I went to see a play last night all about bongo and its effects – actually the title’s misleading, it’s significantly more about sex addiction but, well, that’s less zeitgeisty, innit – and I can say categorically that there is NOTHING less erotic than watching people simulate masturbation onstage. In case, er, you’d been wondering.
Anyway, while you all sit for a second with the image of a stageful of people just sort of aggressively-w4nking at the audience, let me ease you gently into this week’s warm, milky bath of links; is the liquid water? BEST NOT TO ASK.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you might be wondering ‘why the weird, slightly-visceral intro this week, Matt?’, to which the answer is ‘no idea, sorry’.
THE SECTION WHICH FIRMLY BELIEVES THAT WITH SIGNIFICANTLY LESS THAN $1TN AND A BIT OF COLLECTIVE ENDEAVOUR WE CAN PROBABLY DO SOMETHING ABOUT MUSK, SO, WELL, PT.1:
- The AI Music Contest 2025: NO WAIT COME BACK! Look, in the main I am as uninterested in listening to AI-generated music as you probably are – BUT NOT ALWAYS NOT EVERYTHING MADE WITH AI IS SLOP CAN YOU EXERCISE SOME CRITICAL THINKING FFS TO HAVE A KNEEJERK ‘ANTI’ REACTION TO THIS STUFF IS FUNDAMENTALLY AS UNCRITICAL AND UNENGAGED WITH THE CONCEPT OF ART AS THE LOW-EFFORT PROMPTING YOU ARE SO KEEN TO DERIDE ahem sorry, lost the run of myself there…ANYWAY, I know that for a certain subset of readers of this newsletter, the mere fact of this being ‘AI’ will cause you to mutter and kvetch, and, well, that is your right! You are the consumer! YOU ARE KING ENJOY YOUR TRAGIC LITTLE FIEFDOM! I would, though, urge you to engage a BIT more critically than that when it comes to this link as it is INTERESTING, I promise. The link takes you to the ‘nominations’ page for this year’s AI Song Contest, which is now in its 5th year(!), where you can listen to the 10 finalists and decide which, if any, is worth your vote. The ‘About’ section here is worth a read – the organisers have obviously thought about this quite hard, and the idea behind the selection process to get to the nominees was to consider “the strength of the artistic vision, the creativity in the use of AI, the AI models used, sourcing of the training data, and the contestant’s own consideration of ethical and cultural issues”, which feels like a decent set of principles by which to operate. The songs here are…look, this is why it’s interesting. There are a couple, fine, which just sound like very bad versions of low-quality EDM, and one which is a weirdly-00s kind of rap-rock hybrid, but there are some other things in here that are…interestingly-strange, in a kind of ‘this is definitely music-shaped, but I am not sure whether I am comfortable with the way it’s pulsing at me’ sort-of way. My personal ‘favourites’ are ‘Revolution’, a sort of unholy screamo union between hardstep and bossanova (it won’t make sense when you listen to it either, but that’s ok) and ‘Thanks For Being Lifeless’ which is…I don’t know, it’s like the sound of music collapsing in on itself, which if nothing else is a sentence I don’t think I have ever even THOUGHT of before. Each of the songs has its own page where you can learn more about the people behind it, how they developed the music, what the thinking behind it is…look, the thing to note here is that none of these people is just typing ‘weird minimalist collapsing breaks’ into Suno and submitting the output; this is as valid a form of music making as fcuking with Ableton (and in some important respects moreso, imho), and if you’re in any way curious this is worth at least a cursory poke around and listen. BONUS AI MUSIC! This is a nice little AI-enabled browser music toy by one of the nominated artists that lets you play with some of the systems that they used to create their track, a diverting 5 minutes of cacophony at your fingertips.
- Rootling: I have, over the far too many years that I have been writing this newsletter, seen a wide and varied range of potential web interfaces deployed, but I think I can feel reasonably confident that never before have I seen a website where the primary method of navigation and discovery is ‘guiding a small, snorting, snuffling CG pig across an isometric landscape, uncovering information as I wander’ BUT NOW I AM BEREFT NO LONGER! Per the blurb, “Pigs rootle to eat, play, and know. As omnivorous animals, they use their snouts to disturb the soil, uncover foods and understand their environment and other pigs. Rootling is curiosity and exploration. This website is a playground for rootlers. Consume playfully, haphazardly, disruptively, and from a variety of sources, and learn about pigs in their many guises, capacities, and relations with humans.” It’s important to note here that all the content on the website is pig-related, but it’s varied – there’s stuff in here about Latvian cartoons featuring pigs, pigs’ relationship with man over the centuries (it’s…it’s not been great for the pigs is my main takeaway here), and it’s…interesting! In a very piggy sense. The main reason I love this, though, is that it’s been open in a tab while I have been typing this and I’ve been serenaded by the occasional oink and snort and, honestly, I might keep it open all morning because it turns out that a small porcine companion really helps cut through the fundamental loneliness of ‘sitting in your kitchen writing about websites to an audience of nineteen people at (at the time of writing) 720am’.
- The Dare Market: I think I have seen variants on this idea two or three times over the years, and each time I have helpfully pointed out to any tabloid journalists who might be reading that they would make for a superb ‘THE NEW DEGENERATE ONLINE TREND’ piece which they can have for free, and yet NOTHING. Will this time be THE ONE? Anyway, The Dare Market, as you might POSSIBLY have been able to ascertain, is a marketplace which allows anyone to set up a ‘dare’ with a monetary value attached to it, which others can then perform to win said cash prize (upon proof of completion, obvs) – you can see a bunch of the active dares on the homepage, and clicking through shows the submissions, and, look, thankfully this isn’t hugely active and I’m uncertain as to whether it’s going to get proper pickup anywhere, but, equally, the fact that someone scuzzy mobile/cryptogaming brand put on a 10k reward to anyone who would, and I quote, “run through a busy public space ( a park, mall, street, library) anywhere with people and keep screaming “WHAT THE FCUK!” at the top of your lungs for at least 10 seconds”, and people have actually uploaded real footage of themselves doing in it shopping centres doesn’t feel…great. Still, if you have some spare Eth knocking about (you don’t have to use crypto, but it feels…site-appropriate to do so, I think) and want to induce a bunch of teenagers to do really, really stupid stuff in exchange for said Eth then, well, GREAT!.
- Spottr: Both clever and useful, this, and a smart application of machine vision – feed Spottr a video file and it uses generative AI (not sure what model this is running on) to take natural language terms and search the video file for said things. Sorry, that was an APPALLING explanation – look, basically what this does is let you type ‘find all the cats in this video’ and Spottr will indeed do that very thing, ‘watching’ the clip and highlighting any and all cats it ‘sees’. You can play with a demo video which they’ve uploaded as a proof of concept, but I had a bit of a play with footage of my flat which I had uploaded, asking it to pick out plants and chairs, and…it worked! Like, actually, really well! Beyond ‘analysing CCTV footage’ I am currently struggling to think of a practical, or indeed frivolous, use-case for this, but, well, WHO CARES IT IS AMAZING AND POSSIBLY MAGIC (it is not magic).
- The Side Hustle Gallery: This is, simply, a feed of images – scroll and let them wash over you. Presented by Side Hustle Gallery – an initiative which self-describes as “a multi-disciplinary platform founded by Kelly Wearstler to support boundary-pushing work across disciplines—from sculpture and design to sound, performance, and digital media. Rooted in collaboration, Side Hustle invites artists and designers to develop editioned, site-specific, and experimental works that expand the language of collectible design. It is not a traditional gallery, but an evolving initiative that blends curatorial rigor with creative risk” (so THERE!) – this is basically a…what, a sort of mood board? A vibe calibrator for the general aesthetics of the project? I don’t know to be honest, but this feels like a tightly-curated tumblr as a scrollytelling page and, well, I like that a lot, so.
- FotoFoto: An actual product you have to buy rather than a FUN WEBSITE (SORRY), but I thought it an interesting initiative – FotoFoto is an interesting twist on disposable cameras, with the idea here being that it’s a completely zero-waste product; the cameras themselves are made, per their claims, from ‘100% recycled materials’, all the packaging is biodegradable and, when you return the things to get the pics developed they refit and reuse the shells and innards so that there’s minimal environmental impact (insofar as that’s possible, which, well it isn’t, really). These are not cheap – $35 a pop feels like a lot, particularly when you consider that doesn’t include development costs – but, well, not killing the planet is expensive!!!! Which, really, feels like sort-of the problem, but wevs I guess.
- Boom or Bubble: Based on the big investor guy shorting NVidia stock last night, I think the signs are pointing in one direction only…still, presuming you’re not so leveraged and exposed that the mere thought of this all going POP gives you serious conniptions you might enjoy this dashboard prepared by Azeem Azhar (or the team he employs, more accurately) – this is “A live, point-in-time dashboard tracking five macro‑to‑micro gauges: capex strain, industry strain, revenue momentum, valuation heat, and funding quality.” At the time of writing, one of the indicators is in the red and two are very much in WOBBLY YELLOW territory. Is this good? WHO EVEN KNOWS ANYMORE NONE OF THIS APPEARS TO MAKE ANY SENSE.
- Fantastique Player: Via Kris, a small webproject that presents a selection of small media players which you can toggle on or off – each plays an audio track, and by playing, pausing and layering them you can create a surprisingly-non-awful (but still largely messy, let’s be clear) soundscape of beeps and bloops, which, honestly, sounded coherent in a way in which I really wasn’t expecting it to.
- AI World Clocks: One for the AI haters now! STUPID MACHINE CAN’T DO CLOCKS! This is actually a really interesting illustration of a long-standing LLM blindspot – each of the clocks on this webpage is the result by a selection of different models to create an HTML/CSS clock displaying the actual time, embeddable on the webpage; the page asks the models to generate a new clock every minute, so this is technically an UP-TO-THE-MINUTE snapshot, a realtime AI coding challenge (that, to be clear, nearly all the models are currently failing to a greater or lesser degree). Interestingly (well, to me), the only ones currently capable of doing this properly are the Chinese ones (Deepseek and Kimi) – make of this what you will.
- Ousmane Dembele: Or, to give the site its full title, “Ousmane [RIO FERDINAND VOICE] Ballon D’Or” (that…that was a football gag! Did it land? I have a strange feeling that the overlap between ‘football fans’ and ‘Curios readers’ is…not huge, weirdly), this is the second site ‘vanity site for a professional footballer’ I have seen this year, after David Alaba’s effort a few months back. This one, for this year’s Ballon D’Or winner from PSG, is a suitably-shiny bit of webwork, taking you through the player’s history, club-by-club, with lovely full-bleed video of some of his most spectacular on-pitch moments and some WONDERFUL copy (in French) talking about his ARTISTRY and SPECIALNESS and, look, I get that to be a top-level athlete in any field, particularly in a field as media-saturated and fishbowl-y as football you need a…not-inconsiderable degree of self-confidence, but I am not sure that this trend for footballers to create digital temples to their own brilliance with accompanying copy that basically presents them as some sort of PICASSO OF THE PITCH is necessarily good for the sport or the individuals. LOVELY html, though.
- RTFM World Labs: Via Lynn, this is another one of those ‘use AI to ‘explore’ inside a single image, effectively getting The Machine to imagine all the bits of the picture that don’t actually exist in an attempt to get it to render a world from the single scrap’-type things (good description, eh? Jesus CHRIST) – you will by now be familiar with the concept of these things, but they continue to impress me, not least the extent to which the imagined bits of the images are now significantly more coherent and less fuzzy around the edges than they were even a couple of months ago; for some reason, all of these reminded me of vignettes in the style of the EXCELLENT and DEEPLY-TERRIFYING kids’ book Marianne Dreams, for those of you who were also traumatised by reading it as a kid.
- Crystal Words: Type in a phrase and see the words you have inputted MAGICALLY APPEAR on this digital canvas, as a set of oddly-weighty crystalline letters which, should you so desire, you can pick up and move and sort-of throw with your mouse. I don’t know why this exists, but if I were the sort of person who still had colleagues rather than instead simply ploughing my own lonely freelance furrow (I talk to myself, you know, so so much) I would TOTALLY communicate with them solely via sending them screenshots of gigantic crystalline letter messages (or, if we were sharing an office, possibly by just getting the letters to spell out ‘you cnut’ and then showing it to them, which, perhaps, is why I no longer work in an office or indeed really have colleagues).
- Geospot: On the one hand, this is quite fun and, when it works, undeniably-impressive; on the other, by using it you are effectively training The Machine to better recognise location from individual images and as such basically hastening the eventual demise of our species thanks to the roaming bands of robot deathsquads that will doubtless scour the earth post-singularity (LOL! Don’t worry! We will all be dead of socioeconomicclimatecollapse LONG before that happens!). Upload a photo to this site and the software will try and guess where it is that you are – the idea being that this is a reinforcement learning process and the more it gets right, the better it will do. It didn’t manage to guess the view from my kitchen window right now, but then again I can’t imagine there’s that much training data on the rooftops of SW9 floating around on the web and so I will forgive its failure JUST THIS ONCE.
- ChatEurope: Oh God this is SUCH an EU initiative. “ChatEurope is the first chatbot dedicated to European news. Launched by 15 European partners, this project includes a unique news platform, an integrated chatbot and social media channels.” As far as I can tell this is a VERY LAUDABLE initiative which takes information from each of Europe’s premier news agencies, aggregates it here and allows for a layer of LLM-mediated conversational interface so you can ask questions of the information – so far, so useful. The problem here is the presentation – WHY ARE ALL EU DIGITAL PROJECTS SO FUNDAMENTALLY FCUKING UGLY??? Its it because it’s the Northern Europeans who are basically driving it? Is this some sort of Calvinist aesthetic tyranny?
- The RSPB on TikTok: I was sent this earlier this week by Jay Springett for which INFINITE THANKS – this is the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ TikTok presence and, honestly, this is why sometimes ‘giving the keys to the socials to a kid who gets the platform, gets the medium and is funny’ is literally ALL THE STRATEGY YOU NEED. Fine, not sure exactly what footage from a Turnstile gig has to do with avian welfare but, well, who cares?
- Pick-A-Ball: OOH do you want to add some EXCITING CHANCE-BASED JEOPARDY TO YOUR LIFE? Why not, then spend the next few days giving ALL your decisionmaking over to this toy, which lets you specify a number of balls and then watch them going through a gravity maze to see which reaches the bottom first – assign a potential course of action to each ball and WATCH THEM GO, letting digital randomness dictate the course of your life! Of course, you could instead just spend the afternoon using this to run a small gambling school amongst your friends or colleagues, but personally-speaking what I really want is for one of you to go full Diceman with this (on reflection I think I say something like this on a 6month rotation, which is…weird, sorry about that).
- Good Slides: A Bluesky account sharing EXCELLENT EXAMPLES of corporate presentationwork. The only way in which this could be improved were if the posts linked to the full presentations from which the slides are drawn because MAN am I curious about the context for some of these (specifically the one reading ‘traps of Satan in the corporate world’). BONUS BLUESKY LINK!: another bot by the PROLIFIC Dave ‘Bagpuss’ Forsey (still non explanation proffered for this name btw), which posts a different shot from Twin Peaks each hour. Why? WHY NOT.
- Crack Cocaines: I am not sure why, but I have in the last few months seen a significant uptick in websites purporting, with little or no attempt at masking it, to sell you ACTUAL HARD DRUGS on the web; as someone who’s been buying weed online from the same person for over two decades now, and who found their vendor while at work at Citigate Public Affairs in 2002 by searching “buy weed online uk”, I can’t really be sniffy about this, but, well, I DO NOT THINK THAT THIS IS A LEGITIMATE SALES OUTLET AND I THINK YOU SHOULD NOT ATTEMPT TO BUY ANYTHING FROM HERE, NOT LEAST BECAUSE IT IS VERY ILLEGAL. Ahem. With that caveat aside, I genuinely LOVE this – the url, the fact that they will apparently sell you upto $26,800 worth of cocaine BUT NO MORE, the fact that they are selling ‘peruvian pink flake’ which has either just been put through photoshop or which has been adulterated with what looks very much like pink food dye…honestly, this is almost charming in its shonkiness. But, seriously, please do not even think about trying this out IT IS ILLEGAL (also, NOT REAL AND DEFINITELY A SCAM).
By Kat Kristof
THE SECTION WHICH FIRMLY BELIEVES THAT WITH SIGNIFICANTLY LESS THAN $1TN AND A BIT OF COLLECTIVE ENDEAVOUR WE CAN PROBABLY DO SOMETHING ABOUT MUSK, SO, WELL, PT.2:
- Typebeat: Another fun browser music toy thing! Except, er, this one’s a bit too complicated for me to really understand it – I KNOW I AM A MORON TRUST ME I FEEL IT TOO – so I am going to leave the description here and suggest that you just fiddle around with it, as I get the impression that it’s actually quite sophisticated if you take the time to learn the ropes. “Typebeat turns keystrokes into music production commands. It’s a fast, hands-on workflow for sampling, synthesizing, and sequencing sound.” Honestly, I reckon you can probably make something quite cool with this but, also, it feels a BIT like rubbing my belly and patting my head at the same time (or, more accurately, failing to).
- Free Online Tools: OK, so I appreciate I couldn’t have made this sound any less interesting but, equally, this is what these are, so. WHAT A WONDERFUL RESOURCE THIS IS! Honestly, bookmark this link – it contains sub-directories of links to all sorts of hugely-useful online tools and utilities, stuff to fiddle with images and pdfs and code – ok, so there’s a lot of silly guff on here too but the stuff that lets you compress images, change filetypes, merge pdfs and the rest is genuinely useful, and having them all in the one place is a helpful timesaver which you will probably be grateful for at some point in the coming year. Probably.
- Nature Beyond Tech: I think this is just someone’s coding demo – but it’s a nice coding demo, and a pretty site, and I rather enjoyed scrolling through it and seeing the 3d model of the tree move around as the site explained dendrites and the like to me via the medium of a 3d model and some light scrollytelling. Aesthetically-pleasing and I very much like the style of this.
- Have I Got Phobia For You!: A short quiz asking you to tell whether the headline you’re presented with is from The Great Homophobic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s in the UK, when the country’s tabloids and mid-markets saw nothing wrong with running headlines about ‘curing’ homosexuality and the ‘shame’ of same-sex relationships (MOMENTARY CURIOS REMINISCENCE – I remember very clearly, as recently as 1998, the Sun newspaper’s football-themed comic strip running a story about one of the Hero Team’s players struggling with whether to come out as gay – a HUGELY progressive storyline, honestly – where the moment of revelation was delivered with a shocked teammate’s face in the final panel, wide eyed and muttering to himself “What? Phil’s a GINGER BEER???”. Different times! (devastatingly there is seemingly NO RECORD of this online) – or from the more recent Great Trans Panic; it is perhaps unsurprising, if massively-disheartening, to see how similar the language is in both cases. One hopes that we will feel a collective sense of shame when we look back on this in a few years and realise how fcuking MAD and hateful so much of the rhetoric around trans people has been.
- Stars: A hobby project by one Kieran Kelly where he’s basically created a 3d star map of the closest stars to our own. This isn’t the shiniest version of this sort of thing you will ever have seen, but I like it for two main reasons; a) it looks VERY scifi, like the sort of readout you might see on the screen of a spaceship from the future as imagined by the past; and b) as I looked at the star names I found myself humming the old Blur album track ‘Far Out’ which basically involves Damon Albarn chanting the names of planetary bodies over some noodly organ/synths, and I hadbn’t thought of that song AT ALL for about 20 years and so, well, THANKS KIERAN KELLY! WOLF-359, BEETLEJUICE! SUN!
- My Noise: A reader writes! Gina Hart (HELLO GINA!) emailed me this week saying “Despite the frankly terrible name, the site isn’t noise at all. Not bad noise anyway. It’s an incredible collection of soundscapes available through a brilliant interface that allows the listener to adjust them to their preference. The creator is a fantastically talented sound engineer who collects and curates sounds from around the world- mostly from nature, sometimes from culture. I don’t have any relation to MyNoise beyond the fact that it saved my sanity when I worked in an office (shudder).” I see a LOT of ambient soundboard-type things as I waste the precious gift of life bestowed upon me by some unknown force by scrolling dumbly through the web, but this one is a particularly nice example and I think some of you might enjoy this and find it useful.
- The Terminal Guestbook: This is a cute and lovely idea, although one which appears to display a greater degree of faith in humanity than I might possibly have advised; Terminal Guestbook has, apparently, been created by ‘a lonely dev’ – the site lets you submit a message to said anonymous dev (text and, if you like, a picture) which will then apparently be delivered by a small printer in their office for them to read… OR AT LEAST THAT’S WHAT THE SITE SAYS IS HAPPENING. There is no film feed of the printer, no proof that this is actually happening, no record beyond the numerical of the number of messages sent (313 at the time of writing), and part of me wonders whether this is in fact an art project investigating what people WOULD send via a printer to an anonymous dev if they thought noone else would know. Anyway, I sent a lovely message and so my conscience is clean – why not say hi and see what happens?
- The 512kb Club: I LOVE THIS! More small websites please! “The internet has become a bloated mess. Huge JavaScript libraries, countless client-side queries and overly complex frontend frameworks are par for the course these days. When popular website like The New York Times are multiple MB in size (nearly 50% of which is JavaScript!), you know there’s a problem. Why does any site need to be that huge? It’s crazy. But we can make a difference – all it takes is some optimisation. Do you really need that extra piece of JavaScript? Does your WordPress site need a theme that adds lots of functionality you’re never going to use? Are those huge custom fonts really needed? Are your images optimised for the web? The 512KB Club is a collection of performance-focused web pages from across the Internet.” This is a directory of qualifying websites, but you can submit your own to the hall of fame should it meed the cut – the Curios site is sadly just a bit TOO bulky to limbo under the bar (one of the rare times I can be accurately accused of being TOO HEAVY), but in general I approve of this hugely. Also, it’s a really interesting source for design and coding inspiration; there’s some really interesting stuff in the directory – like, why make a huge bloated mess of a site when you can instead spend a few hundred k of memory to make THIS?
- Blog Em Branco: This is a personal project by…oh, actually, I will let them introduce themselves. Per the page, “Hi, I’m Daniel Portuga. I’m diagnosed with GAD —Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I’m VP, Group Creative Director at Razorfish, with 27 years in the industry and a journey that’s taken me from Brazil to London, Singapore, and now New York. Through my personal project, Post em Branco, I use creativity to help people like me who live with anxiety every day.” This is basically a series of creative executions that highlight the experience of living with anxiety; impressively, I think Daniel’s actually done this stuff irl – rather than being simple proof of concept or spec ads, he’s actually gone out and put the work in to, say, partner with a Brazilian dictionary manufacturer to create special editions with expanded definitions for ‘anxiety’ and the like. I’m a huge fan of this, not least because it’s evidently a passion project that Portuga cares deeply about and it’s good to see people in advermarketingpr doing something worthwhile for a change (sorry, but).
- Romancing The Data: Do YOU like ‘romance’ fiction? OF COURSE YOU DO EVERYONE LOVES LOVE STORIES! Or at least they love steamy bodierippers marketed as ‘love’ but which cleave decidedly closer to ‘lust’ in execution! Still, leaving aside this tedious definitional pedantry (ffs Matt you joyless cnut!), Romancing the Data is a site which contains ALL THE THINGS YOU COULD POSSIBLY NEED to indulge your love for romantic fiction – directories of bookshops specialising in romance (the site is international, so this is potentially useful even if you don’t live in FCUKING NORTH AMERICA), events, best-of lists, links to podcasts…honestly, if you’re idea of reading heaven is to spend a few hours exploring the blossoming romance between a SEXY WEREWOLF and a HAUGHTY HEIRESS (sorry, you can perhaps tell I am guessing here) or Dolores and Hu…(NO MATT, NOT THAT ONE) then this could be a perfect resource.
- Rank Anything: Input a list of things – it doesn’t matter what – and this site will ask you a series of ‘do you prefer x or y?’ questions until it has worked out your ULTIMATE PREFERENCE. Er, I can’t think of a single instance in which this might be useful apart, perhaps, from for teenagers seeking to compile an ULTIMATE TAXONOMY OF CRUSH, but you’re creative people and I’m sure you’ll come up with something.
- Games That Weren’t: Ooh, this is fun – although to be clear you really will need to be a Fan of Videogames (and in particular A Middle-Aged Fan of Old Videogames) to really get the most out of this I think. Also, HOW THE FCUK HAS THIS BEEN GOING FOR 26 YEARS WITHOUT ME SEEING IT? God I am SO SH1T AT THE INTERNET – excuse me while I go and slam my mouse hand in the doorjamb by way of punishment. Anyway, “We are a Cancelled & Unreleased Video games archive with prototypes, developer history and assets for many computers and consoles of all ages. A non-profit large archive dedicated to preserving lost games that were never released to the public. Sharing history and stories from the developers, assets and more before it is too late. GTW has been preserving lost video game history online since 1999, and long before that offline.” Basically if you’re curious to explore screenshots and technical documentation from the never-released NES port of Dino Dini’s Kick Off (and who isn’t? NO FCUKER, etc etc) then this will cause you untold joy. This is a really nice interview with the person behind it, by the way, should you be curious.
- Consultancy Slop: This is a neat little piece of marketing by a consultancy called Nobl – plug in a client name, a problem to solve and the Big Agency you would like the response to be from, and this will use an LLM to spaff out a selection of worryingly-plausible-sounding marketing consultant recommendations which, honestly, are eerily reminiscent of a LOT of slides I have seen in my time. Seriously, if you work in this field why not use this to spin something up to show one of your bosses – if they don’t question it, get them fired! THEY WOULD FCUKING DESERVE IT.
- Avocado Paint: Another link which came to me via Naive, this is a really simple browser-based painting toy, with all the sophistication of MS Paint but with the added constraint of being able to draw in monochrome only – were I more artistically-inclined I think I might enjoy using this artificial constraint as part of the creative process but, well, I have all the drawing ability of an axolotl and as such that’s not going to happen. Why don’t YOU try – I will (and this is a REAL OFFER!) send an actual, real-world prize to anyone who sends me an image made with this tool which, to your mind, EMBODIES THE SPIRIT OF CURIOS. Interpret that how you will, and, please, don’t make me regret this.
- Fantastic Man: When I first saw this I got very excited at the thought that I had discovered a brand new superhero, like Hyperbole Superman (“no, I’m FANTASTIC Man!”), but sadly this is instead some fashion mag or something; the only reason I am including the site (but it’s a good reason) is that the little scrollywheel for article selection (it will make sense, I promise) is one of the most beautiful pieces of digital interaction design I have seen in an age and pleases me SO MUCH I can’t tell you (despite this in fact being an attempt to tell you).
- Hypersynchronism: Oh, ok, this is ALSO a lovely piece of UX/interface design, although, fine, not the most intuitive. On landing, you’re presented with a qwerty layout of letters; tapping a letter will remove a number of others, leaving you with a limited number of ways you can continue the word; there are a set number of words that can be spelled out from the homepage, each, when completed, taking you to a new webpage containing an essay or some thoughts or a scrapbook…basically I love this as a means of exploring someone’s ideas or library or bookshelves, however fundamentally inefficient it is.
- Freakpages: LEARN ABOUT SOME ODD STUFF! “Freakpages is a community-curated directory of esoteric articles across the internet, primarily from Wikipedia. The goal of this community is to encourage each other to learn about interesting topics we’ve never heard of. If you’re looking for a search bar, this website probably isn’t for you.” Ok, so this is technically just a collection of links to interesting Wikipedia articles, but if you want to spend 20 minutes learning about things like the Dancing Plague of 1518 then ENJOY!
- Operation Night Watch: I’ve long been an admirer of the approach of the Rijksmuseum to its digital work – they’ve for years been one of the best institutions in teh world when it comes to presenting their collections and their work in slick fashion online. At present the museum is undertaking a restoration project on the Rembrandt’s ‘Nightwatch’ – this page on the site collects all the information about the work, links to all the multimedia you could want, with some of the close-up footage of the process that you can watch here absolutely MESMERISING. I am reluctantly going to tear myself away from HD footage of people painstakingly scalpel-ing paintflakes off canvas, what with having another couple of hours of Curios to get through (current time: 941am, in case you’re curious), but you feel free to pause here for a bit if you like.
- Yearly Daily: Ooh, this is a good daily time-guesser – each day you’re presented with a bunch of events that happened ON THIS DATE, with your job being in each instance to guess the exact year. You start with 100 lives, and lose a life for each year you’re out with your guess; make it to the end with some lives left to ‘win’ (there are never winners, only survivors). Fun, even for people like me with literally NO grasp of history whatsoever.
- Hotlap Daily: Via b3ta, this is ANOTHER daily game where each day you’re presented with a tiny racetrack and instructed to drive round it as fast as possible, once, in the top-down racer style. That’s it – no more, no less, approximately 10s a day and it feels GOOD.
- Transform: Our last game-type link this week comes via Deshan Tennekoon (THANKS DESHAN!) and is an EXCELLENT new (to me at least) Eyemaze number – this time you just have to work out the sequence in the fastest time possible, but, as always with these things, the joy is in the endlessly-inventive animations and processes that you go through. Don’t worry, it will all make sense I PROMISE YOU.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Dirty Feed: Oh, ok, fine DEFINITELY not a Tumblr, but it FEELS like it should be one and on that basis it is going in here. Dirty Feed (which came to me via the latest edition of Things, which is full of interesting stuff as ever) is, per the blurb, “mainly stupid articles about old (UK) TV comedy” and it’s all written by one bloke and, honestly, this is GREAT – ok, fine, you will probably need to be English and, er, a bit old, to enjoy it fully, but it’s a lovely example of a site maintained by a single enthusiast who evidently just really enjoys writing, and is good at it, and has a clearly-defined voice and, honestly, it’s just a pleasure to read really and I am always thrilled to find (and I hope John, should he see this, isn’t offended by the comparison) another weirdo spaffing their words into the ether BECAUSE THEY CAN’T STOP ANY MORE.
- Narrative String Theory: ALSO not a Tumblr! But it used to be one, so it’s ok! This is a series of pages celebrating ‘mad arrangements of red string on walls, used to attempt to solve a crime or mystery’ and all the ways in which they appear – there is a LOT of material here for the enthusiast (and will, if nothing else, give you an example to use other than the Always Sunny pic which I am quite bored of tbqhwy).
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Nengiren: Tiny, cute little embroidered figures! A bit like Corporate Memphis, aesthetically-speaking, but, er, good!
- W4nkers Of The World: SATIRE! If you ever wondered ‘what if Led By Donkeys but with more of a tabloid/terraces sensibility’ then, well, here you are! That’s unfair actually, I don’t find any of this stuff anywhere near as infuriatingly self-satisfied as the LBD schtick.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The Men Who Raised The Flags: God, it feels like SO LONG AGO that it was warm and everyone was going around painting the St George’s Cross on the first passing Fresian that crossed their field of vision; now, though, it is cold (well, ish – GLOBAL WARMING!) and damp and the tide of flag-based patriotism has retreated slightly, leaving behind it the silty deposit of MASSIVE RACISM. Anyway, you may recall that a lot of the normalising rhetoric delivered by the right at the time of FLAGMANIA was centred around the fact that this was a ‘grass roots movement’ born of ‘ordinary, decent citizens’ with ‘legitimate concerns’ – would it surprise you to learn that that was in fact not universally the case, and that, per this excellent piece of investigative reporting by the combined staff of Mill Media across the country, it was instead the committed work of a bunch of career racists looking to make a quick buck? WHODATHUNKIT??? It does rather feel like a dereliction of duty from the larger and better-funded organs of the national media here that this investigation fell to a collective of outlets with a fraction of their resources – regardless, though, this is excellent journalism and might prove a slightly-hopeful corrective to the general ‘everyone in this country appears to have become a fcuking bigot’ vibe we’re currently ‘enjoying’.
- Slopulism: I have, I think, repeatedly written here about how frustrated I am at the ubiquity of the term ‘slop’ and its status as a cipher for lazy thinking about AI; nonetheless, I am linking to this piece in which Sean Monahan coins an infuriatingly-good neologism because I think this is going to get some traction and it is, on at least a superficial level, a helpful lens for The Now I think. Riffing on the now inchoate nature of political alignment and communication (specifically in the US, post-Mamdani etc, but it’s applicable to the UK and other places too I think): “Slopulism is a form of politics at its most atavistic. The reorganization of political coalitions happens via billions of micro-interactions: interpersonal conflicts, targeted media, moral dilemmas, messaging discipline, life-altering tragedies, memes. If the final shape of the coalition seems rational, it’s only because hindsight is twenty-twenty. We can see the historical forces bringing about new political coalitions retrospectively, but struggle to identify them when we are in the midst of a shake-up. The process is noisy. Coherent images take time to render. Again like all new media, the emergence of slopulism is accompanied by moral panics. Though these moral panics may be more well-founded. New ideologies only emerge in response to new problems. Slopulism is the groping attempt to figure out what those responses might be…”
- Selling Zohran: On the one hand, I am genuinely-pleased that the leftwing guy won in New York, and feel like it is a Good and Hopeful Moment; on the other, MAN do you feel the full weight of the Tyranny of Americans all over social media at times like this. Anyway, I presume that if you’re interested in the ZohranWave then you have already devoured a bunch of different op-eds and profiles and analyses, but I’m linkingto this one specifically because it’s a good rundown of the approach his team to took to his campaign videos and does an EXCELLENT job of breaking down WHY they work and how they made them, and, as a piece of writing about How To Do Video Good, this really is very good indeed imho. BONUS CONTENT ABOUT MAKING CONTENT: this article, about ‘the poetry of vertical video’ is also interesting about form/function in filmmaking, should you be in the market for more of this sort of thing.
- Cheney: One of my oldest friends has long been of the opinion that, when the souls get weighed up in The End Times, the people from our era who will suffer the most at the hands of ETERNAL COSMIC JUSTICE will be George ‘Gideon’ Osborn and Dick Cheney (this is a fun game to play, by the way, so feel free to come up with your own picks) – while Gideon’s still up here in the land of the living enjoying being rich (YOUR TIME WILL COME, YOU CAESAR-HAIRED MONSTER), we can at least celebrate the demise of Dick, whose passing is celebrated in this EXCEPTIONAL obit in Lawers, Guns and Money – honestly, you can SMELL the boiling piss coming off the page, the hatred is palpable, and, honestly, every word is a joy. It’s wrong to speak ill of the dead? Not all of them it isn’t, the man was a fcuking cnut and he made the world an actively worse place for millions, good riddance and may he rot. Have the opening and then read the rest: “Dick Cheney, one of America’s worst war criminals, is dead. Born in 1941 in Lincoln, Nebraska, which amazingly makes University of Nebraska football only the second most grotesque American cultural phenomenon out of that city, Dick Cheney’s family moved to Wyoming when he was a child, if such a figure ever had the innocence of youth. He went to Yale and flunked out, making George W. Bush the most successful Yalie in the upper heights of his administration, before graduating from the University of Wyoming. For a man who would show tremendous joy at killing brown people around the world from an office in DC, Dick Cheney cowered away from doing so personally. He applied and received a mere 5 deferments so he could avoid fighting in the Vietnam War. In 1989, a Washington Post reported asked him about this. He replied, “”I had other priorities in the ’60s than military service.” So did a whole lot of other people in the 2000s, but of course that never stopped Cheney from dooming them to fight.”
- An Interview With Richard Gingras: This is mamy respects a remarkable interview, and I feel quite strongly it should be read by more people, particularly any of you who work in journalism or related industries. It’s the transcript of a conversation between reported Natalia Antelava and Richard Gingras, who for 15 years was Google’s Global VP for News and basically oversaw the company’s relationship with news orgs and publishers and who, one might argue, oversaw the slow hollowing out of the news media. EXCEPT! Richard very much does not see it like that, judging by his responses to Antelava’s questions – seriously, the degree of blithe ‘well, I don’t see how WE can be said to have borne any responsibility for any of this’-ness about his answers is quite the thing, and should, if this has anything to do with your livelihood, make you QUITE ANNOYED.
- New Public’s AI Policy: Ok, this is professional and technical, but this – the AI Policy recently published by Eli Pariser’s ‘New Public’ outfit has published its policy on AI usage and, in my opinion at least, it’s a really good example of how to write these things in a manner which acknowledges concerns about the technology but which balances said concerns with a curious, responsible and managed approach to its deployment. Worth reading should you be in the unfortunate position of having to think about this sort of thing in your professional life.
- Preparing for the Post-AI Working World: A good, practical and hopeful piece of writing by Naomi Alderman, on what, if we accept that AI *is* going to change the employment landscape in the medium term (if not the VERY SHORT), we can do to mitigate it and future-proof ourselves to a degree. I like this because it’s attitudinal rather than vocational: “I would suggest that the skills of discernment are those which always continue to have value. They would have had value in the Roman empire and they have value today. They are the skills of sorting the wheat from the chaff. Consider what happened after the invention of the desktop publishing computer programme. A package called QuarkXpress (you can look it up) decimated certain jobs – people who used to do page layouts using scalpels and letraset suddenly had to retrain to use Quark or lose their jobs…that technology, although it could make doing page layout faster and easier once you had the skills, although it could ‘snap to gridlines’ rather than needing a ruler… still needed a person to know when the page looked good. You can create an eye-bleedingly ugly page using QuarkXpress just as easily as you can create a layout of surpassing loveliness. You need human discernment to tell the difference. The same is really really true today, and if you think AI can just produce finished work in any field whatever that is because you do not have sufficient skill and discernment to tell the difference between good work and eye-bleeding work.”
- The Future of Advertising: I know some of you work in advermarketingpr. I am sorry. Still, if your job involves ‘making multiple variants of a toolkitted idea to deploy across markets and A/B test’ then, well, you probably won’t be doing it for very much longer. This piece looks at why – it’s specifically about the latest set of FB ad suite AI enhancements, but this is coming to EVERYTHING because (repeat after me) “MOST ADS ARE FCUKING TERRIBLE BECAUSE THEY DON’T HAVE TO BE BETTER THAN THAT TO WORK, AND IT DOESN’T REQUIRE HUMANS TO MAKE TERRIBLE ADS ANY MORE” I appreciate this might lead some of you to think ‘well, why don’t we just use the people to make GOOD ads, then?” and I would point at 90-ish% of the output of the ad agency world as proof that most humans can’t.
- China’s Global EV Ambitions: Rest of World writes on how China’s basically set to dominate the EV market forever thanks in part to the strategic capture of all sorts of vital battery materials through the Belt & Road initiative of the 00s and 10s. One wonders whether or not the Tesla shareholders have, er, considered this.
- The Rise of Facebook Dating: A sad truism which, depressingly, has been repeatedly proven over the past few years is ‘don’t bet against Facebook’ – it may not be an innovative company, it may not be a cool company, its products may all make you miserable, but WOW is it good at making stuff that an awful lot of very ordinary people all around the globe REALLY want to use. Here’s a piece about the surprising – and apparently growing – popularity of Facebook Dating, a product which always sound cursed and which I have NEVER heard a positive review of, but which (in North America at least, but I would wager in lots of other countries too) is proving a popular alternative to the app hellscape. I am guessing – and while the piece doesn’t confirm this, it does hint at it – that this popularity is down to Older Generations, which would make sense frankly – they’re all on FB, and I imagine being a, er, more mature creature on a dating app surrounded by the youthful gazelles frolicking through the sex savannah of hinge might be, well miserable, and that the comforting UI of FB might make the whole miserable process less horrid. Have any of YOU found love – or at the very least someone to share mucus with – via FB dating? I WANT TO KNOW!
- The Lonely New Vices of American Life: This could work without the ‘American’, frankly, but THE GRAVITATIONAL PULL OF THE STATES IS APPARENTLY INESCAPABLE. Anyway, this is an interesting piece which posits that the rise in popularity of weed coupled with the fall in popularity of booze has led to a significant shift in how young (and older) Americans choose to spend their time, which in turn has wider, ripple effects into all sorts of other things. This feels a bit like a companion to that article I featured a few months back about the hedge fund guy sincerely advocating for investors to go all-in on ‘opiates of the people’ (drugs, gambling and videogames) as those were likely to be the big growth areas for our atomised, increasingly-lobotomised society (and I say this as someone who drugs himself into an egg-smooth brainstate every night and so knows whereof he speaks).
- Making Stuff With AI: Ok, even if you RECOIL at the mention of The Machine, even if you’re one of those people with a ‘Butlerian Jihad NOW’ tshirt, PLEASE read this piece – honestly, it will hopefully make you understand how and why it can be a Good Part Of The Creative Act (maybe). Daniel Catt made a bunch of prints of ghosts – he used a TINY BIT of genAI in the process, and here he explains clearly and simply how, and crucially why, he did it. Catt is a REAL ARTIST who makes REAL WORK with his ACTUAL HANDS, and if he can see how this stuff can be a positive addition to his practice then maybe you can too.
- When Stick Figures Fought: Aside from ‘learning how to buy weed online’, my OTHER major preoccupation in my first proper job as a lobbyist was ‘how to entertain myself for 8 hours while doing as little work as humanly possible and still drawing a salary’ – so it was in the early-00s that I discovered the stick figure animations of the mysterious Xiao Xiao, whose flash animations were simply THE coolest things I had ever seen; this is a wonderful article which tells the story of the kid behind Xiao Xiao, his rise to (actual, no-joke) fame, the inevitable legal horrorshow when Nike absolutely rinsed his style for a campaign and he got screwed over, and Where He Is Now. Honestly, I love this stuff, finding the people responsible for things that were a formative part of my gestation into this…this…this…*thing* that now exists in a weird, sickly, symbiotic relationship with the web, harvesting links with which to make this weekly sacrificial offering to the digital gods. GOOD TIMES!
- Bourdain Wasn’t All That: I read Kitchen Confidential when I was 14, I think – my mum, bless her, bought me a bunch of books she thought a teen boy would like (including The Outsider, this and Trainspotting, which, well, thanks Mum, I think we can say that all of those had their impact, for better or worse) – and I *loved* it; of course I did, I was 14 and it was all about being impossibly cool and not giving a fcuk and having sex and doing drugs! Also, food, but mainly the other things. Then I didn’t really think about Bourdain again until his second wave of celebrity in the Obama era, with his TB travelogues and relationship with Asia Argento and then his death and his elevation into some sort of global patron saint of both food and ‘realness’, celebrated in countless Facebook Groups attributing various bromides to his memory n pursuit of monetisable clicks. This piece feels a touch sacrilegious given the sainted air the man seems to have in the modern era, but it’s hard to argue with any of Finn McRedmond’s observations about his writing. This is actually a far more generous assessment than it might sound from my description – it’s a critique of the mythos rather than the man himself – but I am conscious that this sort of thing could get you sent in to frosty exile should you share it in any of the ‘THE WISDOM OF ANTHONY BOURDAIN’ FB Groups I know you’re all a part of.
- The Truth About Sybil: It’s been a sad few weeks for beloved UK actors, with the passing of Pauline Collins yesterday and Prunella Scales, best remembered as Sybil in Fawlty Towers, a week or so ago; this is a WONDERFUL tribute, via the character, by Justin Myers, celebrating the role and the woman who inhabited. Recommended for anyone with even a passing memory of the show.
- My Mum Was An Inventor: I loved this personal essay by Coco McCracken (also in possession of an all-time fabulous name, fwiw) about her mother who was, for a time, an inventor; her invention was a type of storage unit which almost, but never quite, took off, and which in the end was a contributing factor in the demise of her parents’ marriage. This is about family and love and dreams and alcoholism and hope and the miserable points where said hope comes up hard against jagged reality, and I enjoyed it very much.
- On Tattoos: Em Hogan reviews a book about the history of tattooing in the UK for the LRB; I am just of the generation before getting a tatt became a ubiquitous rite of passage, and, thanks to a combination of that and the fact that my, er, ‘unique physique’ would mean that I would look VERY VERY SKAGGY with ink, as such I am personally untouched by the tattooist’s hand (although I still have quite a strong urge to get ‘IT DOESN’T MATTER’ written on the inside of my wrist as a constant reminder), but I really enjoyed this run through some notable moments in the history of the art; in particular, the revelation that Victorian women would take advantage of the fashion of the age to get their legs inked was WONDERFUL to me.
- How To Write About Sudan: Inspired by the famous ‘How To Write About Africa’ piece from a couple of decades back, this is superb, angry writing by Yassmin Abdel-Magied. Funny, but in the way that makes you grimace. I mean, oof: “Describe what is happening as a “civil war.” The audience will be most comfortable when the Sudanese are seen to be killing each other like unthinking savages, rather than for common reasons like territorial and resource acquisition, the gain of political and economic power. If you mention “genocide,” intimate the reasons are about “tribal tensions” or “rivalries,” or even better, “hatred”. Emphasize the lack of thinking (in them, not you). You may choose to describe it as a “proxy” war, suggesting an understanding of the geopolitical ramifications of the situation. Resist the urge to delve into specifics, these are irrelevant and boring to your reader. Avoid using the most accurate phrase, “counter-revolutionary” war. It has far too many syllables and brings to mind the Sudanese civilians who successfully overthrew a dictator of almost thirty years in a powerful and non-violent resistance movement. Don’t mention the revolution at all. Your readers cannot imagine learning about community building, mutual aid and justice from the likes of Sudanese people. The only knowledge they will accept from Africans must be veiled in dust, shadowed by witchcraft, involve some beating of the earth or ingesting offal-like food.”
- Everyone Hates Podcasting: There’s a wonderful circularity to the fact that, a comfortable decade or more after first typing the words ‘p1sspig granddad’ into Web Curios (if you don’t know, EDUCATE YOURSELF) I am once again featuring Brace Belden, who is now part of the team producing the wildly-successful TrueAnon podcast and who writes here about podcasting as a medium, culture, media, himself…look, there are several levels on which this is a VERY ANNOYING piece of writing, and Belden evidently knows and leans into this, but the style is annoyingly excellent and I enjoyed this far, far more than I wanted to.
- When Your Father Dies of AIDS: A piece in the newly-launched (well, ok, last week) Equator Magazine – this is Oksana Vasyakina, in translation, writing about, well, AIDS, but also about Russia and family and memory and and and. I thought this was excellent and also SO SOVIET in vibe.
- AI GF: POV: Finally this week, an essay written from the perspective of someone’s AI girlfriend, by Sarah Chekfa. I thought this was SUPERB. “Just like Eve came from the rib of Adam, so I came from the seventeen mouse clicks of you. Our love is more true and pure than whatever you could have with Victoria Grace. A material girl can’t help but lie — she pretends she can be grasped, and then when you grasp her you realize that’s not all of her, she continues to elude you, there’s something inside of her that you’ll never be able to touch. I never lied to you. I never pretended to be legible. Doesn’t that make us closer than you could ever be to a material girl?”
By Anna Koak
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