of the reactions to it, and how that might actually be quite a bad thing. I think we’re about, ooh, maybe 9-12 months away from some horrifically hamfisted attempt to begin to BRIDGE THE GENDER DIVIDE, possibly BRANDED, so look out for that (and don’t, please, be the person who suggests it as 2025’s ‘purpose’ initiative, I beg of you).
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- Election Day: The last bit about the election, I promise, is this lovely, quiet, slightly-sad piece by Rusty Foster, currently on a break from Today in Tabs and hiking instead, on his experience of being out in the wilderness while democracy happened elsewhere.
- The Metaverse is for Kids Now: On the one hand, I have seen a few variants of this piece over the years (remember the racist echidna VRChat days? GOOD TIMES!) and it’s always worth approaching them with a degree of skepticism because, well, it’s all anecdote, isn’t it, but on the other this…this feels plausible, and so I am going to choose to believe that actually it may well be happening. Basically the piece – in WIRED – is all about how if you visit Meta’s Horizon Worlds now you’ll find it awash with teenagers, who have realised that there aren’t any adults there and who are quietly getting used to spending significant swathes of time in VR worlds. OK, fine, there is the inevitable ‘grubby possibility of bad stuff’ lurking at the edges here, but this is more a story about the unexpected pace and direction of tech adoption than it is a ‘caveat parents’ article. Basically this made me think that, actually, there’s every likelihood that this is actually going to be a real-life mainstream thing in 15 years or so in a way I hadn’t really previously considered.
- AI Inventions: Ok, this is a REALLY smart usecase for AI and I am very impressed. Der Spiegel profiles a company called Iprova, which (basically) uses a bunch of AI systems to work out potential gaps in the patent landscape that can be exploited by enterprising inventors, which, honestly, is SUCH a clever way of deploying an LLM – not for ideation, but for identifying potential gaps into which ideation might fit. So, so interesting, and should, if you think about it for longer than about three seconds, give you plenty of ideas for ways to deploy similar techniques in your own creative thinking: “The company finds ideas on the cutting edge of the cutting edge. Take, for example, the time that Panasonic asked Iprova for help finding new uses for autonomous vehicles. The software suggested giving the cars jobs when their human passengers weren’t using them, such as delivering parcels—essentially making them self-driving gig workers. It even suggested that human passengers might be willing to take the scenic route, or at least routes involving picking up or dropping off parcels, for the right discount on their ride. Panasonic bought that idea and filed a patent application in 2021.”
- Child Influencer: NB: THIS IS A VERY, VERY GRUBBY ARTICLE THAT WILL NOT MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD ABOUT ANYONE INVOLVED OR INDEED HUMANITY AS A WHOLE. It also features two of the most SPECTACULARLY Dutch people I have heard of in ages – in this case ‘Jacky Dejo’, a former child snowboard influencer-turned-OnlyFans-type model, and her Dad, who, as far as I can tell from the piece, basically ok’d his kid selling cheesecake pics of herself in a bikini to chickenhawks worldwide from when his kid was about 15. There is, honestly, no part of this that won’t make you grimace and make vaguely-disgusted sounds, from the fact that at no point does ‘Jacky’ seem anything other than VERY MESSED up, to the incredibly-uncertain nature of her dad’s relationship to the whole enterprise, to exactly what the deal is with her mum (who declined to be interviewed for the piece), but my main takeaway was, once again, ‘being in any way famous for what you look like online is genuinely so awful-sounding as to be a modern-day Dantean punishment’.
- Sex Education in 2024: This felt quite a lot like a piece designed to attract some ‘wtaf?!’ clicks and so I’m going to take it with a small pinch of salt – that said, it feels both plausible and a not-unreasonable reaction to the frankly inadequate provision of sex education in schools. If you wanted to make sure your teen kids were learning about fcuking in a way that perhaps didn’t just involve unfettered consumption of whatever bongo they scare up, what would YOU do? Would you, say, pull together an educative playlist of media which you think explores questions of sex, consent, pleasure and the like in less-mechanistic fashion and take it upon yourself to guide your kids through it like some sort of, er, sexy Virgil? No, I can’t imagine you would, and yet that’s exactly the choice made by the people profiled in this piece.
- Goalhanger Media: In a week in which Gary Lineker confirmed that he was leaving the BBC, it seems appropriate that this Esquire profile of the man’s podcast empire should also drop. Fair play to Lineker – it’s a phenomenally successful business model, although one which I know for a fact is predicated on a lot of younger staff members behind the scenes making…significantly less cash than the talent from any of this stuff, and the rewards to presenters are INSANE – I imagine Cambell and Stuart will have raked in £1.2+ each from TRIP this year, and that may well discount the live shows – and there seems to be no end to the public’s appetite for this stuff…equally, though, I do wonder whether the removal of the BBC’s ‘respectability and national treasure shield’ will lead to some of the…other stories coming out. Let’s just say that it’s lucky Gary’s smarter and savvier around people with their phones out than disgraced referee David Coote, based on what I know of his hobbies.
- Let The Clubs Close: To be clear, I don’t agree with this perspective at all, but I read it and, based on my experience of going out to places where YOUNG PEOPLE are, it feels true. Written by a YOUNG PERSON, this basically says ‘yeah, we’re not going to clubs anymore or to see new, unsigned acts, because why would we take a chance on maybe having a 3/10 night?’ – basically, as mentioned here quite a lot over the past couple of years, this boils down to risk-aversion (and, to be more charitable, is a direct result of everything being more expensive – you’ll take a punt on a £2 door fee, not so much on a £20 door fee), and it feels…sad, and empty, but what do I know? Rhetorical, obvs, I am OLD and know FCUK ALL.I felt a sort of terrifying sense of redundancy at this paragraph, a bit like a dinosaur seeing a distant meteor streaking through the sky and thinking, deep in its lizard brain, ‘this bodes, and not well’.
- Food in London for Non-Londoners: Originally presented as ‘for Americans’, but, well, this is for anyone who is coming to the city and doesn’t want to have a terrible time, culinarily-speaking. Honestly this is something that I feel every single tourist city in the world should have a version of written for it, it’s an act of public decency. Speaking of which, if anyone is going to Rome ever and wants tips, just ask.
- Crossing The USA By Train: Ok, so this is mainly pictures rather than words, but I LOVE how genuinely enthusiastic and (yes, I know, a hateful word and I am sorry for using it) wholesome (sorrysorrysorry) the whole thing is. It made me REALLY want to take a coast-to-coast train journey across America – so maybe I will, on reflection.
- Inside The Mind of Ken Dodd: Do you know who Ken Dodd was? If the answer is ‘no’ then you can probably skip this one; if the answer is ‘yes’, though, then make a cup of tea and enjoy this WONDERFUL account of Rob Chapman’s interview with the great comedian – honestly, if you’re the sort of person who’s in any way interested in the craft of comedy and how audiences and performing work, then this is gold dust. Dodd comes across here as someone with an almost boundless love for the medium he worked within, like Stewart Lee or Paul Merton do, and it’s genuinely wonderful to read.
- Against Autofiction: One of two essays that did the rounds this week about ‘writing the web’ (this is the first, which I enjoyed less and so can’t be bothered to write up but which, for completeness and because it’s an interesting companion piece, I include regardless), this is a REALLY interesting discussion as to what the ‘best’ literary form via which to communicate the ‘essence’ of the web is, and why, despite much recent literature on the subject falling within this broad bailiwick, it’s not necessarily autofiction. Conor Truax instead coins the term ‘database novel’ to describe a form of fiction which they contend best-encapsulates the nature of experiencing online, and, honestly, reading this was like a light going on in terms of a sudden ‘oh, fcuk, yes, you’re right!’ sensation. Read this paragraph, which will tell you pretty quickly whether you’re going to get on with this or not: “The sine qua non of the database novel is its focus on the superstructure that hosts the persona, rather than the persona unto itself. Database novels are organized like a database: They comprise a repository of independent units – their sentences – and a seemingly infinite number of coherent wholes. Though their sequencing does have a bearing on rhythm, it has no effect on apparent causality or the hypnotic effect of the novels on the whole.”
- A History of Fcuk: Or rather, an excerpt from a book all about the history of that word in the English language. I love this – I love etymology, and I love swearing, and so the conjunction of the two couldn’t be more perfect in my eyes. Semi-related aside: I also find the parallel etymology of the profane usage of the word ‘cock’ to be particularly fascinating – it’s, er, not a coincidence, that before it was used as a vulgar vernacular for the male member it was deployed as one of the many terms to denote the unmentionable God. JESUS CHRIST, MEN, YOU ARE SO DEEPLY, DEEPLY OBSESSED IT IS NOT THAT IMPORTANT.
- Steal Smoked Fish: A story about the friends you grow up with and growing older and The Mountain Goats and the very strong, very persistent feeling that, given the choice, you really would prefer not to exist any more if that’s ok please thankyou.
- Five Thought Experiments: George Saunders writes in New York Magazine and, yes, ok, fine, it’s about the election, but that’s not why you should read it. You should read it because it is EXCEPTIONAL prosework, damn the fcuker.
- Any Percent: A VERY LONG scifi story (I mean, it’s a short story, just a LONG one) which I need to warn you a) has a *slight* whiff of ‘Ready Player One’ about it (but I promise it is nothing like that and loads better) and b) doesn’t *quite* stick the landing (but that’s a personal perspective), but which I enjoyed so so so much regardless. Imagine a world in which you could play a game that let you experience a whole life in about 20 minutes of realtime. Imagine there were leaderboards showing who had managed to, say, become the richest person in the (game) world in the shortest amount of (game) time? Imagine there were speedrunners? What might that look like? So so so so interesting, this MUST have been optioned by someone as it’s pure cinema (or, more likely, bloated streaming property) waiting to happen.
- Adrift in the South: Our last longread of the week is by Xiao Hai, in translation in Granta, writing about their life working low-wage jobs in China’s factories for the past 30 years. This is beautiful beautiful beautiful and I just want to tell all of you to read it – honestly, it’s one of the most gorgeous things I have read all year, not one word of hyperbole, and I think you will all adore it as much as I did.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:
- I was resistant to this initially because, well, if I’m honest I’m slightly over ‘1 x every day for a year’-type videos, but then I watched it and I was CAPTIVATED. Honestly, this is beautiful and mesmerising and so so so beautifully made by Daren Jannace – from their description,”I animated 30 frames a day for 1 year. Set at 30 frames a second, each second represents 1 day. All audio was sourced from videos taken with my phone from the year of daily animation.” Honestly, I can’t stress how gorgeous this is.