How are you all feeling about the upcoming Bank Holiday weekend? Anyone going swimming in England’s placid coastal waters lol?
Insert your own gags here about ‘another sh1tty fortnight in what increasingly feels like some sort of Tory party remake of ‘Noel’s House Party’ in which everyone is Mr Blobby, all the time, and the Gotchas are always on us’ – yes, that’s right, I’m kicking off this week with an ULTRA-CONTEMPORARY cultural reference to the early-90s, because like all increasingly-middle-aged people I’m convinced that the time when I was a teenager was the last instance of anything good and pure in recorded history.
Anyway, I hope you are well and whatever you are doing with your three days of illusory freedom (lol stockpiling tinned goods and coating your walls in insulation foam lol) proves THRILLING – I’m having to schlep back to Rome briefly to pack up the last remnants of my sad little Italian life, and so you’ll once again have to eke this week’s Curios out for a full fortnight til I return. Sorry about that but, well, it’s not like any of you are going to clean my apartment for me and chase down my mum’s ashes (seriously, where are they?), so I’ll have to do it myself.
I’ll see you in September with a special BACK TO SCHOOL edition of Curios – until then, though, take care and try not to die (unless you absolutely must).
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and we should all agree that noone should dance with the policemen at Carnival this year however much they mug for the cameras.
By Jude Sutton
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO REMIND EVERYONE THAT WE WERE DOING CREEPY AI-IMAGINED NUDITY ROUND THESE PARTS LONG BEFORE IT BECAME FASHIONABLE PT.1:
- Stable Diffusion: Another week, another publicly-accessible AI image generation toy here to gently undermine our accepted notions of creativity and collaboration and ownership and such pesky little questions such as ‘copyright’ and ‘ethics’ – what a time to be alive! Stable Diffusion (or, if you want the ‘official’ name of the web interface, DreamStudio) does much the same thing as DALL-E and Midjourney – except unlike Midjourney it doesn’t force you to fcuk around in Discord to generate your outputs, instead providing you with a pretty-good browser-based interface for making your horrible, chimerical ‘artworks’. Stable Diffusion works using a different baseline tech and training set to the others (look, I’m not even going to pretend to be able to explain this is a way that makes sense – if you care about the technical background then, please, go away and read about it and then come back and explain it to me in words suitable for stupid people) and as such its outputs are aesthetically a bit different – personally-speaking I don’t wholly love the style of the outputs, but it’s very very impressive. The big thing about this model, of course, is that it’s ENTIRELY open – whilst the web version linked to here is hamstrung to stop people from generating torture porn, if you download a copy and install a local instance on your own machine, you can do whatever you like with it (this is techy, but there’s lots of information to help you get started should you be interested in experimenting). Which is SUPER-INTERESTING for a variety of reasons, not least when you start to explore all the different artists whose work has been incorporated into the model and whose styles are available as distinct prompts that you can call up from the machine ‘mind) – here’s a list, so you can see exactly whose life’s work you can easily replicate with a few blithe keystrokes – WASN’T ALL THAT TRAINING AND CRAFT WORTHWHILE?! And, of course, the fact that you can download a version that lets you create any sort of images you like has meant that a LOT of creepy bongo has started appearing online – most of it of the ‘imagine the cover to a generic fantasy novel, with naked breasts!’ genre, but it’s early days and so we can expect the really creepy stuff to start popping up in the coming weeks. Reddit has banned at least four ‘erotic’ StableDiffusion subs in the past week, but this is very much a Cnut-ish moment I think – YOU CANNOT STOP THE INEVITABLE TIDE OF CG BONGO, HUMANITY! Whether or not you think this is a good thing is frankly immaterial, so just accept it and move on.
- Enstil: To give you an idea of what the openness of SD is going to mean, take a look an Enstil – another online image-generation tool, built on StableDiffusion, which lets you both create your own and search other images that have been made with the site, and which displays all the prompts used to generate said images, making it a super-useful tool for spelunking through whatever interesting prompts people are using this week to make their sexy pointy-eared elf-ladies.
- Google’s AI Test Kitchen: This is a private Beta at the moment, so all you can do with this is sign up and hope to get approved, but if you’re interested in playing around with HOT NEW CONSUMER-FACING AI EXPERIMENTS (and who isn’t? NO FCUKER, etc) then you might want to give Google your details here (lol like it doesn’t already know everything). The AI Test Kitchen is where Google will release small AI-led experiences for small-group testing – the initial projects they mention include one designed to co-imagine (I know, I know, but we’re all still trying to work out how to talk about all this stuff so I hope you’ll forgive me the occasional linguistic infelicity here and there) place descriptions, one to use natural language processing to seek to break down large tasks into constituent smaller jobs, and, er, a chatbot whose singular focus on dogs see it constantly attempt to return the chat to canines, whatever you attempt to talk to it about (no, really, that is an actual thing). If you’re even halfway concerned with keeping vague track of the applications of modern consumer-facing AI, this feels like something you should probably try and get in on (if you don’t think too hard about what we’re all training the machines for you can probably treat it as harmless fun!).
- Tony The Streamer: What with all the breathless talk of BRANDS IN THE METAVERSE and how violently important it is that every single FMCG and luxe retailer develop a presence in 3d virtual space RIGHT NOW (apropos nothing, I can’t help thinking about 7-UP and Cheetos’ inexplicable foray into videogames in the 1990s when I see/hear about BRANDED METAVERSAL ENTERTAINMENT EXPERIENCES), it’s easy to forget that there are marketing heroes ploughing other pointless furrows in an attempt to deliver that sweet sweet hit of brand engagement with the coveted GenZ/GenAlpha demographic. Let’s all take a moment to raise a glass, then, to whoever managed to convince the moneymen at Kellogg’s that it was a totally worthwhile idea to attempt to reinvent Tony the Tiger (the doubtless-diabetic Frosties mascot) as a VTubing Twitch streamer, complete with mocapped CG render and a (slightly troublingly sexy, if I’m honest) gravelly voice reminiscent of a very particular stripe of US radio DJ. Tony’s only done one stream so far – at the time of writing it’s got a not-exactly-groundbreaking 1.6k total views after 3 days – in which he hangs out with a bunch of other streamers who gamely mug through some pretty desultory chat about how much they love eating Frosties before playing some Fall Guys and other multiplayer games before then getting back to some low-key ‘cereal banter’ (that phrase hurt me more to type than it hurt you to read, I promise, but that is literally what it is). WHO IS THIS FOR? Anyone who likes these streamers can watch them do EXACTLY THIS every week already, and doesn’t need to put up with some 40+ year old voice actor desperately trying to pivot the conversation back around to how great cereal and cold milk is whilst embodying the ‘friendly-yet-cool’ vibe of a fictitious tigrine Frosties obsessive. If Tony is still streaming on Twitch in six months’ time I will be fcuking amazed.
- Endoland: I have on occasion worked in and around consumer healthcare, and know full-well the pain of a brief that says ‘here, take this incredibly-serious and not-at-all frivolous medical condition and create a consumer-facing campaign that makes it approachable and doesn’t dwell on all the horror’. That said, I wonder exactly the thought process behind this website, which is some French agency’s response to ‘how do we make information about endometriosis accessible and friendly and…er…fun?’ – the answer, apparently, is to imagine the condition as a theme park (NO WAIT BEAR WITH ME!) with different areas pertaining to different elements of the condition, and render it all in in-browser 3d CG! Why not head over to the punching machines and, er, hold down your mouse button to determine exactly how much pain your uterine condition is causing you? What’s that? Oh. Sorry. In the project’s defence, there’s something in the about section around how ‘Endoland’ is a term popularised in the French community of endometriosis sufferers by a popular influencer on Insta – that said, I am not 100% sure that the pastels and the ‘fun’ depiction of the multivalent world of rollercoasters and big wheels is necessarily a…helpful presentation of what I am told can be a horribly painful and debilitating condition. Still, all about the endocoaster! BTW, if I am totally wrong about this and anyone would like to tell me why this is in fact a great piece of comms I am genuinely all ears, so please do let me know. EDITOR’S NOTE: So someone DID get in touch, and now I feel bad because it’s a student project – thanks to Louis-Jean for the following explanation: “It’s actually a student project (so, not commissioned by a client or done by an agency). The overall theme park framing was naturally a topic discussed with the students by the teachers (I’m one of ’em) and the jury. In the end, the students obviously decided to roll with it, mostly because of positive response during early testing with their target audience.Yes, and the whole “bumper cars as a metaphor for sexual encounters” got a loud reaction during the final presentation.” WELL DONE, STUDENTS (and I should check more closely before slagging stuff off).
- Be Gay Do Crime: Not all crime, obvs – I sort of presume that this exhortation has an inbuilt caveat along the lines of ‘(…but none of the really bad ones, please)’ – but instead one very specific crime, to whit ‘nicking shopping trolleys from shops that have those near-magical systems that lock the wheels as soon as you attempt to twoc one from the carpark at Big Tesco’. This site lets you play the specific audio frequence that is usually used as a lock/unlock signal for said trolleys, theoretically letting you liberate them from their retail prison and allowing you to amass some sort of personal trolley empire in the alley behind your house. No idea why you might want to do that – although as we seemingly inch ever-closer to some sort of Mad Max-style blasted future perhaps being King of the Trolleys might have some sort of long-term status benefits that I’m just not quit imaginative enough to grasp – but it’s nice that you can.
- Shuffles: I remember about…what, 5-6 years ago? Whenever it was that Stories became very much a Thing in social media land – there was a vogue for cut-out and layered aesthetics and apps which let you make interesting visual content to then export into your Stories like you were some sort of magical design guru channelling Geocities. Then the world moved on and they faded into the background again, but I remained convinced that there’s something interesting in the idea of ‘collage’ as an aesthetic movement for the digital age and so I am going to take Shuffle, a new app developed by Pinterest (iOS-only at present) as proof that I was RIGHT (or, alternatively, that we’re now at such a dizzying pace of cultural reinvention and exhumation that we’re now doing nostalgia for stuff that happened basically yesterday). Shuffle self-describes as “a new app designed for collective collaging. Want to curate a festival outfit? Visualize your dream bedroom? Moodboard your current aesthetic vibe? Or just express yourself by creating something beautiful, strange, or funny? You’ll love Shuffles.”, and if you’re familiar with any of the retro-ish aesthetics of the past decade or so online you’ll immediately recognise the vibe here – there’s a lot of rather cool things you can do with it in terms of cut-outs and animations, and if you, like me, are convinced that ‘stuff that’s reminiscent of zines from the 80s, but reimagined as shiny colourful digital messes’ is still a viable look for stuff then you could find this a useful toy (at least until this gets ripped by Insta like everything fcuking else and immediately becomes uncool and played-out).
- The Werner-Forman Archive: “Werner Forman’s life work was devoted to documenting in photographs the history, art, religion and customs of the great civilizations and tribal societies of the past. The archive has extensive collections of images of archaeological sites, architecture, evocative landscapes and art from the great museum and private collections of the world. Many of these images are unique, some are from cultures which have now vanished or areas which are inaccessible nowadays.” I confess to having been utterly ignorant of Mr Forman’s life’s work, but if you’re the sort of person whose favourite museum is the Pitt Rivers in Oxford (which, by the way, if you’ve never visited I recommend unreservedly) then you will love this – the ‘Masks’ section alone is GREAT.
- OFK: This is a really interesting idea, which will particularly appeal to those of you old and jaded enough to remember the concept of ‘transmedia’ with a shudder of horror. OKC is a real band that makes real music – the link is to their website – who are also the stars of a new videogame which lets you play through the experience of being in an up-and-coming band; the game features the actual musicians (or I presume slightly-stylised representations of them) and their actual songs, and is basically an extended form of promo for both the music but also the ‘band brand’ (UGH GOD THAT WAS HORRIBLE SORRY) and the individual band members’ personal brands (SORRY AGAIN). I think this is so so interesting – to be clear, I have little-to-no interest in playing a visual novel about a band as a means of developing a deeper engagement with their material (and, the band hopes, their merchandising and live tours and branded soft drink endorsements and and and), but I find this a truly fascinating piece of marketing and, if I’m being generous, a really creative way of bringing the music to a wider audience.
- The Philippines Cassette Archive: “The Philippine Cassette Archive is a digital collection of cassette tapes, a glimpse into Pinoy tape culture. Launched in August 2022 under the philippine.design project, the collection currently focuses on graphic design, packaging, and visuals. Materials on launch are largely taken from Discogs. We later hope to expand on collecting cassettes from small labels, locally-produced bootlegs, and in collecting newer (post-2010s) artefacts by contemporary Filipino musicians & artist collectives.” This is early-days and so a bit sparse at present, but there’s something lovely about the preservation of something so specific – also, I now really want to find a recording of ‘Cutterpillow’ by Eraserheads as the cover speaks to me.
- See The World Tours: I think the website’s security cert has expired and so you might get a warning when you click the url – I am pretty certain it’s not some sort of sophisticated malware scam (I mean, if it is a malware scam it’s certainly not a sophisticated one), but Web Curios would like to state clearly that it accepts no responsibility for any weird things that may happen to your device as a result of clicking this url. See The World Tours, should you be brave enough to ignore your browser’s fears, is a truly spectacular piece of oldschool webwork for a seemingly-still-active company selling international cruise holidays. Which, fine, you may not think you’re in the market for, but then you log on and ‘September’ by Earth, Wind and Fire starts autoplaying (no, really, it does) and you’re hit with the fonts and the Dreamweaver-era HTML stylings and you realise that it is BEAUTIFUL. On reflection I think this may be the best ever example of ‘design for your audience’ I have ever seen – if you’re flogging cruises to octagenerian Floridians then why not make your website look like their nostalgic fever dream of The Good Old Days when AOL CDs came in the post? I am agog at this and would LOVE to see their traffic stats.
- The Weird Spotify Discovery: This is…odd. For the full explanation as to what’s going on with the Spotify playlist linked here, you should first read Robin Sloan’s blogpost which gives you the background – the short version is that Sloan ended up in a Spotify recommendations rabbithole which offered him up a seemingly-infinite number of variations on the same track, all ostensibly ‘composed’ by different artists and with different titles, but all of which are also minor remixes of exactly the same 40-second composition. HOW IS THIS HAPPENING? WHY IS THIS HAPPENING? I really think that someone (no, I don’t want to do it myself) should start keeping a rolling tally of ‘stories which neatly frame the whole question of the extent to which our society is increasingly-shaped by mathematics which we simply do not understand and which we are often not aware are shaping our existences at all even though they very much are’. Can you? Thanks!
- The LinkedIn Viral Post Generator: You must have seen this by now, right? This uses (probably, I can’t be bothered to check) GPT-3 to churn out parody chunks of inspirowank in the style of the classic LinkedIn post, based on a few inputs that you give it. It’s…ok, but I am increasingly terrified by LinkedIn and the thought that the past few years of me repeatedly using it solely to post links to Curios and call everyone ‘BUSINESSMONGS’ in block capitals is going to come back and bite me in the Bad Recessionary Times and so can’t really give this much more than a tepid endorsement.
- The Infinite Gallery: The idea of ‘hey, look, a virtual gallery!’ isn’t new or interesting, but I rather liked this hobbyproject by…some person off Reddit which effectively creates an infinite 3d navigable space through which you can move in-browser and which pulls ALL THE IMAGES from Reddit and presents them as artworks for you to browse, like a sort of strange, entirely-uncurated exhibition of the web’s collective ID (which, based on a few cursory minutes’ exploration, is mainly fantasy art of large-breasted women and unsettling horror imaginings) – it’s slow and features lots of blank space inbetween the images, and it doesn’t really work, which to my mind makes it basically perfect.
- Geneva: This has been quite buzzy in the past few weeks – no idea if it’s any good or not, but if you need an organisation tool that isn’t Discord or Facebook Groups then this might be of use. Geneva is basically a community and group tool, which lets you create (and join) different groups themed by interest, within which can exist an infinite number of different ‘rooms’ which let you do various different things (stream audio, video chat, forum discussion, etc) depending on the type, allowing (in theory at least) for a helpfully-flexible means of letting groups of different sizes organise and collaborate on one platform. As far as I can tell there isn’t anything on here that you couldn’t do elsewhere, but the interface looks nice and it’s (crucially) not a Meta product, or Discord. There is, sadly, some cryptointegration stuff in here too, but it’s optional and so I will forgive them.
- Inworld: This is a really interesting idea – no clue as to the extent to which it ‘exists’ in any meaningful sense, but it’s fascinating to think/read about. “Inworld AI provides a developer platform for creating AI-powered virtual characters to populate immersive realities including the metaverse, VR/AR, games, and virtual worlds…Inworld Studio allows creators to build any intelligent virtual character by simply explaining the character in natural language. When crafting their character’s brain, creators are able to use the Studio to tailor many elements of cognition and behavior, such as goals and motivations, manners of speech, memories and knowledge, and voice.” You’ll have to explore the site to learn more of the technical stuff – sorry, but I can’t pretend to ‘get’ this in any way beyond the intensely-superficial – but this is where the intersection of natural language processing and generative art and text-to-image and all this stuff starts to get REALLY interesting. Plugging together all of these systems will eventually make ‘creating a character to inhabit an existing virtual space’ as simple as typing a name, and a few personality/appearance descriptors and then letting them loose – which is dizzying in terms of potential applications and scifi-ish funtimes (and horror, to be clear, but let’s not think about that side of it just yet).
- Design The Next iPhone: A new webprojecttoy by Neal Agarwal, in which you can design up the new iPhone as a 3d model which you can then export and show off in a little 3d video which you can then download to share wherever you like. You may or may not be more tempted by this link when I tell you that one of the design elements you can add is a small propellor.
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO REMIND EVERYONE THAT WE WERE DOING CREEPY AI-IMAGINED NUDITY ROUND THESE PARTS LONG BEFORE IT BECAME FASHIONABLE PT.2:
- Hostile Design: A Twitter feed sharing examples of ‘hostile’ urban design from around the world – that is, specifically, urban architecture designed to make the built environment uncomfortable or unwelcoming for people. Here you’ll find charming innovations like anti-skateboarding bumps on ledges and stairs, anti-homelessness spikes in doorways, and no-sleep benches designed to break your spine if you so much as try and kip on them. This is not only a fcuking bleak reminder of who counts in our cities (is it the people who live in them or the people who own the buildings? CLUE: IT IS THE PEOPLE WHO OWN THE BUILDINGS), but, if you’re in the market for some sort of AWARDS-BAITING project in which your client SOLVES A MAJOR SOCIAL PROBLEM VIA THE MEDIUM OF ADVERMARKETINGPR, a potentially great source of campaign ideas too (KitKat pushes back against the trend for inhospitable urbanity by creating comfortable, heated ‘Take A Break’ benches in some of the UK’s biggest homelessness hotspots!! See, this is easy!) (NB I am joking and obviously don’t think this is anything other than a horrible idea, for the avoidance of doubt).
- Great Landing Page Copy: I got approached the other day about a work thing which involved some tone of voice and brand identity work in which apparently the client sees Brewdog as the lodestar to follow and laud and, dear reader, if I had any soul left then the very last of it would have withered away and died at that moment. Anyway, if you too are in the invidious position of ‘having to come up with copy to sell tat which needs to be ZINGY and STAND OUT whilst at the same time not in any way scaring the people in the boardroom whose relationship to actual humanity is hanging by the very thinnest of threads’ then you may find this website, which collects examples of ‘great’ website copy for inspiration and theft, useful. I can’t claim to have explored this too exhaustively, but my cursory glance suggests that a lot of these are very much on the ‘North American millennial-focused lifestyle brand’ end of the spectrum – still, it might be worth bookmarking next time you want a bunch of different (but, if we’re honest, still largely the same) blandly-positive TOV to rip off.
- All The Research Papers: I can’t imagine that there are many of you who use Curios to keep up with the very latest in academe, but even if you spend your time making ‘trends decks’ or ‘gathering insights’ (lol) rather than mining the very coalface of human knowledge then I promise that there will be something in here for you. This is the website of Core, a UK organisation which is ‘the world’s largest aggregator of open access research papers from repositories and journals. It is a not-for-profit service dedicated to the open access mission.’ What this means in practice is that you can run a keyword search across literally hundreds of thousands of papers, sorted by relevance or novelty, which lets you quickly and easily search for the latest findings on, I don’t know, the semiotics of the package holiday or something. Which is exactly the sort of thing that any of you who do ‘planning’ or ‘strategy’ might find useful when you’re searching for something serious-sounding to bolster whatever flimsy assertion you’re currently constructing to justify spending 7 figures on creating the Tony The Tiger Vtube personality (to name but one example, although on reflection I struggle to imagine exactly what sort of research might support that particular execution, other than some perhaps-too-obscure investigation into furry fetishism).
- Geometrize: In an age in which we’re all now gaily playing around with ‘imagine what I type’ software, the ‘old’ AI imagetoys (your style transfers, your Deep Dreams) are starting to look a bit old hat – that said, I found this this week and was immediately charmed by its slightly-old-school stylings. Geometrize is a webtoy from a few years back which basically takes any photo you give it and rerenders it as a series of layered geometric shapes, creating a pleasingly-semi-impressionist effect. Simple, but I really like the results here.
- Unvarnished: Another really impressive digital history project from the US here, Unvarnished looks at historical housing discrimination in North America, specifically the North and West. “Unvarnished was conceived, developed, and directed by Naper Settlement, an outdoor history museum in the Chicago metropolitan area administered by the Naperville Heritage Society. As part of an extensive community engagement process, the museum expanded its mission from a nineteenth century settlement story to an inclusive history leading up to today’s Naperville. Now the fourth largest city in Illinois because of significant population growth and demographic change, the museum set out to learn how that happened. What were the factors that took the community from being an essentially all-White population in the mid-twentieth century to a resident population that is now 32% people of color? Was Naperville unique or part of a pattern of change?” Not only is this a really interesting topic, but it’s presented simply, clearly and accessibly, telling the stories of six different communities across the US and how discrimation has moulded the urban makeup of the US.
- Katalog: Oh I love this. Katalog is a project by Belgian photographer Barbara Iweins, cataloguing all her belongings over a four year period: “for four years, room by room, drawer by drawer, I photographed, indexed and classified my entire house. Absolutely everything: from my daughters torn sock to my sons Lego, but also my vibrator, my anxiolytics… absolutely everything.” This website collects all the photographs of all the objects, which you can sort and categorise in various ways, by colour or where in the house they sit, or whether Iweins would save them in a fire, and it’s a dizzying portrait of consumption and consumerism and our relationship to objects and how we use them to construct walls around us that shape our identities (or at least that’s what I see here), and, honestly, this is sort-of mesmerising.
- Denim Sunglasses: I don’t know if I like these, exactly, but I was slightly charmed by them and I like the fact that as far as I can tell they are made by some bloke called Jack in Cornwall. Have you ever wanted a pair of sunglasses that have been made from reclaimed denim (or, more accurately, “layers of waste denim that have been infused with a bio based resin and pressed together into a solid sheet.”? No, probably not, and yet you’re curious, aren’t you? Admittedly we’re rapidly getting to the point in the year where those of you in the UK won’t be needing sunglasses again for another 10 months, but think of it as an early present to your future self (although on reflection perhaps you might be better off spending the money on some canned food you can bury in a safe location against The Bad Times).
- Pi-Hole: I LOVE THIS. It’s very technical – in that you need to be able to install the code on a supported operating system, and then do STUFF with your internet’s DNS – but it’s basically an on-network adblocker that you can control yourself. You can do loads of additional stuff in terms of seeing which websites are attempting to serve you most ads, create white/blacklists, etc, but at its most simple the idea of being able to block ads at source to your domestic web browser is SO ENTICING.
- The Denmark Art Explorer: Do YOU want to explore Danish art in its entirety? Well you can’t, it’s an impossible demand, be realistic FFS. Perhaps the next best thing, though, is the Denmark Art Explorer, which is a really interesting way of letting you navigate through an imagined topography of Danish art – “Denmark Art Explorer is an interactive website which let you start out with a random art object from the SMK [Denmark’s National Gallery] with a specific topographical motive. It then fetches its four nearest neighbors which you can click on to move through the country of Denmark while enjoying beautiful art!” I am very much enjoying this current trend for thinking of artworks or colours or concepts as occupying a physical space, and seeking to make the interrelationships between them in this imagined 3d environment a novel means of exploration, and I would imagine that the world’s richest museums are almost certainly doing a LOT of stuff with machine learning and natural language/meaning analysis which will see some pretty radical reimaginings of the curatorial model in the coming few years (wow, that was hyperwanky, sorry).
- Interactive Journalism: “A Twitter-bot that shares interactives, graphics, and other stories built using code from newsrooms around the world.” Basically if you have any interest in modern forms of digital in-browser storytelling (“Snowfalls”, as the methuselan amongst us still call them) as practised by news organisations then this is something of a must-follow.
- Typographic Posters: A wonderful archive of typographic design work, submitted by individuals and design studios all over the world. This has been going since 2008(!) and is PACKED with good stuff – if you sign up for (free, afaict) membership you can access full search functionality, but even without that it’s just wonderful to browse so much excellent design – this is SUPERB visual inspiration if you’re in the market for such a thing.
- The Scotrail Announcements: This is great, and a brilliant example of my long-standing lazy person’s approach to doing any sort of digital stuff (ie if you have it, put it online ffs). Last week (or whenever it was) Scottish train company Scotrail put this MP3 online, consisting of over two hours of every single recorded train announcement that the company plays on its services – such gems as ‘A problem currently under investigation’ or ‘Alight now for Stenhousemuir football ground’. As you might expect, the web has very much enjoyed playing around with all these dulcet Scottish tones and the pleasingly-ASMRish banality of a pleasantly-soft Celtic brogue telling you that your journey will be delayed by seven hours due to sheep on the line – Matt Eason used the files to spin up this nice little Scotrail lo-fi beat generator, which lets you listen to soothing instrumental beats with the occasional ‘However hot it is, Scotrail asks all passengers not to go ‘taps aff’ onboard’ overlaid on top of it, and Simon Willison wrote this useful guide to how to make stuff using the MP3 file in question, including how to isolate different types of announcement by category, and, basically, if you’ve ever had a dream in the back of your head of making train safety announcement-themed drum’n’bass (as my internet friend Adam says, everything is better with an Amen break) then NOW IS THE TIME! Also, if you work in PR for an ostensibly-dull client and this isn’t making you think ‘hm, what boring stuff do they have that we can chuck online for the internet to mess with’ then you’re not doing your job properly.
- Selaro: If you’re someone who works across a bunch of different apps such as Slack, GSuite, Mailchimp, Dropbox and the like and gets really annoyed at having to search each individual one for that FCUKING file you had only ten minutes ago then you might enjoy Selaro, which basically acts as a universal search interface for a whole load of these products. Dull-but-maybe-useful.
- Fockups: A website that lets you make in-situ artwork mockups that are slightly more reminiscent of the real world than the shiny ‘as seen on the Piccadilly Circus LED boards that you will never pony up for’ sort of renders you often see presented in pitches. See how your mocked-up graphics will look on a cracked phone screen being read on the khazi, or on a discarded flyer on grubby pavement! This has a very short shelf-life, fine, but while it’s still reasonably under-the-radar you probably have one or two pitches in which this might even raise a hollow laugh from the client (a million nonexistent Web Curios points to anyone pitching a hyperluxe brand and who dares to go in with these as your mockups by the way).
- Seagull Simulator: A vaguely-existential text-based game in which you get to experience the unique joys of seagulldom. Contains all the things you’d expect – screaming, stealing food and flying – but with slightly less vindictive defecation than I might have hoped for.
- The Case of the Rose Tattoo: Finally this week, a PROPER GAME! Alright, fine, it’s one from The Past and as such probably won’t appeal to anyone who’s grown up with things like ‘decent graphics’ and ‘fast-moving gameplay’, but if you’re old enough to remember the glory days of point-and-click adventures and inventory puzzles then you will LOVE this. The game in question is Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Rose Tattoo, and it’s genuinely great – a whole new Holmesian caper with decent detective-ing and some gentle horror, and if you can avoid looking at spoilers online there are several days’ worth of play in this while you continue to ‘quit quietly’ (THAT IS NOT A THING IT IS JUST CALLED NOT LETTING YOUR EMPLOYERS TAKE THE PISS FFS).
By Tao Siqi
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Sticker Life: I presume that the verbal similarity between ‘sticker life’ and the ‘thug life’ so popularised by 90s gangsta rap is unintentional; lovers of Snoop and Dre may be less enamoured of this site, but if you’re more into the idea of a collection of various laptop stickers around the broad concept of infosec than you are sitting in a bouncing lowrider drinking gin and juice then WELCOME TO PARADISE.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Fesshole: You can now read Rob Maniel’s Fesshole project on Instagram as well as Twitter – he’s also put it on TikTok, should you be interested in watching a middle-aged man take a platform by storm simply by, er, reading out Tweets over a screenshot of said Tweet. Take a look at the numbers on this one and then amuse yourself by showing it to whoever is responsible for ‘TikTok strategy’ within your business (LOL!) and saying ‘so, what can we do with this sort of content format then?’.
- Volstof Research: This is a really interesting idea and exactly the sort of thing I mean when I talk about the exciting new creative possibilities offered up by the confluence of text and image AIs. Volstof Research is a horror.scifi project which basically involves text written by GPT-3 paired with AI-generated images to create an ongoing, vaguely-Lovecraftian tale of ELDRITCH HORRORS FROM THE PIT UNLEASHED THANKS TO MEDDLING WITH FORCES BEYOND OUR KEN!
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!
- The New Moral Maths: I’ve featured articles in here before about both the ‘effective altruism’ movement and the wider concept of ‘longtermism’ in contemporary thinking, but this is a neat piece, reviewing a book that has been EVERYWHERE in the past few weeks, which effectively addresses both. The Boston Review here, er, reviews the new book by philosopher William MacAskill, which posits the broad longtermist position that ‘the needs and wellbeing (or at the very least likely existence of) billions of future humans should be taken into account when considering the needs of fewer billions of people currently alive’, and which is increasingly being used by all sorts of dreadful people (and some very stupid ones who are, at best, likely being manipulated by the dreadful people) to justify ‘why actually you don’t need to do things like, I don’t know, worry too much about a few hundred million people being fcuked by climate change in the coming decade because they are but the blink of a mayfly’s eye in the context of the wider arc of human history and tbh when you take a million-year-view then 85% of us dying of fiery tornado death is just a small blip en route to star colonisation’. This is a good – if occasionally philosophically-chewy – rundown of why this sort of thinking doesn’t necessarily make any sense, and very much worth a read if you want to get ahead of the winter dinner party season (LOL LIKE WE WILL BE WASTING ELECTRICITY ON ANYONE OTHER THAN OUR IMMEDIATE FAMILIES LOL!) and have some good arguments to deploy against your mate’s new cnut of a boyfriend who’s in VC and who really thinks ‘it’s important to take the long view, yeah?’
- Thompson’s Three Trends: I tend not to link to Ben Thompson here because I sort of assume that everyone who wants to read him already does (and I tend not to read him that much), but this crossed my path this week and I thought it was a really smart way of framing the current platform-level upheaval in the social app landscape with the TikTokification of Insta and all the rest. It’s a relatively light read, and Thompson explains his thinking well (although, and this is just a personal bugbear really, I do wish he wouldn’t illustrate said thinking with…other examples of his own thinking; I know everyone likes the smell of their own flatulence, but it’s distasteful to watch someone enjoying said smell to quite this degree) – the general premise, that there are three concurrent trends around immersion, growing AI integration, and interactivity, seems sensible and, most-usefully, applicable far beyond the narrow field of ‘social’ apps.
- Agencies and Creative: I know, I know – if you work anywhere in or around or near agencyland, the last thing you want to do is listen to some other cnut wang ON about ‘creativity’ and its VITAL CENTRALITY TO EVERYTHING and how this one particular super-bespoke methodology that only this particular CD with this particular pair of wide-legged artist trousers could possibly have envisaged is the most transformative thing since Eno. That said, this essay by Richard Turley (whose new agency, Food, has the best website I have ever seen – no joke) is worth reading, mainly because he seems to agree with me that ‘creativity’ is a massive fcuking lie and scam. “CREATIVITY™ flew off the shelves. People couldn’t get enough of it. Queen bees were so pleased that they took it upon themselves to invent conferences and award shows that celebrated CREATIVITY™. They wrote manifestos and mission statements attesting to their shop’s unique brand of genius. These manifestos used different adjectives, but all generally aligned around the exclusiveness of CREATIVITY™ being some kind of sacred act that only a few (them) can really do. Where once you imbibe CREATIVITY™ you can suddenly zig whilst others zag, or “zag when everyone is zigging” or whatever the fcuk that was about. Some pointed out these myths were really just ways of codifying a junior creative having an idea for a sports shoe ad on the way to work into something aspiring to an artform (and that – not inconsequentially – could command huge fees), but not the sellers of CREATIVITY™, they just kept on peddling that CREATIVITY™.” YES.
- Argentina’s Crypto Black Markets: As the El Salvadorian crypto experiment continues to go about as well as cynics like me thought it would (this doesn’t make me any sort of seer, obvs – it just makes me a cynic who’s occasionally right), this piece shone an interesting light at another country in which crypto is finding a role. Argentina, where it acts means of evading government-mandated exchange rates for the local Argenitian peso and an increasingly-useful black market tool. There’s lots of interesting stuff in here not only about the way Argentinians use it but also the way the practical realities of its integration into the culture rubs quite hard against some of the cultural assumptions that big cryoto whales like to make about the why and the how of the crypto movement: “The key characteristic that draws Argentinians to these relatively centralised cryptocurrencies is that the government doesn’t control them, rather than being completely decentralized in a way that no one controls them.”
- The Drone Delivery Future: Interesting-if-unsparkling article, this, about the increasing real-world use of drone delivery and where it’s happening, and the urban areas that are most-likely to see significant infrastructural change as a result of this becoming a preferred delivery mechanism in coming years – basically the thrust of the piece is that it’s going to be suburban rather than urban environments that are most ‘disrupted’ by this sort of tech, mainly because of the fact that urban areas are already deliveried-out with all your couriers and bikes and the rest, whereas suburbia has more scope for growth based on current unserved demand. Which, fine, I suppose is the sort of thing I could have arrived at myself if I’d bothered to think of it, but, well, I didn’t.
- Passive Audio: This really interested me – one of the things I’ve noticed in the UK (well, London) since coming back from Rome is how noisy it is here. Not general decibel levels – trust me, noone beats Romans for shouting and horn-beeping and the inimitable sound of the glass recycling being taken away every morning at 3am – but general tech-associated noise. Phone notifications and Alexas and speaking machines and people playing music out of their devices in public just seem a bit more prevalent here than they do there – although I concede that this might have more to do with the fact that I am now living in a part of town where the average age is less than 60, and that I am doing more with my life than watching someone slowly die and so am leaving the house a bit more. This essay is about the shift from audio as private to audio as public, and what that means in terms of personal boundaries and manners – it feels like there is something in this as an INSIGHT if you can be bothered to dress it up as one. “Because the problem is not just that personal audio is spilling into the public space; the problem is that it feels like it’s slowly becoming socially acceptable to have someone else’s audio leaking into your life…It used to be the other way around. When Sony launched their Walkman almost exactly forty-three years ago in 1979, the idea of a private audio experience — in public — felt like the death of society to some. “This personalised silo, intimate consumption of media was going to end communities, if not society as we knew it.” This was the era where we all suffered boomboxes and people’s radios where you knew the score whether you liked it or not. We suffered, but we suffered collectively. The Walkman broke the social rules of the time in a pretty drastic way. “It’s like a drug: You put the Walkman on and you blot out the rest of the world.” And now we don’t want collective audio suffering any more. I don’t want to blot out the world so much as blot out yours when it leaks into mine.”
- The Metaverse Side Hustle: TO be clear, I am featuring this piece not because it is good but because it is a classic example of ‘all the old things are new again when you put the word ‘metaverse’ in front of them!’ The piece is all about digital creatives making a piecemeal living by designing and creating items, skins, etc, for use in digital spaces like Decentraland (with its 700 users a day, it’s evidently a BOOMING MARKETPLACE), and the article breathlessly presents this as a new frontier in consumer capitalism – except, well, it’s not, is it? This is what people were doing 15 years ago in Second Life, what they have been doing for over a decade with CounterStrike skins and Sims patches and mods, with Minecraft textures and patches, or even more recently with Snap/Insta lenses, and and and and and look, all I’m saying is next time you see something like this and think ‘ooh this is an exciting and brand new thing’ try Googling the headline with ‘metaverse’ replaced with ‘second life’ or ‘virtual world’ and see what 2006 has to say.
- On Andrew Tate: Until the Observer story about hum broke the other week I didn’t know who Andrew Tate was, much like the majority of you I imagine – the thing is, though, it felt like I did when I read all the stuff about him because he’s simply the latest in a long line of men who’ve worked out that there’s an almost limitless supply of other men who will lap up anything that tells them either a) how to get laid; b) why the tips about how to get laid are rubbish; or c) why their inability to get laid with or without said potentially-rubbish tips is all women’s fault anyway. The link goes to Garbage Day, where Ryan Broderick explains very cogently something I have struggled to articulate for years – to whit, the weird taxonomy of hateful men being weird and misogynistic that sprung from Men Going Their Own Way and Neil Strauss. Honestly (promise I won’t wang on about this, but) I sincerely believe that there will be serious future scholarship that seeks to draw the real throughline between ‘SomethingAwful bans hentai’ and ‘reproductive rights under threat across the West’.
- Branding Tusi: This is, hands-down, the best and most readable explanation about ‘THE POWER OF BRANDING’ I’ve ever seen – all about Tusi, a drug that over the past few years has developed a real following in Colombia amongst the aspirant middle-classes, despite its chemical composition having shifted almost entirely from what it was originally. The secret? Its vibrant pink colour, initially a practical side-effect of its being cut with a particular substance to hide the vile taste and appalling nasal burn, which led it to be THE most Instagrammable line in Medellin. Honestly, if you want to explain ‘what branding is and how it can be used to add value’ then fcuk the textbooks, just give your grads this and then challenge them to Breaking Bad their way into an agency job (do not do this, even in jest).
- An Oral History of Superbad: This is LOVELY – whether or not you like the movie (and you should, because as I may have mentioned before I think it’s the only one in existence that mentions me by name), this collection of stories about its filming, assembled from various interviews with all the main principles, is really charming. I didn’t realise that “McLovin” was Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s first big acting role – I cannot even begin to imagine the ruinous psychological impact that being associated with that character would have on a teenager, so well done that kid for not now being a skaghead or something.
- An Oral History of Tim Curry in Command and Conquer: I confess that this is one I’m including more for you than for me – I never had a computer fancy enough to play C&C on as a kid so this totally passed me by, but I’m aware that for certain people a few years younger than me there’s an iconic quality to Curry’s scenery-chewing performance in Red Alert 3 which is almost Proustian in its ability to take them back to adolescence. This is actually really interesting even for those of you who don’t have fond memories of Curry gurning “SPAAAACE!” at you from a monitor, not least the look behind the scenes at the always-interesting cowboy world that was ‘videogames in the 90s’.
- Deep Time Sickness: I really enjoyed this article, about the ways in which people who’ve been affected by earthquakes in Mexico City occasionally seem to tap into some sort of geological…time sickness? Yes, ok, I know, it sounds a touch loopy – and if I’m honest I am not 100% certain that the article does a completely fantastic job of explaining itself – but there’s some beautiful writing in here, and as a piece about the links between geology and time and people and urbanity it’s fascinating. ““Geological time,” or “deep time,” as Robert MacFarlane describes it in his wonderful book “Underland,” is the vastness of planetary history that “stretches away from the present moment.” While the Scottish geologist James Hutton first described the idea in 1788, the term “deep time” is often attributed to the nature writer John McPhee, who wrote, a couple of hundred years later: “Consider the Earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.”” – this explores how the climate emergency, and the way it is manifesting, is bringing us closer to said ‘deep time’ than we might be used to, and how that is placing perhaps hitherto-unimagined psychic strains on people. Spooky and super-interesing stuff.
- Brain Trauma: This is very much an article of two halves – the first, which fortunately comprises the majority of the piece, is a really interesting portrait of the ways in which Sophia Papp became a different person after a serious brain injury suffered in a car accident, and how her personality was transformed beyond almost all recognition as a result of neurological trauma we simply don’t understand (a classic Phineas Gage example), and how she struggled to cope with becoming the new person she now found herself to be. The final 20% or so of the piece takes a weird swerve into very wooly writing about ‘human fulfilment’, which doesn’t really seem to have anything to do with the preceding 80% – but the first four-fifths make this worthwhile, promise.
- Like Oysters In Their Shells: I’ve seen two corpses this year, a figure I sincerely hope is a lifetime annual maximum never to be bettered – it’s one of the oddities of death in a Catholic country that the body of the deceased tends to be left in the home for visiting friends and relatives to pay their respects before the funeral, and so as such I had the slightly-surreal experience of passing some time with both my grandmother and mother’s dead bodies (it’s amazing how quickly you become inured to the literal corpse in the corner and just train yourself not to look in that direction). This is a review of Hayley Cambell’s recent book about the business of death, and it very much made me want to buy a copy – it touches on all aspects of the postmortem industries, from burial to prettification to disposal to everything inbetween, and is pleasingly unfussy about its subject matter: “Relaxing in a downtown seafood joint, the executioner Jerry Givens is candid with his back story but less forthcoming about his inner life, all the while making short work of the lobster he has just casually sentenced to death. Thomas Hardy felt ashamed after watching the hanging of Martha Brown at Dorchester in 1856, expiated perhaps through his creation of that ‘pure woman’ Tess Durbeyfield (though Tess, too, is hanged). But Givens, like the others Campbell meets, is less overtly emotional. Terry Regnier of the Mayo Clinic chuckles at her most searching questions and is unfussed about handling people whose faces have been gnawed off by their pets.” Significantly less gruesome and sad than you might think, promise.
- ReWilding The Tiger: Do you remember last year when that company got 24h of blanket worldwide coverage with their plan to BRING BACK THE MAMMOTH via the medium of in-no-way-potentially-troubling DNA manipulation? Well, turns out that mammoths are HARD and so instead they are turning their attention to a new project which they think has a better chance of short-to-medium-term success – the Thylacine, or Tasmanian Tiger! This is super-interesting, both from a scientific point of view but also from the point of view of someone who’s seen enough films and read enough books about ‘the consequences of short-sighted meddling with the powers of nature’ to think ‘hang on a second, are we sure this is a good idea?’.
- Watching Brad Pitt Eat: This is a superb essay, by Lucas Mann, about both Pitt’s odd approach to food and eating onscreen and the author’s own relationship with food, and that of his daughter, and about presentation and appetites and bodies and self and and and honestly, this is a really excellent piece of writing which I urge you all to read whatever your relationship with your plate and your body is.
- The Recipe: Finally this week, writing about food and love and people and relationships and cooking and memory and time and friendships and Who We Are that is among the best I have read all year – this is by Rebecca May Johnson (whose newsletter I also recommend unreservedly), and it’s so so so good.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:
- I linked to some examples of people stitching AI-imagiend images into animations a few weeks back, but here’s a FULL-ON PROPER MUSIC VIDEO for a Max Cooper song (fine, an unofficial one, but still), which uses a bunch of Stable Diffusion images of the universe and the Earth and LIFE ITSELF at various points in its lifespan to create a properly-cosmic vision of the ENTIRE SPAN OF TIME! Whether or not you particularly like the style or the end product, it’s worth remembering that this is what people are making with these tools when they are brand new and have existed for literally a month or so. Take 10 minutes to think about what you might be able to do with this sort of thing when the tech really takes off – and then go and lie down with a wet towel over your eyes, as such thinking may cause futurevertigo.
THANKYOU AND I WILL MISS YOU PLEASE DON’T LEAVE ME I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU BYE!