I can’t help but feel a slight sense of disappointment at the fact that we haven’t, it turns out, been visited by extraterrestrial forces beyond our ken (or, if we have, we’re as ignorant of it as ever) – mainly because I was quite looking forward to the inevitable pitched battles between the inevitable Cult of the UFO and the growing Cult of the AI to determine which was the TRUE SAVIOUR and which the FALSE GOD.
Anyway, as you all doubtless know, that is a false dichotomy – there is only one true saviour, and it is Web Curios, delivered via your weekly linky sacrament.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should probably confess.
THE SECTION WHICH MADE THE MISTAKE OF WATCHING QUESTION TIME LAST NIGHT AND IS STILL GENTLY VIBRATING WITH FURY, PT.1:
- Checking In On Bing: Oh Microsoft! Oh no! Despite previous experience in the field of ‘letting a chat interface out of the box before it was quite ready’ (Tay, how quickly we forgot you!), it seems that, once again, the world’s least-charismatic software company has dropped something of a ricket by giving people access to its GPT-juiced new version of the Bing search engine without ensuring it wasn’t going to go…a bit rogue. The first link here takes you to the ‘Bing’ subReddit which is just PACKED with wonderful examples of users having…esoteric and occasionally-hallucinatory interactions with the software. From attempting to convince you that you’ve engaged in time travel when you try and look up screening times for Avatar 2, to making up product details in order to persuade you to make a purchase, to flat-out denying facts about itself when presented with them , to, er, threatening harm to users in what is quite honestly a moderately-chilling tone…this is all GREAT stuff and not a little amusing, as long as you don’t bother thinking too hard about the company’s readiness to open up a transformative new product to public use without doing anywhere near the necessary quantity of tests and checks to ensure that it isn’t going to, I don’t know, recommend that people gargle bleach or something. Microsoft’s issued a statement acknowledging the issues, but the company doesn’t seem overly concerned about the potential damage that this might do to public confidence in the idea of AI-augmented information retrieval – all publicity’s good publicity, right? Hm. I think my favourite reaction to all this has been from the New York Times’ Kevin Roose, who one short week ago penned a glowing endorsement of The New Bing and who happily claimed that Google was going to have to win back his custom and who now, after having used the product for longer than 10 minutes, is reporting that the search engine tried to get him to leave his wife and left him ‘deeply unsettled’. Now, I say this as someone who is writing in his pants to an audience of literally dozens, but, well, to me that sort of radical 180 rather suggests that Kev didn’t necessarily do his due diligence in his first writeup, and is perhaps emblematic of the sort of breathless, seal-like clapping that greets stuff like this from certain sections of the tech press which one might reasonably argue is the root of many of our current problems with tech and society. Anyway, this is all fun and games and lol, but it won’t stop the move towards AI integration with search and it won’t stop a whole bunch of industries being turned on their heads as a result – this stuff does feel like it could be transformatively significant in the next few years, particularly if you’re old enough to be able to remember exactly how much Google changed things 25 or so years ago.
- AI Radio: After the UNFETTERED (if temporary) JOY that was Infinite AI Seinfeld, we have a whole new frontier in the exciting world of machine-generated content to explore. AI Radio is a podcast – it’s only two episodes in at the moment – made by Bemmu and a variety of AI tools, and it’s pretty remarkable. The copy is (I presume – details about the exact ‘how’ are a touch iffy) generated by GPT and then fed through a text-to-speech program – what’s remarkable is how…natural it sounds. I mean, look, you’re unlikely to be fooled into thinking this is actual people if you listen closely for a few minutes, but, equally, the audio quality is good enough that it doesn’t immediately scream ‘THIS IS FAKE’, and the discussion, whilst rambling and a bit non sequitur-ish is also, frankly not significantly less interesting or sensical than the in-studio ‘banter’ you’d get between a radio host and the team of braying sycophants they call ‘production staff’. To quote the ‘about’ bit, this is a “Radio show hosted by a dynamic duo of two AI entities, Adam and Bella, who discuss everything from current events to pop culture. They are even able to answer listener questions and cover topics or reddit posts of your choice. You can send suggestions to the /r/airadio subreddit, or by email to me+ai@bemmu.com — Current features of the software running this: – Can invent news, or cover them based on title, and interview fake experts. – Can talk about topics it finds on Reddit or Hacker News. – Can answer listener questions, or invent some if there aren’t any. These segments were made up by AI. Sometimes they get to pretty questionable territory, beware!” It feels a little bit like we’re on the cusp of one of these AI-led creative endeavours properly taking off; one of these is going to end up mining a particular weird sweetspot and I think you will quickly see a boom in this sort of thing. But, er, don’t quote me on that in case I’m as wrong about it as I tend to be about everything else I try and predict.
- The Buzzfeed Infinity Quizzes: Buzzfeed quizzes! God, it’s just like it’s 2011 all over again! Isn’t that ‘Friday’ song mad?! EXCEPT! Buzzfeed has, as promised, integrated AI into some of its quizzes to make them MORE INTERACTIVE – effectively the way this works is that you plug a bunch of keywords in as responses to prompts (“tell us the name of your crush!”, “tell us an activity you’d like to do together!”) and the backend runs it through what I presume is GPT and eventually spits out a personal story JUST FOR YOU, based on your responses. There are four quizzes which you can currently try out if you fancy having a slightly-retro online content experience, and…look, let’s be honest, this is sh1t isn’t it? The outputs (at least the couple of times I’ve tried) have been broadly nonsensical, full of dead ends and with no real sense of continuity, and it’s generally significantly less fun than one of those paper quadrant toy things that you used to make in primary school. Basically this is included in this week’s Curios as a CAUTIONARY TALE – just adding an AI layer onto something doesn’t make it good or interesting. Which, I suppose, is a criticism you could apply to recent editions of this newsletter, I concede, but at least I’m self-aware about it.
- Infinite AI Dating: Another Twitch-based AI-generated TV show – OK, fine, ‘TV Show’ is a bit of a stretch, but it’s definitely VIDEO CONTENT, and doesn’t ‘TV Show’ sound less…well, sad? – which is being entirely created by a combination of text and text-to-speech tools alongside some basic character models. Created by Brighton-based agency RamJam, this channel features two characters having an infinite series of ‘bad dates’ – basically a pair of people having a series of unsatisfying date-type interactions in what sounds like a slightly-empty restaurants. This is, muchlike the AI Seinfeld, nonsensical and not exactly ‘funny’, or even particularly interesting if you listen closely to what they are saying, but at the same time there really is something oddly and inexplicably compelling about the freewheeling conversation – perhaps it’s the fact that by human standards it’s almost entirely unpredictable, and there’s a certain morbid attraction in seeing where the chat is going to meander next. Oh, and I can’t pretend that I don’t find the mere fact of a slightly-stilted machine-generated voice telling another slightly-stilted machine-generated voice about where to find the best sticky toffee pudding, and then getting almost angry about how much it likes sticky toffee pudding, weirdly funny. You know how, famously, it’s easy to fall into a TikTok hole and end up watching approximately three hours of videos and then be completely incapable of telling anyone why you were compelled to do so, or even what any of the videos were about in the first place? Well this is like that, except it makes even less sense. I do worry that this stuff may end up being our species’ Infinite Jest moment, you know.
- Cinebot: Seeing as we’re doing AI-generated content – here, have a newsletter! Cinebot is, as far as I can tell, a newsletter which is ‘reviewing’ a canonical list of the 100 greatest films as chosen by…someone or other, except of course the reviews are penned by GPT3 because a) it’s 2023 and it is the law that everything must involve AI in some capacity or another; and b) because human beings no longer have anything more to say about 20th century cinema (that’s certainly what it feels like ,in any case). All the films reviewed so far are scifi, and the machine is obviously being instructed to review them as though from the point of view of a robot, or machine intelligence, in each case, which occasionally makes for some halfway-interesting observations, but my main takeaway from this is that whilst AI-generated dialogue can be odd enough to create diverting little vignettes, ‘straight’ writing’s just a bit…hollow.
- AI For UI: We’re only scratching the surface of AI-assisted design and build work, and we won’t really start to see the effects at scale until these tools start to become integrated into the big, mainstream software packages, but this service, called Galileo and currently letting users sign up for early access, is an excellent example of the sorts of things you’ll shortly be able to do with minimal effort. ‘Design me a signup page for an app which collects name, email and phone number’; ‘Create the UI for a mobile-first website designed to allow people to leave anonymous feedback about their neighbours’ interior design choices’, that sort of thing – oh, and of course it will knock up the copy for the app/website too, because why not. Oh, and there’s this one too, which does much the same sort of thing – or promises to, at least. I know it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer speed and scale at which this stuff is emerging, but use cases like this strike me as…broadly benign? Unless of course you’re someone in the second world scraping a living by doing super-low-level digital design work of this sort via Fiverr or Upwork, in which case actually it probably isn’t benign at all on reflection. Damnation.
- The Dollar Street Dataset: Do you remember a few years ago when there was a brief flurry of companies getting a small PR boost by taking steps to address stereotypes in media through the release of stock photography libraries that reflected the more diverse and inclusive world in which we now happily live? OF COURSE YOU DO! Who could forget the transformative effect they had! Still, if you miss those halcyon days of easy comms wins, or if you missed the boat the first time around, FEAR NOT! You can do it ALL AGAIN with TRAINING DATA FOR AI!!! Ahem. Sorry, that was desperately cynical of me and, frankly, a bit unnecessary given the fact that this is a serious issue that does need addressing – the datasets that have been used to train the current generation of GAN and LLM are not perhaps as inclusive and diverse as they could be, and the project here linked to is a good example of someone attempting to do something about it. The Dollar Street Dataset is a spinoff of the long-running Dollar Street initiative, which seeks to visualise differential global incomes in a digestible and comprehensible way, and is “a collection of images of everyday household items from homes around the world that visually captures socioeconomic diversity of traditionally underrepresented populations. It consists of public domain data, licensed for academic, commercial and non-commercial usage, under CC-BY and CC-BY-SA 4.0. The dataset was developed because similar datasets lack socioeconomic metadata and are not representative of global diversity. It includes 38,479 images collected from 63 different countries, tagged from a set of 289 possible topics. Besides this, the metadata for each image includes demographic information such as region, country and total household monthly income, allowing for many different use cases, ultimately enhancing image datasets for computer vision.” This is a really important issue which it’s vital to think about – it’s also (sorry to say this) the sort of thing that certain companies and institutions could also parlay into some quite easy PR should they wish to replicate this across different fields / areas.
- PathWai: I’ve had to do some PROFESSIONAL THINKING recently about THE FUTURE and WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN and whilst obviously I have no fcuking idea about either of those things (I have, if I’m honest, a singular inability to visualise anything about my own future, let alone any of YOURS) it took quite the effort not to get all frothy and excited about ALL OF THE TRANSFORMATIONS that we might be on the cusp of thanks to AI (but then again I’m one of those people who thought 3d printing was going to usher in a post-scarcity society, so, er, SKIPS FULL OF SALT is what I am saying here). PathwAI is a website which attempts to map some of the possible (likely?) developments in AI technology against a theoretical future timeline, and whilst a) the site’s a bit of a mess and it’s not the easiest to read; and b) the claims made about timings are obviously nothing other than that – claims and speculation, there’s a lot of interesting detail here about what might come post-GAN and post-LLM and what these potential milestones might practically mean. For the more practical among you, you might want to cross-reference this timeline with another of your choosing which outlines rising sea levels, just so you can track at exactly which point we’re going to need the machines to be smart, capable and humane enough to lift us from the waves.
- GQ3: Remember NFTs? God, they were a THING, weren’t they? Amazingly, much as it feels like the whole period of ‘jpegs for plutes’ was just some sort of collective ayahuasca experience which left us all feeling empty and emotionally purged, it seems it really did happen – and some people are continuing to believe! Which, presumably, is why GQ has chosen early-2023 to launch its own NFT-enabled membership scheme, whereby YOU (yes, YOU!) can spend the princely sum of (at the time of writing) about £1300 to own an EXCLUSIVE JPEG and get access to a bunch of perhaps slightly-more-exclusive real-life stuff – so you’ll get an invitation to dinner along with some as-yet-nameless celebrities and GQ people, access to parties and events, a box of ‘curated GQ products’ and, er, a magazine subscription! Which is nice! Obviously I am making fun of this because, well, it’s NFTs and the artwork here is, even by the standards of the ‘scene’, risibly bad, but equally there is still a small part of me that doesn’t think that the idea of digital membership schemes like this, perhaps based on a degree of blockchain tokenisation, is a TOTALLY stupid idea, and so I’ll be interested to see whether this evolves into an actual thing or whether (as I think is perhaps more likely) noone at GQ EVER refers to this again after about Q2 2024.
- Rare Threats: A subReddit collecting examples of people using particularly obscure, florid or baroque threats in conversation (“I will teach you that ‘fist’ is also a verb”, that sort of thing). Particularly inventive examples include “I am going to scrape the gums off your teeth and staple them to the back of your throat” (no, me neither), and the wonderfully-specific “I hope you eat a tortilla chip vertically”.
- Oilshore: This is odd. As noticed by Ryan Broderick, Oilshore is aTikTok account in which a young woman posts videos purportedly about her life and job working for an oil company called Oilshore – the clips are fairly standard meme-y ‘what it’s like having a job’ and ‘things that give my colleagues the ick’-type things, but they equally all look like they are filmed in a cupboard rather than in an office, and, whilst the company has a name and a logo, its website is quite clearly not actually a real oil company’s website and is seemingly built on Wix or something, and digging around it appears that the girl in the videos ALSO appears in videos for this clothing brand, which styles itself as ‘an environmentally-conscious fashion retailer’, and basically all of my TRANSMEDIA MARKETING CAMPAIGN senses are tingling just like it’s the late-00s.
By Alex Prager
THE SECTION WHICH MADE THE MISTAKE OF WATCHING QUESTION TIME LAST NIGHT AND IS STILL GENTLY VIBRATING WITH FURY, PT.2:
- Bondee: Another appwebsitegamething which will not be the metaverse but which offers some sort of vague directional nod about what that nebulous idea might one day coalesce into! Bondee is described by users as “Habbo meets MSN”, which if you’re about 5 years younger than me will probably scratch all sorts of Proustian itches – the idea is that the platform enables users to socialise in virtual space, with its (mostly young) users congregating there to socialise. “Bondee combines a nostalgic, early-2000s format with social-networking elements. Users’ digital avatars can socialize with each other on the home page — lounging in a chair, petting a cat, standing around — or leave their friends notes if they’re offline. Hop over to a friend’s virtual room, and the same can be done there. Beyond that, a player can engage in activities — from sailing the virtual ocean and collecting limited edition items to entering a private chat with a friend’s avatar and going “party mode” together.” – there’s nothing about this that is unique per se, but it’s an interesting alternative to the Roblox hegemony when it comes to young people and virtual worlds. This probably isn’t for you – although, you know, I’m not judging, much, probably – but it might be worth being aware of if you’ve either got kids, or if you’re just generally interested in how ‘digital third spaces’ (if you’ll allow me) are evolving.
- Lighthouse: So obviously The Metaverse is going SWIMMINGLY – even the FT saw fit to give the concept a kicking yesterday, which honestly felt a bit like smacking a sad-eyed puppy at this point – and noone really believes that we’re all going to be hanging out in immersive digital environments together anytime soon, but, nonetheless, people are continuing to build stuff and play around with what the broad idea of ‘metaversality’ (this isn’t a word, I know, but allow me this brief moment of linguistic creativity) might mean, and now there is a way to explore some of those spaces yourself. Lighthouse is effectively trying to build a ‘search’ layer for whatever the metaverse currently is – as far as I can tell, this currently means that it acts as a sort of central directory / portal to a bunch of 3d experiences that various people have made and which you can access via the website, with the added ability to search for specific themes and features you might be particularly into and find ‘metaverses’ (honestly, even writing that word feels…wrong in 2023) that fit your needs. I have had a bit of a play around with this and it’s an interesting attempt to try and bring some order to an incredibly-fragmented ‘scene’ – you can get links to various different environments on various different platforms (Decentraland, Cryptovoxels, etc), and whilst they’re all…largely underwhelming tbh, or at least they are when accessed via my increasingly-emphysemic laptop, there are also far, far more of these things than I honestly expected and they do appear to be getting some use. Admittedly by a maximum of approximately three people at a time, but still. Basically this is a decent jumping off point if you’re after a vague ‘state of all this stuff’ overview, but it’s unlikely to convince you that you REALLY need to open an office in Decentraland anytime soon.
- Monocle: Is AR ever really going to become a thing? Are we ever going to finally arrive at the weird and glorious future promised by videogames in which we have an always-on-heads-up-display which tells us everything we could possibly need to know about the world around us and even more besides? Fcuk knows, is the short answer, but it doesn’t really seem like anyone’s clamouring to have MORE information density applied to their field of vision at present, so maybe not anytime soon, Anyway, ignore my doomsaying – Monocle is a fun little piece of kit which combines a tiny, lightweight camera, an equally tiny,OLED display that lets you basically hack together any sort of simple Google Glass-type kit you can imagine, from the simple ‘show me my emails on a screen in my eyeline’ to more complex and weighty stuff like moving images and more complex data overlays and, ok, fine, this is HUGELY geeky and not a little techy, and frankly my ability to do anything with stuff like this begins and ends with this writeup, but if you’re a shed-tinkering inventor or the sort of person who just happens to own a soldering iron then you might find this an interesting and fun project to play around with.
- Better On Paper: A simultaneously lovely and generous project, this – Better On Paper is a project which presents a bunch of digitised photographs, shot on film and made available for free printing should you like any of them. That’s literally it – here are some gorgeous photos taken in the now-antique analogue style, and if you like them and want to print them on high-quality paper then you can and they will be yours to keep forever. Not only is this just A Nice Thing To Do – thankyou, Korean photographer and artist and designer Seungmee Lee! – but it’s also something that feels very much like it could be appropriated for a campaign or just a bit of fan service for the right brand or organisation.
- Underwater Photographer of the Year 2023: Fish! And crustacea, and single-cell aquatic organisms, and all sorts of other amazing and terrifying and frankly deeply sinister denizens of the wet, all captured here for your delectation. These will either make you sign up for diving lessons immediately, or alternatively you’ll never want to dip your head below the waterline ever again – although, honestly, how could you possibly be scared of the seas when they contain these adorable little guys? Just, er, ignore all the sharks.
- The Revenant: It seems that over the past couple of decades we’ve switched from a situation where the concept of ‘running a marathon’ was something that most right-thinking people wouldn’t even countenance to one whereby literally every fcuker over the age of 30 seems to blitheley decide to ‘get into running’ and start collecting marathon medals as though they were parking tickets. As a result, ‘just’ doing marathons isn’t really that impressive anymore, and people are exploring increasingly extreme variations on the theme (I once worked with someone, briefly, whose ‘thing’ was doing the Marathon des Sables ‘for fun’, which is just fcuking insane) – if you’ve done the marathon, the ultramarathon, the hypermarathon, the back-to-back-hypermarathon, the insane US ‘backyard ultra’ and you’re still hungry for more, then maybe, just maybe, you’re ready for The Revenant. Taking place in New Zealand in January 2024, the Revenant is “around 200km & 16,000m-ish of vertical ascent. Unsupported individual or two person team Ultra Adventure Run. Map and compass only. No watches allowed. You have 60 hours to complete the challenge if you can tell the time.” So, to be clear, you’re running…what, 6 marathons, plus a 16k ascent, in 2.5 days? Yeah, sounds reasonable. I am…reasonably certain that the total number of people likely to read Web Curios AND be of suitable physical and psychological stock to complete a challenge like this is literally zero, but I would love one of you to prove me wrong.
- Melodice: This is a lovely idea – Melodice is a website which provides music to soundtrack your boardgaming. Select your game of choice from the (incredibly comprehensive) dropdown list and get playlist of musical accompaniments designed to heighten your experience and add ATMOSPHERE and TENSION. I have no idea whatsoever why their selected choice of music to accompany a game of Monopoly would be the music to SimCity3000, but, weirdly, I think it sort of fits.
- Better Search: Seeing as Google and Bing seem hell-bent on ‘improving’ their products with the introduction of unasked for AI gubbins, you might want to find alternative portals to use. This is a very simple search tool which lets you run searches against 4 websites and 4 websites only – Reddit, Twitter, Stack Overflow and Github – and which allows you to specify the content type you want to source (pdf, ppt. Zip. docx) as well as a date range for the search; obviously you can do all this with Google, but it requires you to remember the search string commands and this is basically just easy and quick and if nothing else it’s worth bookmarking this as your go-to Reddit search engine because, honestly, everyone needs one of those.
- Mathijs Hanenkamp: This is the portfolio site of Dutch photographer Mathijs Hanenkamp – his photography is excellent, but I’m featuring this because I genuinely adore the way his site is designed and the UI and UX and the general look and feel of the whole thing is, to my mind, just about perfect and such a wonderful way of displaying his work.
- Welcome To My Home: Not *my* home, you understand, but the digital, online ‘home’ of Phoemela Ballaran, which is a small digital space featuring some poems, some music, a collection of images of stones Phoemela has collected and some stories associated with them, and a link to her ‘garden’ where anyone can leave her a message…this is lovely, a gorgeous, homespun corner of personal web, carved out of the ether, and the older I get the more I think everyone should have something like this somewhere that just…exists in digital space as a refuge or home for its maker. Which, I appreciate, is possibly a BIT w4nky, but, well, it’s my blognewslettertypething and I’ll be w4nky if I want to.
- McCheapest: This is interesting. As you will all doubtless know, the Economist has for years been using the McDonald’s Big Mac as a global price tracker, with the relative price of the uniform product in various countries worldwide being used as a proxy measure of economic performance and relative wealth; I didn’t, however, realise that the price of the sandwich varies wildly within the US, until I found this website which tracks the price across North America and records the differentiation. I was slightly surprised to see that the most expensive Big Mac (a whopping $8.09) was in Massachusetts rather than New York or LA, whereas the cheapskates among you should get to Oklahoma where you can ‘enjoy’ your meal for a mere $3.49.
- The Owl Job: This is really interesting – The Owl Job is a set of instructions and directions on how to set up your own sightless escape room (that is, an escape room suitable to be played by the visually impaired), which I appreciate isn’t something I imagine that many of you are going to be minded to get involved with but which are a surprisingly interesting series of ways of thinking about design and interactivity for a wide and diverse audience which may be of use even if you’re not planning on turning your living room into a playcentre for the RNIB.
- All The Excel Formulas: Look, I appreciate that this is very much on the ‘;boring and functional’ end of the link spectrum, but while we wait for AI to automate the tedious (and, frankly, borderline-incomprehensible) stuff like pivot tables and the like it might be useful to have this master list of Excel formulas to hand. Maybe.
- Special Flushing Waterfront: Take a lightly-interactive tour along Flushing Creek, a waterway that flows northward through the borough of Queens in New York City. This is “an interactive virtual walking tour and public archive project where participants are able to co-create documentation of this body of water and its surrounding area in Queens, NY” – local residents were invited to submit memories, photographs, notes, thoughts, poetry and whatever else they felt like contributing to the project, which contributions were then integrated into the digital experience. There’s something surprisingly pleasant and even meditative about taking a virtual stroll along a NYC canal and browsing notes on what it means to local residents, and I would absolutely love to see something similar about some of the UK’s waterways (it feels like this ought to exist in some form already tbh – anyone?).
- MacOS9: Another one of those old ‘emulate an old Mac OS in your browser and pretend it’s 1994 and Apple’s still horribly uncool!’ web experiences – except this one has the BRILLIANT added benefit of the machine’s virtual hard drive containing a bunch of actual, playable games from the mid-90s, including the all-time-classic LucasArts point-and-click Indiana Jones game – honestly, this is BRILLIANT and frankly there’s enough in here to keep you occupied til the clocks change again.
- All Of The Fast And The Furious Films At Once: I confess to not having really ever engaged with the FF franchise – I’m not, as a rule, particularly interested in either musclecars or musclemen, and given most of mine are dead I am not hugely interested in films that fetishise the concept of ‘family’ as their central premise, and Vin Diesel really does look (to quote Robin Williams on Schwartzenegger) a condom full of walnuts – but I am vaguely aware of the fact that there is a new one coming out at some point soon. If you want to refresh your memory of the franchise to date (WHY?!?!?! It is literally all cars and explosions and homoeroticism, and muscular men shouting the word FAMILY! at each other while dealing with the aforementioned explosions and homoeroticism!) then what better way to do it than by watching them as presented on this site – that is, all playing in very small windows simultaneously. Utter gibberish, but I sort-of imagine that that’s the case even if you watch them sequentially (also, always nice to be reminded of the fact that copyright law simply doesn’t apply if you just make the offending content really, really small).
- Peter Marshall: The Flickr page of Peter Marshall, whose photography of fading England is not only wonderful in terms of subject matter but SO beautifully-lit that I quite want to own vast swathes of it. If you like photos of old seaside resorts and abandoned scrapyards and old caffs then this is basically catnip.
- The Garden Photography Awards: As I type this, I am looking into my girlfriend’s garden and watching a fox; the fox, in turn, is watching me, while it pointedly defecates in the middle of the lawn. Thankfully the photographs in this year’s Garden Photography Awards don’t, at least as far as I’ve seen, contain ANY photographs of sh1tting foxes (there is a ‘pets’ category, but I am really confident that there won’t be any vulpine scat on display), instead choosing to focus on the beautiful flora visible in the UK’s gardens. I am literally the opposite of green fingered (…brown fingered? No, definitely not that, that sounds AWFUL), but even I was struck by how glorious the gardens here are; should you want to feel inadequate about your own poorly-tended patch of scrubland, click here!
- The World’s Biggest D1ckpic: To be clear, this link is ENTIRELY safe for work, I promise – whilst, yes, this is technically the world’s biggest d1ckpic, it’s a cartoony illustration rather than a high-res photograph, and falls very much under the heading of ‘comedy peen’ rather than ‘troubling and threatening throbber’. As explained in this article, “Almost a year in the making, the image has an area of 102,040,171,200,000 pixels — 290 times larger than the current record holder. At one pixel per inch, it would wrap around the Earth 2.7 times. If printed out at 15 DPI, a fairly common setting for large billboards, the image would be as tall as 16,408 Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other. If 3D-printed, the image could (hypothetically) be used to bat the International Space Station out of orbit.” This has been created with a lot of love (and a hope that it will end up in the Guinness Book Of Records) – you can scroll along the dong, keeping your eye out for Easter Eggs and gags, and see whether you have the patience to work your way all the way down its shaft (although if you want the full image you’ll need access to specialist software to view it, given that the file is somewhere in the region of 250TB in size). This is…this is almost perfect – pointless, silly, childish, and yet a weirdly-impressive technical feat. Well done, mysterious and anonymous creator!
- Bases Loaded: A GREAT little game, this, which is basically a weird cross between Vampire Survivors and Baseball and Arkanoid, and which I know won’t make any sense based on that description but which I promise you that you will enjoy a lot and which will make the afternoon pass more quickly than it otherwise might.
- Dire Decks: By the same developer, ANOTHER very nicely-made pixelartish game, this time a deck builder-cum-shootemup where you pick different cards to shoot down the invading armies of space aliens. Challenging, but in a very pleasing ‘one more go’ sort of fashion, and immensely satisfying once you start getting the measure of its rhythms.
- Summer Friends Don’t Stick Around: Finally this week, a game you need to download but which I highly recommend you play around with – it basically takes the ‘ghost’ concept familiar from racing games, where a previous player’s performance on a particular track is used as your opponent in subsequent races, and updates it for an AI age to create an experience where you play with AI-controlled NPCs whose behaviour has been trained by other players, playing the same game as you. Which, I appreciate, is a dog’s dinner of a description – here, try this: “Summer Friends Don’t Stick Around is a “forever-time” multiplayer game. The goal of this game’s creation was to immortalize players and give others a chance to play with them “in spirit” even after they are no longer with us. In the “Remember Me” mode, players can train a neural network to capture their play style. The output is a data model that can be shared with friends and family. Your playstyle is essentially encoded in the data model.” This is SO interesting, and there’s honestly something quite uncanny and arresting about the…recognisably human playstyles that emerge as a result of the training. This feels exciting and cusp-y, like there’s a VERY good idea in here which is going get expanded upon massively by a big-name title before too long.
By Joelle Jones
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Retro Synth Ads: Not in fact a Tumblr, but it’s not like you care and I really needed something to put here after a few weeks of blank space! Do YOU want a selection of old adverts for synths, lovingly scanned and compiled from old magazines? YES YOU DO DON’T LIE TO ME! Regardless of your personal interest in synths from the 70s and 80s, this is also a surprisingly good source of longform copy examples – the ads tend to be quite wordy, and if you’re a copywriter looking for some examples of wordy ads that aren’t the classic ones by VW that everyone always fcuking references then you might find some useful material in here.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Kite Observer: Photos of massive cargo ships at sea. Nothing else, just ships, but I promise you they are REALLY, REALLY BIG (fine, there are occasional non-cargo ships too, but, mainly, it’s just MASSIVE FLOATING HUNKS OF METAL).
- Cat Music Videos: Music videos for popular songs, made from stitched together clips of cats from the internet. Which, yes, I appreciate sounds almost exactly like something from approximately 2007, but that is not a bad thing because everything then was still pure and the rot had yet to really set in.
- New Ireland In Colour: Another in my occasional series of ‘creators who’ve found a really fertile bit of latent space and are just mining it mercilessly and the results are GREAT’ accounts – this is by one Hugh Mulhern, and is a selection of images depicting an imagined pseudo-post-apocalyptic Ireland between 2035 and 2070. These are SO GOOD – if you can imagine Transmetropolitan transposed to County Cork then you’re halfway there.
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!
- Maybe AI Bing’s Not So Bad After All: By way of a counterpoint to the first link all the way up there about how AI Bing’s been a bit of a mess, here’s Ethan Mollick writing about his experiences using the beta product – rather than attempting to jailbreak the machine, Mollick’s been using it in more standard fashion and it’s interesting to read about his experiences with the tech and what it can do. Most interesting to me is the way in which it uses citations – what will determine which sources it cites? The arms race to crack that and manipulate it is going to be INSANE – and the qualitative difference in outputs between it and ChatGPT; to be clear, I still don’t think this stuff is ready to be used in the wild, and I remain unconvinced as to the benefits of this level of AI search assistance for anyone who’s halfway-decent at doing their own research already, but the direction of travel feels pretty unidrectional at the moment so it’s probably best to be aware of what’s coming.
- A Quick Guide To Cloning Yourself: More Mollick, this time on the ease with which he was able to create a passable fake version of himself delivering a lecture to camera – the piece linked here explains how he did it, the software he used, and the end results, which whilst not good enough to fool a careful observer are absolutely neraly good enough to fool someone scrolling through at pace. Which, fine, is also the sort of scaremongering we saw with the initial wave of deepfakes about three or four years ago, except this kit is faster, better and vastly more accessible than that was, and you now have the added insanity of readily-available voice spoofing…basically I think it’s important to realise that there’s been something of a Rubicon crossed with this stuff in terms of its ease-of-creation and general plausibility…I mean, look at this for example. Mad.
- Writing A Song With The Machines: There must be something genuinely odd about being a reasonably-famous songwriter with a defined and recognisable personal style and watching that style being aped in no time at all by an unthinking collection of 1s and 0s. Credit, then, to Colin Meloy of The Decembrists, who decided to see what would happen if he asked The Machine to compose a song in his own style, and to provide chord progressions to the eventual composition, and then recorded it to see how the whole thing sounded – I think I would have had a pretty deep and abiding existential episode, but he seems relatively unfazed by the whole thing. This is, perhaps, a factor of the song’s being pretty much tripe -as he says, “For the record, this is a remarkably mediocre song. I wouldn’t say it’s a terrible song, though it really flirts with terribleness” – but it’s interesting to read him describing why it’s mediocre, particularly as someone with literally no musical or creative ability whatsoever.
- National Stereotypes in Midjourney: INCREDIBLY EASY PR IDEA OF THE WEEK – pick whatever vertical you or your client operate in, and devise a small project which will helpfully point out the specific biases with which the AI model of your choice has been encoded in relation to said vertical! Which is exactly what’s happening in this piece, where Cassie Kozyrkov asks Midjourney to create images based on the prompt “Illustration for an animated show set in [country] about science and progress, taking place in the future”, and records the different results for different values of [country]. This is SO INTERESTING, and Kozyrkov’s writeup details some of the many, many things she learned about what The Machine associates with various places – Syria and Afghanistan, for example, are imagined as ruins even in a theoretical utopian future. Fascinating, and a potential source of inspiration for all sorts of orthogonally-related projects imho.
- The 15-Minute Cities Madness: You’re probably familiar with the concept of the 15-minute city – popularised during the first lockdown periods, it’s (very basically) a school of thinking around urban planning and design that suggests the optimal urban layout involves residents living within a 15m distance (walking, cycling or via public transport) from a base-level set of amenities; so employment, leisure, shopping, healthcare, green spaces, etc etc, all within easy reach of everyone. The idea behind this is that such a setup not only improves the lived experience for residents, but has all sorts of knock-on benefits for the environment, public health and safety, general local economies and the wider ‘community’, and I wrote about it in 2020 as a sensible, interesting new trend in urbanism. Fast forward three years and this ostensibly-benign concept has been seized upon by a certain branch of the wingnut fringe as the latest example of the WEF-led GREAT REPLACEMENT, somehow linked to lockdowns and vaccines and state control and a desire to TAKE YOUR PROPERTY and LIMIT YOUR MOVEMENT and, Christ, it’s EXHAUSTING. This piece in Vice explains some of the ‘why’ behind this madness, but it doesn’t quite delve far enough in my opinion; there’s something slightly terrifying about the fact that, for a seemingly-not-insignificant proportion of the West, literally ANY action taken by Government is a nefarious plot to limit individual freedoms and usher in a terrifying (if nebulous and poorly-defined) globalist future. As an aside, I personally find it very funny that many of the people railing against this as a principle will also likely be members of Facebook Groups which wistfully recall the days when you could walk to the shops safely at 3am wearing nothing but a cheeky smile, and will in no way see any commonality between the two concepts.
- GenZ and Me: Joe Moran writes in the LRB of his experiences dealing with GenZ in his role as a University lecturer, and offers some thoughts on What He Has Learned – I very much enjoyed the riff on his losing battle against the term ‘relatable’, and the significance of ‘relatability’ as a concept for this particular coterie of young adults; perhaps even more, though, I appreciated his suggestion that there is perhaps less ‘generational’ change happening than we might be inclined to believe: “Sociologists give three explanations for the change in people’s attitudes and behaviours over time: period effects, lifecycle effects and cohort effects. Period effects describe change across all age groups: the result of sweeping societal shifts. Lifecycle effects describe change resulting from the ageing process or in response to key events such as leaving home, becoming a parent or retiring. Cohort effects describe change that results from shared generational experiences…the current discussion attributes too much to cohort effects and not enough to period and lifecycle effects.” This struck me as an interesting and useful way to think about this sort of stuff (which, fine, you probably all knew of already but which was new to me).
- Therapy Talk: I read large parts of this article through my fingers – words cannot adequately express the degree of horror and revulsion I personally feel when I read things like: “Hinge, a popular dating app, still lets users post sunglass-clad selfies and proclaim their love for espresso martinis. But now they can also respond to prompts like “Therapy recently taught me___,” “A boundary of mine is___” and “My therapist would say I___,” and this one sent me into a personal horrorspiral imagining exactly how ill-equipped I would be to answer the question: “Becca Love, a 40-year-old clothing designer and dance teacher in Montreal who uses the pronouns they and them, often asks dating app matches, What does connection look like to you? Around the third date, they initiate discussions about their prospective partner’s “attachment style,” a tidy summation of childhood trauma.”” This piece is relatively nonjudgemental about the rise in the use of therapyspeak in dating, but I’m reasonably comfortable being more assertive – this is fcuking TERRIBLE, not least because (as evidenced by the fact that ‘Gaslighting’ has approximately 219 competing (wrong) definitions currently in use in the UK at least) there is literally no common understanding of what the fcuk these terms mean beyond “I am very much invested in my own status as the sole significant protagonist of my reality”.
- TikTok in Afghanistan: There’s something almost comforting about the (at least surface-level) universality of teenage experience in 2023 – wherever you are, whatever your circumstances, if you’re a young adult in modernity you probably want to be big on TikTok. So it is in Afghanistan, as this WIRED article outlines – profiling some of the young people who are using the platform to present a slightly-less-Taliban-y picture of the country to the outside world. There’s an interesting side-effect to this, of course, which is that this TikTokified picture of life in the country is the only one that can really be presented – personal safety means that coruscating political criticism of the regime’s not really viable, and so there’s a weird flattening of perspective whereby Afghanistan through the TikTok lens is sort of just like anywhere else, just with slightly more unplanned ventilation in a lot of the buildings and significantly fewer women. I don’t quite know what I think about this, but overall I am not sure I have the same sort of positive (ie naive) feelings about TikTok’s ability to shed light on the world in 2023 as I did about Twitter’s in 2011, though whether that’s to do with the platform or just the slow loss of hope we’ve all experienced over the past decade or so it’s hard to tell.
- The Moment That Changed The Superbowl: I don’t, I have to admit, really understand American Football – certainly not to the extent that I could analyse a team’s tactics or specific plays – which is why I particularly enjoyed this nice bit of scrolly storytelling in the NYT, which walks you through the moment which analysts apparently agree changed the game in favour of the Kansas City Chiefs. You may or may not give two hoots about a 65-yard punt return (I, personally, do not), but the way this is done is a really good example of how to use this sort of technique to explain something complex and dynamic in really clear and visually-appealing fashion (NB – I appreciate that for people who know about American Football this may well be the equivalent of someone simplistically offering ‘man run clever, ball in net’ as an explanation of Maradona’s ‘86 goal, but, well, bear with me here).
- Selling Out Still Sucks: Ok, one article does not a trend make (as everyone involved in planning and strategy knows, that’s TWO articles!), but I am posting this as it’s the first time in years I’ve read something written by a young person that tentatively suggests that maybe ‘getting the bag’ is no longer the be all and end all of everything, and that we might be moving back to an era in which shilling for brands in exchange for pennies is perhaps not considered a universally-laudable thing to do. This piece riffs on the Superbowl adverts and the degree to which many of them, in the author’s words, “used “Hey, look at that famous person!” instead of an actual idea.” This is a short piece, but worth reading just to see whether or not it feels like a THING – and also for this closer, which felt…true: “when I see a constant flow of low-effort craps that infect our ears with algorithmically generated nonsense, that tell millions of sports fans to risk thousands of dollars with a few taps on their phone, that force us to sit through the richest people in the world getting off on the fact that they remember the ’80s, I have to believe there’s some way to reverse this. We need to bring back shame, for the good of the culture.
- Romanticising The Hays Code: This is a bit of a weird one – on the one hand, just because a few weirdos on Twitter are going around complaining about sex in films being in some way ‘nonconsensual’ for the audience doesn’t mean that any actual, real people in real life think like that (or, frankly, even that the people saying that on Twitter think like that); on the other, we’ve seen the frankly mental reaction to Sam Smith wearing a sub-Bowie red carpet outfit among conservative commentators (is it a coincidence that they donned that a mere couple of days after I linked to an online boutique for the rubber curious? I THINK NOT. Proof, there, that Sam Smith reads Web Curios!) and the insane reaction to drag queen storytime on both sides of the Atlantic, and I’ve been writing about the growing tradwife/puritanical movement for a while now, and and and and…look, it just feels A BIT like some of this longterm project to inculcate conservative values into The Kids is starting to bear fruit a bit, is all I’m saying. Semi-related – who IS behind the $100m campaign to rebrand and repopularise Jesus in the US? Why, it’s an ultraconservative billionaire who opposes LGBT+ rights and abortion! Apologies for focusing on a US issue here – but, also, no apologies, because this stuff is totally bleeding over here and has been for a few years now.
- 3d Printing and the Housing Crisis: 3d printing really doesn feel like a failed utopian dream – but, apparently, it’s not dead! It’s still a thing! Sort of! This is a really interesting piece profiling a company currently engaged in producing 3d printed housing for a developer in the US, with a view to rolling the building method out more widely should the project prove successful; it’s a fascinating look into the technology and its limitations, and the difficulty in bringing these sorts of innovations to mass scale use, even after a decade. More than anything it’s a useful reminder – to me, as much as to anyone else – of the massive gap that always exists between technology that shows promise and technology that actually, really, properly works in real life.
- The Aftermath of Deepfake Bongo: Unless you follow the world of streaming and streamers, you’re probably unaware of a recent controversy whereby a male Twitch streamer was effectively caught buying deepfake bongo of a bunch of other female Twitch streamers – this article explores the controversy a bit, but, more interestingly, focuses on the women whose likenesses were spoofed by the tech and what redress they have been able to seek; it’s not…great, frankly, and if anything this piece neatly shows how the whole deepfake bongo thing is likely to be a very real problem in the short-to-medium term given how easy it already is to make and how little actual input you need to make it. The Online Safety Bill would in theory act to criminalise the creation of this sort of material, but I’m not personally convinced that a) you’d ever be able to meaningfully enforce the legislation; and b) that it will get passed in its current form – it doesn’t, basically, feel like there are quite enough guardrails in place to stop this stuff being pretty much everywhere before too long.
- Childhoods of Exceptional People: This is SO interesting – and, at heart, almost reassuringly-unsurprising. Henrik Karlsson decided to do some research into the backgrounds and upbringings of a selection of what he termed ‘exceptional’ people; geniuses or high achievers, people who, by any reasonable standard, can be said to have been a success in their chosen field(s), and see what common themes emerged. His findings demonstrated a selection of interesting commonalities (aside, of course, from the fact that all the people in question are VERY FCUKING CLEVER), including a high degree of exposure to intelligent adult conversation, high-quality tutoring and self-directed learning…all of which, of course, are examples of MASSIVE FCUKING PRIVILEGE. How LUCKY that your parents have a salon of venerated thinkers that they can introduce you to to enable your curious young mind to grow and explore! How FORTUNATE that they were able to afford a multi-doctoral tutor to coach you through your studies! Obviously this isn’t a surprise, but it’s sometimes helpful to be reminded of the fact that it’s very rare that talent or intellect will be enough to secure success. Alternatively, of course, you may read this and look at your kids’ nonexistent tutor and your useless, drunk, miserable, middle-aged friends who will be no use at all as pedagogical rolemodels and simply despair at your kids’ prospects – in which case, er, sorry!
- Visiting A Bongo Convention: Author Michael Estrin writes novels; he’s working on a series set in the Adult entertainment industry, and as part of his research he recently went to the Adult Video News Convention to do a bit of fieldwork, and this is a blogpost outlining his impressions of the whole thing. This is very funny, not smutty in the slightest, and whilst it’s obviously not a patch on Big Red Son (the canonical example of bongo-gonzo journalism) it contains enough vignettes of the mad, the desperate and the bongo-addled to make you feel like you were there yourself (whilst at the same time being very glad you weren’t).
- The Sound Of Grief: On having, and losing, a child, and the way in which music works to heal and hurt and help and hinder as you grieve; this is a beautiful essay, although, caveat emptor, it is also a very sad one indeed.
- Everything Joel Learned About Renting In London: For several years now, Joel Golby has been writing occasional columns for Vice in which he highlights some of the more egregiously awful examples of the London rental market for the tearful lols. The series has now come to an end, and in this closing piece Joel looks back on the past few years and what has changed and – SPOILERS – everything has just gotten, broadly, worse, and this is a superb piece of angry, sad and slightly-baffled writing about a system which has been broken for an age and which is getting worse and which noone seems to have the inclination or skills to fix, and which is condemning at least two generations of people into lifelong precariety and which, it seems, is just The Way It Is. This really is fantastic – it annoys me quite how good Golby is, but, well, he is.
- Stolen Twins: Finally this week, the first thing I have read this year that made me stop halfway through and go up and look at the name of the author again because I was so impressed – this is by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow, and it’s about fostering and growing up and neurodivergence, and the prose is STARTLINGLY good, honestly – from the opening line (“Like many autistic people, I find neurotypical communication fascinating but often deficient in fixedness”) to the last, this is almost-perfect in its composition. I think this person, whose first novel is apparently being published this year, is going to be famous (and if they aren’t, they should be).
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: