I confess that while I personally have no beef with crypto per se – other than my occasional angry recollection of how much I would be worth had I bought Bitcoin when I first wrote about it 15 years ago and it was worth thruppence – I can’t help but find it very, very funny that a bunch of people who’ve been hodling like motherfcukers can all be undone by some iffy infosec at a meaty level. ALL THAT ONCHAIN ENCRYPTION CAN’T DO SH1T IN THE FACE OF HUMAN INCOMPETENCE, MY APE ENTHUSIASTS (yes, I know ‘people who are into crypto’ aren’t a 1:1 match with ‘idiots who were into BAYC’, just allow me a bit of artistic license ffs IT’S MY NEWSLETTER).
Anyway. It has been Another Week and one in which I have had to spend FAR more time than I would have liked thinking about prediction markets and reading Select Committee transcripts (yes, my life is a thrilling carousel of excitement, I am so glad you asked!), but I am now going to go and have a nice lunch with my friend Dave so I’m going to fcuk off and leave you with the links now. Ok? OK!
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you might be feeling masochistic enough to watch a podcast with me on it, talking about PHP stuff (but you might not, and that is fine too).
By Cho Gi-Seok
THE SECTION WHICH MIGHT HAVE BEEN INTERESTED IN CHECKING OUT THAT ELIZABETH HOLMES FILM HAD IT NOT BEEN FOR THE ENDLESS, INESCAPABLE COVERAGE OF THAT ELIZABETH HOLMES FILM, PT.1:
- Warhound: I know, I know, you all heard about Palmer ‘Possibly One Of The Worst Men Alive’ Luckey’s genetically modified battle dogs startup last week, and thus it is OLD NEWS, I know…BUT! Did any of you go and check out the website for said murder canines? No, I bet you didn’t, did you, and that is why Web Curios is BEST. Click the link and enjoy – there’s a lot to love here, from the little textual flourish in the top right reading ‘advanced cybernetics – cybernetic platform’, which reads EXACTLY like what a 14 year old boy would think is the coolest sentence EVER, to the (I think) AI-generated vignette of a team of cartoon death-fidos greeting you just below the fold, to the copy reading ‘A NEW BREED OF DOMINANCE’ which, honestly, sounds to my jaded ear like it might be some sort of weirdly-bestial sex thing (sorry, but it does). Also, there is NOTHING ELSE, which does raise…some doubts in my mind about the seriousness of the venture. Still, here’s hoping that at least one mutant killer daschund gets spawned, if only so it can rip out Mr Luckey’s oesophagus, the hateful, deathmongering weirdo.
- Claudia: Ooh, this is conceptually quite interesting. You may, should you have been paying attention (AND IF NOT WHY NOT? Won’t *you* feel silly when St Peter greets you at the pearly gates with a clipboard and the quiz about Web Curios!), remember a link from the other week showcasing an AI-generated video made in one shot by one or other of the latest models, and which featured a female-presenting avatar as its central star…that avatar was ‘Claudia’, who is an open-source character who, as you can learn if you click the link, is basically a set of prompts and character models which anyone can use in their AI-generated shorts should they so desire. This link takes you to an explanation of the character, how she was made, links to all the various assets you might want to use to insert Claudia into a film of your own, and a whole host of ‘how to’-type explainers around song generation, AI filmmaking, etc etc. This is both incredibly generous in terms of knowledge sharing and…quite odd-feeling, to my mind at least; the idea of a character in the commons isn’t new per se, but there’s something…queer, and not a little icky, about the copy telling you can use Claudia however you like when she looks so…real. Which, I know, is just my brain fcuking with me, but still. Also, while there’s nothing particularly sexualised or bongo-ish about Claudia (or at least not by the general standards of the ‘boobs and robots’ AI film crowd), it also feels…probable that there’s an awful lot of bongo being made featuring this character, which, again, shouldn’t matter because they are not a real person, and yet…As you can probably tell, I am…uncomfortable about this, but I can’t quite logically explain why.
- Higgsfield Playable: Higgsfield – a company I had previously only associated with AI video – launched an interesting new product this week, which is basically a tool which lets anyone spin up mobile games in short order based on character assets and a gameplay description, and which will also create playable ads of said game on demand – you will know exactly what I mean if you’ve ever played a mobile game and been assaulted by ads for King’s fcuking Prolapse or whatever those match three games are called. Clicking the main link here will take you to a page where you can try the tool yourself – but you’ll need a Higgsfield account, and it is not quite as simply as just typing ‘make me Clash of Clans’, so instead I suggest you scroll down and check out some of the examples of things others have made which are…Jesus, they’re not terrible, and it’s hard not to look at this stuff and think that it is going to a) result in an absolute FLOOD of appalling shovelware hitting the Play store in the coming weeks and months; and b) that it is very, very bad news for a lot of mobile game studios because, well. It does rather feel like GTAVI might be something of the end of an era in videogames terms. BONUS MAD AI-ISH GAMES-ADJACENT STUFF: this link takes you to some demo videos showing off Google’s new experimental worldbuilding model Genie4 which does the whole ‘spin up an entire navigable 3d environment based on a single prompt’ thing, but, well, better than the last versions; while interaction is limited to ‘wander around’ and ‘sort-of contextual buttonpressing’ and ‘jump’, it’s slightly jaw-dropping to see how fluid the generated stuff looks; Ethan Mollick’s had access to it for a few days and his videos of stuff he’s made are frankly incredible. Once The Machine has a working idea of what ‘fun’ is in gameplay terms things are going to get very interesting indeed. Thank God we’ll have so many new games to play in the wartorn, immiserated future that awaits!
- Nebulofi: This is an interesting idea which is, AGAIN, slightly-ruined by AI’s total ability to make Actually Good Websites. This is a sort of synthtoy thing, based on the idea of solar systems and planetary orbits; there are a variety of different systems in this digital galaxy, each of which has a slightly different sonic pattern in terms of timbre, pitch, etc; clicking on each of the various ones will take you to a zoomed view, and you can change the sounds being by shifting various planetary orbits, etc. Now, while I appreciate that was something of a dog’s dinner of an explanation it does, I hope, give you at least a passing idea of how this works and what it does, which is more than the fcuking website gives you. A TIP TO YOU FCUKERS SPAMMING MY INBOX WITH AI-GENERATED STUFF: JUST BECAUSE YOU HAVE SPENT DAYS OBSESSING OVER YOUR TOY AND DREAMING ABOUT IT, AND JUST BECAUSE IT MAPS THE CONTOURS OF YOUR PSYCHE EXACTLY AND IT IS YOUR SPECIAL BABY, DOESN’T MEAN IT MAKES SENSE TO ANYONE ELSE! Do not assume that the UI is intuitive (it almost certainly isn’t)! Consider adding some ‘what the fcuk is this and what the fcuk does it do and how the fcuk does it work?’ explainer text on landing! THINK FFS! Ahem. Anyway, this would be fun were the music more interesting and the interface better-explained, but it’s more of a curious idea than one to bookmark imho.
- The Moving Image Archive: Ooh, this is a potential timesink. Per the blurb, “The Moving Image Archive is a searchable library of archival films. The material is drawn from public-domain collections and is free to reuse. The internet is full of forgotten films, and this archive is a growing library of that collection. When synthetic footage can now fabricate the past, preserving verifiable history matters more than ever before.” Well, EXACTLY. This is a quite incredible trove – type in whatever you fancy in the search bar and it will pull up a selection of clips from across the years, with provenance and duration clearly displayed – and the breadth of subjects covered is dizzying. I just typed in ‘crying man’ to get an idea, and now it’s all I can do not to have a massively emo 10 minutes as I just watch clip after clip of people weeping from my screen (look, we all have our quirks, shut up), but all of human life is here in grainy footage. If you’re an artist or videomaker this is quite possibly the greatest thing you will see all week.
- Braintree Town FC: I don’t, as a rule, spend a lot of time perusing the websites of non-league football teams in the UK, but for some reason the web discovered the online presence of Braintree Town FC this week and fell in love with it – click the link and you will see why. IT’S ALL HAND-CODED HTML! IT LOOKS LIKE IT PROBABLY DID WHEN IT WAS MADE (the Wayback machine takes this back to 2007, but I think it predates that by a few years)! IT IS STILL BEING UPDATED, PRESUMABLY BY THE ONE BLOKE WHO MADE IT AND KNOWS HOW THE WEIRD, BESPOKE CMS WORKS! Honestly, any of you who are any sort of web geek (I see you, you perverts, you *weirdos*) will adore this.
- Paintshed: This was sent to me by its creator, who has made it with AI and is obviously very proud of it…I wanted to love it, I really did, and there’s something cute about the idea, which seeks to replicate a, er, painter’s shed in which you can sit with your canvas and palette and MAKE ART, and there’s a really nice tactility to the way in which the virtual paint smears and layers like Actual Oils…but, on the flipside, it is SO slow and unwieldy, and, it turns out, that while there’s something nice about the *idea* of an intensely-realistic interface that involves you dragging an Actual Virtual 3d Brush over canvas, it’s STAGGERINGLY fiddly and overcomplex, and, it turns out, that most of the ‘art’ you can produce basically looks like spirographs. Still, if you have a) a lot more talent than I have; b) a SIGNIFICANTLY better laptop than I have; and c) lots and lots of patience, you may find that you can make something beautiful. Maybe.
- Sideshift: Are you feeling the pinch? Are the pennies not stretching? Did the budget leave you feeling more pauper than plute? Well why not join the growing number of people whoring themselves to brands in exchange for sweet, sweet creator pennies? Sideshift is A N Other marketplace which connects ‘creators’ with brands who want to pay them to advertise said brands wares – the gimmick here seems to be that it’s software brands looking for normal people rather than Big Number Influencers, so there’s hope for you LinkedIn hustlers too. I can’t tell you how incredibly miserable I find this idea, that we’re all reduced to flogging product in the hope of securing some trickledown VC dollars while they last – still, the only thing more depressing than selling out is *trying* to sell out and realising that noone wants to buy you, so, well, GET CREATING WHILE THE CASH IS THERE.
- B2BStudio: Ooh, this is potentially interesting; B2BStudio is a websiteappthing which basically lets you DJ in your browser – import tracks via MP3 or MIDI and mix and scratch to your heart’s content. Which, ok, isn’t new or interesting, but I think the fact that you can DJ with other people – you can effectively create shared rooms where two people can mix together – is an interesting wrinkle. I have to confess that this is FAR too complex for me – it literally simulates a proper DJ rig with all sorts of buttons and knobs and levers that I simply do not understand – but if you vaguely know your way around a pair of Technics then you might have fun with this.
- Posting2: “LIKE INSTAGRAM BUT NOT HUGE AND EVIL” is, I think, the core pitch here; this is a small, nascent photo-based social network which self-describes thusly: “Casual ad-free photo sharing. Simple, independent social media. No ads, no algorithms, no data sales. See posts from your friends and friends of your friends. Vote on ideas and changes with the in-app polling system. Funding for this project comes from user donations and web shop sales.” It’s available on Android and iOS, which isn’t always the case with these things, and I am particularly in love with the act that they make the finances of the app visible on the homepage so you can see if the community donations/subscriptions are covering overheads (at present they are). I have absolutely NO clue whether the app itself is any good – it is impossible for me to be less interested in something than I am of the idea of a photo-based social network – so should any of you try this out please let me know.
- MuGlobe: Another interesting idea let down by a complete lack of any sort of explanation as to what the fcuk is going on or how it works. MuGlobe is, basically, a music discovery system which lets you move a pointer around a world map; hover it over a specific country and you can listen to musical genres that are popular in/typical of that place, create playlists, listen to live radio mixes, all that jazz. Except it’s…quite hard to work all that out from the landing page, the controls are…somewhat unintuitive and the whole thing could do with another layer of explanatory UX/UI to help it along a bit. Ed, its creator who sent it to me, was kind enough to share some explanatory notes which I am going to drop here for you because, honestly, this is kind-of cool and deserves some attention, and this will help you enjoy it rather than just bouncing off in frustration as I nearly did: “Use the mouse to drag the globe in any direction. The selector that stays fixed In the center of the globe display selects the location on the planet. If over land, the site instantly creates a virtual radio station as if it were exactly where you selected and plays music that the people in that location would listen to. Location genre information: Click on the (i) information button attached to the location selector, it shows the genres of music popular at that location and how much influence those genres have at that location by percentage. For example Nashville TN would have high percentage of country music influence.Areas of the globe are shaded to show where each genre has influence For example Reggaeton will show much of Latin America shaded its color. You can click on each genre to toggle its influence region display on/off so you can example genre influence for whichever genre you are interested in. Click on the name of the genre and it will take you to a wiki article for that genre.” SEE, IT DOES MAKE SENSE!
- Life of Art: Ok, I know this *looks* and *feels* like the purest ClaudeSlop, but I think there’s an interesting idea here and the person who sent it in sounded like they are a nice guy, so, well, you can decide for yourselves. Yogesh wrote to me (he’s not English so used AI to smooth the language, which, ugh, I just have to get used to this, don’t I?) saying “It’s a daily music discovery app. Each listener gets seven songs picked for them every day, from artists they haven’t heard yet. The discovery app is free for listeners, and the songs open through available links to streaming services. It’s live on the web and still early…We seed a daily catalog across genres and languages, then pick each listener’s seven using their preferences. Artists can submit their own songs too. The aim is to make finding unfamiliar music a small daily ritual, and help it reach people beyond an artist’s existing circle.” I asked him how it works, and he explained thusly: “An automated daily job seeds the catalog using public music metadata, looking for new releases across genres and languages and filtering out things like live versions, compilations and karaoke. Each listener’s seven are then selected from that catalog using their genre, language and streaming-service preferences. The aim is to help them find music they haven’t come across yet, not necessarily music from unknown artists. It isn’t a hand-picked selection, and AI isn’t choosing the songs. I use AI to build and maintain the app. The songs open through available links to streaming services, so Life of Art is the discovery layer rather than a streaming platform itself.” This is a nice idea – I like the premise, and there’s something clever about the mechanics that sit behind it, even if it is leaning very heavily on The Machine to make it all happen – and you might find it an interesting way of discovering some new tracks.
- Good Call: I am, as I have mentioned many times over the years, fcuking AWFUL at predicting anything – you, though, may be a fcuking CLAIRVOYANT, and if said clairvoyance extends to the world of music then you might enjoy this. Each day it presents you with an artist and some tracks, and your job is to say, simply, whether you think said artist or track will be a hit or not. That’s it. The website tracks the WISDOM OF CROWDS around said artists and tracks, offering a little barometer as to what the community of users *think* is going to be The Next Big Thing; I have no idea AT ALL how accurate or otherwise this might end up being, but it’s fun both as a music discovery tool and a little game you can play to see whether you could ever made it as an A&R person (I bet you could; in my experience the main qualities necessary for success are an heroic appetite for cocaine and being a total cnut).
- Waddle World: Meta appears to have landed on ‘cute’ as its major marketing strategy for all its AI gubbins going forward. Following the announcement of its physical AI device and accompanying weird inuit avocado mascot Jolly, now the company’s quietly started trialing another AI toy. This one is aimed at kids and is currently only available to users in (I think) the Philippines, and is, basically, an AI-enabled Tamagotchi-style pet (Jay Springett’s ‘era of the little guys’ very much in full swing right now) which is designed to be a low-friction gamified companion-type thing which, I am guessing, Meta is trialing as both a gateway towards its wider AI product portfolio, a way of getting young users invested in the brand and comfortable spending time with it and its products, and – OBVIOUSLY – a massive fcuking datacapture exercise. This may never see the light of day in other territories – Meta does a lot of experiments, after all – but I think the general ‘cutesy companion’ thing is very much something we are going to see it do a lot more of because, well, it works.
- Project Sunroof: Christ it’s been YEARS since I have seen a Google project and thought ‘wow, what a good and positive and generally-beneficial thing this is, well done Google!’ – which, if you consider what the business was two decades ago and what it was doing and experimenting with is…sad, honestly. Anyway, this is a really smart and helpful use of its satellite imagery and maps data which, sadly, only works in North America; still, if you happen to be unfortunate enough to live there then at least you can console yourself with the fact that you can use this site to plug in your address and it will then give you details of how much money you could save over the next 20 years thanks to the installation of roof-mounted solar panels based on the available real estate of your roof footprint, and then helps you search for accredited providers in your local area so you can explore installation. This is very much the sort of thing which ought to be a Government website but which isn’t because the current administration are fcuking cnuts.
- Facelink: Grace Li, whose work I have featured in Curios before, returns with a new project which I really like; simple, silly and fun, Facehack is a browser extension which you can install and which, if you do, will do one thing and one thing only – detect faces as you browse, and apply small, dumb filters to them on discovery. Want everyone whose face you see as you peruse the web to have googly eyes? GREAT! As she writes in the ‘about’ text, “How we present ourselves online has shifted towards extreme optimization and hyperbole. This has led to phenomenons like mewing, biohacking, and facial procedures to optimize our appearance for reach, trust, and growth. In hacking, we satirize, play, and remix – or omit identity – all together from the content we consume.” This is great fun, and you should all install it at least once and then go and look at the ‘Team’ page of a former employer for the lols.
THE SECTION WHICH MIGHT HAVE BEEN INTERESTED IN CHECKING OUT THAT ELIZABETH HOLMES FILM HAD IT NOT BEEN FOR THE ENDLESS, INESCAPABLE COVERAGE OF THAT ELIZABETH HOLMES FILM, PT.2:
- Small Ideas: It feels, possibly, a *touch* bleak that merely ‘actually taking some small legislative steps to ameliorate or desh1ttify certain specific aspects of normal life which affect lots of people’ is being talked up as a radical new policy position which deserves its own nomenclature (no, Andy, NOT YOU – I am talking, of course, about Mamdanism), but that, apparently, is where we are now. This link takes you to a website set up by UK ‘Consumer Champion’ Martin Lewis (note to Americans and other foreigners: Martin Lewis is, basically, considered something of a minor deity by the sorts of people who know and care about gas tariffs and how to pick the best one, and what an ISA is), where members of the public – that is, YOU! Well, if you’re living in the UK at least, the rest of you can fcuk off to the next link – can submit their Small Ideas for ways in which things could be improved or be made marginally less bad than they currently are. So, I don’t know, maybe you think that the ONE THING that needs to happen to improve the lot of man and woman is to institute two-lane pavements, or maybe to ban dogs from restaurants, or, er, fcuk, I am running out of suggestions here…corporate-sponsored free food dispensers for homeless people – should you have an idea, whack it into this site and Martin himself will raise the best ones with our elected policymakers FOR HE HAS THE EAR OF GOVERNMENT! On the one hand this feels like a nice idea, someone widening the influence and access they have rather than using it for their own, or their paymasters’, benefit; on the other, it feels…suboptimal that we need Consumer Champion Martin Lewis as our means of effectively interfacing with People In Power.
- Acid211: This is an in-browser synth toy which will let you make MAD SQUELCHY ACID TRACKS, and whose design is really rather cool…but which runs so appallingly-badly on my laptop that I thought the thing was going to actually die forever when I opened the link just now so, er, good luck with this. It is VERY nicely-designed, though, seriously, all acid green and weird, bubbly interface buttons.
- Figmoji: On the one hand, this is just AN Other infinite collaborative webcanvas thingy (how jaded I am become!), with the singular gimmick that each pixel is an emoji rather than a coloured block, and as such you know what you are getting here (large-scale collaborative artworks, toilet wall graffiti, a surprisingly-detailed emoji recreation of Rick Astley); on the other, this has a neat little feature which lets you watch a video of the site’s history and how it has changed over time, and I highly recommend clicking on the link in the bottom-left and seeing what 9 months(ish) of collaborative creativity looks like as it builds and grows and ebbs and flows. Honestly, this really is weirdly interesting and, for reasons I can’t quite explain, it made me feel…slightly hopeful about humanity. No, I have no idea why.
- The World Chocolate Masters: You might not have been aware that the World Chocolate Masters have been taking place this month – don’t worry, I forgot too! – but they have recently concluded (won by ‘Tommaso from Italy’, a man so famous he apparently doesn’t bother with a surname) and now you can go to the competition website and look at some of the pictures of the contestants’ creations and JESUS are these some elaborate chocolates (sample description: “Inspired by diamonds and panther imagery, this dessert plays with shifting light reflections and textures”; we are, let me assure you, a long way from Cadbury’s here). Pleasingly there’s no sign whatsoever of that gurning French bloke whose chocolate sculptures must, at this point, have been seen by every single person currently alive on the planet – IN YOUR FACE AMAURY GUICHON, THERE ARE SOME PARTS OF THE WORLD YOU CAN NEVER SULLY!
- A New Paywall Jumper: On the one hand, as someone who basically makes a living as a ‘journalist’ these days (I know, me too, but, well, it is what it is) I am very much in favour of ‘paying for journalism’; on the other, TIMES ARE HARD and we all seem to be paying approximately a grand a month in subscriptions between newsletter and Patreons and streaming services and, honestly, SOMETHING HAS TO GIVE. As such the main link takes you to a tool called ‘Unwall’, which was new to me and may be new to you too, and which seems to work; there’s also this one, called Wallhop, which comes with a convenient button you can add to your browser for one-click paywallhopping. But, er, maybe still pay for *some* journalism, ok?
- Shelf And Story: Are you a parent? Do you want your kids to read more books but find it hard to navigate through the endless procession of celebrity-authored dreck which publishers seem to think is the only possible route to getting books in young people’s hands? Have you an ENTIRELY COINCIDENTAL desire to never see David Walliams’ name on a spine ever again? In that case you might find Shelf and Story interesting; it’s a platform that’s designed to provide book recs for parents; it’s free, there’s an app, and the idea is pretty simple. Tell it the books your kid currently likes – and has read, based on a snap of their bookshelf or a list from a linked app – and it will recommend new ones. Which, you know, sounds like it might be useful if you don’t have another way of sourcing recommendations. There is some AI under the hood, and as a childless man who will die afraid and alone I obviously haven’t tried this out – as such, I have literally no clue if this is good or useful but, well, give it a go and find out.
- Buy A Digital Tomato: I absolutely adore this, mainly for how incredibly fcuking dumb and pointless it is, but also because, well, it’s an NFT in the post-NFT era, and GOD is it fun remembering that era (lol). Would you buy a jpeg of a tomato for £100? NO OF COURSE YOU WOULDN’T THAT WOULD BE MAD. And yet, this site offers you the chance to do that. “This is a website where you can buy a digital tomato for £100. One tomato. One hundred pounds. There is no complex pricing model. There is no premium tier. There is no subscription. It is simply a £100 tomato.If you searched for a hundred pound tomato or wondered why such a thing exists, you have found it.” I recommend the FAQ, it is pleasing. Anyone got some slurp juice for my Apes?
- Cyanotype Camera: This is SO nice, a perfect little webtoy – it was sent to me by its creator, Kevin (as an aside, I cannot help but be thrilled that there are Germans out there called ‘Kevin’), who wrote: “I’m Kevin from Munich, Germany. This summer on vacation in France I started to get into cyanotypes: you cover a piece of paper with iron salts, put an object or a negative of a photo on it, put it in the sun and it becomes a picture in beautiful blue and white. Now I am at home and don’t have the gear to do it. So I built a browser camera that imitates the process.” THIS IS LOVELY! The results, also, are really pleasing – it’s simple, fun and the outputs are beautiful, and you might enjoy opening this on your phone and seeing what you can make with it.
- Your Insides:And, I presume, mine too – my well-documented revulsion at the meaty physicality of existence means that I have spent very little time thinking about What Is Happening Beneath The Dermis (although now that I have typed that sentence I have become uncomfortably aware of the fact that I have *organs* and that they are *doing things* (presumably the things they are supposed to be doing; again, let’s not interrogate this too hard!), and MY GOD is it horrible. Ahem. Anyway, this website is called Your Insides and it is an organ-by-organ tour around the body, with neat 3d graphics (all very bloodless) and a voice over and I think this is probably something that might be quite cool for a little kid who’s starting to get into the idea of BODIES and stuff. Me? I am never clicking this fcuker again, I find it almost unbearably distressing.
- An All-The-Wayback Button: This is a nice idea – the link takes you to a blogpost, but there’s a button there which you can drag into the extensions area of your browser which will then, when you click it, take you to the first version of that webpage that was archived by the Wayback Machine. Try it on your favourite corporate website or news site and see where it takes you (fine, it will take you to THE PAST, but you know what I mean you pedantic fcukers).
- Jono: Ok, this is something you will have to Actually Download if you want to play it, but frankly it’s less about the thing than the idea behind the thing; Jono is a recently-released new game on Steam, which is itself a fairly-unremarkable platform game with pretty hard mechanics. The gimmick – and the thing which makes it ART and, frankly, a work of genius – is that only one person in the world can be playing it at any given time. You load it up, you get added to a queue, and you wait – everyone gets one life, and when they die control transfers to the next player waiting in line. This will continue until the game has been completed – there are a million levels so that is likely to take…some time. Honestly, I cannot express how much I adore the idea behind this, it should be in galleries around the world.
- Tributary: AN Other ‘music genome project’-type tool designed to let you find music which is related to stuff you already like – the difference here is that it sources the artists that your favourite artists were inspired by, letting you wander back upstream through musical history to see how influence filters through into modern sound. This requires the artist to have been indexed by the site, so it won’t work with everyone you think of, and there’s obviously a lot of AI going on under the hood to generate the results (and, probably, pull the influence connection stuff too), but I think it’s quite an interesting way of exploring some interesting older artists you might not be aware of (particularly if you look into the influences of artists from countries whose musical canon you may be less familiar with).
- A Flickr Album of Fcuking Incredible LEGO Work: Honestly, these things are insane – how do they make them look all…curvy like that? What the fcuk are the pieces they are using? Anyway, this is genuinely jaw-dropping but it loses points in my mental scorechart because the account behind it is called ‘Woomy World’ which, honestly, upsets me more than it probably ought.
- Soviet Posters: I mean, it’s literally that. “Princeton has a large and expanding collections of Russian and East European posters. The collection documents poster art as used in advertising for performances and films and in and a variety of Party-sponsored campaigns and ephemera. It is an illuminating complement to Princeton’s expanding special collections of documents of early-Soviet visual culture.” Some very cool design in here.
- Assorted Early Gay Publications: Not, I concede, a hugely-lyrical title, but there’s SO much interesting stuff contained in this online archive of old gay publications maintained by the Houston LGBT society; these are all from outside of Texas, but as a history of the gay underground in 20thC North America it’s a staggering resource. I am SO thrilled to learn, for example, that there was a gay magazine in New York from 1970-2000 called, simply, ‘Michael’s Thing’.
- Title Art: Would you like an online webtoy which lets you make text in the style of 90s/00s word art (that is, the ‘art’ textual styles you used to be able to deploy in MS Word)? OH YES YOU WOULD! If you’re after that specific aesthetic then OH MY GOD will you enjoy making things with this.
- Narnia Tapes: This was sent to me by a reader – I am linking to it not because it’s a particularly thrilling site per se (not that it’s dull, it’s more that it’s simply a site hosting a bunch of their dance music tracks, some of which are actually pretty good) but because it’s a pleasing example of AI web development being…just a good thing. Adam Kulidjian (whose site and music this is) made this with Claude and now has a place to chuck all the tracks he makes which he owns, which looks and works in the way he wants it to look and work, and which wouldn’t have existed without the AI being there to make the site’s creation easy and quick. THIS IS A GOOD THING! For all my kvetching and moaning about the wave of AI-generated dross sites that are flooding the web and my inbox, I am still so thrilled that we’re now in an era where it’s possible for someone to just…create their own shop window for their own creative work rather than having to wrestle with a big platform and their terms and commercial concerns.
- Chinese Checkers: I confess to personally having very little interest in the game of Chinese Checkers, but if YOU are an aficionado then you might find this site interesting, sent to me by its creator Joe, who wrote: “I built a free Chinese Checkers game with what I believe is the strongest AI opponent out there. My mom loves Chinese Checkers, and this started because she couldn’t find a computer opponent she liked.” It’s Claudeslop, fine, but I find the addition of the custom opponent model interesting enough to warrant its inclusion.
- Interactive Fiction Competition Winners 2026: Regular readers will be aware that I fcuking LOVE interactive fiction in all its forms and the IF Competition has been a fixture in Curios for years – I haven’t had time to give the winners and entrants a proper go yet, so can’t recommend too many specific games, but, of the ones I have tried, I *strongly* recommend the ASCII-tastic ‘The Count and the Communist’ (interactive fiction AND dialectic materialism, what more could you want?!). NOTE TO READERS IN THE UK – because of our fcuking moronic laws around ‘online safety’ (they don’t keep kids safe, but they do make browsing the web really annoying for everyone!) you will have to use a VPN to actually play these, as they’re hosted on a website which has chosen not to make itself available to us due to fears of being sanctioned (misplaced fears – seriously, you do not need to geoblock this – but still).
- Yesterpedia: Friend of Curios Giuseppe Sollazzo has knocked up this clever – and oddly-addictive – little game which asks you to pick the most-read articles on English Wikipedia yesterday: “Every day, Yesterpedia shows the most-read English Wikipedia articles from the day before. Put the top five in order, from most read to fifth. You get 3 attempts. Standard mixes the top five into the day’s top 10. Easy shows just the top 5, shuffled, and Pro hides them among the top 20. Pick a mode before your first guess; it’s then fixed for the day.” This is an EXCELLENT addition to your daily procrastination setup, and might teach you things too.
- Marble Madness: This is, honestly, a legitimately GREAT game, and were I not such a dedicated correspondent I would stop typing right now and play it instead. It’s a complete ripoff of 80s home computer (and, I think, arcade) classic Marble Madness, where you have to navigate the titular marble across a challenging landscape in isometric 3d, with PHYSICS and INERTIA and OBSTACLES and all that jazz, and, seriously, this is GREAT – actually, properly enjoyable and with a real ‘just one more go’ feel to it, and this will fcuk your productivity in half if you’re not careful.
- Homunculus: This is SUCH a neat little point-and-click game – creepy and WEIRD and gross, and appropriate for Hallowe’en. It explains NOTHING, so you will have to do a lot of speculative and experimental clicking, but it’s rewarding and enjoyable and the payoffs are excellent; oh, and the artstyle’s a treat too. I like this a lot.
- SWOS: OH GOD THIS LINK IS CRACK. The trend for decompiling old games and setting them up on a url has reached what is possibly still the absolute greatest two-player football videogame experience ever designed – SENSIBLE WORLD OF SOCCER! ALL OF IT! IN THE BROWSER! EVEN PLAYABLE ON MOBILE FFS (although if I’m honest I don’t think it really works on touchscreen)! Honestly, it’s all I can do not to invest in some USB-enabled modern versions of microswitched joysticks and invite Phil Niewiadomski round so we can spend approximately six hours playing this like it’s 1994 all over again. Seriously, if you are a middle-aged English man this will give you possibly the greatest Proustian hit of ludic nostalgia you have EVER had – YOU ARE WELCOME!
By Alex Webb
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- The Art of Disney Fairies: Would you like a Tumblr devoted exclusively to concept art of Disney fairies? Er, why? But ok, here, I am not judging you.
- Mak Rustic: Pixel art. Yeah, I know, but this is REALLY GOOD pixel art and you should check it out.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Homeless In Poetry: I bumped into the owner of this account, Andrew Mtizwa-Mubayiwa, in town last weekend, and we had a chat and he told me all about his life and his experiences of homelessness, and how he now tries to use poetry to communicate what life on the streets is like; this is his Insta account which captures his stories and what he sees as he wanders round Central London, and it’s honestly worth a follow, he’s a fascinating (and interesting) man.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The Myth of ThatcherFuturism: Yes, yes, I know, not THATCH in big old 2026 – but, I promise, this is interesting and worth reading (and that includes all you non-Anglos); this is basically a piece of writing that explores why the post-Thatcherite idea of ‘slashing red tape’, employed by every single Government in my memory and a reliable cure-all for right-wing figures across the world, is fundamentally fcuking bullsh1t, and why regulation is good actually and, yes, I know that YOU don’t need that explaining to you but perhaps you might appreciate reading a cogent explanation as to why. The opening paras set out the argument, but it really is worth reading the whole piece because it is smart (and because I agree with it): “This is what I think of as “Thatcherfuturism” – the idea that the thing which stands between Britain and a land of plenty is the completion of the deregulatory agenda of the Adam Smith Institute circa 1985. I think it’s not only wrong, but dangerously and nostalgically wrong in a way that ought to be familiar to any observer of left wing thought. When an experiment fails, the only way to move on is to accept that failure, try to understand it and pick up what can be saved of the underlying principles. It’s terribly attractive to think that the problem was that you didn’t go far enough, and it’s often easy to make a credible argument to that effect. But it’s empirically observable that this is a reliable way to end up in blind alleys. In a complex system with feedback, the fact that an attempt to change the system didn’t work is itself informative about the system. The UK is, in fact, a highly regulated economy in which it is very difficult to build anything. However, this is not for lack of efforts to deregulate it and make it easier to build things. Comparatively, France is indeed covered in nuclear power plants, housing, high speed rail and the like. This is not because France has made repeated attempts to deregulate.” BONUS RELATED LINK: this is another good piece along orthogonally-related lines, asking why, if libertarianism is such a smart and successful ideology that would fix everything, it’s not actually implemented in practise.
- Bunkering Down: Matt Webb here writes about his personal response to the AI-facilitated hacking singularity that appears to be about to sweep across the digital realm like a particularly-destructive tsunami; Matt, who I think many of you will be familiar with, is a long-standing maker and geek who’s been tinkering with tech and the web for years and whose projects I have featured in Curios many times in the past, and he knows what he is talking about when it comes to the web and associated topics, and if he thinks things are bad then, well, I would probably agree that Things Are Bad. Also, I know more than one person (paranoid geeks all, fine, but still) who is thinking like this: “I shut down my web servers on Thursday. I’ve had a home of my own on internet for 27 years. A good innings but a sad day. A home-owner no more! I’m renting now. Old websites have been archived to static HTML and moved to a shared host. I said goodbye to some old apps. You’re reading this because I moved my blog to GitHub Pages. Lost some functionality on the way, but security is now someone else’s problem….I’m no longer confident in keeping my own server secure with years of PHP/CGI/apps all on the open internet, what with this current wave of new vulnerabilities – sure it’s possible, and Claude speeds up the patching process, but the calculus of whether it is worth my time just tipped.”
- The Algorithmic Constraints On The Possible: Ok, this is an academic paper but I promise you it’s a really interesting one; it touches on a personal bugbear of mine which I have doubtless bored you with over the years, to whit the degree to which the averaging out of taste via the algo is A Bad Thing from the point of view of culture and interest, and why that is, and I think it’s both true and quite important and worth reading (even if you skim it a bit because, ok, fine, it’s not exactly zingy prose): “This article argues that the contemporary crisis of the public sphere cannot be adequately understood as a crisis of communication alone. What is at stake is a contraction of the horizon of the possible: a narrowing of the conditions under which alternatives can be imagined. Drawing on the Frankfurt School tradition, it develops a concept of imagination as a critical faculty grounded in Walter Benjamin’s characterisation of it as the “awareness of the de-formations of the future,” and traces its erosion through Marcuse’s analysis of one-dimensional society. The article proposes the model of Infrastructural Conditioning of Imagination (ICI), identifying three interdependent dynamics (filtering, familiarisation and anticipation) through which algorithmic systems pre-structure the field of the thinkable. Each dynamic bears on a distinct dimension of experience: filtering concerns the structure of access, familiarisation the structure of reception, and anticipation the structure of temporality. The article argues that this conditioning operates as a suppression of non-identity in Adorno’s sense, eroding the conditions of Erfahrung under which the preponderance of the object can function as a critical moment, at the level of the conditions through which subjectivity itself is formed.”
- Analysing The Anthropic Listing: I have to admit that I didn’t expect Anthropic to actually list this year, but it looks like they are doing it later this year based on this week’s SEC filing in the US; this is the typically-excellent Matt Levine, writing in Bloomberg about what he gleaned from the documents – how he manages to be funny about this stuff is honestly astonishing, but his ability to squeeze laughs out of balance sheet information remains unparalleled. “But it wouldn’t be an AI prospectus without threats. I searched in vain for words like “extinction” or “kill everyone,” but there are a couple of mentions of “existential risks to humanity.” The prospectus does not quite say “our products pose an existential risk to humanity.” It attributes that belief to someone else; it says that some people think Anthropic might pose an existential risk to humanity… have to say that, if the robots do kill everyone, I am going to spend my last few seconds on earth being annoyed at that use of the passive voice. “Concerns have been raised … within our organization … that sufficiently advanced AI systems could … pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity,” ah.”
- The Unequal Token Costs of Different Languages: The news this week that one of my very favourite tech outlets Rest of World – which I have featured regularly in here since it launched – might be facing closure due to having its traffic kneecapped by changes to search was profoundly-saddening to me; there are too few publications presenting stories about technology, its adoption and impact on the non-Western world. This story – about the fact that querying LLMs in non-English languages can have a significant impact on token usage, and that as a result there’s an inbuilt cost disadvantage to people querying Claude in (eg) Malayalam – is a near-perfect example of the sort of reporting they do well and which, crucially, no other fcuker touches. We already suffer in the West from our perspective on The Machine and what it is doing to society being largely blinkered and inward-facing; fewer stories like this will make the situation worse. In the unlikely event anyone reading this is REALLY RICH and can spare a load of cash to bail out Rest of World then, er, could you do that, please? And then come back here and talk to me about paying me a £30k pa stipend for Curios, please.
- The Journalists Getting Tech Support Queries: The team at 404 Media have started getting emails from people requesting tech support…because LLMs are telling them that their struggles with malfunctioning systems and software are Actual News Stories that should be investigated. For example, ““How can I get my account back?” the man asked ChatGPT on Wednesday. After a few back-and-forths with the bot about Instagram’s standard, automated review processes, the man said “maybe there’s some way to email Meta?” ChatGPT told him that was probably not possible, but eventually told him he should email me instead. “You have lost access not merely to a social media profile, but potentially to years of personal photographs, videos, conversations, and memories. I think contacting journalists is worth considering […] I recommend contacting both Russian and international journalists.”” This is SUCH an interesting story, and an example of one of those weird wrinkles that will arise as a result of LLMs intersecting with The Way The World Works – the fact that customer service has been hollowed out almost entirely means that these sorts of frustrations are omnipresent and quotidian, and that they will be directed to The Machine because there’s literally nowhere else for them to go…is this good? It doesn’t feel good.
- Welcome To The Age of AI Weapons: In case you’re interested, I did some ACTUAL JOURNALISM about AI-enabled weaponry, where it’s at and why, despite what every single fcuking picture editor under the sun wants you to think, we won’t in fact be getting red-eyed Terminator armies anytime soon.
- Approve My Spending: This is fun/weird/slightly-depressing; a BIG NEW TREND from China (as ever, it is probably not that big and it is probably not actually a trend, but still) which is seeing kids downloading an app which lets them crowdsource feedback on their spending decisions from strangers. Why? JUST TO FEEL A SMALL SENSE OF CONNECTION FOR A FLEETING SECOND! “On the platform, users anonymously submit requests to spend money, listing the item, its price, why they want it and what they could use instead. Strangers then vote to approve or reject each one. Voters must explain their decision and cannot see how others voted until they have cast their own, according to a Southern Metropolis Daily report. Almost any spending decision can go up for a vote, whether it is a new outfit, a bottle of perfume, a house move or a trip.” This feels…stealable, honestly.
- Should You Break Up With Your Friend Over Their Job?: The answer here, obviously, is ‘it depends on the friend and the job’, but I found this piece in Dazed broadly interesting as a barometer of where shame is currently at, professionally-speaking, and the extent to which performing virtue in the workplace is now A Thing for some people (but, also, very much not the vast majority of people). Are there some employers too evil to countenance? There’s an interesting series questions about purity culture here – as someone who is professionally connected to a woman who is, er, VERY UNPOPULAR on Bluesky I am on some interesting blocklists, for example, which I personally think is…slightly-mad, but, also, I can also understand that if you perceive businesses or ideologies as fundamentally anti-human, say, you might also consider any connection to them as morally unconscionable. FWIW I am a total pr1ck to my friends who work at Spotify and Amazon but they are kind enough to put up with it (perhaps the fact that they all earn six figures and I, er, very much don’t makes it easier for them to tune out my tedious soapboxing, who knows??).
- Censorship and Indie Comics: A webcomic about the censorship of webcomics – and other work, often queer – by an increasing number of online platforms, whether it be payments companies not wanting to process transactions relating to erotica or sexually-focused material, say, or Steam’s increasingly mad ‘adult content’ gatekeeping. There’s something very, very sinister about the slow, creeping normalisation of attitudes to sex and sexuality which are straight out of the weirdo Christian playbook, but I suppose that’s what several decades of billion-dollar cultural astroturfing buys you (THANKS PETER AND THE KOCH BROTHERS AND ALL YOU OTHER CNUTS OVER THE OCEAN, THANKS FOR CONTINUING TO FCUK UP CULTURE FOR THE REST OF THE WORLD JUST BECAUSE YOU’RE EMBARRASSED ABOUT WHAT YOU ARE INTO, THANKS!).
- The Pedestrianisation of (Part Of) Oxford Street: This is, fine, quite niche, but I enjoyed this London Centric writeup of the process of pedestrianising the small stretch of Oxford Street which is the first to be de-carred, and I am a sucker for photos of overnight workers in hi-viz.
- Inside London’s Weird AI Art Scene: This is…interesting rather than brilliant, I think (I was personally disappointed at how…po-faced it was, if I’m honest, apologies should the author ever see this and think ‘who’s this pr1ck slagging off my words?’), but it does a decent job of exploring the question of AI’s use in art in a more open-minded fashion than you often tend to get online (and with none of the moronic, NFT-adjacent boosting that you equally tend to see from the pro crowd). Could have done with more WEIRD, though, imho: “I’m a historian, not an artist or theorist or technologist. But I’m based in London, a city where I regularly encounter people sensitive and alert to cultural and aesthetic developments wrought by technology long before they wash over the rest of us. My journey exploring how these people were responding to AI took me from robot dog fights to Victorian graveyards, and along the way, I noted that, interestingly, many of them never assumed that art and AI must be inimical. Perhaps precocious, perhaps prescient, they are instead harnessing emerging AI tools and aesthetics for bizarre, challenging, subversive, beautiful ends. Rather than letting platforms manipulate them, they manipulate platforms — or at least submit to their logics in an artful manner — thereby freeing AI from Big Tech’s fixation on extraction and efficiency rather than exploration. Why had so many individuals and collectives with this inclination — that is, to remain so effortlessly ahead of the curve concerning AI’s cultural transformations — emerged in Britain, a nation that has otherwise dwindled culturally, at least on the global stage, in recent years? The answer, I feel, lies in a fluency with alienation that dates back to the Romantics. But first, there’s the dog fight.”
- Amol Rajan: Ok, this is going to be of limited interest if you’re not a) an anglo; and b) an anglo who has been paying attention to Amol Rajan’s attempts to launch an eponymous media brand under the banner of ‘The Amol Rajan Connection’; and c) someone who would quite like to see Rajan’s endeavours fail, but, should you tick all three of those boxes then WOW are you going to enjoy this pleasingly-spiky analysis by Mic Wright of TARC (as the true heads call it) and how it’s performing so far. SPOILERS: at this juncture it seems unlikely that we are seeing the birth of one of the UK’s great new media empires, but, equally, it’s early days yet. BONUS ARTICLE WHICH IS MAYBE HALFWAY-RELATED: this one is by me (sorry), but it’s about how it’s impossible to tell what is popular anymore and how this issue leads to things like TARC (also contains not one but TWO Rajan-related jokes, should that tempt you).
- Is Curiosity Good For Us: Ok, I *really* enjoyed this, but I should warn you that it is also VERY Undergraduate Philosophy in both scope and topic and as such it is something of a chewy read; that said, it’s wide-ranging and fascinating, taking in Freud and political theory and ideas of ‘good’, and it’s a bracing, interesting and SMART piece of writing and thinking in the LRB by Adam Philips. I mean, look at this, it’s just ACE: “One of the things we may fear about our curiosity is that it might prevent a more purposive life. It might license distraction and distractedness and reveal us to be capricious and whimsical rather than passionate and ambitious. A society of the curious may not be able to settle or concentrate or achieve or make a profit. And yet, noting this confronts us with the fundamental question that lurks in any discussion of curiosity: what kinds of curiosity are we – whoever we are – going to endorse, support and encourage, and what kinds of curiosity do we feel we must prohibit and condemn? That is, what do we fear discovering about ourselves, and what might we be trying not to know? Curiosity, then, is a way of thinking about our fantasies of freedom, and therefore about what we imagine our more disinhibited selves to be like. What might we find ourselves being interested in that we might fear or love or be utterly surprised by? If, when you go out, you follow your eyes or your ears or your nose rather than your intentions, where will you be and what will you have done?”
- An Oral History of Civilization: The videogame series, to be clear, not the, er, broad concept – this is LONG and VERY DEEP, but if you are one of the millions who have lost days and occasionally nights to a Civ save then you will absolutely DEMOLISH this long oral history, by Polygon, interviewing people from Sid Meier down, across every single Civ in the series, about the series’ genesis, the design principles that underpinned it, the process of making games (and how that has changed over the decades since it first emerged some 4 decades ago) and all sorts of other things. God, if nothing else it sounds like (at least some of this was) so much FUN.
- On Cancellation: I don’t really know who Ivy Wolk is, and it doesn’t really matter if you don’t either – I thought this was a great essay, in New York Magazine, about her experience of growing up online and of being (repeatedly) ‘cancelled’ for saying bad or silly or sh1tposty things, and the contrast between the presented Ivy seen by the cancellers and the actual, living human sitting hunched over a phone, typing posts between crying jags and psychotic episodes and comedowns and and and. I have no particular opinion on the individual but I thought this was a brilliant bit of writing, honest and clear-eyed and self-aware, and an excellent reminder of the oft-forgotten fact that we know nothing of the human behind words on the internet and their internal life and who they actually are, beyond what they want us to infer and what we in turn choose to infer based on our reading of their presentation.
- Afternoons with Marianne: I have featured previously-nearly-successful singer songwriter Tom McRae’s writing before in Curios, and this is another lovely short piece, in which he remembers spending a week with Marianne Faithfull writing songs for an album which she never used and which never saw the light of day. Writing by people who nearly made it is almost always infinitely more interesting than writing by those who did.
- Everything Means Something Different: I absolutely adore this essay by Calum Jacobs, writing in Vittles about his dad, the food he cooked and how it connected to his sense both of his English home and his Guyanese place of birth, and how Jacobs’ own life bears the hallmarks of meals cooked by his father that encompass both traditions – seriously, this is a BEAUTIFUL piece of writing from start to finish, so good it’s worth a subscription. “After he died, I found a cobalt-blue clipboard to which he’d clamped dozens and dozens of recipes, largely by Rick Stein and Gordon Ramsay, carefully cut out from the Sunday Times, the dates on each page revealing the timespan of his middle-class aspirations. Buried among the yellowing stack was a handwritten step-by-step guide to making pepperpot, the Guyanese national dish. I don’t know who took the time to write out and donate this recipe to him. What I do know is that in his later years, as his accent involuntarily thickened, Dad would prepare a lamb stew with broad similarities to pepperpot. Made of simple ingredients – a packet of diced lamb, onions, garlic, a stock cube, cloves, flour, black pepper, tomato purée and a Scotch bonnet – it was uncharacteristically delicious for his food, and he cooked it with an instinctual ease I’ve never been able to replicate. My intermittent attempts have gone nowhere. If I’m honest, I’ve stopped trying. Some things were his to make. An obsessive archiver, one night I filmed my dad recreating this stew, as he made silent circles, turning away from the hob and back again to gather its components. Had he looked out into the darkness of the patio where I stood, he wouldn’t have seen me.”
- Brian: Our final link this week is another essay from Spencer over at Scope of Work, another trip with him to his local park where he works out with some guys from the neighbourhood. I don’t know why I enjoy Spencer’s writing so much, but I find this absolutely glorious – simple, unshowy, personal and (and I don’t even like this word much) heartfelt, this is just lovely.
By Adam Neate
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!