Webcurios 13/01/23

NEW YEAR NEW YOU! You look great and I love what you’ve done with your hair/wardrobe/septum piercing/new gym regimen!

I, though, remain sadly unaltered, despite the benefit of a month’s absence and a whole three weeks spent not really looking at the internet AT ALL (what did I learn? That without the internet I spend more time than is healthy looking inwards and that that is not a good idea, frankly). BUT NOW I AM BACK AND SO IS WEB CURIOS!

I hope that you all had wonderful festive periods, that you managed to rest and relax, and that you are approaching 2023 with vim and vigour and no little spunk, with a spring in your step and a twinkle in your eye, and that the glimmering in the distance is indeed a light at the end of the tunnel rather than an oncoming train hurtling towards you at weighty speed.

2022 managed to squeeze in one final death for me, sadly, with our cat passing away at the end of the year, so this first edition of Curios of the year is dedicated to Lebowski, who was excellent and will be missed.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I hope at least one of you has made it a new year’s resolution to ‘click all the links in 2023’.

This was Lebowski, RIP

WE KICK OFF 2023’S SELECTION OF MIXES WITH THIS STAGGERING COLLECTION OF OLD AUTECHRE RARITIES THAT THEY APPARENTLY FOUND DOWN THE BACK OF THE SOFA THE OTHER WEEK!

THE SECTION WHICH HOPES THAT THE REST OF THE YEAR CONTAINS SIGNIFICANTLY LESS CHAT ABOUT THE ROYAL FAMILY THAN THE FIRST COUPLE OF WEEKS HAVE, PT.1:  

By Tommi Parrish

NEXT UP, ENJOY THIS LOVELY UPTEMPO MIX OF UNRELEASED NUKG AND TWOSTEP BY XANDER!

THE SECTION WHICH HOPES THAT THE REST OF THE YEAR CONTAINS SIGNIFICANTLY LESS CHAT ABOUT THE ROYAL FAMILY THAN THE FIRST COUPLE OF WEEKS HAVE, PT.2:  

• Colours of Africa: This comes via Anjali Ramachandran’s newsletter and is a gorgeous bit of work by Google’s Arts and Culture team. 60 different artists from across the continent share their work on this site, which you can browse using a lovely colour-based kaleidoscope-style interface which lets you select works by country or colour or artist, and which presents a gorgeous means of exploring varied works in a way that’s significantly more playful and interesting than a standard list of names or works. There’s something rather lovely about the way in which the interface affects the browsing experience, should you care about these little UX flourishes; if you don’t, though, it’s still fascinating to browse through the works and to see the diversity of style and medium on display – a salutary reminder that ‘Africa’ is a VERY BIG continent which contains a LOT of different people and cultures and referring to it monolithically isn’t always hugely helpful or sensible.
• ESPN’s Year in Review: Would YOU like to look back at the past 12 months of SPORTS (as seen from the point of view of North America, which therefore means ‘baseball, basketball, hockey and American football (and some athletics, and maybe a couple of other things, and, if we remember that we have a sizeable hispanic population that quite likes it, maybe some ‘soccer’) via the medium of a lovely scrolly audiovisual smorgasbord of photos and video and writings? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! Even given that I am not a particularly enthusiastic consumer of SPORTING MOMENTS – let alone the SPORTING MOMENTS featuring the sort of pituitary meatheads so beloved of the American armchair fan – this is a really impressive piece of archival webwork, pulling together SO MUCH STUFF in one place that it’s rather dizzying. If you have any interest in whether the Bills managed to pull of a third quarter reverse on the Cardinals at the bottom of the seventh down (I am exaggerating my lack of knowledge here, but only very slightly) then you will ADORE this, but even if you’re just a casual sports fan you’ll find loads of great material in here (but probably nothing to convince you that baseball is a proper sport that’s worth watching) (and before you anglos get smug, I would say the same about cricket).
• Close-Up Photographer of the Year: Astonishingly it would seem that this is a photo competition I have NEVER featured in here before – I feel like I have failed in some way. Still, it’s a particularly good one, and the winners here collected of this fourth edition of the contest are pretty spectacular – my personal favourite here is the ‘Gordian Worm Knot’, but, as ever, I invite you to pick your own favourites.
• What Is Missing?: “We are witnessing the 6th mass extinctionin the history of the planet.By 2100 50% of all species may face extinction.” So begins the admittedly not very cheery intro to this website, which invites visitors to share memories of the nature they grew up with in order to highlight all that we are losing as we capitalism ourselves into a species-wide early grave. “What Is Missing? is a multi-sited memorial created by Maya Lin to raise awareness through science-based artworks about the present sixth mass extinction of species, connect this loss of species to habitat degradation and loss, and emphasize that by protecting and restoring habitat, we can both reduce carbon emissions and protect species.“ This project has been ongoing for nearly 15 years, but this website is new(ish) and is…well, it’s incredibly fcuking sad if I’m honest, but also rather beautiful.
• The Westminster Accounts: A very UK-centric link, this one, but for all those of you currently freezing your fingers off (WHY IS IT SO COLD AND HOW DID I FORGET SO QUICKLY WHAT WINTERS ARE LIKE IN THIS FCUKING COUNTRY?) in lovely second world England (or Scotland, or Wales), here’s a nice piece of investigative work by media outlet Tortoise (and, fine, Sky News too)  which has gone through all the records of payments received by MPs to create this searchable record of how much cash they have each trousered over the past year. Some of the numbers are astonishing – although my own personal favourite unpopular opinion is that you would see a lot less of this sort of thing if you simply paid politicians more. Look, I know that they already earn a relatively high salary – but, equally, would YOU take a job which paid you 85k a year but which also required you to work approximately 100h weeks, which was basically ALL meetings, where you were literally responsible for the lives and wellbeing of tens of thousands (at least) of people, where you were subjected to intense scrutiny at all times, where you had relatively limited agency and freedom to act as you consider best, and where (and this is the crucial bit, I think) literally EVERYONE (or as close as makes not difference) thinks you’re a cnut and wishes you specific and probably quite physical harm? I posit that you would NOT – unless you were some sort of sociopath, which one might argue is why we’re in this mess. Anyway, if you happen to have a Tory for a local MP and want to put an exact figure on how much you hate them and want them to lose their seat, you will enjoy this.
• URL Animations: I think it’s fair to say that 2023 doesn’t look like it’s going to be a year full of lols, or at least not for those of us who still have to do things like ‘eat’ or ‘pay for a roof over our heads’, so I think it behooves us all to introduce small notes of levity and gaiety wherever we can. It’s in this spirit that I present this link, which offers you a bunch of code which can give you URLs that ANIMATE! Yes, fine, I appreciate that a web address which looks like a shark’s fin swimming up and down your address bar isn’t likely to raise much of a smile when you’re into your fifth month of applying for the final jobs left on the content farm, but, well, it’s all I’ve got right now.
• Leaving: A website that exists solely to tell you how many people are on it at any given moment, and when said people leave again. Which is obviously largely pointless, but equally feels like the sort of thing (and I know I have said this before, which means that either noone reads this stuff or alternatively that noone listens to my BRILLIANT SUGGESTIONS – both are equally likely, tbh) that you could have a bit of fun with on a brand site, with special content that only unlocks when a specific number of people are on a specific page at one time, etc etc. If 420 people are on the Rizla website at 1620 in the afternoon then they all win a free pack of skins, that sort of thing (but, er, less sh1t, obvs).
• Atlas of Blobs: Well this is LOVELY – thankyou to Max Lieberman (and others) who have pulled it together – the website presents a collection of blob-like animations, which have been given names and personalities and descriptions, and it’s honestly quite beautiful just to scroll through and see the works and the prose that the visuals have inspired, and the extent to which movement and form can afford personality to even the least anthropomorphisable of objects. “For this project, Atlas of Blobs, I asked ten artists, designers, researchers, and visual thinkers to pick one of the blob forms I’ve made and write a text to name and describe it. I should say from the start that I have a sort of blob obsession. It’s one of my favourite forms and one I keep coming back to in my daily sketches, over and over again. Blobs are living, organic, and slightly absurd forms modelled on nature. They are always moving—responding, getting larger or smaller, adapting, swimming—and it’s this constant adjusting and redefining of space that gives them their lifelike quality.” I like to think that this is the sort of thing that AI is a long way from producing, but then the more I think about it the more I start to think that actually that’s really not true at all.
• The Dog API: Do YOU want to integrate more canine-related facts into your website or digital project? OH GOOD! “The Dog API provides information on over 340 dog breeds, 20 breed groups, and fun facts. Our data is accurate and constantly updated. Easily integrate this information into your own website or application with our user-friendly API.” If you are going to be involved in building any sort of website this year, regardless of what it’s ostensibly about, you owe it to yourselves (and the rest of the world, and, frankly ME) to include some sort of hidden Dog Facts lookup service as an Easter egg (please someone, do this – in fact, can we make ‘totally unrelated and slightly-whimsical Easter Eggs in otherwise incredibly fcuking dull corporate websites’ a thing in 2023, please? Can we? Can we?).
• Everyday Photo: A bit of a happy/sad project, this one – you may recall Noah Kalina from The Olden Days of the web; he was one of the first people (the first?) to popularise the whole ‘take a photo of yourself each day and make a timelapse video over a year’ thing, and he’s created this website to store each and every photo he’s taken over the course of this now two-decade-plus-long project. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Noah would also like to make some cash out of the past 23 years worth of artmaking, and as such he’s also selling the images of his own face as NFTs, just like it was 2021 all over again! I have no idea what the market is for a series of datestamped pictures of one man’s fairly-expressionless face, but if you have a particularly special day from the past 23 years that you think would be best commemorated by an NFT of a photograph of an unsmiling, moderately-internet-famous stranger, then this will be the best thing you see all day.
• Mutalk: I have a fairly strong suspicion that this isn’t in fact real and is some sort of elaborate troll – except I think it’s been featured at CES, which would suggest that someone somewhere thinks that this is a thing that real people will actually one day want to buy. I’m going to say that that is…never going to happen, but why don’t you click the link and see what YOU think? Would you want to buy something which I can only describe as a muzzle, to mask your shouted expletives as you, I don’t know, play Fortnite on one of those 5g enabled stretches of the tube? Are you so worried about people overhearing your SUPER-CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS CHAT that you would be willing to wear something that looks, in all honesty, like a piece of fetishwear in order to keep your conversations secret? In which case you probably want to sign up to the waitlist for this pronto (you absolute weirdo).
• Adopt A Drain: This is sort-of brilliant, but also, on some level, something of an indictment of Californian public services. Would you like to ADOPT A DRAIN in San Francisco? Would you like to become responsible for its maintenance and ensuring it’s not blocked by leaves, mud, or the corpses of San Francisco’s homeless population? Whilst this may sound like an onerous and thankless task, know that by adopting you get to NAME THE DRAIN, which is why there is currently one named ‘Willows Dirty Furby Hole’ and another called ‘Heklina’s Spit Roasting Room’ (I haven’t had time to check, but I would be astonished if there wasn’t one simply called ‘Drussy’). Over 6,000 city residents have apparently signed up to this programme so far, which is LOADS; can we do this in London, please? The names alone would make it worthwhile.
• BirdBuddy: I appreciate that the variety of birds one sees in UK cities isn’t necessarily vast, but if you happen to live somewhere more ornithologically-diverse then you might be interested in this snazzy birdfeeder which features sensors and a camera and some light IoT integration which means it can take pictures of each avian visitor and send it to your phone, telling you what sort of bird it (thinks it) is – which, honestly, is GREAT! If you look at the website you can get a feel for the sort of slightly-confused bird selfies you’ll get sent, and there’s a pleasing feature whereby you can add a bunch of different people to the alerts so that the whole family or household can enjoy the day-to-day comings and goings of whatever feathered friends (or, if we’re honest, thieving squirrels) you happen to have attracted.
• Shift Happens: This is a website built to promote a forthcoming book all about computer keyboards, which if we’re honest is a…pretty niche concern, but which is enlivened by the fact that the website is all EXCITING and INTERACTIVE and generally COOL. You can see a 3d model of the book that takes you inside it and shows you the wonderful production values! You can play a small game where you attempt to remember where all the keys on a keyboard sit! You can try typing with different types and configurations of keyboards! Look, fine, this may not sound like the most groundbreaking or revolutionary interactive functionality, but if you consider that this is – to reiterate – a VERY NICHE book about a VERY NICHE topic, all this interactive gubbins helps make it visible and interesting to a whole new set of audiences (to whit, people who like webspaff), and it feels like a nice little case study about the return of the playful web (if you’re the sort of poor s0d who has to think about things like that for a living).
• The Dunmow Flitch Trials: I’m slightly astonished that I have been alive 43 years and had, until now, failed to learn about the Dunmow Flitch trials – an ancient custom which takes place each year since the early-12th Century and which works as follows: “The Dunmow Flitch Trials exist to award a flitch of bacon to married couples from anywhere in the world, if they can satisfy the Judge and Jury of 6 maidens and 6 bachelors that in ‘twelvemonth and a day’, they have ‘not wisht themselves unmarried again’. A reference to The Dunmow Flitch can even be found in The Wife of Bath’s Tale within Chaucer’s 14th century Canterbury Tales.” A flitch, by the way, is an Olde Worlde term for a ‘side’ of bacon – so effectively you can win a lot of meat for being happily married, which sounds like a great deal and something to aspire to. The next Trials take place next year, but that just means you have a lot of time to make sure your marriage is in cracking shape so that you and your spouse can quite literally BRING HOME THE BACON. Honestly, please can one of you compete in this next year, it sounds GREAT.
• Genuary: “GENUARY is an artificially generated month of time where we build code that makes beautiful things…Over the 744 hours of January, for every 24 hours there will be one prompt for your code art. You don’t have to follow the prompt exactly. Or even at all. But, y’know, we put effort into this. You can use any language, framework or medium, on any planet.” So there – this is obviously already halfway done, but if you’re a generative artist it might still be fun to participate, and if you’re interested you can see galleries of each day’s works collected here. Fwiw there is some really beautiful stuff buried in here should you have a spare 10 mins to go spelunking around.
• Sleepagotchi: Do you have trouble sleeping? Do you think that the best and most obvious solution to said trouble is to attempt to gamify your sleep and earn virtual rewards for going to bed on time? ARE YOU SEVEN?!?!?! Ahem. Sleepagotchi is currently in beta and there is a waiting list, suggesting my skepticism as to its efficacy isn’t universal – look, I appreciate that a large part of accepted wisdom around sleeping well is about routines and ‘good patterns’, and if it takes a CG dinosaur offering you small CG badges to help you make those routines stick then, honestly, who am I to judge? It’s interesting to see this second wave of gamification mechanics start to take off, though – this feels very much like the sort of thing that might have been pitched circa 2009, when the first wave of Jane Mcgonigal hype was very much in the ascendancy and we were all a little less cynical about how game mechanics and dark patterns and rewards could be used to manipulate us.
• Literary Britain: A personal project by…someone, who has quite reasonably chosen not to make their name public but who is undertaking an EXCELLENT labour of love by mapping literary references and people and works across the UK; so you can navigate around the map and learn about what particular literary works are from which places, and, honestly, if you’ve any interest in English literary history then you will really like this a lot. I just happened to click on the only entry for Swindon, where I grew up, and it gave me The Thistle Hotel, which, and I quote, “As the ‘Wiltshire Hotel’, was the place where Stephen Fry was arrested for credit card fraud at the age of eighteen.” WHAT A PLACE! WHAT HERITAGE!
• Diffudle: I know I said last year that we would have NO MORE WORDLE CLONES in Curios – but, well, this isn’t really a Wordle clone so I think it’s ok. Diffudle asks you one simple question – what prompt generated the day’s AI-generated image, and it’s surprisingly fun. Basically builds on Damjanski’s ‘Win the NFT by guessing the prompt used to create it’ game from last year, which you all OBVIOUSLY remember.
• That Lonesome Valley: I didn’t honestly think that the first videogame I would play this year would be one liberally inspired by Brokeback Mountain and which involves you playing a city kid whose helping out on a ranch and who may or may not be able to inveigle your way into the handsome local’s dungarees by the end of your stay, nor indeed that I would play said game all the way through to the end, but, well, here we are. This is by ‘veteran’ explorer of gay life through games Robert Yang, and it’s surprisingly fun (even for someone whose tediously straight nature means he’s not hugely motivated by the prospect of seeing pixellated cowboy junk).
• Joe Danger: This week’s last general purpose link is a corker – not one but TWO old-school mobile games, themed around Joe Danger (which means NOTHING to me, but may be something that resonates with those of you less methuselan than I) and which are now playable either in-browser or on your phone and, honestly, just smoothbrain your way through the rest of the day with the clicking and the jumping and the zooming and the lantern-jawed stunting, go on.

By Maxime Ballesteros

LAST UP IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, HERE’S A BEAUTIFUL SELECTION OF ICILY-SMOOTH LOUNGE-ISH NUMBER SELECTED BY MOJO AND WHICH IS PERFECT FOR A COLD WINTER’S DAY IMHO!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Beesip: All of the bee-related imagery you could possibly wish for!  God they’re sexy little fcukers, aren’t they?
• Bernie Kaminski: Bernie Kaminski makes papier mache objects (but, like, really GOOD ones), and if you’re anything like me you will feel a small, covetous stab at his paper-and-paste Le Creuset.
• NYC Slice: I have to say that I have never understood the particular appeal of New York’s pizza slice joints – oily cardboard with terrible plastic non-mozzarella is my PIPING HOT TAKE – but I am willing to appreciate that others hold the NYC Slice in high reverence (they are wrong, but wevs). This Insta account documents NYC’s pie shops one slice at a time – this may well make you hungry, fine, but it will also make you appreciate pizza that doesn’t look like a fatberg in waiting.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Roma Auskalnyte

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: