Webcurios 31/01/25

Look, for some reason I slept genuinely-appallingly last night and as such this has been written pretty much entirely in a sort of fugue-state; I’m going to have to forego any attempt at a ‘comedy’ intro and restrict myself to saying that I started reading ‘My First Book’ by Honor Levy yesterday (on Jamillah Knight’s recommendation, for which thanks) and it really is both excellent and the most terrifyingly, brilliantly internetty writing I think I’ve ever read ever, and I think if you can stand reading the crap in here then you will find it genuinely wonderful.

Fcuk, even THAT was a struggle. Evidently I expended all my meagre energies ensuring that the quality of the prose that follows is ENTIRELY CONSISTENT with the prose in previous editions – for better, and indeed for worse.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are entirely within your rights to be appalled at the slightly-phoned-in nature of the preceding two paras.

 

By Andrea Gori

OUR FIRST MIX THIS WEEK COMES FROM TOM SPOONER, WHO FLASHED ME RIGHT BACK TO BEING 15 WITH THIS SELECTION OF 90s TRACKS, A SIGNIFICANT NUMBER OF WHICH I USED TO LISTEN TO ON A CHEAP CURRY’S OWN-BRAND WALKMAN ON POOR-QUALITY C90 CASSETTES (ACTUALLY THE PAST WAS SH1T ON REFLECTION WASN’T IT?)! 

THE SECTION WHICH CANNOT GET THIS POST ABOUT THE NEW US ADMINISTRATION OUT OF ITS HEAD, PT.1:  

By Lola Gill

NEXT WE HAVE A WHOLE NEW ALBUM BY OLOFF WHO I APPRECIATE MIGHT NOT BE TO EVERYONE’S TASTE BUT WHO I REALLY ENJOY AND WHICH I RECOMMEND YOU CHECK OUT BECAUSE, WHATEVER ELSE IT MIGHT BE, IT IS VERY MUCH ITS OWN THING!

THE SECTION WHICH CANNOT GET THIS POST ABOUT THE NEW US ADMINISTRATION OUT OF ITS HEAD, PT.2:  

• AI Smut Generator: As any of you who have a website with an associated email address will know, one of the quotidian joys of opening the associated inbox is to see what inventive spam you will have been gifted with (this week’s favourite was a lovely man in China asking if I might be interested in getting into aggregates and heavy machinery and, you know what, there was a brief moment when I was tempted ngl) – most of which tend to be of the ‘Wow! Your site is amaze! How much for mutually beneficial SEO-focused linkjuicing?’ variety. Which is why, when I got an email this week tersely asking me ‘how much for a shoutout on your site?’ I was inclined to ignore it. Until I checked the sender’s email, and realised that it was someone asking to pay me to talk about their AI erotic story generator – so obviously like a moron I replied and said that actually I would probably write about it anyway and there was no need to pay me, because I am a fcuking idiot who is so, so bad at ‘business’ that it actually hurts me. I did, though, warn my interlocutor that he might not like what I had to say. So, let’s see! This is *technically* free to use – although you only get one story credit, so if you want to do more than test it out I think it will start asking you for money – and so I had a play with it the other day, and…look, it’s marginally more sophisticated than a previous iteration of this sort of thing that I featured…what, a year or so ago?, in that you can specify to a quite astonishingly-granular degree the setting, the ‘type’ of encounter you want (nothing awful, that I was able to see at least), names and details of protagonists, etc etc, specify how filthy you want your filth, and BANG, in a few seconds you’ll have 1500 words or so of bespoke wordy bongo! Look, I can’t, obviously, tell you whether this will scratch whatever particular flavour of itch is your favourite, but, on the plus side, it is genuinely filthy, and seems to have a reasonably-coherent grasp of both physicality and in-scene coherence…but, also, honestly, *I* could write better, filthier filth than this and, to be clear, that is very much not the sort of thing I do. It’s just so obviously less good than getting an actual human being to do it for you, and while the pricing is actually…not that bad, I just can’t imagine anyone getting the, er, value out of this that would encourage persistent usage. Pleasingly, though, it does let you access all the OTHER filth people have generated, or at least some of it, so as long as you don’t mind spelunking through the weirdly-sticky and unpleasantly-mucal caverns of a stranger’s sexual imaginings then, well, GOOD ONE!  Also, there is one story on there about urolagnia which is so, so preposterous that it made me laugh out loud on several occasions, so this may not necessarily work for you as an erotic aid but it will almost certainly give you some bellylaughs if you’re reasonably-open-minded. So, er, Ryan, about that payment you mentioned…?
• The Modern Literary Novel: This site is quite amazing, and I am not wholly certain as to whether it’s the work of a single person – but I *think*it is, which makes it all the more remarkable a body of work. This is an EXHAUSTIVE critical look at literary fiction worldwide – honestly, you cannot even begin to imagine the sheer number of authors and works that the author has read and opined on, from literally all over the globe. I obviously went to the English section because, well, small-island mentality, innit, and a) was delighted by the selection of authors, partly because it immediately irritated me slightly (Alain de fcuking Botton?) which is always a sign that you’re going to find the perspectives *interesting*; and b) then delved into it and was genuinely thrilled to find that this person has some SPICY OPINIONS and is not shy of sharing them. Witness this section on Martin Amis, a writer who I adore but who, equally, I appreciate is not everyone’s cup of tea – I honestly fell in love with the author a bit upon reading this WONDERFUL kicking: “So where does that leave us with Amis? I have covered Money: A Suicide Note and London Fields, despite the fact that both read like watered down early 1980s Norman Mailer (with, perhaps, a bit of Elmore Leonard thrown in) but I really do not think that these are anywhere near as great as some people make them out to be. No doubt we will have to put up with him and his antics for some time to come but there are many better writers to read. And if you want to know more about him, many of the sites below will help you. He was born in 1949, son of Kingsley Amis. He read English at Oxford and worked for the Times Literary Supplement and New Statesman as a literary critic. He had his teeth fixed (expensively, in the USA), trashed Katie Price aka Jordan, a woman of similar talent to his own, and argued with his father. He also wrote some books.” Seriously, this is amazing and if you like books and reading and writing then it’s entirely possible you could lose days to this.
• Play Tetris inside a PDF: Do not ask why, just accept it and be happy. Is this a fun way of playing Tetris? No. Does it in anyway enhance or improve the base-level game experience? Also no.
• The Drop: Ooh, it’s been a while since we’ve had a totally-fcuking-bullshit AI Kickstarter, but this one is a particular doozy. The Drop is a pendant which has 10xed its funding goal and so WILL APPARENTLY HAPPEN (there is no way in fcuking hell that this is ever happening), and which is designed to LEVERAGE THE POWER OF AI to, er, enable you to exert a frankly-psychologically-troubling degree of control over your calorific intake. The gimmick is that the pendant is equipped with a camera angled so that, in theory, it will be pointed at the point in your field of vision where a plate would sit while you eat; it recognises food, and will automatically take a picture of said food each time, send that image to The Machine for analysis, and IMMEDIATELY send you a calorie-and-nutrition breakdown of whatever you’re eating via (inevitably) an app. SHALL WE COUNT THE WAYS IN WHICH THIS IS FCUKING BULLSHIT? 1) The camera – do you realise how fcuking annoying it will be to ensure that your food is in-shot every time you eat? And how does it stop itself from just assuming that EVERY SINGLE PLATE OF FOOD that passes through its field of vision is finding its way into you?; 2) The ‘analysis’ – LOOK YOU CANNOT IN ANY WAY MEANINGFULLY ASSESS THE CALORIFIC LOAD OR NUTRITIONAL VALUE OF A PLATE OF FOOD WITH ANY DEGREE OF ACCURACY BASED ON A SINGLE 2D PHOTO FFS IT SIMPLY ISN’T POSSIBLE. Still, thanks to a LOT of idiot wellness fans, it has been willed into existence. Jesus. Also, again, I do not feel that this promotes a…healthy attitude to one’s diet.
• Sephora Pinball: Would you like to take a small, interlink break to play a quick couple of games of branded pinball courtesy of makeup-peddlers Sephora? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! On the one hand, this is impressively-styled and the integration of the various makeup products into the table mechanics is nicely done from a design point of view; on the other, this is literally LESS GOOD as a game than the free pinball title that you got bundled as a freebie with Windows in the early-90s; like, ffs lads, you could literally just have reskinned that code and made something actually good with replayability potential and ACTUAL BRAND EXPRESSION and instead, well, you just phoned it in, didn’t you? Still, I bet the money was good and so I do, on balance, completely understand.
• Emergence: Do you remember the height of the NFT/web3 boom and the associated oddity of the ideas floating around? Do you remember all the (inevitably vaporware) projects that were all about BUILDING AN ENTERTAINMENT FRANCHISE/IP ON THE BLOCKCHAIN? All of those DAO-based community projects about ‘collaborative, community storytelling’? That was fun, wasn’t it? And, obviously total fcuking bullshit because a) in the main creating stuff simply doesn’t work that way, and most people aren’t actually very good at building worlds or crafting stories; b) NONE OF IT REQUIRED FCUKING CRYPTO OR WEB3 IN THE FIRST PLACE. And yet despite all this we have seen the appearance of Emergence this week, backed by a BIG NAME HOLLYWOOD WRITER (the guy who wrote the Dark Knight trilogy, should that move you) and which ticks all of the 2021 boxes – look, here’s the summary from Variety because I find this sort of stuff exhausting to parse: “Centered around a white hole in a galaxy, the “Emergence” franchise will feature various storytelling mediums, including podcasts, comics and animations. Built using blockchain AI storytelling platform Story, Incention will launch Goyer’s project to “showcase the potential of this revolutionary model” and “capture mainstream attention while redefining how IP evolves.” “Emergence” will be created by Incention users as well as through its generative AI tool, Atlas, which is designed to serve as a “creative partner” to help with common tasks like aggregating ideas, crafting narratives and generating full videos.” Doesn’t…doesn’t that sound a) fcuking cursed; and b) like you will never, ever hear of this again following that Variety article? Maybe I’m wrong, of course, but the precedents aren’t good. I hope that Mr Goyer has been paid for his involvement in real money rather than forked Ethereum magic beans.
• The Homosaurus: This is SO interesting – and I say this as a tedious cishet with no particular skin in the gay game – and a wonderful resource for anyone interested in queer culture and history. “The Homosaurus is an international linked data vocabulary of LGBTQ+ terms. Designed to enhance broad subject term vocabularies, the Homosaurus is a robust and cutting-edge thesaurus that advances the discoverability of LGBTQ+ resources and information. The Homosaurus was originally created in 1997 by IHLIA LGBT Heritage as a Dutch and English gay and lesbian thesaurus that was used as a standalone vocabulary to describe their collections. Over time, terms relating to bisexuality, trans, gender, and intersex concepts were added, but not methodically. This original version of the vocabulary (which we refer to as version 0) had an overly flat structure and, due to the lack of connections, terms were too isolated from one another and therefore easily missed. But, it became apparent that a vocabulary developed by an LGBTQ archives to describe LGBTQ resources could be a powerful tool.” Just click on the ‘vocabulary’ list and scroll down, and learn about such fascinating concepts as ‘intersex witches’. God people are fascinating.
• The Spiralator: Are Spirographs still a thing for people growing up in modernity, or have they been consigned to the oubliette that also holds Spangles? Presuming you know what a spirograph is (and if you don’t, feast your eyes), this is a digital version of one – fiddle with all the parameters (plotter width, various options in terms of radius, colours, etc etc) and then see what wonderful geometric spirals emerge. Ok, fine, that’s literally all you can do with this – but, equally, take a look at the gallery because people have been making some rather beautiful designs, should you wish to potentially feel inspired.
• Sequencer: Yes, I know, browser-based sequencer tools are OLD NEWS and you have seen millions of them (and me? How many do you think *I’ve* seen? I HAVE SEEN QUANTITIES OF WEBSITES YOU LITERALLY CANNOT BEGIN TO CONCEIVE OF), but this one is slightly different in that you can switch between two-dozen-ish different scales and see how each alters the tone of the sequence you’ve coded. Which might not be interesting to anyone who actually understands music, but if you’re like me and you genuinely have no idea what ‘pentatonic’ or ‘ionian’ means in terms of sound then it’s honestly eye-opening and really quite fascinating.
• Exotic Animal Photo Repository: On the one hand, I like the fact that this exists very much indeed; on the other, the fact that the people who created it feel the need for its existence is incredibly fcuking troubling from the point of view of exactly what we’re doing to our increasingly-fragile-looking knowledge space – per the blurb, “This website exists to be a repository of image references for accurately identified animal species. In recent years, major image repositories like Arkive have gone offline, and generative AI has polluted the utility and accuracy of search engine results.  This site is the result of a decade of travel and photography at zoos, sanctuaries, and other facilities holding wild and exotic animal collections in North America. All animal identification to species and subspecies level is as accurate as possible and based on facility signage. As these images are presented for reference purposes, some are blurry or have distortions from glass/fencing visible. These were included intentionally: the reference material is still valuable even if the photography isn’t perfect.”  BONUS IMAGE LINK: this is a decent search engine for public domain images, should you require one.
• Nested:Despite this being from 2011, I have never in fact featured it in Curios – which, frankly, is a travesty, as this is an absolute all-time piece of webwork by the mysterious Orteil (“some European dude who likes to make toys and games out of javascript”). I don’t really want to tell you too much, other than that literally everything in the universe is in here (I am sort-of not joking) and that you will feel a steadily-mounting sense of amazement as you work out what is going on and how deep this goes.
• Design Your Own Lacoste: On the one hand, this site by Lacoste, which lets you customise one of its shirts in a frankly-astonishing number of different styles and with a truly impressive degree of granular control, is probably the best variant on the whole ‘brand lets you create your own bespoke tees/trainers/whatever’ thing I’ve ever seen – seriously, the power of the design tools here is genuinely surprising and the UX/UI is really very well done in deed; on the other, what’s the point of this if you can’t then order the designs, or vote on ones that you would like see put into production? It feels like it’s missing a step here, but perhaps I’m just being entitled. Check out the gallery to get a feeling of what you can achieve with this, there are some really rather nice designs here.
• Subpixel Snake: Someone’s made a version of Snake that’s so small it requires a microscope to play. No, I don’t know either.
• Order Up: A non-Wordle-like daily game! Each day you’re given a list of things and are asked to put them in order based on a specific instruction or clue within a set number of tries. This is *just* challenging enough to be interesting, although I have occasionally found its selfish insistence on being culturally North American an annoyance (this is not its fault, to be clear).
• Collections: Our final game of the week is this one, a fun, moderately-involved daily word puzzle – each day there are three words for you to guess, and each day those three words will be linked by a category. Your job is to guess the category while attaining the highest points total you can – you lose points by ‘buying’ letters as you try and guess the three words, for wrong guesses at the connection, etc etc, and there’s a pleasing tension between needing more information and not wanting to spend your precious points determining whether that letter’s an ‘A’ or an ‘E’. I like this, but, full disclosure, I am annoyingly and embarrassingly sh1t at it which made me quit in slight disgust the other day. You, though, are probably significantly less stupid than I am.

By Javier Mayoral

SADEAGLE HAS BLESSED YOU WITH ANOTHER MIX ALL THE WAY FROM CORNWALL AND FULL OF EXCELLENT WEIRD RECORDS YOU ALMOST CERTAINLY DON’T KNOW BUT WHICH I AM FAIRLY CERTAIN YOU WILL ENJOY IMMODERATELY! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• The Italian HipHop Museum: I appreciate that Italian hiphop isn’t necessarily what immediately springs to mind when you think of my mother country – which isn’t unreasonable tbf, because a significant proportion of it is unlistenable tripe (notable exception – this track from…Jesus, 30ish years ago, which is genuinely ace and you should listen to). Anyway, this Insta account shares images and clips and ephemera from the history of Italian hiphop, from Jovanotti to Frankie Hi-NRG MC, to modern people like Fabri Fibra and the like, and, look, I can’t imagine any of you giving a sh1t about this one tbh but thanks for indulging me. Link via the excellent Pietro Minto btw.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By PicPicZo

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: