Do you feel UNDER THREAT? Do you feel like your sovereignty and security is being compromised by a bunch of poor fcuks so desperate to escape their current circumstances that they’re willing to risk life and limb to end up in THIS fcuking country? Do you believe that a certain BBC sports presenter shouldn’t have opinions about the rightness or wrongness of particular aspects of government policy?
If the answer to any of the above questions is ‘yes’, then please fcuk off and stop reading my newsletter (if the answer is instead ‘Matt, what the fcuk are you talking about, can you please stop with the increasingly-provincial UKcentric intro copy please?’ then you can stay, but I can’t promise it’ll get any less navelgazey). For the rest of you, though, WELCOME BACK! It’s so nice to see you! How’s it going?
Oh. Sorry to hear it. Still, maybe the links will help.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you a
THE SECTION WHICH WANTS TO FIND THE PERSON RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS STELLAR PIECE OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS AND SHAKE THEM WARMLY AND FIRMLY BY THE HAND, PT.1:
- The Temple: We kick off this week with something which I hope will soothe and relax at the end of what, for all I know, may well have been a HECK of a week for you (it may not seem obvious from, well, the content or the writing style or the general vibe of Web Curios, but I am here to help!) – I hope it soothes and relaxes, because I have literally no idea whatsoever it’s for beyond that. The Temple is a Japanese website whose actual purpose is utterly alien to me (any of you who happen to speak the language, er, can you explain it? And can you reassure me that by linking to it that I’m not somehow tacitly endorsing anything awful?), but which lets you navigate around a bunch of soothing, pale, slightly-abstract landscapes which I presume are meant to evoke a, er, temple, while soothing sounds play. Different doorways will take you to different areas – at the time of typing, for example, I have just wandered into “The Infinity Tower” and was greeted by a few lines of haiku-esque poetry upon so doing (which was nice) and now I’m on some sort of weird structure going up into the sky, and there are these brass bowls I can click on…look, basically this is totally baffling but oddly-soothing, and given the fact that most things in 2023 so far are also totally baffling but tend towards the “colossally unsettling”, consider this something of a therapeutic antidote to the year so far. No, you’re welcome!
- Figure AI: No! Wait! Come back! Not THAT sort of AI, I promise! This is ANOTHER sort – even more speculative and moonshot-y! A combination of Boston Dynamics’ ubiquitous and memeified Spot robodogs and the staggeringly-unfunny running gag that is Elon Musk’s promise of a functioning bipedal assistant has seen the prospect of humanoid robots rather fall out of fashion in recent years, but last week Figure AI had a big event where they unveiled their attempt to finally offer each and every one of us the eventual opportunity to purchase our very own plastic pal who’s fun to be with (probably should have considered punctuating that sentence rather better; don’t worry, it’s still early and I promise the prose will pick up as the tea kicks in). Click the link, scroll down, and marvel at the VERY SHINY (and, if I’m honest, not a little sinister) photos of a robot moving around on two legs like it’s the most natural thing in the world. The rationale for Figure’s investment in this particular design is, not unreasonably, that given the rest of the world is designed for bipedal humanoids it makes sense that any device invented to help us navigate said world share a similar form – although it’s also clear from the website that this is all quite a long way away from being anything other than a gleam in an engineer’s eye. This all looks very shiny and exciting, but I can’t help but wish that companies like this would stop writing things like ‘MASTER PLAN’ on their website as it does rather make the casual observer think that they’re possibly a touch on the mad and megalomaniacal side.
- The Deep Agency: I am fairly confident that the number of fashion models who read Web Curios is approximately zero – still, should any of you happy to know any beautiful, photogenic people, feel free to inform them that the AI entrepreneurs are trying to make them obsolete. The Deep Agency is a recently-launched service that purports to offer brands or businesses seeking photos of people for commercial use a cheap, infinite solution – to whit, AI-generated humans! Except, sadly, it doesn’t actually work very well at the moment – the details aren’t great, and the people it generates tend to be VERY WHITE, and, basically, it doesn’t feel like it’s significantly better than just messing around with Stable Diffusion or Midjourney yourself and cutting out the middleman. Still, as I am getting increasingly bored of writing, this is very much the direction of travel and it will get better and the 2020s are probably not, if we’re honest, going to be a vintage decade for the catalogue models (although hand models should be feeling pretty safe and smug right about now).
- MissJourney: I have to say, I was surprised I didn’t see more of this sort of thing around International Women’s Day this year – in fact, I’m still slightly surprised at how little AI-derived work (specifically, work riffing on the fact of AI) there is out there at the moment. MissJourney is a nice-if-not-wildly-original idea, taking as its starting point the already-noted biases inherent in recent GAN training sets (whereby if you ask Midjourney or Dall-E to imagine a ‘doctor’, say, it will tend to spit out an image of a white bloke) and letting you instead generate an infinity of illustrations of professional women. Launched, obviously, on IWD as a joint project between TedX Amsterdam and the Ace Agency Group, this is a cute bit of work.
- Face-to-Voice: Ok, so this is just a paper demonstrating the concept, but there are a few examples embedded in there and the fact that this is possible made me think I should include it here in case it inspires any of you to make something wonderful with the tech (CREATE FOR ME! DO MY BIDDING! Ahem). I’m not going to even try to explain how this works, mainly because I’m not really capable of doing so, but, well…you know how everyone’s face can basically be turned into numbers, right? And you can then turn those numbers into sounds? Yeah, well, THAT (please do not write to me explaining how far away from the truth that explanation was). This explores the ability of The Machines to ‘look’ at someone’s face and then ‘imagine’ what their voice might sound like based on their photos and MY GOD do the opportunities for gentle trolling just leap out at me unbidden. If nothing else, I REALLY want this to be turned into a briefly-zeitgeisty viral app/website that offers to reveal the TRUE VOICE of anyone whose face you feed it to – I can’t, if I’m honest, think of any practical applications for this, but perhaps you’ll fare better.
- Beatbot: Give it a theme, suggest a style, press a button and WATCH IN AMAZEMENT as this website spits out 4 bars of vaguely-coherent music and lyrics! Nothing that this site produces is good, to be clear, but it is occasionally inadvertently funny and I can absolutely recommend it as a means of delivering messages to friends and colleagues (try it with something like “trip hop, diane is late with the reports”, for example – see? PERFECT).
- HackerFM: Another AI-generated podcast, but this time a rather better one than previous efforts – rather than having a pair of machine-generated voice wittering on about whatever crap the autocomplete lands on, this is instead a regularly-updated series which each episode takes ACTUAL TECH NEWS and sees The Machine generate a discussion between two hosts on the actual topics. As far as I can tell, the links that are used as source material for the discussion are taken from HackerNews, though there’s minimal detail on exactly how the chat is generated – I wonder whether it’s using the BingAI interface to generate the summaries and analyses and then running *them* through another model to create the ‘personalities’. Who knows. Anyway, this is…not terrible, which I know sounds like faint praise but, again, remember how fcuking awful most human podcasts are and rejoice in the fact that maybe, just maybe, the era in which every tedious cnut with a baseball cap and a beard and a microphone and an opinion feels the need to record themselves for the world’s delectation (what’s that you say? No, people who write email newsletters are TOTALLY DIFFERENT, why do you ask?).
- Opinionate: This is interesting and, potentially, genuinely quite useful – Opinionate is basically a toy that lets you make GPT argue with itself. Give it a topic or a premise – the concept of universal basic income, for example – and it will generate arguments for and against in the debating style. You can set the machine to deliver as many rounds of ‘discussion’ as you like (it defaults to 3 back-and-forths) – while it’s not going to win any points for intellectual flair, this is, honestly, a really really good way of quickly and easily getting an overview of the most obvious and basic questions around any issue. That’s not a diss, honest – sometimes it’s genuinely useful to get a shortcut to the basic stuff, and this is GREAT for that. I saw someone somewhere this week talking about how asking LLMs for ideas was actually a really good way of finding an eliminating the banal and the obvious, and this works in a similar-ish way; if you can’t outargue this, you should probably think harder about your position.
- An AI Search Scare Story: I know I’ve wanged on about this a bit of late, but I do think that people aren’t quite giving enough thought to the potential impact of search becoming chat-based – still, if you’re after a small cautionary tale to make you think, you’re in luck! This website explains an exploit for BingAI search which works by putting invisible text on a webpage (lol it’s just like SEO in 2006!) to ‘inject’ a prompt into the search engine and turn it into something else entirely – the examples given here range from ‘making it talk like a funny pirate’ to ‘sending you to a third party website that is going to phish your credit card info’, and whilst this is very much unlikely to be a long-term problem (you’d sort of hope that this particular sort of attack vector is in some way patch/preventable, otherwise…) it does give another reminder that possibly releasing all this stuff into the wild before it’s entirely cooked is…maybe a bit fcuking stupid. Still, THINK OF THE SHAREHOLDERS AND PLOUGH ON, EH?
- Wonder Studio: This feels like a GOOD AI and creativity story, though – Wonder Studio is a new business which aims to use AI techniques and the economies they afford to allow small, independent filmmakers access to the same sort of technical SFX chops that big studio films have – I won’t get into the tech (mainly because, er, as ever I don’t really understand it), but there’s a whole load of different processes and types of work that go into putting all those oddly-weightless spandex-clad CG heroes onscreen that are beyond the budget of all but the biggest studios; thanks, though, to advances in image processing and associated tech, it’s now a lot easier to calculate light refraction and all those sorts of complex things. Mocap, rendering, lighting, it’s all in here – ok, so this is a commercial product and obviously you have to pay for it, but it’s potentially game-changing for small-scale videographers and filmmakers – and, even better, it’s not going to put anyone out of business because there’s currently noone at all serving this market! Is this…is this a genuinely good tech thing? I am pinching myself.
- Looria: Hang on, this ALSO feels like a genuinely good tech thing! UNPRECEDENTED! Looria is basically a chat interface built on top of the excellent subReddit ‘Buy It For Life’, which exists to recommend products that last for a long time without falling apart and is generally just a great and VERY DEEP repository of high-quality product knowledge across a wide range of verticals – it is therefore PERFECT for having a GPT-enabled layer added to it which makes the archive of posts interrogable. I find things like this really, really exciting (obviously I use that word advisedly – it’s not like I’m tumescing or anything, honest), and I am 100% going to add some sort of GPT search layer to Curios as soon as I can bully Shardcore into figuring out how to do it for me – basically I want to turn it into something like this (but less useful and more full of weird internet stuff and occasional SHOUTY CAPS).
- GPT Hackathon: A thread of some of the entries and winners from a recent GPT hackathon – none of these are LIVE PRODUCTS, but all of the featured concepts are interesting and either useful or fun, and a nice antidote to the seemingly-infinite ‘summarise a document’-type products currently floating around the AI swamp. My personal favourite of these is the AI-powered stuffed toy, which is 100% going to be on sale somewhere this Christmas (honestly, I really do think that the potential for using GPT in a sort of updated Tamagotchi or Little Computer People fashion is HUGE – so, er, go on! Do it!), but the trivia game looks fun too and this is, generally, just good inspiration should you be in the market for something to do with all this shiny, exciting new tech.
- The Shot List: Very much a link for the ‘I work in an agency’ people, this, but Nathalie Gordon has compiled this superb thread on Twitter showing different types of shots that you might use when filming a video; the idea is that you bookmark this so that when you’re pitching a specific video you can use actual examples of specific shots or visual styles to illustrate your concept. Which, fine, is probably something that REAL visual creatives do all the time already, but, well, I am not a REAL visual creative (or even a fake one, frankly) and so I will take all the help I can get. THANKYOU NATHALIE.
- The Census Maps: The UK’s Office of National Statistics this week updated all its maps with data from the latest census, meaning that it’s now possible to explore the UK through entirely new eyes and it is FASCINATING. You can literally get information at a street-by-street level, so if you’ve ever wanted to know exactly how many of your neighbours work in telly (do you live in Walthamstow? ALL OF THEM!!!!) then now’s your chance. Both just really interesting as a way of passing a few hours, and specifically really useful for any sort of local campaign planning you might need to do.
- Asdfjkl;: I love this SO MUCH, and really ought to put something similar on the Curios website (that’s a really bad idea, isn’t it?). “I’m not going to give you any information. I’m not going to try to sell you anything. I’m not going to preach anything. Because I’m different. I’m also going to ask you to be different, too. You see, a website that does not deliver information is useless. But like I said, I’ve washed my hands of that job and I’m leaving it to you. I want YOU to talk to me. So go ahead. Tell me something interesting. Tell me about how your day went. Tell me about ancient Roman trade routes. Tell me a funny joke. Anything at all. This is your website now and I am your audience.” Speak into the void – what’s the worst that could happen?
- Hand-carved Totoro: There’s something of a boom in super-luxe Miyazaki-related merch at the moment – first the Loewe/Howl crossover that’s being promoted all over Old St at the moment, now this astonishing bit of craftsmanship. Have you ever wanted to own a model of Totoro, carved by hand with exquisite precision by a master Japanese woodworker? It’s quite possible you have, yes, but have you ever wanted to fork out 330,000yen or a cool £2000 for such a thing? No, perhaps not, but NOW’S YOUR CHANCE! This is very silly but also rather lovely – and if you’re a fan of Miyazaki and Totoro and the rest, there’s a bunch of other less-expensive stuff for sale on the site (including some really rather lovely pottery for not very much money at all).
- WriteOut: Free audiotranscription powered by OpenAI’s Whisper – this is very, very good, and it’s free, and, honestly, if you’re paying for Otter then you might want to stop.
- Anima: Another massive interactive AI-enabled music toy! After the beatmaking arcade cabinet from last week comes this, which feels a bit like the muesli-eating, Guardian-reading, free-range parenting equivalent – “Anima is an interactive installation that facilitates a musical jam session between humans and machines. Anima functions like a sequencer that uses AI algorithms to generate new musical sequences, but with a unique twist: the installation not only allows you to make changes, but it also serves as a musician in its own right, meaning that it is an equal and active participant in the jam session, able to bring in and overwriting sequences. It creates variations and transitions that you can ignore, adapt and build upon. Through interplay and interaction with Anima, humans can freely experiment with various musical ideas and boundaries, as if they were jamming in a band.” This looks SO MUCH FUN – it’s a project by Dutch design studio Bureau Moeilijke Dingen, and you can contact them if you can think of something fun you’d like to do with it – so THINK OF SOMETHING.
- Patterns and Van Gogh: A website by one Stefan Pullen, which analyses the works of Vincent Van Gogh based on specific, data-based criteria – the size of the canvases he used, for example, where he painted them, which months of the year were his most creative, etc – and visualises the results; this is a really lovely bit of dataviz and a nice way of exploring the works through a slightly different lens.
By Gordo Hart
THE SECTION WHICH WANTS TO FIND THE PERSON RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS STELLAR PIECE OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS AND SHAKE THEM WARMLY AND FIRMLY BY THE HAND, PT.2:
- Kaonavi Project Town: Another Japanese site, but this one is significantly less esoteric than the last – “Kaonavi envisions a future where everyone can play an active role in society , based on the purpose of implementing technology in “work” and changing the specifications of society from the power of individuals . So what does the future look like? How to work and live with individuality? The Kaonavi Town Project visualizes such questions and curiosity about the future as a town through an in-house workshop”. What this effectively means is the creation of a massive LEGO diorama (built by Japan’s very own accredited LEGO master, no less – I had no idea that such things existed, by the way, but apparently there are a small numbers of LEGO-certified professional builders who are recognised by the brand for their excellence in miniature construction, and I can’t tell you how much that pleases me) which kids can use as a way of exploring concepts around planning and society and social responsibility, and there’s even an associated OTHER website that lets you explore said diorama in more detail (but which is all in Japanese and thus is sadly utterly incomprehensible to me). I think this is such a smart didactic technique, and it feels like something from which inspiration could be drawn for lots of other forms of lightly-educational activity.
- Notes Art: A gallery of sketches drawn by one Chris Silverman on his iPhone, using the most basic of built-in drawing tools rather than anything more arty – it’s almost annoying how good these are, but I am choosing to feel admiration and awe at Mr Silverman’s skills rather than a burning sense of injustice that I was in a different building when the artistic talent was being handed out. This has been going for about 18 months, and, aside from the obvious skill and creativity on display here, I am very much a fan of that sort of dedication.
- Heatmap: A BRAND NEW news organisation, dedicated to covering issues pertaining to the climate crisis. Interesting both from the point of view of media – I wouldn’t, personally, have imagined that there was too much money in running a publishing venture focused exclusively on an issue that the past few decades have shown we are more than happy to pretend simply doesn’t exist – and content, this is worth adding to your media lists should you operate in this space (or worth bookmarking if you’re simply interested in charting the apocalypse).
- Rotating Sandwiches: This feels very much like a Matt Round project, but somehow doesn’t appear to be one – have you ever wanted a website which offers one thing and one thing only, to whit: a selection of high-res 3d scans of sandwiches, rotating on themselves? No, you probably haven’t, have you, but that’s probably only because you lacked the imagination to conceive of such a marvellous entity – I guarantee that once you click you will come to appreciate the majesty. These are really high-quality scans, so well done whoever it is who’s taken the time to get a really faithful 3d representation of a classic reuben and whatever the fcuk that…thing about halfway down the page is meant to be.
- North of the Border: Whether or not you’re someone who ‘gets’ ASMR, one of the nice things about the web has been learning that it’s a pretty universal human joy to watch someone performing a task with great concentration and skill. So it is with this YouTube channel, in which a very talented North American guy shows you how he makes some quite astonishingly detailed models of pop-culture figures – the stuff he makes is very much on the geeky end of the spectrum, but the quality of the work (and the intensely-soothing nature of watching anyone sculpt clay, frankly) means that these are a pleasure to watch whether or not you particularly care to see what a ‘realistic’ version of the alien from Lilo&Stitch would look like (‘grotesque’, should you be curious).
- Unclogging Drains: I recently had to get the drains unblocked (more fascinating dispatches from my personal life as and when!), and there was something weirdly-compelling about seeing this bloke wielding what was basically a nine-foot plunger with uncommon élan (less-compelling was the £50 bill for what was literally 17 seconds of (doubtless highly-skilled) wiggling) – after all, who doesn’t want to see persistent blockages being cleared? NO FCUKER, etc! This is the TikTok account of a guy whose job is literally clearing blockages in drains and gutters, and is basically a neverending feed of streaming water and decaying leaf mulch (there may well be slightly more faecal surprises lurking elsewhere in the feed, but I am yet to spot any) and the general sense of warm satisfaction of things being fixed. Low-stakes, and all the better for it.
- Href Place: YOU HAVE UNTIL 12th MARCH 2023 TO ENJOY THIS LINK! Or, more accurately, to engage with the project it’s promoting – the website will continue to exist, but you won’t be able to get involved. Vidya Giri writes: “as someone who is fond of making sketches of natural landscapes and sharing links, i thought it would be fun to illustrate digital landscapes (aka websites) and send them on to others as a way of sharing/showcasing various parts and lands of the internet! from this online space, i wanted to invite friends and internet strangers to sign up to receive an href postcard from me in the physical mail! based on your form submission, i will send you postcard that contains a recommended link along with an illustration of the website. in addition, you can recommend me a cool link and i will illustrate these into postcards too!” Links! On postcards! Sent to you in the mail! This sounds, frankly, perfect – there’s something so wonderfully silly about sending people handwritten urls that it almost becomes entirely sensible again, and I encourage all of you to click the link and sign up to the project because, honestly, who doesn’t like receiving postcards?
- The World Nature Photography Awards: MORE PHOTOS OF ANIMALS! Another week, another photo award – obviously the crocodile shot at the top of the page is the one that’s garnered all the attention, but my personal pick of the bunch is the incredibly dapper-looking Lesser Antillean Iguana (do you think it has an inferiority complex)?
- Dumb Password Rules: There are a few things that can be relied upon to shake one’s faith in humanity and one’s belief in the fundamental ability of our species to solve problems and strive towards the greater good – the replies to any of Elon Musk’s tweets (in fact, any trending topic on Twitter), the Daily Mail, string cheese, any pub on a Saturday or Sunday during the fcuking Six Nations – but few are so indicative of our propensity to make everything a bit sh1t as a bad website password system. Is there anything more annoying than being asked to create a password for something and then having to try nine separate ones because at each juncture the site you’re trying to use sees fit to add another condition that your password must meet before it can be considered valid (caps! Special characters! Numbers! Iambic fcuking pentameter!)? I put it to you that there is not – and you can prove it to yourself by perusing this excellent collection of websites whose password systems are so annoying, so bone-headed, that they act as cautionary notes to UX designers the world over. SO MANY IDIOTIC DESIGN CHOICES HERE – also, this is a convenient shortlist should any of you be hackers looking for easy sites to gain access to, so feel free to share your ill-gotten proceeds with me once you’re done.
- Clarity: There have been a variety of platforms over the past few years – particularly post-2016 – which have sought to create an analytical layer over media overage of the news to enable readers to get a sense of partisan bias and polarisation around particular stories; Clarity is yet another, and whilst it’s not perfect it’s an interesting attempt to contextualise how certain news stories are being treated and who’s driving coverage of them. The site picks the biggest news stories of the day and then analyses their coverage across a range of news websites, specifically analysing their prominence on-Page to determine the weight being given to each story from the left and right-wing press respectively. This only covers stuff of interest to the US, but I would be really interested to see what this showed us about news in the UK – if nothing else, it’s a useful way of seeing at a glance which stories are being pushed (or, depending on your perspective, suppressed) by which publishers.
- NDA Buzz: These are, I think, actually available for sale – NDAs in pill form! Obviously not ACTUALLY legally binding, I presume that this is a riff on the fact that NDAs really aren’t worth the paper they are written on – this is a project by interactive design studio Hoax, which features pills filled with powder made from powdered rice paper, on which had previously been printed a standard NDA contract, which pills are designed to be ingested by all parties involved in the contract. VERY silly, but, equally, I would very much enjoy buying a bunch of these and then forcing everyone I worked with to solemnly ingest one with me as part of some sort of stiltedly-ceremonial ritual (possibly involving a minor act of bloodletting, just to up the ante a bit).
- LGBTQ+ VR Museum: This looks great – it’s a piece of work that’s created to work as an installation, and so the only thing available at the URL is some details about the exhibit and some trailers, but it looks like a fascinating project and experience. The LGBTQ+ VR Museum is (as the name might suggest) a virtual reality museum of queer history, melding significant milestones such as the Stonewall riots and the AIDS epidemic with personal anecdotes and recollections from the wider community, the trailers give the impression of an interactive exhibition that really understands the medium it’s built in. If you’re working on anything relating to queer history and have a space you’re looking to fill, this is very much worth a look and potentially a booking.
- Doorknobs: A 24 year old digital art project! This is a work from 1999, which is frankly mindboggling – never mind that it’s not exactly the most thrilling of webpages, FEEL THE WEIGHT OF HISTORY ON YOUR MOUSE FINGER! “I photographed every door or drawer knob, handle, or latch I touched from the time I awoke on Thursday, June 3rd, until I went to bed on Friday, June 4th, 1999.” See the doorknobs! Enjoy the doorknobs! Revel in the analysis of the doorknobs! Practically-perfect internet.
- The Phrontistery: I’m slightly astonished that this hasn’t wandered across my field of vision before now, but this is SUCH a great website for lovers of the English language: “Welcome to the Phrontistery! Since 1996, I have compiled word lists and language resources to spread the joy of the English language in all its variety through time and space. A phrontistery (from the Greek phrontistes ‘thinker’) is meant to be a thinking-place for reflection and intellectual stimulation. I invite you to explore the various site features relating to language and lexicography, find that half-remembered rare or obscure word you’ve been looking for, or to read and explore essays on language, linguistics, and culture. Have a look around, and enjoy!” There is so, so much to enjoy here, but if nothing else may I encourage you to have a spelunk around the obscure words list – I was just educated as to the existence of ‘gelicide’ (death by cold) as a term, which pleased me no end, and you will definitely find at least one new term with which to annoy the fcuk out of friends and colleagues.
- Free Vector Memes: All the memes! In vector form! For free! To do with what you will! “Introducing powerful Meme vectors! Remix, tweak and change colors to your heart’s content – all licensed under GNU General Public License with no copyright infringement intended. Unleash the creative beast within you!” If nothing else you now have absolutely no excuse for putting a vectorised version of wojak on your company’s 404 page.
- Phylopic: Do you want a free repository of images of a frankly incredible variety of ‘animals, plants and other lifeforms’ in black and white silhouette? OF COURSE YOU DO! Honestly, you have no idea how amazingly comprehensive this is – you want a silhouette of a banded anteater (as opposed to a regular, non-banded one)? GREAT! How about a lesser flying phalanger? EVEN BETTER! Honestly, this has silhouettes of animals so obscure I am half-convinced the site owners have just made them up.
- Sumplete: This annoyed me this week – a bunch of people uncritically wrote this up as ‘GPT INVENTED AN ENTIRELY NEW GAME OMG!’, based on this blogpost by its co-creator where they explain that they asked ChatGPT to come up with an idea for a word game, and the code for it, and it magically WORKED! Which is impressive, until you bother to do a bit of supplementary research and discover that what The Machine has in fact done is dug up the code for an already-existing game that’s available on the Play Store. Which, obviously, is unsurprising, given that the software is merely drawing from things it’s seen before – it doesn’t ‘understand’! It can’t ‘think’! Any ‘originality’ it is capable of is accidental! Anyway, just putting this here because we are going to see a LOT of ‘AI invented XX!’ stuff in the coming months and it’s important to retain some healthy scepticism.
- Cinemashle: Can you guess the films that have been mashed together, based on the AI-generated images you’re presented with? 5 guesses each time, a different pair of films to identify each day – this is quite fun, and when you guess correctly you get a bonus AI-imagined script snippet for the nonexistent film as an additional treat.
- The Videogame Sound Effects Quiz: How many of these samples from videogames can you identity? Listen to the clip, guess the game it’s taken from, and know that if you can get more than about 5 of these you have made…questionable use of the mysterious gift of life granted you by an unknown force. This is SO HARD, and, honestly, I think anyone who manages to get above 40 on this (there are 60 in total) ought to have some sort of nerd shrine built to them (and anyone who gets 60 probably needs some sort of intervention to pry the controller from their hands and wash between the skin folds).
- Rogule: Another daily puzzle, this one letting you play through a small roguelike dungeon every 24h. Can you survive? Will the monsters defeat you? Erm, probably not to be honest – as pointed out by Rob at B3ta, from whence I have shamefully filched this link, this does seem to be rather easy to win. Still, consider it another distraction to add onto the pre-work routine stack.
- Big Sad Fall Assistants: This is FUN, but also requires a slightly greater degree of hand/eye coordination than I’m honestly comfortable with, meaning I am embarrassingly unskilled at it – still, it’s enjoyable to play even if I can’t get past the third level (so ashamed). The game’s simple – move your pair of robots left and right between the buildings to catch the office workers hurling themselves from the windows and bounce them right back to their desks again (there’s a light ‘oh the horrors of late-period capitalism!’ tone to the whole thing, should you care about the framing) – but rendered slightly more complex by the fact you need to move both robots at once, which lends it a slight ‘pat your head, rub your belly’ quality (or at least it does for me – perhaps you’re less of a malcoordinated mess than I am); this is fun, and could probably work as a keyboard-sharing two-player game if there’s anyone who you’d feel comfortable being that proximate with.
- Lander: This is very, very simple – land the lunar module! How hard can it be?! – but I guarantee that you will be cursing it, and yourself, when you’re 15 minutes late for dinner/bed/that person off Grindr who’s been cuffed to your bedpost for about an hour now (delete per your lifestyle choices) because you decided to have JUST ONE MORE GO. This is insanely moreish and very fun (and not a little infuriating too, like all the best games).
- Gourdlets: Finally this week, a genuinely soothing digital toy – Gourdlets is a playable demo for a forthcoming game which answers the question “what if SimCity but pixelart and with literally no challenge to it at all?” – your job is just to build whatever small village-type setup you choose, with no worries about budgets or disasters or making things work. Your creation will be populated by small, cute, bloblike creatures (called, one presumes, Gourdlets) who will arrive in your village by train at regular intervals, and who will proceed to wander around your town, enter your buildings, sit on your benches, barbecue on your fires…honestly, this is possibly the most soothing thing I have seen all year, and if you’re feeling in any way stressed or overwhelmed or, honestly, like you’d rather stick pins in your eyes and ears and genitals than spend another second thinking about customer journey profiles, or audience personas, or the importance of strategy in the modern agency landscape (lol!), then click this link and let the pain melt away. This is practically therapy, I tell you.
By Glen Baxter
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- The Dot is Black: I absolutely adore this. The Dot Is Black “is a platform for research design that aims on the development of design knowledge through generative drawings made with code. The multidisciplinary design concept behind thedotisblack attempts to combine visual narratives and natural science studies, sound analysis and data visualization. In general, thedotisblack focuses on simple rules in code that utilize basic design principles that can be overlapped, merged or used for further development. In this context, geometry plays an important role as it enables a circular argument that brings things together while providing direction and flexibility. At the same time, coding does not only emphasize on the relationship among its parts but also enables the potential for a high and unexpected complexity of the whole that can be controlled. thedotisblack is exploring this complexity and control.” SO MANY PRETTY IMAGES.
- Faces In The Cloud: A VERY OLD Tumblr, this, highlighting all the ways in which facial recognition tech is often very bad at recognising faces. It would be fascinating to run this sort of thing again to see how much the tech’s improved (and, perhaps more interestingly, where it hasn’t).
- WTF Happened in 1971?: This is interesting – accompanying the podcast of the same name, this is a collection of graphs which all suggest that SOMETHING happened in 1971 that changed the world and basically set modernity in train; these are mostly of a variety of different global economic indicators, and tend to show the rate of change of each of them shifting dramatically around 1971 – WHY? WHAT HAPPENED? I am never, ever going to listen to the podcast that goes with this, so if someone smarter than me could explain this all via email that would be great thanks.
- Vault of VHS: “Dedicated to the design of retail VHS packaging, for both home & pre-recorded tapes.” I bet THAT’S got your pulse racing, hasn’t it?
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Gigtapes: Oddities from old VHS videotapes found at US thrift stores and boot sales – this tends towards the ‘odd, old-time curio’ rather than the ‘cursed’, but that’s no bad thing to my mind. If you want a great source of slightly-grainy clips of moderately-surreal local access cable programming from the 1980s and 90s then this will be PERFECT for you (and if you don’t, WHY NOT FFS?).
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!
- The Machine’s Work Is Good Enough: I can’t stress enough how good I think this is and the extent to which it’s (imho) the most nailed-on analysis of What All This AI Stuff Means For Creativity and Content and Entertainment. Brian Feldman writes persuasively that anyone suggesting that AI-generated content won’t sweep the world because ‘it’s not very good’ is spectacularly missing the point and has failed to pay attention to what’s been going on for YEARS online – specifically, that we don’t actually expect or even particularly want things to be ‘good’ anymore, that the way the web works and is structured and has evolved means that in fact we’re perfectly happy to put up with stuff that is a bit crap but generally just about ‘good enough’, and that machine-generatyed content (copy, specifically) is already just about ‘good enough’ to fit neatly into that ecosystem of mediocrity. Honestly, next time someone tries to give you the line about ‘people won’t put up with the pabulum spat out by The Machine’ take a moment to think about what is most popular on TV and online (the REAL popular stuff, not the things that broadsheets write op-eds about) and realise that, well, it’s simply not true: “I just think it’s worth reiterating that the story of internet culture recently has not been one of austerity or moderation. It’s about taking the easy route and flooding the zone with the same meme templates and TikTok sounds everyone else is using at a regular interval — as opposed to things that are creative and unique and, well, good. This has been true for years: consistency over quality is a winning strategy in terms of audience growth. All of the stories I read about content creator burnout are about how exhausting and awful it is to have to post so often, rather than about what most artists have traditionally struggled with throughout most of human history: being in a creative rut. To me, that’s extremely telling.5 A flywheel system that encourages this type of brainless output incentivizes the proliferation of automated systems that let people continue to pump out at-best-mediocre stuff while shirking responsibility for what’s actually generated. So I see the twisted appeal of the shortcuts, and am not more aghast about it than anything else I’ve seen over the last decade. The posters have been sleepwalking for a very long time.”
- The Waluigi Effect: You may have seen Waluigi’s name bafflingly cropping up in the general AI-wrangling discourse this week and wondered what the fcuk it was all about – this is the article that started the ball rolling, and whilst it’s…a bit knotty in places, it’s also SUPER interesting from the point of view of how our current crop of AI models work, and how they ‘think’ (they don’t think), and how knowing more about how they identify concepts and ‘situate’ them in latent space can help direct them more effectively. I am not going to try and paraphrase the arguments here because, honestly, you do just have to read the longform work I’m afraid, but I promise that if you take it slowly then it does all make sense and will properly make your brain fizz with the cleverness and oddity of it all.
- AI & Photojournalism: I continue to be generally discomfited by the p1ss-poor tenor of most of the coverage of the current AI boom, and the lack of anything beyond “WOW THIS IS BASICALLY MAGIC” and “IT ONLY CREATES DERIVATIVE RUBBISH” discourse from much of the mainstream press. This article in the Columbia Journalism Review is an interesting corrective to that – in it, Amanda Darrach interviews Fred Ritchin, a former NYT Photo Editor, about what image-based AIs mean for photojournalism and ideas of ‘truth’ and representation, and the whole conversation is so much more nuanced and intelligent than 90% of what I’ve read around this in recent weeks. Ritchin asks interesting questions not only about the technology but also about the role of photojournalism in culture and the particular ways in which it works to create collective cultural memory, and the storytelling aspect of a single image, and trust and truth and and and – honestly, this is really interesting and thought-provoking, even if (as I appreciate many of you probably are) suffering from not-insignificant AR fatigue right now.
- How Long Does Twitter Have Left?: The slow decline of my favourite website continues apace – it’s astonishing how many people simply don’t use the platform anymore compared to a year ago, and how rickety it is, and how much worse the spam is, and how, despite all of this, That Fcuking Man is still making like it’s all going swimmingly (it’s clearly not). Anway, this is a short bit of speculative analysis by Dave Karpf which suggests, based on his calculations, that the site’s got about 6 months before Elong declares it bankrupt (and inevitably blames his failure to make the business a success on the WOKE MIND VIRUS.. Let’s see how accurate this proves to be.
- Google Control: Ok, this is QUITE GEEKY, and unless you’re particularly interested in search rankings or ‘how the internet works at a sort-of foundational level’ or advermarketingpr-type gubbins then you might want to skip it – for the rest of you, though, this is a SUPER-interesting look at the the companies that effectively own all of the most trafficked sites on the web, how they maintain that position, and what YOU, eager digimarketer, can learn from them. Honestly, whilst yes, fine, this is a BIT work-y, and whilst also yes, fine, there is literally nothing more boring on this earth than SEO, this is genuinely interesting and informative, and I say this as someone who has pretty much decided that they can’t be fcuked to feign interest in ‘work’ anymore and may well just stop forever and see what happens.
- The MAGA-fication of North Idaho College: I know that the majority of you aren’t North Americans (actually, due to the previously mentioned absence of any sort of analytics on Curios whatsoever, I don’t know that at all – but I assume), and that this writeup of CULTURE WAR B0LLOCKS at some college you’ve bever heard of therefore probably doesn’t strike you as immediately interesting, but I honestly think that this sort of thing is a bit of a canary in the coal mine for the UK and as such I would encourage you to have a read as, well, if you don’t see this sort of thing happening over here before too long then you’re a more optimistic person than I am. The piece details how “for most of the past two years, the college’s governing board has been a volatile experiment in turning grievances into governance. Trustees backed by the county Republican Party hold a majority on the board. They have denounced liberal “indoctrination” by the college faculty and vowed to bring the school administration’s “deep state” to heel and “Make N.I.C. Great Again””, and how that has rendered the institution effectively ungovernable and at risk of closure. This is less about North America and more about a general trend towards a conception of the world that is entirely zero-sum, in which it is impossible to conceive of an improved outcome for one group without a necessarily worsened outcome for another, and which, as a result, leads to the sort of rage and fear we’ve been seeing around LGBTx rights and women’s rights and immigration over the past few years. Honestly, after this week’s ridiculous, horrible ‘small boats’ performative sh1tshow in the UK, this sort of article feels significantly less alien than one might have hoped.
- Inflationships: Ooh, I do like a new lifestyle slang term (and apologies, by the way, if this has been current for AGES – I am old, and so get to this stuff late) – ‘inflationships’, as characterised by this piece in The Face and coming to every single strategy upfront for every single youth-facing FS brand campaign in the world VERY SOON, describes the modern situation where couples are forced to move in together earlier than they might have chosen to as a result of everything costing seventythreemillion pounds. Basically this is an updated, three-years-on version of all those stories about people ending up spending Lockdown One with some random they’d chirpsed off Hinge, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use it as a spurious hook for whatever tired old brand activation you’re currently looking to peddle to Monzo or whoever.
- The TikTok Bad Dates Content Flywheel: It is interesting, if you’re an online Methuselah like me, to witness different content trends and formats being resurrected and reinterpreted for a new platform and generation – so it is with the storied ‘OMG my dating life is a disaster!’ content vertical, beloved of (mostly) young women since blogging was a thing and now being remixed for the TikTok age. Which means more crying into camera, more sleuthing and tracking and shaming…what I find interesting about this is the way in which the style of what’s produced differs from generation to generation, and the way in which things that would have most likely been anonymous back in the day are now presented in-person – because, after all, what’s the point of going massively viral if noone knows who you are? I think there’s a really interesting essay to be written looking at the different ways specific content tropes play out on different platforms and in different eras, so, er, if any of you would like to write it for me then that would be great, thanks.
- ExploitTok: There’s not much to say about this – this piece details how people in the developing world are increasingly turning to dark and exploitative content to get eyeballs on TikTok, and, subsequently, some money. “In a series of recently viral livestreams on Indonesian TikTok, the premise is always the same: Women in their 50s and 60s sit in a stagnant pool of water and mud, often shivering. The women’s clothes are soaked to the skin, and they periodically throw a pail of water over themselves, looking directly at the camera. At times, they wipe away tears, appearing distressed. In doing so, the women — or the TikTok creators directing them, at least — can earn money. Over hours, sympathetic viewers send “coins” and gifts that can be exchanged for cash, amounting to several hundred dollars per stream.” This isn’t in any way surprising – “will w4nk for pennies” is, after all, a classic variation on The Oldest Profession In The World – but that doesn’t stop it from being miserable. Much like with the dating horror stories piece above, this is another ‘every generation runs the same content hoops’ story, except this time this is basically ‘bumfights, but make it globalised late-stage capitalism’. Bleak.
- The King’s League: This is SO interesting – the first profile I’ve read of Gerard Pique’s “King’s League” seven-a-side tournament/franchise that the former Barca player has established in Spain, where a bunch of teams (captained by streamers, YouTubers and a couple of ex-pros) compete in rolling tournaments which are shot and cut for distribution across streaming platforms, complete with vague soap opera-style intrigue and a bit of wrestling-ish kayfabe thrown in for good measure. This feels like a version of a future, not least in the (very smart) way that it’s all been envisaged backwards from the mobile screen – everything is optimised to make COMPELLING CONTENT FOR THE SOUGHT-AFTER 8-24Y/O DEMOGRAPHIC and everything (from the format of the tournaments, to the way the games are structured, to the way they’re shot and edited) is designed to match up to the hypersaturated, fast-cut media which its intended audience is already addicted to.
- Dating Men With Podcasts: I think you probably already know what this article says, but, as someone who fcuking hates podcasts and is firmly convinced that somewhere in the region of 97% of them don’t deserve to exist and doesn’t understand why so many men with skinny jeans and beards seem to think that anyone should care what they think about anything, I found it both pleasing and funny and perhaps you will too.
- What Drum Machines Can Teach Us About AI: This piece is actually not really about AI, or at least not so’s you’d notice; instead, it’s about the history of drum machines, and how they have been used and incorporated into musical creation since their development – ok, fine, so it’s a BIT AI-ish insofar as there’s a bit of discussion about technology as complementary to, rather than substitutive of, human creativity.
- Finding Audrey Amiss: The link here takes you to the ‘collection’ page for a series of articles about outsider artist Audrey Amiss, which have been commissioned as part of the process of cataloguing and analysing her works which is currently being undertaken by the Wellcome Collection; there are three parts at present, and the rest will be published over the coming weeks. Amiss was a classic ‘outsider’ artist – prolific, almost compulsive, in their work, and frequently beset by mental illness which characterised their life and their practice and which affected their ability to make inroads into the ‘mainstream’ arts scene of the 20th Century. I personally find stuff like this absolutely fascinating, heartbreaking and poignant – plus, beyond that, the Wellcome is asking some genuinely interesting questions about the role of the curator in the presentation of collections such as this, and whether or not it is possible for a curator to ever present an ‘artist centric’ view of a body of work such as this. Honestly, just read this opening to the first essay and see if it grabs you: “On a summer’s day in 2013, a woman called Audrey Amiss died alone in her south London flat, aged 79. On that day, she had eaten a Cornetto ice cream and a Sainsbury’s fruit sponge pudding before sticking the packaging down into a lined notebook, a scrapbook where she documented all the food she ate and household items she used every day. She sketched a few items she could see in her home. She wrote a letter to the charities Scope and Freedom from Torture. She tucked a bus ticket to Croydon and a receipt for a cheese sandwich into a log book, ready to be pasted down and annotated with her thoughts on the day’s activities. In her account book, she recorded, next to a receipt, that she’d “trudged the route. Arrived home exhausted. ZAPPED. CHEATING. After 10 July 2013, the rest of the pages of these volumes are blank, marking the final moments of Audrey’s life.”
- Making Bikes: It may not surprise you to learn that I subscribe to a LOT of newsletters – one of my favourites is called ‘Scope of Work’, which is about manufacturing and making stuff, and is full of things I don’t really understand written by and for people who are several orders of magnitude more practical than I am. This week it featured this essay by Spencer Wright, all about their experiences building bikes, and I am not exaggerating when I tell you it is honestly one of the most interesting things I have read in ages and taught me LOADS about how bikes are made and how they work and, look, I accept that not everyone is going to be enticed by a few thousand words of someone talking about soldering metal tubes together but I promise you that there is poetry in here if you look for it.
- In For A Pound: This is a GREAT piece of writing in VAN magazine (which is, in case you were as unfamiliar with it as I was up til this week, a publication dedicated to classical music) and which reminded me a lot stylistically of something one might find on Vittles, or The Fence (which is no bad thing, to be clear – just that it clearly inhabits a certain space in young, humorous, disaffected, urban, left-wing cultural criticism which you may find familiar) – the author, Hugh Morris, buys a £1 ticket to the Royal Opera House as part of its current scheme to improve access to FINE ART (as aside: does anyone REALLY like opera? It’s always struck me as something that people pretend to enjoy rather than actually enjoy, like caviar and children’s first birthday parties), and writes about art and value and how the two intertwine, and, honestly, this really is very good indeed.
- The California Problem: OK, even by the standards of Web Curios this article is VERY LONG – we’re talking a good 10k words here, I think – and it’s very specifically about current trends and themes in indie game design, and as such I feel confident in saying it’s perhaps not for everyone; that said, if you’ve any interest at all in the production of culture and how that works, and how trends within a field work and don’t work, and how they can become stultifying, then this is very much worth reading (but you might want to break it up into bitesize chunks). It will also help if you know who Jonathan Blow is, I think, though it’s not 100% essential.
- Agnes Callard’s Marriage of Minds: This article has caused QUITE THE FUSS in certain sections of the web – I present it here with minimal comment, other than to offer you this basic precis: 1) Agnes Callard is a philosophy professor, who was married to another philosophy professor until she fell in love with one of her students and divorced her husband to be with him; 2) Agnes Callard now lives with her new partner, her former husband, their two kids, and her new child with her new husband – they claim this works out well for everyone involved; 3) Agnes Callard spends an awful lot of time in this article talking like someone who does not in fact think this is working out super-well for everyone involved, no matter what she thinks she is saying; 4) Agnes Callard writes and talks about feelings with a degree of precise self-absorbtion I don’t think I have ever encountered before in a human being (also, as an aside, Agnes Callard is autistic, which feels like perhaps it could and should have been made more of in the piece, but you may feel differently about this bit). You will either find this HILARIOUS or quite incredibly boring – but, honestly, I couldn’t help but giggle throughout at how STAGGERINGLY self-regarding and self-involved this all is. Whilst I appreciate that the unexamined life may not in fact be worth living, I would also cheerfully posit that there can be such a thing as TOO MUCH examination.
- Football in Brazil: An exceptional piece of writing in the LA Review of Books, by Clarissa Fragoso Pinheiro, which writes about Brazil and being Brazilian and the way in which football is inextricably linked with nation and nationality. This is not only superbly-written throughout, but also taught me so much – from the idea of ‘brazilian’-style football being intrinsically-linked to the country’s demographics and the concept of ‘mulatismo’, to the links between the famous 7-1 defeat to Germany and the rise of Bolsonaro, this is packed full of history and ideas and culture, and is, above all else, a great read (even if you don’t care about football whatsoever).
- The Taking of Stonehenge: A short story by Adrian Hon, part SATIRE about cultural conservation and paternalism, part amusing scifi short, this is near-perfect in idea and execution.
- On Novocain: If you’ve ever read anything about addiction you’ll have come across the trope of the addict who needs medical attention but can’t risk taking anaesthetic in case that should trigger a relapse; this is one of those, but, I promise you, it is LOADS better than you might expect and it’s a million miles away from the tortureporn machismo of James Frey’s (fictional) experiences. “It’s a scientific fact that there’s no way to know exactly how long a single second is. It’s not like an inch. You can’t lay a second next to another second and see if it’s the same size. The truth is that seconds might be all kinds of different sizes. Ordinarily this is an abstract, philosophical kind of truth about the difference between time and space, but when you experience extended chronic pain, this truth loses its abstract quality and you understand that all seconds are not the same size and that there are long seconds, and there are longer seconds, and there are Very Long Seconds.”Superb.
By Maud Madsen
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS (WHICH THIS WEEK MAINLY COME FROM RENE WALTER’S EXCELLENT GOOD MUSIC NEWSLETTER!)!: