Webcurios 17/11/23

Hello everyone! Hello! Normal service is once again resumed after last week’s minor, prose-free aberration – thanks for your patience and for the fact that the vast majority of you managed to resist the temptation to email me with a pithy ‘it was better without the words, you cnut’ message.

Anyway, I am once again in something of a rush due to the fact that I owe my girlfriend several hours of domestic labour and need to get my marigolds ready – while I accumulate cleaning products and worry about their effect on my delicate hands, why don’t YOU sit tight with this week’s selection of top-quality webspaff and click and read and smile and laugh and cry and wonder and hope, and generally enjoy the whole gamut of human emotion that I am slowly trying to eliminate from my life via the medium of persistent substance abuse?

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you might well end up being Foreign Secretary of the UK if you hang around long enough (and if you went to Eton. And Oxford).

By Carla Sutera Sardo

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH TWO HOURS OF BRILLIANTLY-CHOSEN TUNES RUNNING THE GAMUT FROM ‘DEEP BASS’ TO D’N’B THROUGH A BUNCH OF GENRES WHICH I COULDN’T PUT A NAME TO IF I TRIED, MIXED BY FLOATING POINTS!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT, NO, NOT ALL PEOPLE UNDER THE AGE OF 25 BELIEVE THAT OSAMA BIN LADEN WAS ACTUALLY A GOOD LAD THANKS TO TIKTOK FFS, PT.1:  

By Maisie Cowell (via)

FOR REASONS I CAN’T ADEQUATELY EXPLAIN I HAVE BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS ALBUM ALL WEEK AND I CAN HAPPILY REPORT THAT IT IS STILL GOOD, SO WHY NOT LET’S ENJOY ‘ONE COLOUR JUST REFLECTS ANOTHER’ BY ACHINGLY-PRETENTIOUS 90s WORLD MUSIC BEAT PIONEERS UP, BUSTLE AND OUT (WHO ARE BETTER THAN THIS FRANKLY AWFUL DESCRIPTION HAS JUST MADE THEM SOUND I PROMISE YOU!)!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT, NO, NOT ALL PEOPLE UNDER THE AGE OF 25 BELIEVE THAT OSAMA BIN LADEN WAS ACTUALLY A GOOD LAD THANKS TO TIKTOK FFS, PT.2:            

• Message In A Bottle: Would you like to issue a desperate ‘come and get me!’ plea to the little green men out there in the vastness of the cosmos? DO YOU REALLY THINK THEY WILL CARE? Regardless, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US has the theoretical opportunity to send a small record of our existence our into the inky black infinity that is SPACE thanks to this initiative by the NASA – you have until December this year to join the apparently 700,000 people worldwide who have already put their names on the list to have their identity engraved in TINY TINY TINY LETTERS onto a piece of metal that will be fired into space next year as part of the forthcoming Europa Clipper mission in 2024. Sadly there don’t appear to be opportunities to add any additional messages to any eventual readers, but you may still have time to change your name by deedpoll to, I don’t know, ‘save me from this dying planet before it’s too late’ which might be a suitable workaround.
• What Is My Cookie Cutter?: I was until this week unaware that there was such a proliferation of differently-shaped biscuit-cutting stencil shape things – BUT FCUK ME THERE REALLY ARE A LOT OF DIFFERENT ONES. As with everything else in life, there is a subReddit dedicated to the very specific question of ‘what the everliving fcuk is this shape meant to represent’, although (disappointingly to my mind) there is limited follow-up discussion on ‘yes, but WHY though?’.
• RoastPlug: This is, fine, a BIT rubbish, but I like the fact that it exists – using what I presume is an opensource multimodal model, this website invites you to upload a photo of yourself so that it can make fun of your hideous countenance. The humour isn’t exactly what I would call ‘sophisticated’ (I am of course the best person in the world to arbitrate what is and isn’t ‘sophisticated’, as those of you who’ve spent a decade or more wincing every time I type the word ‘teledildonics’ can attest), but I confess to letting out a small, shamed laugh when it told me that I was obviously someone who had mistaken superglue for hair gel. Again, you won’t be able to do this sort of thing with any of the big models due to tedious safety concerns, but it’s an example of the sort of fun/weird things that you will be able to make (for better or worse) with all the open source stuff.
• Scrolly Animation Styles: Would you like a webpage that demonstrates a whole host of different ways in which webpages can animate on scroll? IT’S LIKE CHRISTMAS HAS COME EARLY! This is really nice – hover over each example to see it in action, and there’s even links to download code examples should you want to try implementing any of them yourself.
• Oculi Mundi: MAPS! LOVELY OLD MAPS! “Oculi Mundi is a digital heritage destination: the home of The Sunderland Collection of world maps, celestial maps, atlases, globes and books of knowledge. The Collection was built out of a personal passion for travel, history, and the imagination. We seek to make it as accessible as possible — for study or for pure joy. Oculi Mundi takes a fresh, innovative approach to presenting antique material online…Explore mode presents beautiful images in a cluster, where you can browse and filter. You can peek inside the atlases and books to see internal maps and plates; you can view items at scale, and you can zoom in at super high resolution. An overview of each object is provided in text. In Research mode, the Collection’s objects are displayed in a more traditional way — but the functions are the same. You can filter or browse, view internal pages, and see items to scale. In this mode, full catalogue information is provided about each object.” This is really very nicely-presented – perhaps a *touch* fiddly in terms of UX/UI, if I’m being a pr1ck, but in general this looks gorgeous and is a pleasure to explore. Also, who doesn’t love old maps? NO FCUKER, etc!
• AI Voiceovers: More fun with multimodal – this is a proof-of-concept demo that shows how you can get AI to effectively create a(n admittedly not very good) voice over for whatever video you feed it – the machine effectively ‘watches’ the film you feed it and produces a v/o based on what it thinks is in it. Which, obviously, is only of use if you want a voice over which describes what is happening in the images which is…possibly unlikely, but it’s really not hard to see how this is going to be used at scale for product tutorials, sports highlights and the like in relatively-short-order.
• Mouchette: Via Kris, the website of Mouchette – ‘little fly’ in French – a digital artist who is almost certainly not a 13 year old girl, despite what the homepage here says. This is, I think, part of the body of work of Martine Neddam,  “an artist who uses language as raw material. Since she began as an artist, her favourite subjects always were “speech acts”, modes of address, words in the public space. Since 1988 she exposed text objects (banners, plaques, shadows on the wall) in museums and galleries. She also realized many large public commissions in several european countries: Netherlands, France, Great Britain Since 1996 she created on internet virtual characters who lead an autonomous artistic existence in which the real author is never disclosed.” – this is weird and baffling and labyrinthine, and if you are interested in following the threads there is a whole afternoon’s worth of reading and exploring to be found here.
• Omeleto: This site bills itself as home to ‘the world’s best short films’, which, honestly, strikes me as unlikely, but I was intrigued by the tactics on display here – each short is between about 8-12m long, and they are all, as far as I can tell, decent-quality and well-produced, and each is accompanied by a VERY SPECIFIC description of what you will get if you watch it – “A man who stutters is forced to drive a voice-activated car”, for example, or “A traumatized man tries to convince his girlfriend to keep their unborn baby” – and the description box for each video feels very much like an AI-generated summary of the script…I am fascinated by this. Is it just a reaction to the fact that a whole generation of people seemingly really, really dislike surprises in their fiction and want to know exactly what they are getting before they consume it? Are all these videos by the same production company? Are the plots AI-generated? Am I just assuming AI here when it’s just a standard, human-issue bit of growth-hacking? No clue whatsoever, can any of you tell me?
• Lightning: Apologies for the second ‘I…I don’t really know what this is’ link in a row but, well, I don’t really know what this is (and I was hoping one of you might be able to help me understand). Lightning is…a self-help movement? A cult? Some sort of awful cryptononsense? POSSIBLY ALL OF THE ABOVE!!! All I can tell you is that there is a webpage, and the promise of ENLIGHTENMENT, and a lot of very weird and oddly-shonky-looking images in which, for reasons that escape me, Vermeer’s ‘Girl With A Pearl Earring’ appears to be sitting at a laptop in a nondescript coworking space. There is an ‘About’ page, but, well, listen to this: “Lightning is dedicated to harmonizing the timeless wisdom of ancient philosophy with the transformative power of modern technology to cultivate vibrant communities, nurture personal and collective growth, and ignite the flames of inspiration. We believe that by seamlessly integrating the profound teachings of the past with the cutting-edge tools of the present, we can create a dynamic environment where individuals and groups can thrive. Lightning is to be a catalyst for connection, growth, and enlightenment, offering innovative solutions that bring people together, empower them to reach their full potential, and infuse their lives with purpose and inspiration.” LOL! Oh, no, hang on – here we go: “Lightning is a digital-first learning community; an immersive Encyclopedia that competes with Penguin, Wikipedia, and Kindle; a curator of sages, living, dead, and AI-resurrected; and, above all, an actual treasure hunt, threading tech and IRL, allowing you to choose your own learning adventure over the course of decades. In 10 years, anyone who reads the Great Books will be reading them on Lightning. Anyone who wants to chat with Socrates, Hammurabi, Keynes, Anselm, Virginia Woolf, Thucydides, Walter Benjamin, Marie Curie, Rabia, Rumi, Spinoza, or Suzuki, will be doing it on Lightning. Anyone who wants to travel the world, guided by the great texts and ideas of their destination will do so with Lightning in their pocket. The PhDs and would be PhDs who cannot make tenure or no longer want to because Humanities Departments are done for will work for Lightning—as spiritual Uber drivers, Charons taking you just beyond the bend of the familiar.” HM. I am going to suggest that in ten years time this is VANISHINGLY-UNLIKELY, but if any of you want to hand over your hard-earned (although I don’t know why but I imagine that the market for this sort of guff tends to be ‘inherited’ rather than ‘earned’ wealth) cash then please do let me know how you get on (if you can bring yourselves to descend from your intellectual eyrie).
• 7 Frames of Film: Thanks to reader Darren, who sent me this project with the following self-deprecating writeup: “just a little time-waster that shows my love for those parts of movies that most people don’t pay much attention to. It’s NOT cutting-edge technology, it’s NOT important, it’s NOT even that well-designed (as a former graphic designer I see the flaws), but it IS just a little fun.” DO NOT BE SO HARD ON YOURSELF, MYSTERIOUS READER DARREN! The game here is, in Darren’s words, “The rules are simple: every day a new puzzle is posted, and each new puzzle involves a new film. You’ll be presented with seven frames from the film, one at a time, starting with something extremely obscure and leading, eventually, to something that most people would recognize. Your goal is to correctly name the film as early as possible, earning as many points as you can. The number of points for that frame are shown at the bottom, so it’s easy to keep track”. Now I am so much of a film refusenik that this is basically impossible for me to play, but presuming that you don’t have my inexplicable-and-frankly-borderline-pathological aversion to watching films then you might find this a lot of fun.
• Chaptr: I am slightly surprised that none of the platforms have really leaned in to the whole ‘death’ thing – although perhaps that’s a factor of their own relative youth, and possibly the relative youth of many of the people that staff them. Still, it seems an odd oversight that Meta et al are continuing to cede territory to entrepreneurs attempting to solve the problem of ‘how do we deal with death in the post-digital/social era’ – which is exactly what Chaptr is attempting to do, letting people who sign up use the app to canvas memories and tributes from friends and relatives, and helps map the contours of a person’s life through the relationships they built along the way. There are multiple versions of this sort of thing out there now, but this looks like a decent addition to the range should you be in the market for such a thing.
• 150: I don’t, based on when this was seemingly launched, think I have featured this before and it doesn’t come up on the site search – but it does feel VERY familiar (though that might have more to do with the fact that the central conceit here, the “INSIGHT”, if you will, feels unpleasantly-familiar from far-too-many idiotic advermarketingpr ‘strategy’ conversations). 150 is a social network (Apple only, to date) which lets you have upto 150 connections and NO MORE THAN THAT – the idea being that 150 is more than enough people based on actual, real-life connections, and any more than that is basically getting into the realms of WEIRD ONLINE VANITY SH1T. I have just realised that there’s a lot of ‘PROUDLY TEXAN’ guff on the webpage which always sets my ‘potential fash’ alarms going, but I am quite interested in the idea here and whether they can find enough (or indeed any) people willing to pay $2 a month for what looks like, basically, the sort of service you could easily replicate with a well-curated WhatsApp group.
• Nervous System: The arrival of Christmas Advert Season here in the UK has once again given me the horrible seasonal whiplash that comes from the annual juxtaposition of ten months of ‘you know, we really ought to take some actual practical steps to mitigate the increasingly-terrifying-looking effects of humanity and capitalism on the planet we are still juyst about lucky enough to call home’ messaging followed by six weeks of constant exhortations to BUY MORE STUFF NOW BUY MORE THINGS LANDFILL ALL OF THE PLASTIC NOW! – and, as such, I’m unlikely to be doing much ‘festive gift guide’ content in Curios in the coming weeks. Still, I did think this company was interesting – Nervous System is “a generative design studio that works at the intersection of science, art, and technology. Drawing inspiration from natural phenomena, we create computer simulations to generate designs and use digital fabrication to realize products”, and they sell all sorts of procedurally-generated jigsaws and jewellery which you might like the look of (and obviously please ignore me and my tedious ‘buy less stuff’ moralising, and feel free to live however the fcuk you see fit because, honestly, I’m just some cnut sitting in his pants typing at you and you owe me literally nothing).
• The New Public Directory: This self-describes as “Products designing for a prosocial internet: As the social media landscape changes and a new wave of digital spaces emerges, this Directory is meant to be a resource for our field — a jumping-off-point for further exploration and research for anyone who’s interested in studying, building, stewarding, or simply using digital social platforms. We hope this will inspire creative exploration, spark new collaborations, and highlight important progress.” You want to find tools for community-building, activism, collaboration and communication? You want somewhere where you can explore solutions that are bottom-up and open-source and largely free or not-for-profit? GREAT HERE YOU ARE THEN!
• Ping: A few years ago my friend Simon (HELLO SIMON!) had an idea for an app which would basically have let you send up little ‘hello I am here right now’ location flares, visible on a map either publicly or to a limited selection of people, to help set up serendipitous encounters (and, obviously, as an easy and user-friendly tool for drug dealers) – that never came to anything (though he has a working prototype iirc, so do hit him up if you’re interested in making him an offer), but I see the ghost of it in Ping, a new app out of NYC which effectively does much the same thing – tell your friends when you’re out in case they fancy SPONTANEOUSLY MEETING UP WITH YOU. Which basically doesn’t really do anything you can’t do with Snap Maps (although in fairness there are better privacy controls here), but with the bonus that you don’t have to use fcuking Snap.
• The MiniZine Library: A collection of small zines made by kids as part of a multi-year project that has been taking place for a few years now – from its descriptor: “a community art project that aims to create zines and wall newspaper‚ simple home-made publications in different shapes and sizes, during customised art-making workshops with children of all ages‚ on subjects related to their specific contexts and interests. The workshops are essentially resources oriented, meaning that they are specifically designed for participants to be able to identify their internal and external resources through the creative process, play and sharing. Ultimately, they allow for an experience of the life affirming qualities of art-making without the pressure or expectation to produce anything. The fact that something wonderful stands at the end, namely the library, something collective albeit with individual efforts, is both empowering and humbling. With editions in Switzerland (Giswil and Langnau), Pakistan (Lahore) and India (Kolkata), we aim to create a growing Mini-Zine-Library that visits more cities and countries, broadening the range of local expressions to include different languages, cultures and ways of thinking.” I love this, and the window into international kids’ heads that it provides, and I would happily spend an hour or two hanging out in a physical library of these (which is weird given I can’t muster any enthusiasm at all for praising my mate’s kids’ scrawls).
• The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2023: Yes, I know, but YOU NEED THESE IN YOUR LIFE. I feel the memetic potential of ‘incredibly defeated-looking owl’ (trust me, you’ll know him when you see him) has not been fully explored yet, FYI.
• Mechanical Creations: Yes, ok, fine, I know I said I wasn’t going to include loads of ‘here’s some Christmas tat you can buy!’ links, but this is DIFFERENT. How happy would you be if some mysterious benefactor were to commission you your very own mechanical wood-and-metal toy based on their own specific design? I obviously have no idea – I don’t know you or who you are or what you are into FFS! – but, speaking personally, I WOULD BE FCUKING DELIGHTED, so if any of you fancy clubbing together and commissioning, I don’t know, an emaciated and slope-shouldered webmong tapping away at a low-end laptop in his pants, then I would be HUGELY GRATEFUL. This is the website of one Oliver Pett in the UK, and he is very talented indeed.
• Suspense Accents: A little soundboard website with a selection of buttons which, when pressed, produce a selection of small, suspenseful audio stings, which will be PERFECT for irritatingly soundtracking your significant other’s progress around the house/garden centre/soft play area (delete per your own personal flavour of domestic horror) this weekend.
• Bake Off: The Recipes: Ok, this might be old news to all of YOU, but I had literally no idea that every single recipe they have ever had on Bake Off is available on their website…BUT THEY ARE, ALL OF THEM! I appreciate that I might be a bit more excited about this than is strictly necessary, but I have made a yoghurt and orange cake AND some guinness and treacle bread this week and basically feel like some sort of gluten god, and basically just want to the rest of you to feel the same sort of carbohydrate glow that I am currently basking in.
• Nail Studio: You may not think that a small browser toy in which you get to paint the nails on a disembodied hand, in a graphical style reminiscent of 80s Apple, would be soothing, but you would be WRONG and that is why noone listens to you any more.
• WikiWho: Finally this week, a lovely link from last week’s B3ta – can you guess whose Wikipedia entry is being referenced from the drip-fed selection of biographical facts you’re presented with? If you’re anything like me, the answer will be ‘lol no of course you fcuking can’t’, but here’s hoping you’re less stupid than I am.

By Leonard Baby

OUR FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS THIS SLIGHTLY-BATSH1T SELECTION BY OSCO1 WHICH RUNS THE GAMUT FROM LOUNGE TO LATIN AND BACK, AND WHICH CONTAINS WHAT IS HONESTLY MY FAVOURITE COVER OF ‘STAYING ALIVE’ EVER AROUND ABOUT THE HALF HOUR MARK! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Targz: Do you like spirographs and pen art? Good, so does Targz, you will get on.
• Where Is Carrot Man?: I was not previously aware of this, but it turns out that there is a local celebrity in Melbourne – CARROT MAN! To quote from a small profile I found, “the man known only as Nathan, explained his reason was pure and simple – to make people smile. His choice of large vegetable hasn’t always stayed the same – at first he carried around a giant turnip he found at an op shop. “I was carrying it home and noticed how much it made people smile. That made me feel really good. So I decided to try carrying other giant things around,” Nathan said. He decided to trial a giant octopus and a giant squid, but neither attracted the same volume of smiles as his giant carrot. “The diversity of people smiling and the number of people smiling was much greater. So I just kept carrying the carrot around because it was the most successful thing at making people smile,” he said. Nathan, who is on a disability pension, said he would have preferred continue carrying around his giant squid, but in the end it was the smiles that spoke for themselves.” Which, I think we can all agree, is HEARTWARMING. This Insta account shares photos of Nathan and his carrot – if you don’t find this at least a tiny bit cute then, honestly, even *I* think you’re a miserable, dead inside cnut.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Patrick Leger

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: