Webcurios 10/02/23

Hello everyone! HELLO!

One on the one hand it was fun this week watching Google’s PR fcukup with the whole ‘your AI search engine’s a liar LOL’ story; on the other, I can’t help but think that none of the serious coverage of this I have read in the media has spent quite enough time thinking through the potential consequences of what AI-led search might mean and that, given our previous experiences over the past 15 years with ‘letting technologies we don’t fully understand and haven’t fully evaluated the potential impact of loose on our society without doing anything even halfway-resembling proper, meaningful user testing because that’s what investors want and caution be fcuked!’, we might want to perhaps employ a bit more caution rather than ploughing straight ahead with the whole ‘let the black box tell me what it thinks is true, despite the fact that neither I nor indeed anyone else currently alive has any idea by which mechanisms it arrives at those evaluations’ thing.

Christ, sorry, we’re only at the beginning of this fcuking thing and I’ve already done one of those horrible nested paragraphs that seems to go on forever like some sort of hideous mobius strip of badly-crafted prose.

ANYWAY. I hope you’re all well and having fun, and that you enjoy this week’s Curios; I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should probably start looking up old editions of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica to use as some sort of gold standard of truth in the coming veracitypocalypse.

By Alfonso Gonzales Jr.

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK’S EDITION WITH THIS PLEASINGLY-ATMOSPHERIC TECHNO MIX BY JOACHIM SPIETH!

THE SECTION WHICH OBVIOUSLY CAN’T TELL YOU WHAT TO DO BUT WHICH IS JUST GOING TO LEAVE THIS LINK TO DONATE TO RELIEF EFFORTS IN SYRIA/TURKEY HERE, PT.1:

By Mercedes Helnwein

NOW WE HAVE A PLAYLIST WHICH IF I’M HONEST I FOUND MORE FRIGHTENING THAN ANYTHING ELSE, BUT WHOSE WEIRD COMBINATION OF GABBER, HYPERPOP AND DNB IS WEIRDLY-COMPELLING! 

THE SECTION WHICH OBVIOUSLY CAN’T TELL YOU WHAT TO DO BUT WHICH IS JUST GOING TO LEAVE THIS LINK TO DONATE TO RELIEF EFFORTS IN SYRIA/TURKEY HERE, PT.2:      

• Photobooth Dot Net: Do YOU want access to the web’s premiere resource for all things related to the little kiosks you use to get passport photos? OH GOOD! This is a genuinely-charming and very oldschool little site, run by a proper enthusiast who, as far as I can tell, seems to spend a reasonable amount of time wandering the world and checking out different examples of photobooth tech (and, frankly, why the fcuk not?). This is partly just an interesting overview of the history of the things and the various baroque differences in style and tech that they have employed, but it’s also got a search feature which means that you can, should you desire, find EVERY SINGLE PHOTOBOOTH IN THE WORLD (ok, fine, this probably isn’t strictly true, but) and plot your future travel plans accordingly based on whether or not you’ll able to enjoy some booth-based analogue photo fun. There are worse ways to plan an itinerary tbh.
• Cloudwatching: A meditative little webart project where any user who lands on the page can participate, either by designing their own ‘cloud’ using a rudimentary Paint-style interface or by sitting and watching as the clouds created by other anonymous webmongs glide past over a background of cerulean blue. Admittedly the slightly contemplative and gentle nature of the experience can be jarred somewhat by the occasional cloud in the shape of phrases like, er, “I Eat Kids”, but generally this is a supremely gentle way of spending 5 minutes staring at a screen.
• Shortest Lives: This is a really interesting project, but it’s probably worth pointing out at the top that it’s about miscarriage and as such, depending on your personal experience and circumstance, you might want to skip reading this one. Shortlist lives is an initiative being developed in the Netherlands – specifically at the UZ Gent hospital, at least initially – which is designed to give parents who suffer miscarriage a tangible, personal memory of their child via the medium of a 3d render of their heartbeat. “Shortest Lives originated from An-Sofie’s personal experience. In 2017 she became the godmother of Lily, the stillborn daughter of her cousin. By experiencing the loss up close, she saw how parents are left behind in a great void. What started as a project for Lily’s parents has, thanks to the support of UZ Gent and Berrefonds, grown into an opportunity to support other parents as well. Shortest Lives is an initiative that wants to give parents a powerful reminder of their child. Based on an ultrasound, it is possible to make the heartbeat of a stillborn child audible again. This heartbeat is then visualized in a unique way.” I think this is rather beautiful, personally, and I like idea that it’s something which could in theory be extended to all parents who have access to ultrasound data, wherever they are – I equally appreciate that everyone’s experiences with miscarriage are personal and different and that you might not agree.
• Calculating Devices: This is a YouTube channel whose sole raison d’etre is to explain and ‘review’ various obscure or antique counting devices. Have you ever wondered how the ancient Hittite method of enumerating things differed from that popular with Mesopotamians c.Hammurabi? No, probably not, but that is why we are here – TO LEARN (and to fill all these empty hours between birth and death with CONTENT). This is, honestly, significantly more interesting than it has any right to be, not least because if you’re moderately innumerate like I am it actually provides some useful insights into how one my helpfully go about conceptualising the concept of ‘numbers’ and thereby better deal with them (I’m…I’m not selling this, am I? FFS).
• The Aircade: I am always amazed and slightly-appalled at recruitment-focused PR efforts for the military and the various different ways that different nations’ various branches of the armed forces vie to attract the best and brightest cannon fodder into their ranks. This website is one part of the US Airforce’s efforts to entice the youth into the whole ‘death by plane’ business (I presume they spunked the rest of the budget on the recent Top Gun film which from what I could tell was effectively a two-hour recruitment ad for the airforce which people astonishingly paid to watch) via the medium of a series of genuinely really rather good games – honestly, I wanted to hate this but unfortunately all the stuff you can do here (from the in-browser elements to the downloadable AR-enabled ‘Command The Stack’ game) are annoyingly really quite fun and super-polished, as I suppose I should have expected from an institution whose annual budget is probably something comparable to the GDP of the UK. Whilst I find the very existence of this website and the associated content somewhat…icky, I have to grudgingly applaud the fact that it’s all very nicely made indeed.
• Crewmap: I can’t quite work out whether this is a genuinely smart idea for the new age of remote/hybrid working, or some sort of dreadful parody of ‘modern working life’ – YOU DECIDE! Crewmap is a platform which exists to help create bonds between colleagues and coworkers – the idea being that in a working world in which many of us see our colleagues on screens for 90% of the time, and where we don’t necessarily enjoy the same opportunities for smalltalk and socialising and general, fluffy ‘getting to know you’ chat as we might once have done whilst sharing corporate meatspace, you might want to find other ways of getting to know the other humans who are doing the same largely-pointless, soul-destroying job as you are. Basically the platform lets you set up quizzes and questionnaires about your likes, your interests and your hobbies, share them with your team members, and then get told who has what in common based on everyone’s answers – which…sounds like it might be fine in theory, but I can’t quite help get the feeling that this could quite quickly get awkward – in part because of the fact it feels, I don’t know, just a bit *too* close to the sort of thing that people associate with dating apps, and partly because I can envisage a scenario in which people end up feeling isolated rather than connected when they realise that none of their teammates like the same things that they do (“Noone else ticked the self-fisting box? I QUIT!”, etc). Still, maybe I am wrong and this is a genius idea, in which case YOU ARE WELCOME!
• Read Jpeg: I LOVE THIS. Honestly, I can’t explain how much this pleased me when I came across it (I think via Kristoffer again, but I couldn’t swear by it) – I think it’s because it feels zine-y in a way that always appeals to me. Read Jpeg is a newsletter that is just a stream of images that link out to places: “Curated streams on contemporary culture. Image essays. Subject matter varies. No text. Just images. Click–throughs for surprise. Mailed irregularly by the zip.” Really, this is practically-perfect – odd, esoteric, aesthetically (in)coherent and consistently surprising – you can go back through past editions to get a feel of how this works, but given how much of newsletterland is SERIOUS and BUSINESS and about KEEPING AHEAD it’s nice to see one that is pure vibes.
• Petswitch: I have a special place in my heart for websites which do one thing and one thing only, and which do that thing practically-perfectly; Petswitch is not such a website. It does, admittedly, do only one thing – to whit, taking your face and ‘swapping’ it with the face of any animal you choose to offer it an image of – but it does it in a way that is frankly quite shonky and a bit ‘phoned it and I promise you that when I found it this morning and had a quick play with turning myself into a sad-faced dog I lost it for a full two minutes (it was just after 6am and I was tired, in my defence). This is, to be clear, not very good at all, but it is VERY FUNNY and I confidently predict that you will all know at least one person who will be driven absolutely mental if you start sending them one of these a day featuring them combined with a series of different critters.
• WikiShootMe: Simultaneously interesting and really not interesting at all (sometimes I like to think this is the exact liminal space which Curios occupies and that’s perhaps why no cnut reads it), WikiShootMe is “a tool to show Wikidata items, Wikipedia articles, and Commons images with coordinates, all on the same map” – so basically you can look up anywhere in the world and see ALL THE STUFF that Wikipedia has on the area, on a map! From places of interest to images of the local area, it’s a surprisingly-detailed look at a particular geographical space which leads you (or at least it did me) to look slightly differently at where you are and what surrounds you and what is and isn’t significant about it.
• The List of Stews: An actual Wikipedia entry this time, both tasty AND seasonally-appropriate! Given it continues to be so chilly here that I seriously contemplate buying a pair of fingerless gloves to type today’s Curios in, it feels like this encyclopaedic list of international stewed dishes might come in handy – from Peruvian chicken to the (apologies to any Flemish readers) frankly-repellent sounding horsemeat stew with gingerbread(!!!!) of the Northern European lowlands, there is everything you could want here (presuming your ambitions tend towards ‘the consumption of largely-brown, largely-meat-based meals).
• OpnSouls: Do you ever feel like your friendships are stuck in a rut, that you don’t really talk anymore? Is your groupchat moribund? FEAR NOT! OpnSouls is an app which promises to reinvigorate your friendships by, er, sending your group of mates a question each day which you all have to answer. “Every day, you will receive a new question that is designed to spark meaningful conversations and help you learn more about your friends. You can share your own answer and see how your friends have responded, leaving comments and replies along the way.” Depending on what you and your friends are like this will either be HILARIOUS or the sort of thing that will see you all blocking each other on every single platform going within a month.
• Poline: I have to confess upfront here that I really don’t understand how this works or what it really is – that said, my total confusion as to its exact utility and purpose is part of the reason it appeals so much. As far as I can tell, Poline is a palette-creation tool – beyond that, though, well…Let me give the the website’s own descriptor text and see if you can make head or tail of it: “”poline” is an enigmatic color palette generator, that harnesses the mystical witchcraft of polar coordinates. Its methodology, defying conventional color science, is steeped in the esoteric knowledge of the early 20th century. This magical technology defies explanation, drawing lines between anchors to produce visually striking and otherworldly palettes. It is an indispensable tool for the modern generative sorcerer, and a delight for the eye.” GREAT! So, er, one for all you generative sorcerors, then – erm, could one of you possibly explain to me what the fcuk is going on here, should you have a second?
• WTFDoesThisCompanyDo: Balls, this is a GPT-ish thing and should be uptop, but, well, I can’t be bothered to scroll back and add it in. Sorry. ANYWAY, this is a genuinely fun application of the tech – plug in any website url you like and the tech attempts to give you a description of what the company actually does based on the copy on the homepage. What this is useful for, I’ve found, is for gently pointing out to people that the copy on their website is meaningless dogsh1t, as evidenced by the fact that not even a machine trained on the entire corpus of the web can make sense of it – honestly, this is particularly good for agencies and I strongly advise you to pick your own favourite ‘disruiptive creative studio’ and see whether or not the machine can work out that what they do is ‘make videos to sell petfood’.
• CandyCoated: I feel I ought to explain that I stumbled across this site via this article rather than through any sort of personal interest (not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with being into this stuff!) – that out of the way, let’s all enjoy browsing through the esoteric world of hand-made, bespoke, inflatable rubber fetishwear! Have you ever wondered where people whose idea of a perfect sexy time is, say, being inside a space hopper while someone attempts to tug them off from the outside, find an appropriately-modified space hopper? WELL WONDER NO MORE! Personally speaking it was the combination whale toy-slash-dildo that gave me greatest pause, but you will all find something to love here.
• Manifesturbation: It seems that every few years someone reinvents the basic lie at the heart of new age classic ‘The Secret’ – to whit, that you can basically get the universe to give you what your heart desires simply by following a few simple instructions. There was the original, there was Cosmic Ordering, there has been the modern reframing of it as ‘manifesting’, and now…now we have this. I feel compelled to point out that this link was a reader submission (I am sworn to secrecy), and that there’s a very slight possibility that your employer might not massively enjoy you clicking on the link whilst on their dime…and now let’s dive in! What would you say if I were to tell you that there was a way of securing EXACT SUMS OF MONEY through no activity or effort whatsoever other than having a VERY MINDFUL W4NK? I imagine what you say is “fcuk off Matt, I am not a moron and I was not born yesterday, this is obviously rubbish, what are you trying to sell me?” – but, seemingly, there are others for whom the answer would instead be “SIGN ME UP FOR CASHW4NKS!” And it is for these people who Manifesturbation exists – people who, in exchange for the secret of how to “co-create your life through juicy, lit-up pleasure instead of to-do lists, overwhelm, stress and struggle” are willing to fork out a (NON-REFUNDABLE) $200. Yes, that’s right, for a mere two hundred quid you too can have someone tell you ‘facts’ about how if you just finger yourself properly you’ll be granted your heart’s financial desires (except, er, the small print is keen to point out that there are no guarantees here). This is, let’s be clear, a quite astonishing grift and the sort of thing that I feel no compunction whatsoever being mean about because whoever is doing this (my girlfriend pointed out that they also do a podcast about their sex lives which is quite famous, which I guess figures) is, I feel comfortable saying, making this all up and peddling snake oil (also, please watch the testimonial videos – those people do not look like the most discerning of consumers, is all I’m saying here). Still, MANIFESTURBATION! What a fcuking world we live in.
• Order Automatica: Finally this week, a palette-cleansing card-battling game which will hopefully clear your mind from the last link and which is a really pleasing pixel-y looking timewaster which you can happily while away a few hours with.

By Deon S’Souza

LAST OF THE MIXTAPES THIS WEEK IS THIS LOUNGEY CRACKER FROM LOUIS LARGO!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS ONCE AGAIN EMPTY! POOR TUMBLRS! 

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Typewriter Artist: Anatol Knotek makes art from an old typewriter, typography and, occasionally, coloured ribbons. This is minimal and beautiful and feels like the art style of a campaign that’s just begging to be commissioned.
• Models Architecture: This Insta account really should be named ‘Architectural Models’, but I will forgive them the confusing reversal because there is something SO SO LOVELY about architects’ models and dioramas, and there’s some superb work here.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By David Fullarton

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: