Last weekend I went to watch non-league football at Canvey Island. I don’t really feel I should write about it too much in this newsletter other than to say ‘I do not, in all honesty, recommend that you spend a Saturday in February watching non-league football at Canvey Island’, but I would like to say in the club’s defence that you can get pints for £4.50 which makes it easier to pointedly ignore the 22 men shouting “FCUKING HOLD IT” at each other for 90 long, freezing minutes.

I also went to see contemporary dance last night – MY HOUSE HAS SO MANY ROOMS! Most of them admittedly empty, but nonetheless – which was warmer, but no less baffling (and the drinks were significantly more expensive). My ANALYTICAL TAKEAWAY from these experiences, which you will be grateful to learn I will happily share with you, is that you should basically never step outside your cultural comfort zone – it’s called a ‘comfort zone’ for a reason ffs, you wouldn’t want to hang out in your ‘torture and pain zone’ would you? No, you wouldn’t, so there.

Fcuking hell I am so so so tired. Can you tell? I worry you can tell.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are entirely entitled to just click the links and ignore the words this week, seriously.

By Tomona Matsukowa (this image lifted from TIH, for which thanks)

YOUR FIRST MIX THIS WEEK IS A COLLECTION OF REALLY *INTERESTING* (IN A GOOD WAY!) TRACKS WHICH I MIGHT CALL ‘CINEMATIC’ IF I WERE THE SORT OF PERSON TO WHOM THAT ADJECTIVE MEANT ANYTHING, SELECTED BY DJ LOSER! 

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IF YOU HAVE A NEWSLETTER WITH 140K SUBS WHICH YOU CHARGE £80 A YEAR FOR AND YOU MENTION THAT YOU FOUND SOMETHING IN MY P1SSY LITTLE EFFORT THAT YOU CHOOSE TO LIFT AND QUOTE ME ABOUT THEN THE LEAST YOU CAN FCUKING DO IS INCLUDE A BACKLINK (YES I AM TALKING ABOUT YOU, THE KNOWLEDGE, I KNOW YOU ARE READING THIS), PT.1:  

By Marta Blue

NEXT, THIS IS AN ASTONISHING 13H PLAYLIST COMPILED BY JARVIS COCKER WHICH IS RELIABLY ACE AND WHICH YOU SHOULD BOOKMARK RIGHT NOW!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IF YOU HAVE A NEWSLETTER WITH 140K SUBS WHICH YOU CHARGE £80 A YEAR FOR AND YOU FOUND SOMETHING IN MY P1SSY LITTLE EFFORT THAT YOU CHOOSE TO LIFT AND QUOTE ME ABOUT THEN THE LEAST YOU CAN FCUKING DO IS INCLUDE A BACKLINK YOU CNUTS (YES I AM TALKING ABOUT YOU, THE KNOWLEDGE, I KNOW YOU ARE READING THIS), PT.2:

• Komaeda: In what is an absolute BUMPER WEEK for ‘inexplicable and very large and occasionally-unsettling websites which your very own internet Virgil couldn’t begin to adequately describe even were he an actual, proper writer’, I think Komaeda might be the oddest of all. It opens with the phrase ‘i cant fcuking breathe’ and, honestly, only gets weirder from there. It’s a bit janky, there are parts of it that feel oddly like a Newgrounds animation c.2005 (REAL HEADS WILL KNOW) – including this alternative entrypoint, which feels like a portal back to a VERY different online time – and, again, I don’t have the faintest idea what is on all the pages or how deep this goes and so can’t promise there isn’t anything bad lurking somewhere in the depths, but it doesn’t feel like that sort of site fwiw. This is – and I know I say this all the time, but I feel it quite strongly, so – ART. Weird, broken, possibly-not-very-good art, but art nonetheless. There is music, there are visuals, there are stories and comics and essays and animations and VERY WEIRD THINGS, and quite a lot of stuff that sounds, honestly, like schizophrenia, but who can tell in this day and age? ENJOY!
• Psst!: In an era in which it seems clear that any ostensible – even if cosmetic – progress we might have made on the concept of ‘corporate responsibility’ is going to be rolled back hard over the course of the coming years, consequences be damned (I am not going to keep repeating the ’Boom Boom’ thing, but, well, that), it feels like the concept of leaking and whistleblowing is set to be more important than ever. Effectively Psst! is running a digital dead drop, letting anyone anonymously share files with their legal team who will then analyse and see if there’s anything that can be done with said information – per the blurb, “Psst is a non-partisan, non-profit public service that helps people bring forward public interest information. We’ve worked with a lot of people concerned about something they’ve seen at work. We know the tricks powerful corporations use to shut people up. We also know a lot of important information never comes out due to legal threats. In our era of AI, Big Tech and decreasing government guardrails, we need safe channels to share public interest information more than ever.” Perhaps unsurprisingly given Where We Are, “Currently, the Psst team is prioritizing depositors who are working in tech or US-based governmental entities” – should there be any of you reading this who fit that description, this might be worth a look. Although based on what I was told yesterday about some…changes another VERY LARGE company is set to make to its stated ‘values’ (LOL) and what this stuff practically means in terms of likely directions of corporate travel, I might suggest that any of you working in BIG EVIL CAPITAL LAND might want to think about this sort of thing too.
• Fiverr Go: I have long thought that the digital pieceworkers and VAs in places like the Philippines are going to be some of the earliest canaries to fall as AI starts cutting swathes, and it’s hard to see this latest innovation from gigworking platform Fiverr as anything other than an accelerant to the inevitable endpoint (ie all of those jobs are gone). The gimmick here is that Fiverr is allowing CREATORS (in this case v/o artists, illustrators and graphic designers from what I can tell) to spin up their own AI models based on their work, and license those models on a per-use basis to customers, theoretically combining AI and HUMAN CREATIVITY to create a passive income stream – the digital, model version of you works all day and night while you put your feet up and enjoy the fruits of your talented, exploited and extended via the magic of The Machine. Except, well, I can’t see how the economics work here because – and I appreciate that what I am going to say is possibly going to sound mean, and maybe is, but I think it is also true – none of the v/o artists or illustrators or designers tending to ply their wares on platforms like Fiverr are distinct enough to be worth the fee, and won’t be better enough than what, honestly, you can get from AN Other model where you can either use it for free or get an infinite license for a tenner a month rather than having to pay a per-work rate. So, well, why the fcuk would I bother? If I want to support a REAL CREATOR I would like them to do the actual work rather than using a model of their style; it feels like this offering misses several points. Still, as I often say, I don’t know the first fcuking thing about business or economics or, really, anything at all, and so expect this to be how we all do business in the AI-enabled luxury communist future of tomorrow.
• Olyn: What is Olyn? Per the landing page, “Pioneering the Future of Media Distribution…Supporting creators to monetize and distribute their media content without listing dependencies or platform constraints.” SO EVOCATIVE! SO INSPIRATIONAL! SO ARTISTIC AND HUMAN! Leaving aside the frankly-hideous prose, Olyn is marketing itself as a direct-to-consumer model for film creators – per this TC writeup, it: “claims to offer a new model for film and video distribution that leans on the power of social referrals to spread “à la carte” streaming content. Although any size of production — from Hollywood blockbuster downward — can use the platform, the company claims it could be a game changer for the independent film industry, which tends to struggle against the marketing budgets of the bigger movies distributed on mainstream streaming platforms…Instead of films being sold to platforms like Netflix, the model hinges on the marketing budget of the filmmakers themselves, combined with influencers, film critics, and content creators acting as distribution partners by embedding purchase links within their content, blogs, and social channels.” Look, it’s possible I’m missing something here but I don’t wholly understand exactly how ‘share a link to your content!’ is a revolutionary or disruptive proposition given, well, that’s how people have been sharing things for 25 years by now, but perhaps there’s something I’m missing (if this company still exists in the same shape in three years time I will eat my pants) (I would be grateful if a) none of you bothered tracking this; b) in three years’ time this is a long distant memory and I am finally happy and at rest).
• Sky360: I know that, per horse_e_books, everything happens so much, and that it is therefore hard to keep track, but it honestly feels like approximately a decade since a bunch of incredibly smart people in the US started taking potshots at planes because they thought that they were alien craft. Except it wasn’t, it was only a few months, and, given the potentially-parlous state of the world over the coming few years and the likely growing sense of paranoia which everyone’s going to start wearing like so many additional lbs of stress around our necks (you can feel it, can’t you, the knotting?), it’s likely that we’ve not seen the last of mad online UFO conspiracies – which is what makes it so UTTERLY TIMELY that someone has seen fit to launch Sky36, a project promising to establish “Observational Citizen Science of Earths atmosphere and beyond” (the infelicitous punctuation there is theirs on this occasion rather than mine, I promise) which DEFINITELY won’t attract every Area51-coded crank in the Northern Hemisphere, no sirree. Basically the spelling and tone of this makes me…somewhat concerned, but should you be the sort of person who wants to build their own UFO-detection system out of homebrew parts then, well, GREAT!
• Cutting Edge AI Video, February 2025 Edition: Or “LOL WE ARE SO COOKED (again)!”, choose your headline per preference. This comes via Arnicas’ superb newsletter (I can’t stress again how much you should be subscribed to it if you have any interest in visual / storytelling tech and AI) and is an experimental lora (that is, fine-tuning mod) for one of the better text-to-vid models, Hunyuan which basically creates vids that look…a bit crap. Honestly, watch these and tell me you’d be able to tag them as fake if presented to you in-feed – I posit that you would absolutely fcuking not be able to. I know I keep banging this drum, but I don’t think people are quite *getting* it, still – these things are not going to go away, they are not going back in the bottle, and they are very soon (within the year, doubtless) going to be good enough to create photorealistic video that mimics the grain and lighting and…mundanity of real life, and they will then become small enough and lightweight enough to run locally on a phone or laptop and cheap enough that the generation cost is less-than-trivial…and at that point I genuinely don’t know what happens. Do you?
• Rabbithole: As everyone begins to realise that what both OpenAI and Google both admitted two years ago (specifically, “we have no moat here”) is entirely true, we’re basically entering the era of ‘all the models are largely interchangeable outside of specific usecases and they all do basically the same stuff’, which is good for users if not for the poor chumps who put all their eggs in the wrong basket (what’s that? Is that the sound of no violins whatsoever? It fcuking is, you know!). So it is with ‘Deep Research’, which is being touted by everyone as THE NEW HOTNESS. Rabbithole is a standalone platform (although almost certainly built on top of something else – oh, yes, Gemini, with other integration coming soon) which is designed specifically for ‘exploring interest areas’ – while I wouldn’t rely on it AT ALL for anything that actually mattered (which applies to all AI research, by the way – it is simply not good enough yet to be useful, unless what you consider ‘useful’ is ‘something that could have been produced by an average 16 year old’ in which case, well, raise your fcuking bar ffs), it is actually quite a fun way of asking a question and letting it lead you – give it an area of enquiry and it will not only give you answers with sources, but it will also suggest other directions in which you can take your enquiry – so a question about, say, situationism, will give you a sourced breakdown of the movement but also suggested branching questions around its impact on urban exploration practices, its subsequent influence on later social movements, and specific techniques employed in the movement’s early days to create ‘experiences’, all of which are, honestly, not bad follow-ups! As a means of getting the broad ‘shape’ of a topic, this could be quite useful imho.
• Angus Nic Neven: Look, I think Angus Nic Neven is a musician. I THINK. That, though, doesn’t explain why his personal website is possibly the most obviously, overtly, occult thing I think I have ever seen on the web ever. Like, I don’t believe in evil and witches and things like that (when, like me, you sold your soul to the devil aged 17, it is important to maintain this sense of grounded reality lest you get impossibly panicked about What Is To Come), but it’s impossible not to get the sense that there is something about this whole site that…well…*bodes*, basically, and not well. If the internet existed when I was at secondary school and I was caught looking at this by Sister Janet she would have been even more concerned for my mortal soul than she already was, let’s just say. I am reasonably-certain that clicking this link won’t leave you cursed or in any way doomed to a life of satanically-linked torment of the soul but I can’t promise it for sure, is all I’m saying. Should Angus happen to ever see this, please do drop me a line and explain what the fcuk is going on here because I love it but it also scares me quite a lot.
• Sacred Forests: While I might personally be, er, *somewhat bearish* about the future prospects of the planet (at least without the aforementioned Big Tech Hail Mary that we’re all seemingly now fixated on), I am very much pro initiatives that exhibit a slightly more hopeful outlook, such as Sacred Forest. It’s also a really nicely-made website which features a friendly capybara early-on, which endeared me to it no end. This is basically a project that seeks to work with indigenous communities to encourage rewilding of natural areas in a way in which is consistent with, and sympathetic to, their community and practice as well as benefiting the planet – per the blurb, “Sacred Forests is an Amsterdam born, internationally operating social enterprise start up at the forefront of a ‘new’ yet ancient way to protect forests, Indigenous forest conservation.” In typical Dutch fashion they acknowledge the slightly-eyeroll-inducing trope of ‘a bunch of rich white guys doing the saviour thing’ – although ‘acknowledging’ is not the same as ‘not doing the thing you are acknowledging’, to be clear, and this is obviously an initiative with its heart in the right place – your mileage will obviously vary, but I thought this was an interesting idea and, from the simple point of view of communication and digital/visual design, is very nice indeed.
• EggThread: How online are you, do you think? VERY online? I think this thread is a decent test. It is about the fact that there are no eggs in the US, and those that there are are currently very expensive. It starts off silly and gets increasingly nonsensical and internetty, and, honestly, I think this is possibly one of the purest expressions of Where We Have Ended Up With Digital Culture – serious news filtered through what is now an accreted series of layers of memetics and irony and DEEP-FRIED KNOWLEDGE; a decade or more of marination and maceration of ourselves in the internet soup has led us to this point, where someone can post a photo of an empty palette of eggs in a shop with the caption “Trump take egg” and a dozen or so (mad) posts later someone will write “You need slurp juice to buy egg now” AND IT MAKES SENSE (to me. Oh God, I am irrevocably ruined, aren’t I?). Consider this a useful barometer of the extent to which you’re able to function in polite, offline society (or, er, not).
• Goosebumps: An infinite runner – click to jump, collect the tokens, avoid the rocks! Simple, fast and visually rather glorious (but VERY hard to play, to my mind at least, as a result of the visual clutter), this is a promo for something or other (I don’t know or honestly care what) which will give you a pleasing few minutes’ distraction before you move onto something a bit more nourishing.
• 3d Maze: Also via TITAA, this is FUN – basically your task is to navigate a 3d maze in FPS; by the end of your first run you can choose the size of the next maze you take on, meaning you can create something enormous and very, very difficult. The only way this fun, lightweight little webtoy could be improved would be to allow you to upload your own images to act as wallpaper for the maze – being confronted with a closeup of your own hideous visage would give a new and compelling reason to get the fcuk out of there sharpish, for example.
• The Flash Museum: I can’t believe I haven’t featured this before. The Flash Museum is, er, a digital museum of old flash games, converted so they play in modern browsers – if you spent any time on Newgrounds (second mention this week, IT’S SO BACK!) in the early-00s then you will recognise SO MANY of these titles – in the main they are fcuking awful, but there’s a certain janky period charm to them imho. Also there are some legit classics – Alien Hominid still slaps as much as it did when I spent entire days doing nothing but playing it at work (RIP Citigate Public Affairs, you are wiv da angles) – although you should be aware that, given the 00-iness of the whole thing there is also a bunch of stuff of possibly questionable taste to modern eyes (I think I saw a variant on ‘columbine simulator’ up there, for example).
• Weekend At Mario’s: Via Rob at B3ta, what would the first level of Mario be like if the plumber was dead? Not that much fun tbh, but the ragdoll physics here makes this a reasonably-enjoyable thing to futz around with for five minutes or so.
• Virtual PC: A virtual PC! With a virtual hard-drive! On which you can play actual, full PC games from the late-90s! Seriously, there’s DOOM (obvs!), Sim City 2000 (honestly, load it up just to hear the intro music and get the purest hit of Proustian nostalgia you will feel all week), Civilisation, Age of Empires…GO BACK TO YOUR CHILDHOOD WHEN EVERYTHING WAS SIMPLE!
• Little Sisyphus: Our final game this week is this LOVELY little NES-style platformer with a surprisingly-sophisticated physics model at its heart – this is HARD, be warned (or at least it was for me), but I guess that’s era-appropriate, and it’s really very impressively made indeed considering it all runs in-browser, and it came to me via Andy and you should give it a go RIGHT NOW.

By Dennis Møgelgaard

FINALLY THIS WEEK WE CLOSE OUT HARD WITH FORMER EDITOR PAUL AND HIS GERMANIC BLEEPS AND BLOOPS AND WHEES! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• TV Wishes: Brought to my attention by the ever-excellent Links, TV Wishes: “is an Instagram account dedicated to sharing photos and videos from Flickr. Evie, the college student based in Missouri who runs the account, visits the site daily, sifting through thousands of images and pulling them from obscurity: a ferret eating a pink lollipop; two teddy bears tucked into bed; teens embracing on a suburban rooftop; an evening lightning storm. tvwishes has accrued a significant following, and many of her fans, like Evie herself, were not active on the platform during its heyday.” I LOVE THIS SO MUCH, and I also love this interview with the Evie in question by another person whose work I love, Molly Soda.
• The Office of Collecting: This is the Insta feed of The Office of Collecting, which is: “part wonderland, part library, and part nostalgia machine, devoted to the diminutive, the misplaced, the unusual, and the forgotten. The space is an elaborate love letter of leftover fragments from our collective memories — meticulously organized and displayed for maximum satisfaction and delight.” Basically this is a load of random stuff – but INTERESTING random stuff, arranged and photographed beautifully, and if you’re interested in, generally, ephemera and *slightly weird sh1t* (HI WELCOME YOU HAVE FOUND YOUR PEOPLE) then you will enjoy this. Brought to me via Things Magazine, which published a new update overnight which is worth checking out for more excellent design-y links.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Julia Hetta

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY EVERYONE! I assume all your digital cards to me are currently stuck in the ether somewhere and will all arrive together in due course – consider this my personal, amorous missive to each of YOU, for what could motivate a man to set aside so much time and effort every week for strangers other than a deep and abiding sense of LOVE (agape or eros, take your pick)?

Yes, that’s right, mental illness and a growing sense of their own futility in a world which increasingly doesn’t seem to care! But we can call it ‘love’ if you prefer.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are still in time to cancel that dinner reservation, you know it is a bad idea and you will regret it.

By Ana Cuba

WE START OFF THIS WEEK WITH A SLIGHTLY-STRANGE PROJECT BY A MAN CALLED, APPARENTLY, GLEMPY, WHO HAS DECIDED TO SET THE BBC’S SHIPPING FORECAST TO LOFI BEATS AND HAS CREATED A SURPRISINGLY-COMPELLING NEW GENRE WHICH I AM GOING TO CALL CROMERTYHOP!

THE SECTION WHICH DISCOVERED THIS WEEK THAT THERE IS A TRADE BODY FOR THE DATING APPS INDUSTRY AND THAT IT IS HELMED BY A MAN WHO WEARS JEANS AND SHOES, WHICH FEELS WEIRDLY SIGNIFICANT IN A WAY I CAN’T QUITE PUT MY FINGER ON, PT.1:  

By Andrew Wyeth

NEXT UP, THIS IS A SLIGHTLY-GOTHY, SLIGHTLY-DRONEY AND ENTIRELY-FCUKING-WONDERFUL ALBUM BY VYVA MELINKOLYA AND IT IS PRETTY MUCH WHAT FEBRUARY SOUNDS LIKE!

THE SECTION WHICH DISCOVERED THIS WEEK THAT THERE IS A TRADE BODY FOR THE DATING APPS INDUSTRY AND THAT IT IS HELMED BY A MAN WHO WEARS JEANS AND SHOES, WHICH FEELS WEIRDLY SIGNIFICANT IN A WAY I CAN’T QUITE PUT MY FINGER ON, PT.2:  

• CityWalki: Another portal back to early COVID times (SORRY!) with this throwback website – this isn’t new, conceptually-speaking, and I have featured stuff very similar to it before, but I am including it here partly because in London we literally haven’t seen the sun for 10 days now and I had forgotten what it looks like until I opened this up and ‘strolled’ around a few other cities for a while. Oh, I should probably explain what the fcuk it is, shouldn’t I? CityWalki is one of those ‘pick a city, get some FPV footage of someone walking (or driving, or drone-ing) around it – so far, so ‘exactly like a bunch of other sites’. But there are a LOT of different cities, and I’d forgotten how momentarily-transportive a slow-paced FPV tour of somewhere can be. Also I let it take me to Rome and had an unexpectedly incredibly emo moment where I found myself weeping slightly at the colosseum, which suggests I possibly haven’t really been taking adequate care of myself of late if I’m wholly honest. In the UK you can visit London and Manchester – beautifully, while the footage of all the other cities I’ve seen has been picturesque and sunny, Manny basically gives you steel-grey skies and the walk from Piccadilly into town, past a Ladbrokes, which feels…perfect, tbh.
• Drone: This describes itself as a ‘rich, harmonic soundscape synthesiser for music practice, chanting and meditation’, and, while I am not personally into any of the aforementioned practices, fcuk me did I enjoy using it to make weird dirge-ish sounds. Honestly, this is strangely compelling, even if you’re not the sort of person who needs something to synchronise their ‘oms’ with, and, as you will realise when you start playing around with it, this actually afford you quite an impressive degree of control over the tone and pitch of your, er, synthy-drone noises. Aside from anything else, this affords you the opportunity to soundtrack ANYTHING you like in the manner of a 1970s horror/scifi film, which I think we can all agree is not to be sniffed at.
• Snow Crystals: Did you know that there is an online guide to snowflakes, snow crystals and ‘other ice phenomena’? THERE IS AND IT LIVES HERE! This site appears to be the labour of love of one Kenneth G Libbrecht (proud author of a book on the same subject, apparently) who really, really likes snow crystals and associated phenomena. Honestly, I was ready to write this off as ‘ahaha old timey obsessional website, how quaint’, but, honestly, there’s something properly infectious about the enthusiasm here and I got quite into the section about designer snow crystals and how to build bespoke designs in lab conditions, and then there’s a page featuring an image of the largest snow crystal ever found in the wild which contains the following copy whose final parenthetical aside basically made me swoon slightly for reasons I can’t quite explain, and basically I am in love with this website now: “This is the largest snow crystal ever photographed, as verified by Guinness World Records, measuring 10.0 mm (0.4 inches) from tip to tip (averaged over the three axes). I captured this image on December 30, 2003, during a gentle snowfall in Cochrane, Ontario. Click on the picture for an even larger view (if you dare).” IF YOU DARE! Seriously, Kenneth, should you ever happen to read this, THANKYOU.
• After Dark II: This links to an art auction taking place in the US at the end of the month, but for which online bids will be accepted – it is described thusly: “Our latest AFTER DARK catalog continues our sale of exclusive LGBT oriented art, design, and historical ephemera. From emerging contemporary names, to early 20th century male nude fine art and photographs, our catalog includes iconic names like Robert Loughlin, Bruce of Los Angeles, and Gran Fury to many overlooked 20th century gems of the queer art world. This sale celebrates a century of creativity and expression from gay artists in all forms, from print ephemera to original canvases.” Whether you’re queer or otherwise, there is some GREAT work here, some ‘erotic’ and some not at all, and the starting prices look eminently-reasonable should you be in the market for some works.
• HistoryScapes: A joint app project by the National Trust and the University of Essex which basically works to present a bunch of different interactive tours of National Trust properties which you can either download to listen to you as you visit, or which you can set yo GPS track you with audio triggering as you walk through relevant areas. There are only three on there at present, which rather limits the utility, but you’d expect/hope that this be seen as a more long-running project which will see additional tours/walks/locations added to it. Worth a look if you’re the sort of person who spends their weekends dropping a tenner on a small cup of tea and a dry scone in a slightly-draughty ‘tearoom’.
• European Alternatives: Want to kick back against the US’ tech hegemony? AHAHAHA GOOD FCUKING LUCK! Still, we can still pretend that it’s not basically all sewn up by perusing this list of European alternatives to popular software products which you might want to explore should you be sick of enriching Those Fcuking Men. This is all quite dry and techy stuff – email providers, SaaS services, filehosting and uptimemonitoring and DEAR GOD THIS IS DULL. But, equally, it is nice to be reminded that there are companies not based in North America that you can choose to use instead (if you don’t mind the friction, and the occasionally suboptimal service, and the fact that you’re basically Cnuting against the inevitable tide of capital).
• Trees: I like this a lot – I am not the target audience, I have no use for it, but I am thrilled it exists. “Meye is a collection of free cut out PNG trees from all four seasons by landscape architect Mikkel Eye. All the trees are available as high quality PNG’s with transparent background. The trees are free to use for anyone who wants to add plantings to their visualizations, sections, and diagrams within the fields of landscape architecture, architecture, or urban planning.” So far, so standard, but it’s the next line in the description that made me fall in love: “However, your project should be in focus.” I am 100% going to add that stipulation to every single thing I ever do from now on – in fact, here, “you are allowed to steal whatever you like from Web Curios – I know you do already, don’t make that face at me – as long as your project is in focus. What does that mean? I WILL BE THE JUDGE”.
• Normal Time: I have on various occasions over the years complained about the lack of temporal innovation over the past few thousand years – we landed on the 24h day and the 365-day year and just sort of…stopped innovating (special shout out to Swatch’s ‘Beats’ initiative which I think I mention every 3-4 years on here and which will forever hold a place in my heart as the most insanely-ambitious marketing ploy I think I have ever seen). Thanks, then, to OG digital artist Rhea Myers who has entered the ring with their conception of Normal Time, which, look, is maths-y enough that my brain basically slides off the side of it but which FEELS good and which gives a pleasingly-long-term feel to the passage of time over a year – make years feel monolithic again! You can read the mechanics of how it’s calculated on the site, but I liked this description of the utility which also sorts of acts as an artist’s statement of sorts: “Normal time makes it easy to compare progress across different time scales by removing artificial human concepts of time. It creates a unified way to express completion of any cyclic or linear time period. Dehumanizing time in this way has the counterintuitive effect of making it more recognizably natural and intuitive for human beings to express and understime durations. Furthermore it respects that each human life is complete unto itself, removing the implicit judgment of longer lives being “more complete”. It creates a clear distinction between lives that are “in progress” and “complete” without obfuscating the progression of those lives. And it recognizes that all completed lives are equally whole.”
• The Single Feed Returns: Without wishing to redo my small rant from last week (I know that Web Curios is basically 30% thematically the same every week and I hate myself for it, trust me), EVERYTHING IS CYCLICAL. We’re currently having a resurgence, for I think the third time now, of the ‘all your various feeds in one convenient place!’ combinator app – the main links takes you to one offering called Tapestry, there’s this other one I found called OpenVibe, but basically they all do (or try to do) the same thing; to whit, pulling your various social feeds into one place so you don’t have to keep flitting between all the different apps to manage your interests, feeds and conversations. Which on the one hand is interesting and obviously convenient to a point, but on the other strikes me as slightly negating the concept of social media – I am not sure how helpful adding another layer of context collapse to your feeds would be (for better or worse, every platform’s grammar is different and posts removed from said grammar work…differently, quite simply), and by doing something like this you’re basically removing quite a lot of the ‘spontaneous and serendipitous discovery’ bit from the social experience (although, in fairness, each of these does allow you to pull in ‘interest-based’ feeds too, so there’s perhaps an element of that still here). Still, I can imagine this appealing to a few of you so one or both might be worth a look (they seem to be pretty much feature-identical as far as I can tell) – be aware though that they can’t pull stuff from the Meta platforms (actually Threads might now be federated enough to work, but no fcuker cares about Threads so wevs) so you’re not totally covered.
• ReorProject: This is something I personally have little-to-no interest in but which I am aware some of you might find useful – SEE HOW FCUKING NICE I AM TO YOU? AND WHAT DO I GET IN RETURN, EH?? – although, honestly, I was so confused and frankly slightly upset by the description of it as a note-taking and information-organisation service for ‘high entropy thinkers’, because, honestly, WHAT IN THE NAME OF FCUK IS A HIGH-ENTROPY THINKER??? I think it is b0llocks. Anyway, my weird little eruption of rage aside (sorry, not sure what came over me there, this is basically one of those ‘give us your unformed notes and we will scry order in your mindchaos’ apps, which uses THE MAGIC OF AI to automatically categorise and sort your thinking into useful, semantically-linked chunks. Take a look at the homepage – as ever with this stuff, your mileage will vary depending on the degree to which you’ve ever thought ‘God, I wish Evernote actually worked’.
• ROOST: Boring and technical but also useful and A GOOD THING, ROOST stands for Robust Open Online Safety Tools and is a collaboration between a bunch of big tech companies to put out a load of open source tools which will afford smaller companies the opportunity to implement industry-standard safety practices around their digital work, for free. Per the blurb, “ROOST is a community effort to build scalable and resilient safety infrastructure for the AI era. Many organizations – big and small – still lack access to basic safety resources, hindering innovation and putting users at risk. ROOST develops, maintains, and distributes open source building blocks to safeguard global users and communities. Backed by dedicated technical teams and leading experts, ROOST meets organizations where they are and provides hands-on support at every stage of their safety journey.” This is obviously only really of interest to you if you have to worry about safety/security in digital product delivery, but it’s a rare example of Big Tech ‘doing something not-terrible’ and possibly the only actually practically-meaningful thing to emerge from the massive farrago that was the AI Summit in Paris (a very, very expensive press conference for Lil’ Manu, was how I saw it).
• WikiTimeline: Turn any Wikipedia entry you like into a timeline. Why? I DON’T KNOW WHY FFS. Look, maybe it’s useful for teachers or something, I don’t know, I don’t have all the answers. Any answers, in fact. It’s distressing, frankly.
• XScreenSaver: Screensavers are a weird sort of lost artform, for two decades ubiquitous and then *poof*, gone, vanished, all those flying toasters and infinitely-recursive pipe layouts vanished like so much morning dew. XScreenSavers is a collection of SO MANY SCREENSAVERS which you can download and run on desktop and mobile should you want to carry them with you forever – if you’d rather just have a brief hit of nostalgia, you can explore the gallery of memories here.
• Stretch My Time Off: I think over the 15ish years I have been writing this fcuking thing I must have mentioned KitKat as a brand more than any other – turns out there is a frankly STAGGERING quantity of internetty cruft that you can retrofit into the broad ‘have a break’ brand strategy, and as such there have been dozens of instances where I’ve pointed at a site or idea and written ‘KitKat, steal this, it is an easy win’ and, inevitably, noone from KitKat did anything because a) they obviously don’t read this sh1t; and b) even if they did, they don’t need to take advice from some superannuated webmong typing in his pants at 933am on a Friday morning. Anyway, this is, AGAIN, SO perfect for a rebadge and a light bit of branding – this website does one simple thing, which is to tell you (seemingly wherever you are in the world) which days you should take off as holiday to maximise your allocation based on bank holidays, religious celebrations and other national days off which your country of employment has scheduled for the year. THIS IS SO SO SO PERFECT FFS JUST PUT A FCUKING KITKAT LOGO ON IT.
• KidPix: Personally-speaking this means little to me, but I think if you’re the sort of person who grew up with Macs (I don’t really understand how this could have happened, but maybe your parents were graphic designers or architects or just really irritating hipsters) then you might have a soft, nostalgic spot for KidPix which was apparently the MacOS equivalent of MS Paint and which now exists as a browsertoy for all your childish scrawling needs. I think there’s something quite nice about adopting this as your entire aesthetic for the rest of the year, personally, but then again I was recent told that my dress sense is ‘risibly bad’ so, well, I probably wouldn’t listen to me on matters visual at all.
• A Bunch of Full Warner Bros Films On YouTube: Ok, so you’ll need to VPN yourself to the US for these to work but this is literally 39 full films which are available to watch on YouTube for free, in high res – the selection is…odd, frankly, running the gamut from The Mission, which iirc won an Oscar, to Critters 4, which I know very much didn’t, and passing through a bunch of forgotten comedies, a few Serious Films and, inexplicably, American Ninja V, a film which I am reasonably certain noone, including the people who made it, have thought of since the wrap party. Still, it also contains a Bobcat Goldthwaite film AND the animated adaptation of The Phantom Tollbooth, on which basis I recommend it without reservation.
• Fabularious: AI BONGO STORYTIME! Yes, another week, another AI-enabled smut-generator! I include this not because I think it’s ‘good’ (no, really, I promise), nor indeed because I think that you have a strange and inexplicable desire to spin up poorly-written gangbang smut, but more because, well, a) there’s something VERY funny (to me, at least) about quite how obviously this is made for (and quite probably by) very horny teenage boys; and b) slightly-less amusingly, how this is obviously made in India, and how it made me think of the already-weird-and-not-hugely-healthy way in which gender politics works in the country, and the weird and bleak reality that demographics mean that a significant proportion of Indian men will live and die entirely alone, romantically-speaking, because of the fact that there are simply so many more of them, and the extent to which I can 100% see stuff like this becoming an ingrained part of life, forever, for a certain type of guy. Which is quite hard to see as anything other than utterly bleak, if I’m honest. Erm. Anyway! Choose your characters, choose your scenario and spin up some TRULY AWFUL (ie, not in any way erotic) erotica!
• EdHeads: Occupying the final games-y slot in this week’s ephemera section is this…odd selection of semi-educational games, which let you play short flash-style browsergames based on investigating a mechanic’s workshop, or a crash scene, or, er, undertaking ‘deep brain surgery’ or ‘virtual knee surgery’. Want to spend ten minutes fcuking around with someone’s patella? OH GOOD!

By Llyn Foulkes

WE CLOSE OUT THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH THIS ABSOLUTELY FCUKING WONDERFUL SELECTION OF JAZZ COMPILED BY SAKINA ABDOU!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

•  Patagraph: Stop-motion animation by one Victor Haegelin – this is very, very good work by a very talented professional.
• Babil Online: Photographs of telephone wires (I think) against grey skies, which I know don’t sound hugely-compelling as a subject but actually really quite beautiful when shot and framed this well. Photos by one Alexey Narodizkiy.
• The Bop House: I don’t normally feature accounts that are influencer-y, less those that feature said influencers doing cheesecake photoshoots and thirst traps, because, well, I don’t care and I figure that if you do you can find that sort of thing yourself. I am making an exception for the Bop House account, though, not because the content is particularly fascinating but because I find the premise behind it – effectively this is a creators’ house for OnlyFans influencers, which makes a sort of sense from a commercial/collaborative point of view and which is evidently being parlayed via this sort of mainstream channel into a PG13-ish reality-lite franchise while the seamy stuff gets shot behind closed doors for the OF crowd. This is…very now.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Mark Tennant

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

I went to the theatre to see Oedipus this week with my friend Jay (thanks Jay!), and there was a moment towards the end of the show where the climactic, pivotal fact that (and I don’t think I’m spoiling anything here) Oedipus had in fact fcuked his mum ELICITED ACTUAL SHOCKED GASPS FROM THE AUDIENCE.

How? HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE AN ADULT AND TO GO AND SEE THE PLAY OEDIPUS AND YET HAVE SEEMINGLY NO FCUKING CONCEPT OF THE MEANING OF THE TERM ‘OEDIPAL’ AND ITS ORIGINS?!

Anyway, the play is fcuking dogsh1t and I really wouldn’t bother (the lighting is nice, though).

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are free to mine me for more pithy analysis of contemporary London culture at your convenience.

By Guim Tió Zarraluki

WHY NOT ACCOMPANY THIS WEEK’S OPENING SELECTION OF LINKS WITH THIS IMPECCABLE SELECTION OF ‘70s/80s JAPANESE GROOVES’? NB THERE IS NO GOOD REASON!

THE SECTION WHICH FEELS LIKE IT POSSIBLY OUGHT TO ADMIT THAT MAYBE PROJECT25 WASN’T IN FACT ‘QANON FOR LIBERALS’ AFTER ALL, PT.1:  

By Summer Wagner

NEXT UP, ENJOY SOME VERY PLEASING UK BASS (AND OTHER THINGS BESIDES) COURTESY OF JED HALLAM OF LWSTD!

THE SECTION WHICH FEELS LIKE IT POSSIBLY OUGHT TO ADMIT THAT MAYBE PROJECT25 WASN’T IN FACT ‘QANON FOR LIBERALS’ AFTER ALL, PT.2:  

• Define Art: This is, admittedly, *quite* conceptuallywanky, but it turns out that’s exactly the sort of thing I like, so. Define Art is a very simple webpage which offers anyone the opportunity to write their own definition of what ‘art’ is/means, either by replacing the definition that’s currently on-page entirely or by editing it as they see fit. At the time of writing (840am; I know how you LOVE to be apprised of the exact progress of the Curios sausagemaking process) ‘art’ is defined as “The immanentisation of the artist’s personal eschaton”, but it’s entirely possible that it will be something else entirely by the time you arrive at it – the act of defining ‘art’ as a piece of interactive digital artwork is basically exactly the sort of neatly-pretentious, semi-recursive, not-as-clever-as-it-thinks-it-is b0llocks that I live for and I think this is PERFECT (so, so shallow).
• Ahead: This really, really gives me the fantods, but I can’t adequately explain why exactly. Ahead purports to be ‘Duolingo for emotional intelligence’ (oh, there, THAT’S why it feels intensely-creepy!), and seems to work by offering you a daily battery of tasks and exercises, tailored to YOU based on what it thinks you want/need (based on a fairly-rudimentatary sign-up questionnaire, as far as I can tell, and what I imagine is some sort of machine learning stuff under the hood) which are designed to, I don’t know, ‘help you manage your anger’ or ‘come to terms with the feeling of inadequacy that assails you every time you leave the house’ or ‘stop crying all the time’ (ha, impossible dream!), all packaged up in nice, pastel-adjacent palettes and reassuring fonts and Simple, 2025-Friendly Mental Health Bromide Speak! Ach, I know, I know, I am a terrible, miserable cynic who might perhaps benefit from not being such a miserable cnut all the time – I know this! I do! – but, equally, I am not wholly certain that spending more time on your device (the device that already acts as a prism through which the world is manipulated and filtered to be ALL ABOUT YOU) obsessing about yourself is necessarily good for you. It’s unclear from my limited fiddling with this whether the app has its own ‘impossibly-horny owl’-type mascot, should that be something that might motivate you to try/not try this.
• Book Saboteur: Ooh, this is a fun idea by Javier Arce – upload any ebook file (in epub format) and use this website to fcuk with the text – censor random words, insert errant sentences or spoilers from books or films, add typos, replace all instances of one worth with another per your specifications…part art project and part way of really, really messing with someone on what, now I think of it, could be a really troubling and quite unpleasant level. There’s something HUGELY dark about the idea of taking someone’s ebook file, fcuking with it and then replacing it on their device as though nothing were amiss, leaving them to be increasingly baffled as to why their copy of Moby Dick seems to have replaced every instance of the word ‘whale’ with ‘Joe Swash’ or ‘Harambe’ – DO NOT DO THIS TO ANY OF YOUR FRIENDS OR LOVED ONES OR CHILDREN, DO NOT DO THIS.
• Chipped Social: My note for this simply read ‘transhumanist girlies!’ which tbh I was quite proud of (but you don’t need to know that, and almost certainly don’t care, so apologies for the unnecessary digression). Chipped is, basically, fake nails with NFC chips, meaning that you can not only look INCREDIBLY GLAM but also be super-digital at the same time – the nails link to Chipped’s own Linktree-esque profile pages, which you can customise to include whatever urls or social profiles you like, meaning you can effectively use your manicure as an integrated business card type thing. Which, to be clear, is sort-of brilliant and exactly the kind of mad, semi-future thing that I was hoping for from 2025. Honestly, this is a great idea (apart, er, from the obviously-appalling environmental cost of the disposable plastic nails and the chipset and the rare metals! Apart from that!).
• The Trump Golf Tracker: Yes, I know, but I’ve managed to make it ⅕ of the way through the second links section before mentioning that cnut so I think I should be lauded for my efforts at minimising his impact (is…is this ‘activism’? LOL!). The Trump Golf Tracker does exactly what it’s name suggests, offering an overview of how much time That Fcuking Man has spent on the golf course since his inauguration. One might argue that time spent on the golf course is time NOT spent dismantling the fabric of American Democracy, but that’s what Elon’s ramen-haired tech-death-squad (I am riffing on Ryan’s excellent description here, credit where its’ due) are apparently spending 23 of every 24h doing, so maybe even this is an illusory hope. The golfing percentage for the Presidency to date stands at an estimated 22% – sterling work!
• Corners of the Internet: Linking to another person’s list of links from Curios feels…a bit ourobouros-like, if I’m honest, but then again this is an EXCELLENT resource which, should you be the sort of person who needs regular doses of browser-based distraction throughout the day, you might want to bookmark. This is VERY unfancy – literally a GSheet with some urls on it – but they are GREAT urls, many of which I’m familiar with as an online timewaster of some vintage but many more of which were entirely-unknown to me and which are lots of fun. Toys and games and things to read and listen to and learn about – there are at least a hundred-odd links in here to all sorts of interesting places around the web, which is pretty much my perfect way to spend a couple of hours when someone is paying me to do something else entirely (have I mentioned I’m available for hire? Tempting, isn’t it?).
• The Taiwan Queer Voice Map: You might have to ‘right-click-translate’ this one – or at least you will if you don’t speak Chinese, but it’s a lovely, fascinating project. Per the description, “Since the lifting of martial law in Taiwan, the stories of queer, homosexual, and sexual minorities have gradually appeared in various media in the 1990s. Deeply inspired by Lucas Larochelle’s 2017 work Queering The Map, Queer Voicemap Taiwan hopes to extend the concept of Queer Map to collect queer moments, voices, and experiences in every corner of Taiwan, and to supplement the small history and daily life that has been overlooked in Taiwan’s big history.” It’s sadly a bit sparse, but there are some beautiful little stories in there if you explore.
• Be Moss: Via Kris and Naive Weekly comes this beautiful little web experience which I might almost describe as ‘meditative’ were I not approximately as spiritual as mince. Click the link, enjoy the sounds, and spend a few minutes enjoying the visuals as they happen at you. BECOME MOSS – it increasingly seems preferable to some of the alternative options, if I’m entirely honest with you.
• Neural Viz: I think this year will be the one in which an AI-generated video of some sort does actual numbers and is received well from a critical point of view – the tech is now sharp enough that anyone who understands its limitations well enough to work around them can make some very impressive-looking films, and in the hands of someone who gets how scripts and visual storytelling works I think these tools could be used to create something…objectively good. Neural Viz is particularly impressive – there are nearly 30 vids on here from over the past year or so, all mining the same vaguely-connected extended universe of slightly-seamy-looking 70s police procedurals and detective shows, featuring a revolving cast of alien creatures which absolutely nail the general aesthetic vibe of the era (there’s an EXCELLENT look/feel to all of this, and it’s a corner of latent space I very much appreciate). The scripts are…actually pretty good, the editing works to the limitations of the medium (pace Trisha Code), and there are some nice gags in each of the few clips I’ve watched to date…This is worth a look – although, obviously, if you’re of the opinion that anything and everything made with AI is sh1t and evil then it’s unlikely to change your mind (also, ffs, we’ve spoken about this, it is a silly attitude to have) (also, thanks to reader Deshan Tennekoon for the tip).
• Science Urls: Yes, ok, this is just a bunch of RSS feeds, but if you’re the sort of person who REALLY NEEDS TO KNOW ALL OF THE SCIENCE NEWS then you will probably find this useful, seeing as it appears to draw from nearly-30 high-quality sources like Nature, BBC Science and others.
• Mascot Micrographia: As far as I can tell this is some sort of visual compendium of Japanese mascots – it’s quite hard to tell, though, seeing as there’s literally no additional information about what the actual fcuk is going on here. Still, I enjoy it because there’s a pleasing fluidity to the interface and I like the way you can explore the different cutesy guys in clusters based on particular qualities they might share – so, for example, you might choose to view them grouped by broad taxonomic groups, or you can instead click on any that take your fancy and see them clumped by physical resemblance…as an interface I rather like it, even if, per my opening line, I don’t really have the faintest fcuking clue what this is depicting.
• The Underwater Photography Contest Winners 2024: SO MANY FISH! Also, aquatic birds and corals and a bunch of organisms whose exact status in the great panoply of life I’m not exactly certain about! These are obviously all fcuking amazing – there’s a beady-eyed cormorant I’m a particular fan of, and a slightly-baffling category that seems to involve people posing in elaborate costumes underwater, and and some frankly terrifying things with far, far too many teeth.
• Lines of Flight: I rather love these. Per the blurb, “Lines of Flight is a sequence of volumetric digital poems examining the entanglements of wind, wing and flying technique that constitute the airborne encounter. These poems offer a depiction of the human and more-than-human registers of atmospheric flight, while gesturing towards the histories, infrastructures and media environments that entwine them’. While I’m not entirely convinced that these work as ‘poems’ per se, there’s something really gorgeous about the way in which the visualisation is used to express the inherent concept of the work (which, yes, I know, but that sentence will I promise feel significantly less cnuty (I hope) when you click the link and see what I am describing).
• TOS About: A SMART AND USEFUL USE OF GENAI! This is a little site which has used some LLM or another to parse all the terms and conditions of various major tech providers and asked it to offer an assessment of each from the point of view of the customer – it may not surprise you to learn that they are nearly all utter bstards! Still, it’s a smart and simple and effective use of the brute-force power of the machine which, should you still be struggling to work out how to make this stuff work for you (really?) might prove in some small way inspirational. Or it will just make you hate Adobe and the rest even more than you already do. Or both!
• Smile To Sing: Also via Kris, this a very simple website that does one thing and one thing only – it uses your webcam to see if you’re smiling, and if you are it plays you a song. THAT IS IT BUT IT IS PERFECT. I really, really think that all websites from hereon in should have this sort of thing built in – rewards for smiles to all visitors, please! If nothing else I quite like the slightly-evil spins that you might put on things with tech like this – maintain a rictus grin while filling out your HMRC self-assessment and receive a £50 tax rebate! Which thought, amusingly (and, er, self-indulgently),, made me smile for a second, which triggered the website – seriously, I really do want this sort of tech EVERYWHERE, can we please start setting this up? Thanks.
• Deck Gallery: THEY ARE SLIDES FFS WE HAVE DISCUSSED THIS. Ahem. Sorry. If you work in the sort of benighted industry whereby the majority of your job seems to involve shoehorning concepts that have no business being presented in PowerPoint or Keynote onto PowerPoint or Keynote slides, you might find this collection of ‘nicely designed ‘decks’ (grinding my teeth so hard, so hard) a useful place to find ‘inspiration’.
• I Don’t Have Spotify: Thanks to Raf Roset for sending this to me – although judging by Spotfy’s latest results, the proportion of people reading this who don’t have a Spotify account is likely to be…very small indeed. Still, just in case a couple of you find it useful, the website basically lets you plug in a link to any Spotify track you like (or songs on YouTube, or other platforms) and tries to find it on non-Spotify platforms, presumably using some sort of audio-matching tech. It’s…spotty, but then I have been testing it on VERY OBSCURE things and so your mileage may vary hugely.
• Hot Tub: BONGO FOR APPLE USERS! I wasn’t aware that there was a whole, semi-unsanctioned app market for the iPhone out there (unsurprising given my general distaste for all things Apple I suppose), but there is, and this week there apparently appeared on it this app – Hot Tub is basically something which circumvents Apple’s own squeamishness about sex to deliver an on-phone bongo experience to those poor iPhone owners who’ve previously had to…I don’t know, w4nk to a Tube site in their phone browser? Is that a hardship? I really don’t understand bongo, you know. Anyway, I obviously haven’t tried this because of the aforementioned ‘no Apple’ and ‘not into bongo’ points, but it seems to pull in, er, ‘content’ from a bunch of different popular smut-peddlers and is ad-free, and, from what I have seen, has been…er…enthusiastically-received by horny Apple fans, so if you’ve been DESPERATE to watch people fcuking via an app rather than via boring old url-based browsing then this is presumably all your Christmases come at once.
• Pitfall: Play 1980s ATARI classic Pitfall in your browser! Be reminded that, honestly, old games really were quite sh1t before getting bored and moving on! As ever with this stuff, I think the best use of it is to show it to a young person in your life and watch their growing astonishment at the poverty of The Past’s entertainment landscape.
• Bluejeweled: This is a single-note gag, but it is moderately cathartic and it made me laugh, so. Also, if you have a family member who has wasted untold hours on one of these fcuking ‘match the gems’-type games they will appreciate this to an immoderate degree I think.
• When They Died: WHEN DID THE FAMOUSES DIE? Macabre, but strangely-compelling (also, I am so embarrassingly bad at history that this put me in a really bad mood as a result of my own crushing ignorance, so, well, be warned).
• Middle of Lidle-dle: Another one of those little games which I am astonished noone from Lidl or their agencies a) thought of themselves; or b) have decided to lob some money at to make it ‘official’, this is silly and pointless but weirdly fun. The site shows you an object from the storied Middle Aisle of Lidl, where they keep the esoteric sh1t, and asks you to guess how much it costs in a ‘higher’/’lower’ Price Is Right-style game of narrowing down the value until you hit paydirt, The quicker you get there, the higher your score – this shouldn’t have entranced me for 10 minutes earlier this week but, embarrassingly, it very much did.

By Wei Lin Tse

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS BASICALLY THE SOUNDTRACK TO MY DAYS OF TAKING CHEAP SPEED, AS FORMER EDITOR PAUL RETURNS WITH THE TRANCEY BEATS AND BLEEPS AND 303s! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS IS INEXPLICABLY EMPTY THIS WEEK! ONWARDS!

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Thomas Sing

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Look, for some reason I slept genuinely-appallingly last night and as such this has been written pretty much entirely in a sort of fugue-state; I’m going to have to forego any attempt at a ‘comedy’ intro and restrict myself to saying that I started reading ‘My First Book’ by Honor Levy yesterday (on Jamillah Knight’s recommendation, for which thanks) and it really is both excellent and the most terrifyingly, brilliantly internetty writing I think I’ve ever read ever, and I think if you can stand reading the crap in here then you will find it genuinely wonderful.

Fcuk, even THAT was a struggle. Evidently I expended all my meagre energies ensuring that the quality of the prose that follows is ENTIRELY CONSISTENT with the prose in previous editions – for better, and indeed for worse.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are entirely within your rights to be appalled at the slightly-phoned-in nature of the preceding two paras.

By Andrea Gori

OUR FIRST MIX THIS WEEK COMES FROM TOM SPOONER, WHO FLASHED ME RIGHT BACK TO BEING 15 WITH THIS SELECTION OF 90s TRACKS, A SIGNIFICANT NUMBER OF WHICH I USED TO LISTEN TO ON A CHEAP CURRY’S OWN-BRAND WALKMAN ON POOR-QUALITY C90 CASSETTES (ACTUALLY THE PAST WAS SH1T ON REFLECTION WASN’T IT?)! 

THE SECTION WHICH CANNOT GET THIS POST ABOUT THE NEW US ADMINISTRATION OUT OF ITS HEAD, PT.1:  

By Lola Gill

NEXT WE HAVE A WHOLE NEW ALBUM BY OLOFF WHO I APPRECIATE MIGHT NOT BE TO EVERYONE’S TASTE BUT WHO I REALLY ENJOY AND WHICH I RECOMMEND YOU CHECK OUT BECAUSE, WHATEVER ELSE IT MIGHT BE, IT IS VERY MUCH ITS OWN THING!

THE SECTION WHICH CANNOT GET THIS POST ABOUT THE NEW US ADMINISTRATION OUT OF ITS HEAD, PT.2:  

• AI Smut Generator: As any of you who have a website with an associated email address will know, one of the quotidian joys of opening the associated inbox is to see what inventive spam you will have been gifted with (this week’s favourite was a lovely man in China asking if I might be interested in getting into aggregates and heavy machinery and, you know what, there was a brief moment when I was tempted ngl) – most of which tend to be of the ‘Wow! Your site is amaze! How much for mutually beneficial SEO-focused linkjuicing?’ variety. Which is why, when I got an email this week tersely asking me ‘how much for a shoutout on your site?’ I was inclined to ignore it. Until I checked the sender’s email, and realised that it was someone asking to pay me to talk about their AI erotic story generator – so obviously like a moron I replied and said that actually I would probably write about it anyway and there was no need to pay me, because I am a fcuking idiot who is so, so bad at ‘business’ that it actually hurts me. I did, though, warn my interlocutor that he might not like what I had to say. So, let’s see! This is *technically* free to use – although you only get one story credit, so if you want to do more than test it out I think it will start asking you for money – and so I had a play with it the other day, and…look, it’s marginally more sophisticated than a previous iteration of this sort of thing that I featured…what, a year or so ago?, in that you can specify to a quite astonishingly-granular degree the setting, the ‘type’ of encounter you want (nothing awful, that I was able to see at least), names and details of protagonists, etc etc, specify how filthy you want your filth, and BANG, in a few seconds you’ll have 1500 words or so of bespoke wordy bongo! Look, I can’t, obviously, tell you whether this will scratch whatever particular flavour of itch is your favourite, but, on the plus side, it is genuinely filthy, and seems to have a reasonably-coherent grasp of both physicality and in-scene coherence…but, also, honestly, *I* could write better, filthier filth than this and, to be clear, that is very much not the sort of thing I do. It’s just so obviously less good than getting an actual human being to do it for you, and while the pricing is actually…not that bad, I just can’t imagine anyone getting the, er, value out of this that would encourage persistent usage. Pleasingly, though, it does let you access all the OTHER filth people have generated, or at least some of it, so as long as you don’t mind spelunking through the weirdly-sticky and unpleasantly-mucal caverns of a stranger’s sexual imaginings then, well, GOOD ONE!  Also, there is one story on there about urolagnia which is so, so preposterous that it made me laugh out loud on several occasions, so this may not necessarily work for you as an erotic aid but it will almost certainly give you some bellylaughs if you’re reasonably-open-minded. So, er, Ryan, about that payment you mentioned…?
• The Modern Literary Novel: This site is quite amazing, and I am not wholly certain as to whether it’s the work of a single person – but I *think*it is, which makes it all the more remarkable a body of work. This is an EXHAUSTIVE critical look at literary fiction worldwide – honestly, you cannot even begin to imagine the sheer number of authors and works that the author has read and opined on, from literally all over the globe. I obviously went to the English section because, well, small-island mentality, innit, and a) was delighted by the selection of authors, partly because it immediately irritated me slightly (Alain de fcuking Botton?) which is always a sign that you’re going to find the perspectives *interesting*; and b) then delved into it and was genuinely thrilled to find that this person has some SPICY OPINIONS and is not shy of sharing them. Witness this section on Martin Amis, a writer who I adore but who, equally, I appreciate is not everyone’s cup of tea – I honestly fell in love with the author a bit upon reading this WONDERFUL kicking: “So where does that leave us with Amis? I have covered Money: A Suicide Note and London Fields, despite the fact that both read like watered down early 1980s Norman Mailer (with, perhaps, a bit of Elmore Leonard thrown in) but I really do not think that these are anywhere near as great as some people make them out to be. No doubt we will have to put up with him and his antics for some time to come but there are many better writers to read. And if you want to know more about him, many of the sites below will help you. He was born in 1949, son of Kingsley Amis. He read English at Oxford and worked for the Times Literary Supplement and New Statesman as a literary critic. He had his teeth fixed (expensively, in the USA), trashed Katie Price aka Jordan, a woman of similar talent to his own, and argued with his father. He also wrote some books.” Seriously, this is amazing and if you like books and reading and writing then it’s entirely possible you could lose days to this.
• Play Tetris inside a PDF: Do not ask why, just accept it and be happy. Is this a fun way of playing Tetris? No. Does it in anyway enhance or improve the base-level game experience? Also no.
• The Drop: Ooh, it’s been a while since we’ve had a totally-fcuking-bullshit AI Kickstarter, but this one is a particular doozy. The Drop is a pendant which has 10xed its funding goal and so WILL APPARENTLY HAPPEN (there is no way in fcuking hell that this is ever happening), and which is designed to LEVERAGE THE POWER OF AI to, er, enable you to exert a frankly-psychologically-troubling degree of control over your calorific intake. The gimmick is that the pendant is equipped with a camera angled so that, in theory, it will be pointed at the point in your field of vision where a plate would sit while you eat; it recognises food, and will automatically take a picture of said food each time, send that image to The Machine for analysis, and IMMEDIATELY send you a calorie-and-nutrition breakdown of whatever you’re eating via (inevitably) an app. SHALL WE COUNT THE WAYS IN WHICH THIS IS FCUKING BULLSHIT? 1) The camera – do you realise how fcuking annoying it will be to ensure that your food is in-shot every time you eat? And how does it stop itself from just assuming that EVERY SINGLE PLATE OF FOOD that passes through its field of vision is finding its way into you?; 2) The ‘analysis’ – LOOK YOU CANNOT IN ANY WAY MEANINGFULLY ASSESS THE CALORIFIC LOAD OR NUTRITIONAL VALUE OF A PLATE OF FOOD WITH ANY DEGREE OF ACCURACY BASED ON A SINGLE 2D PHOTO FFS IT SIMPLY ISN’T POSSIBLE. Still, thanks to a LOT of idiot wellness fans, it has been willed into existence. Jesus. Also, again, I do not feel that this promotes a…healthy attitude to one’s diet.
• Sephora Pinball: Would you like to take a small, interlink break to play a quick couple of games of branded pinball courtesy of makeup-peddlers Sephora? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! On the one hand, this is impressively-styled and the integration of the various makeup products into the table mechanics is nicely done from a design point of view; on the other, this is literally LESS GOOD as a game than the free pinball title that you got bundled as a freebie with Windows in the early-90s; like, ffs lads, you could literally just have reskinned that code and made something actually good with replayability potential and ACTUAL BRAND EXPRESSION and instead, well, you just phoned it in, didn’t you? Still, I bet the money was good and so I do, on balance, completely understand.
• Emergence: Do you remember the height of the NFT/web3 boom and the associated oddity of the ideas floating around? Do you remember all the (inevitably vaporware) projects that were all about BUILDING AN ENTERTAINMENT FRANCHISE/IP ON THE BLOCKCHAIN? All of those DAO-based community projects about ‘collaborative, community storytelling’? That was fun, wasn’t it? And, obviously total fcuking bullshit because a) in the main creating stuff simply doesn’t work that way, and most people aren’t actually very good at building worlds or crafting stories; b) NONE OF IT REQUIRED FCUKING CRYPTO OR WEB3 IN THE FIRST PLACE. And yet despite all this we have seen the appearance of Emergence this week, backed by a BIG NAME HOLLYWOOD WRITER (the guy who wrote the Dark Knight trilogy, should that move you) and which ticks all of the 2021 boxes – look, here’s the summary from Variety because I find this sort of stuff exhausting to parse: “Centered around a white hole in a galaxy, the “Emergence” franchise will feature various storytelling mediums, including podcasts, comics and animations. Built using blockchain AI storytelling platform Story, Incention will launch Goyer’s project to “showcase the potential of this revolutionary model” and “capture mainstream attention while redefining how IP evolves.” “Emergence” will be created by Incention users as well as through its generative AI tool, Atlas, which is designed to serve as a “creative partner” to help with common tasks like aggregating ideas, crafting narratives and generating full videos.” Doesn’t…doesn’t that sound a) fcuking cursed; and b) like you will never, ever hear of this again following that Variety article? Maybe I’m wrong, of course, but the precedents aren’t good. I hope that Mr Goyer has been paid for his involvement in real money rather than forked Ethereum magic beans.
• The Homosaurus: This is SO interesting – and I say this as a tedious cishet with no particular skin in the gay game – and a wonderful resource for anyone interested in queer culture and history. “The Homosaurus is an international linked data vocabulary of LGBTQ+ terms. Designed to enhance broad subject term vocabularies, the Homosaurus is a robust and cutting-edge thesaurus that advances the discoverability of LGBTQ+ resources and information. The Homosaurus was originally created in 1997 by IHLIA LGBT Heritage as a Dutch and English gay and lesbian thesaurus that was used as a standalone vocabulary to describe their collections. Over time, terms relating to bisexuality, trans, gender, and intersex concepts were added, but not methodically. This original version of the vocabulary (which we refer to as version 0) had an overly flat structure and, due to the lack of connections, terms were too isolated from one another and therefore easily missed. But, it became apparent that a vocabulary developed by an LGBTQ archives to describe LGBTQ resources could be a powerful tool.” Just click on the ‘vocabulary’ list and scroll down, and learn about such fascinating concepts as ‘intersex witches’. God people are fascinating.
• The Spiralator: Are Spirographs still a thing for people growing up in modernity, or have they been consigned to the oubliette that also holds Spangles? Presuming you know what a spirograph is (and if you don’t, feast your eyes), this is a digital version of one – fiddle with all the parameters (plotter width, various options in terms of radius, colours, etc etc) and then see what wonderful geometric spirals emerge. Ok, fine, that’s literally all you can do with this – but, equally, take a look at the gallery because people have been making some rather beautiful designs, should you wish to potentially feel inspired.
• Sequencer: Yes, I know, browser-based sequencer tools are OLD NEWS and you have seen millions of them (and me? How many do you think *I’ve* seen? I HAVE SEEN QUANTITIES OF WEBSITES YOU LITERALLY CANNOT BEGIN TO CONCEIVE OF), but this one is slightly different in that you can switch between two-dozen-ish different scales and see how each alters the tone of the sequence you’ve coded. Which might not be interesting to anyone who actually understands music, but if you’re like me and you genuinely have no idea what ‘pentatonic’ or ‘ionian’ means in terms of sound then it’s honestly eye-opening and really quite fascinating.
• Exotic Animal Photo Repository: On the one hand, I like the fact that this exists very much indeed; on the other, the fact that the people who created it feel the need for its existence is incredibly fcuking troubling from the point of view of exactly what we’re doing to our increasingly-fragile-looking knowledge space – per the blurb, “This website exists to be a repository of image references for accurately identified animal species. In recent years, major image repositories like Arkive have gone offline, and generative AI has polluted the utility and accuracy of search engine results.  This site is the result of a decade of travel and photography at zoos, sanctuaries, and other facilities holding wild and exotic animal collections in North America. All animal identification to species and subspecies level is as accurate as possible and based on facility signage. As these images are presented for reference purposes, some are blurry or have distortions from glass/fencing visible. These were included intentionally: the reference material is still valuable even if the photography isn’t perfect.”  BONUS IMAGE LINK: this is a decent search engine for public domain images, should you require one.
• Nested:Despite this being from 2011, I have never in fact featured it in Curios – which, frankly, is a travesty, as this is an absolute all-time piece of webwork by the mysterious Orteil (“some European dude who likes to make toys and games out of javascript”). I don’t really want to tell you too much, other than that literally everything in the universe is in here (I am sort-of not joking) and that you will feel a steadily-mounting sense of amazement as you work out what is going on and how deep this goes.
• Design Your Own Lacoste: On the one hand, this site by Lacoste, which lets you customise one of its shirts in a frankly-astonishing number of different styles and with a truly impressive degree of granular control, is probably the best variant on the whole ‘brand lets you create your own bespoke tees/trainers/whatever’ thing I’ve ever seen – seriously, the power of the design tools here is genuinely surprising and the UX/UI is really very well done in deed; on the other, what’s the point of this if you can’t then order the designs, or vote on ones that you would like see put into production? It feels like it’s missing a step here, but perhaps I’m just being entitled. Check out the gallery to get a feeling of what you can achieve with this, there are some really rather nice designs here.
• Subpixel Snake: Someone’s made a version of Snake that’s so small it requires a microscope to play. No, I don’t know either.
• Order Up: A non-Wordle-like daily game! Each day you’re given a list of things and are asked to put them in order based on a specific instruction or clue within a set number of tries. This is *just* challenging enough to be interesting, although I have occasionally found its selfish insistence on being culturally North American an annoyance (this is not its fault, to be clear).
• Collections: Our final game of the week is this one, a fun, moderately-involved daily word puzzle – each day there are three words for you to guess, and each day those three words will be linked by a category. Your job is to guess the category while attaining the highest points total you can – you lose points by ‘buying’ letters as you try and guess the three words, for wrong guesses at the connection, etc etc, and there’s a pleasing tension between needing more information and not wanting to spend your precious points determining whether that letter’s an ‘A’ or an ‘E’. I like this, but, full disclosure, I am annoyingly and embarrassingly sh1t at it which made me quit in slight disgust the other day. You, though, are probably significantly less stupid than I am.

By Javier Mayoral

SADEAGLE HAS BLESSED YOU WITH ANOTHER MIX ALL THE WAY FROM CORNWALL AND FULL OF EXCELLENT WEIRD RECORDS YOU ALMOST CERTAINLY DON’T KNOW BUT WHICH I AM FAIRLY CERTAIN YOU WILL ENJOY IMMODERATELY! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• The Italian HipHop Museum: I appreciate that Italian hiphop isn’t necessarily what immediately springs to mind when you think of my mother country – which isn’t unreasonable tbf, because a significant proportion of it is unlistenable tripe (notable exception – this track from…Jesus, 30ish years ago, which is genuinely ace and you should listen to). Anyway, this Insta account shares images and clips and ephemera from the history of Italian hiphop, from Jovanotti to Frankie Hi-NRG MC, to modern people like Fabri Fibra and the like, and, look, I can’t imagine any of you giving a sh1t about this one tbh but thanks for indulging me. Link via the excellent Pietro Minto btw.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By PicPicZo

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Had you missed this? The feeling of being basically sandblasted in the face by a sort of fecal whirlwind? WE’RE SO BACK BABY! You know those photos they always release at the end of a storied leader’s tenure showing the ageing effect the weight of office has had on them? Well imagine what WE’RE going to look like after four years of this; perhaps it’s time for me to consider preventative botox and maybe having my tearducts sealed up.

Anyway, last week’s Curios apparently contained ONE LINK that Google didn’t like, meaning that I think it got spamghettoed and so literally three of you will have seen it. I know, you don’t care, but it was a good one and you can read it here should you so wish.

I have no idea whether that will have utterly-fcuked the deliverability of this sh1tshow in perpetuity, but, well, it’s not like I write this for you fcukers anyway so wevs.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are very much appreciated, whatever I may in fact say to the contrary.

No idea when this is from or who made it, but it’s via Feuilleton

THIS IS A BRILLIANT MIX OF APHEX TWIN TRACKS AND MIXES PUT TOGETHER BY THE FABULOUSLY-NAMED DJ SALIVA WHICH I RECOMMEND UNRESERVEDLY!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS BECOME SOMEWHAT UNCOMFORTABLE AT THE AMOUNT OF TIME IT SEEMS TO SPEND WISHING GENUINE, TRANSFORMATIVE HARM ON THE WORLD’S SUPER-RICH, PT.1:  

By Katrien De Blauwer

NEXT WE RETURN TO THE TEUTONIC, TRANCEY BLEEPS AND BLOOPS AND BEATS FAVOURED BY FORMER EDITOR PAUL IN HIS LATEST EXCELLENT MIX WHICH MADE ME QUITE WANT TO TAKE SPEED AND STAY UP ALL NIGHT DANCING UNTIL I REMEMBERED WHAT THAT WOULD DO TO WEDNESDAY! 

THE SECTION WHICH HAS BECOME SOMEWHAT UNCOMFORTABLE AT THE AMOUNT OF TIME IT SEEMS TO SPEND WISHING GENUINE, TRANSFORMATIVE HARM ON THE WORLD’S SUPER-RICH, PT.2:  

• The Pudding Cup 2024: Official holder of the Web Curios ‘best dataviz people in the world’ title (and STILL they won’t return my calls), the Pudding presents their annual list of their favourite dataviz projects from the past year – there are three main winners, none of which I’d seen before, and a selection of other commended projects, and if you’ve any interest in ‘how to best communicate stuff that can often be quite data-heavy and a bit dull in ways that are, well, less data-heavy and less dull’ then you should take some time to go through all of these because there’s some gorgeous work here – personally I thought this site, exploring the data, topics and associations, contained within GPT3.5 was particularly wonderful (and I was personally annoyed that I didn’t see if last year FFS what sort of a fcuking webmong am I?).
• Fictional Videogame Stills: While videogames and gaming culture are now so utterly-embedded in the consciousnesses of anyone…what, under-35?, it’s fair to say that this very much wasn’t always the case; way back in the grey, malnourished days of the early-90s (so different from the, er, grey, malnourished days of modernity!) the idea of anyone drawing artistic inspiration from the world of videogames was frankly preposterous, let alone that this might be considered ‘fine’ art in any way shape or form. I had literally no idea that as far back as the late-80s Suzanne Treister was making work inspired by games, or that in the early-90s she produced this series of images directly inspired by the Commodore Amiga, at the time the most-cutting-edge home gamesplaying machine. “In the late 1980s I was making paintings about computer games. In January 1991 I bought an Amiga computer and made a series of fictional videogame stills using Deluxe Paint II. I photographed them straight from the screen as there was no other way to output them that I knew of apart from through a very primitive daisy wheel printer where they appeared as washed out dots. The effect of the photographs perfectly reproduced the highly pixellated, raised needlepoint effect of the Amiga screen image. Conceptually this means of presentation was also appropriate in that it made it seem like I had gone into a videogame arcade and photographed the games there, lending authenticity to the fiction. The first seven works on this page form a series titled, ‘Q. Would you recognise a Virtual Paradise?’” I sort-of love these from an aesthetic point of view, but more than anything I am thrilled to learn that this was A Thing. Also, each of these games looks fcuking fascinating and I would love to see a gamejam focused on bringing these screenshots to playable life.
• Trains: Specifically, trains in North America! Via Andy over at Waxy, this is a live map of all the trains in North America RIGHT NOW, showing you where they are and where they’re going (sometimes – information’s incomplete for a lot of these, or so it seems). I am sure that North Americans will find their own reasons to find this interesting or useful, but my main takeaway from this is ‘how the fcuk is it that a country the size and wealth of the US doesn’t seemingly have a functional national passenger rail infrastructure?’ – seriously, click the map, there are FCUK-ALL trains on there, it’s insane. Anyone would think that’s the result of a fixation on (and billions and billions of dollars of lobbying by) the motor industry to the exclusion of pretty much all else.
• The Infrared Photography Award 2024: PHOTOS OF THINGS THAT ALL LOOK SORT-OF PURPLE! Not just photos, though – there’s a short film category here as well as the stills, and, despite my tedious snarking, the images here are actually a lot more interesting than I might have imagined from the general ‘infrared’ thing; yes, ok, a lot of them *are* purple, but there’s also some quite wonderful black and white work there which, for reasons I don’t entirely comprehend, has a sort of vibrancy and contrast which is particularly pleasing to the eye (or at least mine), and the photos of space are, as you might expect, fcuking mental. I have a vague sense that this sort of stylistic effect might be something you see quite a lot of this year after Harmony Korine’s popularisation of it in filmmaking over the past year or so (but, as previously noted, you should never, ever listen to any of my predictions for anything because I am, in the main, a fcuking moron).
• TabBOO!: Again via Andy, this is a very silly Chrome extension which basically adds jump-scares to the browsing experience of any website you tell it to – you can get a feel for it from the on-site explainer vid, but, basically, if you tell it to work on, say, bbc.co.uk, every time you then visit said URL you will, after browsing for a short while, get a scary pop-up image to shock you out of your digitally-induced torpor. I can’t for a second imagine that this will make an iota of difference to anyone’s browsing habits, but it did make me think that it would be VERY FUNNY to install this on a luddite colleague’s computer, assigned to (for example) the url for their timesheeting software. Except, of course, noone goes to the office any more and so you can’t really do that sort of thing these days – SEE WHAT WE HAVE LOST FFS!
• Rutland Ramblings: NOT, contrary to what you might be thinking, the ceremonial county in the East Midlands of England (OBVIOUSLY that’s what you were thinking), but instead the Rutland in question here is the one in North Dakota (I now feel bad saying something the other week about how the US could effectively afford to lose the Dakotas and noone would really notice – sorry, Dakotas!), which, at the most recent census conducted in 2020, had a population of 163 but which, despite its diminutive size, somehow has an active and semi-regularly-updated local website detailing the comings and goings and EXCITING EVENTS going on in the community, and, look, I’m not going to pretend that this is anything other than a VERY NICHE CONCERN or that an entry from last October about how some people in Rutland had a nice time playing frisbee golf is…particularly-scintillating, but it makes me VERY HAPPY that it exists, and I can’t help but love a corner of the web so pure. Also, it made me think that there’s an interesting fictional project here – I do rather like the concept of a website like this which over the course of a year or so gradually reveals something sinister, glistening and possibly suppurating lurking at the village’s core, something whose unspeakable hungers can only be sated by The Old Rituals. That might just be me, though.
• A Wibbly 3d CG Aubergine: I mean, look, I’m not sure how much more I can gild this particularly lily – it’s, er, a sort-of-3d model of the aubergine emoji which, if you drag it around the screen with your cursor will wobble with fleshy promise. It is significantly less-phallic than I possibly just made it sound, to be clear, but it is also completely, totally and utterly pointless and therefore perhaps perfect.
• The Dropbox Brand Guidelines: No! Wait! Come back! IT IS INTERESTING I PROMISE YOU! Or, ok, fine, it’s interesting to *me* and might be to a few of you too, what with some of you being designertypepeople (or at least I *think* some of you are; as ever, you remain a mysterious enigma to me – so fascinating! So unknowable! So distant!) – this is, as you probably worked out from the link description, Dropbox’s brand guidelines, setting out the look and feel and tone of the company’s work and assets, and while I appreciate that’s not per se thrilling I think this is a really nice example of how to create documentation around this sort of thing that is user-friendly and clear and INTERESTING, and therefore has an outside chance of people actually looking at it and using it rather than sitting unloved and unlooked-at in the S: drive somewhere. In particular I really liked the part around ‘motion’, not least because it’s nice to see a company take all aspects of this seriously and think consistently about all aspects of how it’s expressed (oh, and the tone of voice stuff is good too – not necessarily because of the tone itself, but because of how clear and easy to understand it is, and how the examples work, and how user-friendly it is in a way these things so often aren’t).
• Pepper: This link comes courtesy of Present & Correct, the world’s most personable stationery retailer, and is a website celebrating, and I feel I need to quote this in full, “The Peppermills of Jens Quistgaard…Over the course of his prolific and varied design career, Jens Quistgaard created a series of peppermills for Dansk Designs. Taking the dispersal of salt and pepper as the jumping off point, JHQ’s designs are a meditation on the possibilities of shape for a common household object. Intriguing and fantastical, the variety of forms expands the vocabulary of functional design, calling on an array of familiar references: chess pieces, tools, clocks, toys, as well as natural and botanical shapes. These peppermills, otherwise known as “table seasoners”, evoke tiny household sculptures, powerful individually, but most compelling when grouped and viewed in sets.” I know that the word ‘iconic’ should probably be retired for ever, so cruelly and wantonly has it been misdeployed and abused over the years, but seriously, just LOOK at these! You can literally imagine the feel of these in your hand, and the smell of the wood, and all of the corduroy and the sideburns and the appalling-retrograde attitudes to gender politics associated with the era! This feels like the sort of design work that someone with a retro-feeling apartment in the Barbican would flay the skin from your bones to get at.
• Vivos: We’re, what, about 6-7% of the way through the year – how are you feeling about everything? LOL! In the spirit of the age, then, let me present to you ‘Vivos’, the ‘Global Shelter Network’ that also describes itself in the next breath as ‘the backup plan for humanity’. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.Humanity, you say? Is it…is it a backup plan for ALL of humanity? What’s that? “575 Private Bunkers With Space For Thousands In One Of North America’s Safest Locations” – so, er, no, then, it’s ‘a backup plan for a few thousand lucky, rich souls who might have an outside chance of saving themselves while the rest of us claw at the outside walls of their secure dwellings with radiation-blistered fingers and skin sloughing from our fragile, crumbling bodies! Great! Obviously this is fcuking vile and I wish ill on everyone involved in this preposterous grift (I think it’s fair to say that if you’re reduced to the point of needing one of these, things have probably gotten beyond the point where one of these will be sufficient to save you, is what I’m saying, and we all know that Peter and the real plute players have already bought half of New Zealand as contingency, so good luck on your own in the burning Cali desert!) – but I am also intrigued as to whether it gets any traction; the site claims that they are expanding into Germany and other countries, so, well, who knows? Maybe you’ll all be safe in your airlocked safety paradises while I continue spaffing out Curios til the very end – I mean, it would feel sort-of fitting tbh.
• Your Digital Envirofootprint: To be clear – you watching or not watching Netflix is not going to make a blind bit of difference to anything, other than your own state of mind, and the concept of a ‘personal carbon footprint’, as we all know by now, was literally invented in the US by comms firms employed by the fossil fuel industry to deflect blame for environmental catastrophe away from them and towards the individual. So, well, this is SLIGHTLY bullsh1t. Equally, though, it’s quite interesting – tell it some of your lifestyle habits and it will tell YOU how much CO2 they contribute to emitting. What are you supposed to do about this? NO FCUKING CLUE! Still, if we all send 30 fewer emails next week that will make up for people worth £600m quid taking private jets everywhere, won’t it? Won’t it?
• LED Scroller: Type whatever you want and it will scroll across the screen in big glowy LED-style letters. This reminds of a website whose url sadly no longer works which used to let you put a BIG FCUKING MESSAGE on your mobile screen, which during lockdown 1 I used to use to inform people who were being inconsiderate when walking around in terms of space, etc) that, and I quote ‘YOU ARE WALKING LIKE A CNUT’ (look, we all coped in our own way).
• Loura’s Game: OH I LOVE THIS! Such a fun idea and such a cool thing to do with your personal website – this belongs to someone called Loura, who writes: “I’ve had a fascination with old-school rpg games since I played Final Fantasy VI as a kid and my blog theme reflects that. Recently I decided to take it up a notch and turn my blog itself into a game.” Such a lovely idea – there should be a pop-up-looking window in the bottom left of the site when you load it up that you can use to access the game part, which, while simple, is genuinely fun and I am slightly in love with the idea of just gamifying a site BECAUSE YOU CAN. If any of you can see fit to set something like this up on, I don’t know, PWC.com, I will love you forever.
• Vox Regis: You are the king! The people are rebelling! But, with a bit of smart thinking and some very light maths you can crush the rebellion by causing various factions to fight amongst themselves – this is very simple but engaging enough to keep your attention for its full five-minute start-to-finish runtime, and there’s something really pleasing about the way the perspective is you, as the king, looking up from on high (the hands in particular are a nice touch). Oh, and the rebelling peons get smeared into pleasingly-jammy smudges when they die, which oughtn’t be satisfying but, worryingly, very much is.
• Escape from Castle Matsumoto: A bumper week for games, this – here’s another one which is pretty fun and which you can play with a friend should you have such a thing. Are any of you old enough to remember Spy vs Spy? Not just the classic comic from Mad magazine, but the 80s videogame? Of course you do, you’re all fcuking ancient like me (but in case not, this is what it was). Anyway, this is a bit like that – except you’re not spies, your ninjas, and it’s set in ancient Japan. The general premise is the same, though – you play against either the computer or a human opponent, each trying to loot the titular castle, leaving traps and tricks to thwart the other player so you can emerge with more cash than them. It looks GREAT – by which I mean it looks legitimately like a C64 title – but it is QUITE FIDDLY and you will need to spend a bit of time familiarising yourself with the controls before you’re able to do anything other than wander about confusedly.
• Dragonsweeper: Minesweeper, but with a fantasy-themed skin and some interesting tweaks to the rules (which you will have to work out as you play because the game seemingly has no interest whatsoever in telling you what is going on). Getting your head around the shape of the game is part of the fun, and if you can be bothered working it all out there’s something very satisfying indeed about finally beating the fcuking thing (I may have become…somewhat frustrated).
• Asterism: The final link of the week is SOMETHING YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR. Sorry. That said, I think that this is worth every penny of the £10 or so that its creator is asking for it – Asterism is a truly GORGEOUS indie videogame, seemingly the work of a single person who has built a beautiful, superbly-animated, rich and heartfelt story through a combination of craft techniques and stop-motion animation, resulting in a game which is part-point-and-click adventure and part just sort of beautiful animated short film, and, honestly, it is inventive and beautiful and creative and I can’t stress enough what a truly incredible feat it is and how much it deserves people to take a look at it – oh, and the music is glorious too, which is just the cherry on the cake. It’s not super-long, but it’s just gorgeous and is one of the most impressive personal creative projects I think I’ve seen in years. If nothing else, please click the link and watch the trailer, I guarantee you will be utterly charmed.

By  Jesse Zuo

OUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS BY SUN SONE AND I CAN ONLY REALLY DESCRIBE IT AS SOUNDING LIKE WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO SIT IN ONE OF THOSE SCANDI OVERDESIGNED LOUNGE CHAIRS FROM THE MID-70s IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Kee Kunath: I discovered this photographer’s work through a selection of articles about her recent portrait series on India’s female bodybuilders – you can see some of those shots on her insta feed along with her wider body of work, and she is fcuking great.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Sophie Sund

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

I hope all of you who’ve sent me complaining messages about there being ‘too much AI stuff’ in Curios over the past few years are feeling suitably-chastened now that Sir Keir’s going to MAINLINE IT INTO THE NATION’S VEINS. Whether or not intravenous injection was necessarily the right analogy for the forced introduction of a potentially-nefarious technology that noone necessarily wants into the body public is…questionable, but, well, tough! You’re getting AI whether you like it or not! COMPLAIN TO YOUR ROBOT THERAPIST ABOUT IT, SOYBOY!

Sorry, not sure what came over me at the end there, it must be excitement at the coming of a new world order (suspiciously, just like the old one!) in which ‘owning the libs’ is once again the court sport of choice; rest assured that I am, remain and always will be 100% soy.

So, as we sit in the ROLLERCOASTER OF LIFE, feeling it crank up once more towards a the summit and knowing that we’re once again about to take a species-wide plunge at speed into a pit of unfettered capitalism, let me offer you up a Web Curios to take your mind off things. I hope it works it works for you, it doesn’t seem to be working for me.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you don’t have to watch on Monday afternoon if you don’t want to.

By Frances Waite

WHY NOT BEGIN THIS WEEK’S MUSICAL JOURNEY WITH THIS EXCELLENT AND WILDLY-ECLECTIC SELECTION OF OLD RECORDS FROM AROUND THE WORLD? NO, YOU ARE RIGHT, THERE IS NO REASON NOT TO! 

THE SECTION WHICH WAS GENUINELY SADDENED TO HEAR ABOUT PAUL DANAN YESTERDAY AND WHICH WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER THE ORIGINAL LOVE ISLAND, RIP YOU MAD-EYED SESH HOUND, PT.1:  

By Alfonso Duran

NEXT, ENJOY TWO HOURS OF REALLY RATHER LOVELY JAZZ COMPILED BY WINDRUSH RADIO! 

THE SECTION WHICH WAS GENUINELY SADDENED TO HEAR ABOUT PAUL DANAN YESTERDAY AND WHICH WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER THE ORIGINAL LOVE ISLAND, RIP YOU MAD-EYED SESH HOUND, PT.2:  

•  Loser Lane: Are YOU a cyclist? Are YOU annoyed by the provision of cycling lanes and other pro-bike amenities in your city? Are YOU so irritated by it that, er, you’ll go to the trouble of coding a small game about how bad cycling there is? I imagine the answer to that last one was ‘no’, but full kudos to Toronto resident Marie LeBlanc Flanagan who was so annoyed at the Mayor’s plan to close cycle lanes that she knocked up this little – to be clear, impossible – game to demonstrate what being on a bike in the city currently feels like. You can read a bit more about it here, but I am now IN LOVE with the idea of making a small videogame as protest at small acts of municipal idiocy. Can someone make a game about the bins please? Oh God, someone’s going to make one about grooming gangs aren’t they? Let me retract this idea immediately.
• JourneyMaker: Another digital arts and culture toy, this one brought to me by Ben Templeton’s excellent newsletter; the Art Institute of Chicago has built this website which lets kids prepare their route through the museum ahead of their visit by picking a selection of works that interest them – it’s a lovely interface, which does a good job of giving the illusion of LIMITLESS CHOICE while actually being relatively-tightly-constrained, and there’s something really nice about the packaging of it and the way it creates a bespoke map JUST FOR YOU detailing your route and giving you little worksheets…it’s just a nice, light-touch bit of personalisation which has the benefit of being ACTUALLY CURATED rather than being chucked into The Machine and latent-space-sliced, which makes it feel like a more crafted experience than you might get otherwise. Lovely stuff.
• The Smell of Data: ‘What if you could smell your computer?’ is a question that almost no actual consumer has ever wanted to know the answer to, but nonetheless is something which the tech industry seemingly seems hell-bent on making reality; I think it’s been 20-odd years since I first saw a ‘here’s a box that will spray relevant scents into the air as you play Call of Duty so you can actually SMELL the cordite and, er, blood as you perforate terrorists for FREEDOM!’ device – they had a bit of a resurgence during lockdown, and again during the brief metaversal spazzout of 2022, but noone’s ever REALLY wanted this to be a thing. This, though, this is ART and therefore a million times better: “The sense of smell helped early humans to survive. But now that our hunting and gathering has moved to the digital environment, our noses can no longer warn us of the lurking dangers in the online wilderness. The Smell of Data is a new scent created to instinctively alert internet users of data leaks on personal devices.” The Smell of Data is a device which you charge up with scent capsules and carry around with you, linked to your phone; when your phone connects to an unprotected website on an unsecured WiFi network or Hotspot, it will spray a puff of the scent into the air to alert you to the fact that you’re potentially being mined. This has now put me in mind of all sorts of builds on this – I quite like the idea of something like this embedded into the outsize collar of a coat or something and triggering at any point you’re in-shot of a digital camera, some sort of surveillance-watcher (impossible, obvs), but I am sure you can come up with your own.
• Hyperkinetic Art: I like this a lot. The website of someone called Simon, who makes work with a plotter pen – per their description, “I make art with maths and programming, and I have a pen plotter robot called Stephen that brings it to life with a biro…The majority of the work I produce is inspired by nature, and the pursuit of generating organic shapes in the least organic medium I can think of – a bstard fcuking computer…All of the artwork is created with javascript, rendered on a HTML5 canvas for development and then exported to polylines and curves to be plotted onto paper. I’ve built up a considerable set of tools for creating generative art in the process, and have wandered down some unexpected paths, such as implementing Newton’s laws of gravitation to manipulate particle paths.” I think the work here is LOVELY, and far more interesting than a lot of machine-drawn imagery often is – it’s a commercial site and the prints are available to buy, but if you’re not in the market for new art then you might just want to have a browse and enjoy.
• Emoticon Generator: Before the TYRANNY OF EMOJI there was the emoticon, and in the land of the emoticon the emoticon that used non-standard, non-English characters was king. This EXCELLENT little site lets you simply and easily create your very own bespoke emoticon, choosing from a selection of drop-downs to make a personalised little face JUST FOR YOU. Why not make this your kooky, whimsical digital callsign for 2025 (other than, you know, the appalling tweeness and self-regard involved in believing one needs a ‘kooky, whimsical digital callsign for 2025’)?
• Alphabetical Order: Another newsletter! This is BRAND NEW,  only one issue in, and if you’re interested in music writing then you might enjoy the premise here: “Every other week, I’m going to pull a record off the shelf and write about how it affected my life in some way. Not my favorite records necessarily, or ones I even love for that matter, but albums that are tied to memories or important life moments.” This is a similar premise to Shelfies by Jared and Lavie, but for music, and I rather like this way of thinking of cultural items in relation to oneself. I can’t vouch for the quality of the resulting essays – there’s only one up there so far – but I think this is a fun idea which might be worth following.
• Vintage Bowling: Would YOU like to immerse yourself in some classic Americana, the American of diners and T-Birds and large men demonstrating impossible grace and skill when wielding a 15lb mass? GREAT! This website collects photos of old-style bowling alleys in the US and is, basically, just a whole aesthetic in itself. These are actually really quite interesting from an historical perspective, as they trace the evolution of the game from the…19th?C to more modern iterations, but the real gold here is, imho, in the 1950s-era stuff, where you can practically smell the Brylcream, the tallow for the fries and the appalling quantity of cheap aftershave worn by Spike who just won’t leave that poor waitress Jeannie alone (look, that’s where I imagination just took me, what of it?).
• Doom Running in a PDF: It’s monochromatic! It renders so painfully-slowly it’s unplayable! But! It is, definitively, the original DOOM running inside a PDF document! An achievement as stunningly-futile as it is technically-impressive, so WELL DONE to whoever is behind it, I can only applaud your endeavour.
• Wandermap: On the one hand, I am impressed by how clever this is; on the other, I think that it is likely to lead to some genuinely unpleasant travel experiences. The premise, though, is really smart – Wandermap lets you plug in any video from Insta and then parses it to pull all the destinations from it and then map them for you, giving you an instant itinerary to mimic that of your favourite shiny-toothed and floppy-haired influencer moppet. Which, to be clear, is really smart! – I presume there’s a ‘feed video to GPT, extract destinations, map to OpenStreetMap’ pathway going on under the hood, though I am guessing here – but, also, means that what you’re doing is mimicking exactly the same route and destinations as the influencer in question, leading to a) you going to places that will inevitably be fcuking rammed by the time you get there, because, well, INFLUENCER!; b) you seeing stuff that you have already seen because, well, YOU WATCHED THE INITIAL VIDEO. Although given current travel habits practiced by The Young this doesn’t appear to be something that bothers them, so, basically, I should shut up and accept that I am old and don’t understand anything anymore.
• Eyemead: Thanks to my friend Josh for sharing this with me – Eyemead is…Jesus, you know how I occasionally wang on about the fact that there are several million words of me on the web, blah blah blah? Well Eyemead is the home to ‘69 hand-coded websites by John Palmer’, started in 1998, which comprises “2,673 htm files and 6,206 images, totaling 12.92 million words and 268 Mb.” I MEAN, FCUKING HELL. This is, I think, no longer being updated – the last entries date from 2016 – but…this is SO MUCH WORK, on everything from oak trees to making haybales, Sherwood Forest to the Anapurna Circuit in Nepal…I love the fact that this exists, and I love the fact that John Palmer spent nearly 20 years building all of this stuff and that it is STILL THERE. I honestly believe – and, actually, as I type this, I realise I actually DO believe this, very firmly – that Governments ought to consider a certain personal hosting budget as a birthright, for anyone to create and host and maintain projects, and that this should extend to their posthumous preservation, because THIS IS CULTURE, however small and seemingly-marginal and frivolous it may seem, and the thought of all of this sort of thing one day vanishing into bits is…distressing to me, turns out.
• Amazon Kitchen: This is a YouTube channel promoting some fancy brand of knife or another, but the reason I am including it here is because its promos are basically lavishly-produced, vaguely-ASMR-ish cooking videos which almost EXACTLY mimic the very specific aesthetic of a specific corner of the Meta algorithm which was stalking me a few years back – there was a period of about a year or so when on the rare occasions I opened Facebook I would be confronted with an endless stream of videos of LARGE MEN, mostly bearded and often topless, cooking in outdoor settings over open flames, mostly MEAT (obviously), using lavishly-oversharpened and outsize knives. Why? NO IDEA (I am 11 stone damp and have never, ever been able to grow adequate facial hair, just so’s you know). Anyway, these videos are basically like that and I’m linking them here mainly out of some sort of weird sort of algonostalgia, which now I come to think of it is…weird. Is this a thing? Has anyone else felt like they miss an algorithm they’re no longer exposed to? Am I having some sort of nervous breakdown?
• The Missouri Marmite Museum: I don’t mean to be unfair to the state of Missouri, but I’ve never been presented with a compelling reason to visit it before (actually, speaking of being mean to States, it’s always interesting (to me at least) to ask Americans ‘if you could disappear ONE state – like, it would totally cease to exist immediately – which would you disappear?’; it’s astonishing how often the answer is ‘one of the Dakotas, maybe both’) – NOW though it’s all different. THEY HAVE A MARMITE MUSEUM! Ok, this is a terrible webpage – it’s literally just some information – but I was SO heartened to find this slightly-inexplicable piece of the UK in the US. “The Missouri Marmite Museum celebrates the world’s most famous love-it/hate-it item: a yeast extract made from the dregs found at the bottom of British beer barrels, and sold in adorable brown glass jars. The museum’s collection began with one metal-top jar purchased in 1974; today the collection is a broad spectrum of plastic-top jars, toy trucks, cookbooks, stuffed animals, thimbles, toast racks, advertisements, and wearing apparel: socks, t-shirts, aprons, and sweatshirts.   Parts of the collection come from India, New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, England, Sri Lanka, Canada, and Hong Kong – with the oldest item (1930’s) having been excavated from a rubbish dump in Wales. The Missouri Marmite Museum, located in Valley Park, Missouri, is open by appointment only.” I mean, that feels almost like it merits a roadtrip.
• The Coney Island History Project: Sorry, there’s a lot of Americana this week, turns out – still, this is a really interesting website collating photos and information about the history of the Coney Island fairground in New York and, best of all, oral histories with locals about their memories of the place – I’ve only skimmed this, but there are some great stories in here which are worth exploring imho (via Blort).
• The Puppets Co-Op: OH THIS IS FUN! Would YOU like to get into making puppets? Would you like a bunch of guides on how to do so, from small puppets to frankly-terrifyingly-large ones? Would you like an incredible trove of information about puppets and puppetry, all presented in an adorably-scratchy style that I genuinely adore? OH GOOD! Also there’s a section on the site about ‘puppet libraries’ where you can RENT OUT PUPPETS, which sounds like quite a fun thing to do on a rainy afternoon if you ask me.
• Musiq Is: I *think* that this is another site that has basically been spun up by AI, like some of the ones I featured last week, but I can’t be wholly certain – either way, it’s a fun series of toys/games designed to test your musical ability – so you’re tasked to maintain a series of BPMs, for example, or identifying notes of a certain pitch. Fun, although possibly less so if, like me, you’re borderline tone-deaf.
• Handcheck: Fun, pointless but also sort-of a cool proof-of-concept – the site just asks you to make and hold a series of hand gestures which it uses your webcam to track and verify…ok, so the payoff is a touch underwhelming, but there’s obviously quite a lot of uses for this; I quite like its potential as a non-traditional captcha for example, but there’s also a very childish part of me that quite wants to make a website to which access is locked until visitors make the ‘Loser’ sign on their foreheads.
• The Current Time In Morse Code: I mean, that is literally what this is, I don’t really know what else I’m meant to say about it other than that part of me would really like one of these on a very big, railway station-style clacker board (yes, I know that that’s not the technical name for them but it escapes me right now).
• Realbird Fakebird: A FUN NEW DAILY GAME! Which is nothing like, and doesn’t want to be anything like, Wordle! Actually I don’t think this is new at all, just new to me (so slow, so superannuated) – anyway, the premise is that each day you’re presented with seven things which you have to characterise as ‘X’ or ‘not-X’ – so today for example it’s ‘which of these were real, branded pinball machines?’. This takes literally 30s and is…light, frivolous, pointless fun! It still exists! Just!
• The Visible Zorker: OK, this is…VERY, very geeky, but also quite wonderful in its own way. Zork, in case you don’t know (but if you’re reading this I have a creeping suspicion that you probably do), was one of (if not THE) original text adventures from the 80s; in this version, you can play the whole game but ALSO see the code as you play, so you can literally SEE how the sausage is making itself as you eat it (so to speak – wow, that was a really horrible analogy, sorry about that). Obviously if you’re a code person then this will speak to you far more than it did to me, but as someone resolutely non-technical it’s actually a really helpful and useful way to get my head around some of the ‘how does software actually work?’ questions that occasionally flit around my head in search of an answer (you can read more about the project here if you’re curious).
• Sebastian’s Quest: A cute little Pico-8 browsergame in which you play a mouse. There is cheese. This is VERY ill-explained, but you basically have to make your way from screen-to-screen, pushing the blocks around to make a path for yourself…except you will quickly realise that there are wrinkles to the rules, and that you will have to work those wrinkles out for yourself. This is more fun than I expected it to be, though you will have to think a *little* bit.
• St Blamensir: Finally this week, something a bit lovely which I don’t want to explain too much. From the creator’s blurb: “this is my personal interactive worldbuilding project hosted on neocities which incidentally also feeds my medieval hyperfixation. It is everchanging and I have a lot more stuff planned for it.” Do you like manuscripts and marginalia? Did you enjoy the visual stylings of Pentiment? I think you’ll enjoy this, then.

By Elif Özen

THIS WEEK’S FINAL MIX IS BY BOBBY MYSEH AND IT IS TWO HOURS OF GORGEOUS, VAGUELY-80s LOUNGECORE! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Aim Not Here: AI video (sorry) depicting a few nice corners of latent space – as with the more interesting projects of this sort, there’s a very clear aesthetic and vibe to these which, whilst obviously the product of The Machine, are stylistically-distinct enough to make them interesting to my mind; I rather like the ‘weird Hunterian Museum’ vibe of a lot of the stuff in here.
• MD Foodie Boyz: I post this link with NO INTENDED SHADE WHATSOEVER, but with the following comments: 1) this is the Insta feed of a podcast (I know, I know) in which a bunch of ACTUAL, LITERAL CHILDREN (‘tweens’, if I’m being generous) talk about fast food and snacks; 2) the podcast has a LOGO. I appreciate the world is very different now to THE DISTANT PAST in which I was this age, but fcuk me the degree of media sophistication at play from the kids here is impressive (if you assume that this isn’t being adult-managed, which I am going to do); 3) I have tried listening to this. WHO IS LISTENING TO THIS? The inanity – no shade! I am sure they are nice kids! I am very much not the target audience! – is astounding. WHO WANTS TO LISTEN TO THREE NOT-HUGELY-ARTICULATE 12 YEAR OLDS TALK ABOUT CHIPS??? I don’t know man, I don’t see the ‘children as pillars of the creator economy’ thing as a necessarily Good Vibe, but I suppose this is what the Rizzler has wrought and so, well, here we are.
• Marion Cumpa: An Insta feed posting what I might be tempted to call ‘erotica’ were that not such a fundamentally-awful word, there’s some photography on here but the reason I’m posting the link is because of the illustrations which I think are EXCELLENT and several of which I would pay actual cashmoneyfor should such an opportunity present itself.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Tim Barr

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

New year, new worries, same old Web Curios! Even in the maelstrom of moderately-unsettling uncertainty that is Q2 of the 21st Century, rest assured that I am once again here to greet you with open arms, a tear-streaked face and a hug that you will initially find welcoming but will, as it continues without showing signs of stopping, begin to make you feel uncomfortably like I am holding onto you for dear life lest I otherwise slip away into nothingness.

You’ve missed this, I know you have, don’t make that face.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and it’s ok if you make ‘unsubscribing from this sh1t’ one of your new year’s resolutions, I will never, ever know.

By Noelia Towers

A GOOD START TO THE YEAR, MUSICALLY AT LEAST, AS SADEAGLE HAS ONCE AGAIN EMERGED FROM A CORNISH CAVE WITH A COUPLE OF HOURS OF CRACKING TUNES FROM HIS COLLECTION! 

THE SECTION WHICH  ODDLY ALREADY FEELS LIKE THIS YEAR HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR APPROXIMATELY THREE DECADES, PT.1:  

By Kaoru Ueda (this and the rest of the pics this week from TIH)

I DID NOT EXPECT TO FIND MYSELF RECOMMENDING A FOLK CONCEPT ALBUM BASED ON THE PREMISE ‘WHAT IF ALIENS LANDED IN APPALACHIA AND BACKWOODSPEOPLE MADE MUSIC ABOUT SAID ALIEN LANDINGS?” BUT 2025 IS FULL OF SURPRISES ALREADY AND THIS ALBUM CALLED ‘WHERE THEY LANDED’ IS BY BE/HOLD AND REALLY RATHER GOOD! 

THE SECTION WHICH  ODDLY ALREADY FEELS LIKE THIS YEAR HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR APPROXIMATELY THREE DECADES, PT.2:  

• Joys of Facebook Marketplace: NGL, linking to Twitter increasingly feels like I’m furtively passing you a wrap of something illicit, muttering something about ‘into the gums, you ain’t seen me, right mate?’ Still, given that people appear to have once again decided that they can’t quite be fcuked to start over again on Bluesky and the MASS EXODUS has slowed somewhat, Twitter continues to be at least somewhat worth looking at, and occasionally it will throw up a gem – like this! Collecting some of the unique and fantastic goods available for purchase on Facebook Marketplace, you know EXACTLY what you are getting here – it’s not big, it’s not funny, but if you attempt to tell me that you don’t find the idea of someone attempting to sell ‘The OG Testicuzzi’ (yes, it is what you think it is) to people in their local area USING THEIR REAL NAME funny then, well, I do not believe you.
• Princess Etch: Are Etch-A-Sketches still a thing, or is it a relic of a bygone age which for anyone under a certain age will elicit shrugs, blank looks and a plea to STOP TALKING ABOUT THE PAST WE KNOW IT WAS BETTER WITHOUT THE INTERNET? Anway, presuming YOU know what an Etch-A-Sketch is, you may be impressed with the singular skill displayed with the instrument by one ‘Princess Etch’ (I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that that’s not her given name), whose website presents examples of her work and the opportunity to book original artworks made on a kid’s toy from the 80s and then fixed in place by MAGIC (actually chemistry) and mailed to you anywhere in the world. Do YOU want a monochromatic depiction of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers rendered in iron fillings and right-angles? GREAT! As ever with stuff like this, I am torn between thinking ‘I am genuinely thrilled that the web has enabled this person with a very singular and specific talent to make a living from it’ and ‘there is something about the woman’s eyes in all of the shots on that site that makes me think there’s an internal monologue screaming about being trapped in some sort of retro-art purgatory of her own making, as I often am with stuff like this.
• Particles: A little visual code demo which, for reasons I can’t quite explain, I find pleasing to the point of near-ASMR. I could watch this ALL DAY, honestly, and it’s frankly miraculous that I’ve torn myself away to continue typing this (just think, you almost got away!).
• DOOM Captcha: Because it’s the law that DOOM must be embedded into every single possible aspect of human life before the heat death of the universe (I just had a fleeting fever-dream of FPS-styled fertility treatments, which suggests last night’s lack of sleep is starting to catch up with me at 844am), here’s a version of the game’s first level which operates as a simple CAPTCHA system – prove you’re a human by shooting three enemies in a tiny on-page embedded version of DOOM. Made VERY difficult by the small window size, which would add a pleasing degree of friction and frustration to, say, logging onto the HMRC website (lol like it needs more). BONUS DOOM: this is a winning little bit of comedy-modding in which Filippo Meozzi has created a version of the game where, rather than shooting Cacodemons with a shotgun you’re instead sipping a glass of mediocre red wine as you stroll around a gallery opening, wandering the corridors and perusing the works (the works, by the way, drawn from th actual, digitised collection of the NY Met). I really enjoyed this, partly because it’s having a slightly-Proustian effect on me and I’m flashing back quite hard to all the bad wine I ‘enjoyed’ at Thursday night openings between 2005-10ish and partly because it’s just a nice use of the digitised collection.
• Colourspace: Er, look, I don’t really understand what’s going on here – as far as I can tell its simply a way of displaying the colour spectrum, but it’s entirely possible I’m missing something deeply significant about why it’s clever. BUT! Who cares? It looks nice! You can move around it! It’s a CYLINDER OF ALL THE COLOURS! I think you can use it for a bunch of palette picking stuff and things but, honestly, I’m just here for the CYLINDER OF ALL THE COLOURS (although you can in fact read more about the theory behind this visualisation here, which might be of interest to designers or…colour theorists? Is that a thing?). I would quite like to see this as a large-scale projection, fwiw. What’s that? It’s worth ‘nothing’? Oh.
• Surf: This is an interesting-sounding project which doesn’t *quite* exist yet but which points towards a future where the federated social web has taken off, and we’re all living in a future paradise with infinitely-customisable multi-platform feeds pulling content from a variety of independent-but-interconnected platforms existing as part of the fediverse – which, admittedly, is a bit of a stretch at the moment, but it’s not inconceivable and the ideas presented by Surf certainly seem like an attractive alternative to the feed-based status quo. It helps to click the link and read the blurb yourself, but BASICALLY the idea is that Surf will allow you to create custom feeds on whatever topic you choose, pulling from sources across the fediverse (so, for example, Bluesky and Mastodon and Threads and…YouTube? Sources are a bit unclear) and stipulating search terms and guardrails to keep it tightly-focused; these feeds can then be individually explored by content type (so, by video or images or audio or text) rather than by platform, immediately creating a more coherent sense of the informational ecosystem around a topic…I can 100% see the appeal here, and I think they’re being smart attempting to onboard social ‘curators’ to create initial feeds for them before a proper launch, but I still wonder whether there’s just too much of the stench of geek about the term ‘fediverse’ and we’re going to have to wait until it feels a bit less neckbeardy before any normal people give a fcuk.
• L’Atelier de Musique: Via former editor Paul comes this YouTube channel which is relatively new, relatively sparsely-populated, but which I think looks GREAT – per the blurb, “Weekly mixes on vinyl that will transport you to different genres, countries, eras, and inspire new discoveries! Welcome to our YouTube channel where we post mixes and tracks on vinyl records! We collect music from different genres and eras, presenting rare compositions by little-known artists to broaden your musical horizons.  We explore rare grooves from around the world on vinyl. Each mix is a new journey into the world of music.” Which, fine, sounds pretty generic, but mix titles so far include “Soviet and Socialistic Grooves from the 60s & 70s” and “Mexican 70s Jazzy Vibes”, which puts this squarely in my area of interest. If you enjoy the Sadeagle mixes I post then you will enjoy this very much I think.
• HyperEssays: Anyone still feeling that this week’s Curios is a bit lightweight will hopefully EAT THEIR FCUKING WORDS at this link. Do you want a project for 2025? HERE’S YOUR FCUKING PROJECT THEN. “HyperEssays is a project to create a modern and accessible online edition of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne…The Essays is not a single, cohesive book but a collection of short and long pieces on various subjects such as religion, horses, friendship, sleep, law, or suicide, which Montaigne wrote over more than twenty years. His goals for the book and the circumstances under which he worked on it changed over time. The first edition, published in 1580, comprised two books. Eight years later, an updated edition included hundreds of revisions and a new, third book. By the time of his death, in 1592, Montaigne had planned many more changes, which were in­cor­po­rat­ed in the first posthumous edition of 1595. So, while you can read the Essays from beginning to end, starting with Montaigne’s address To the Reader, you can also follow John Cage’s advice and “begin any­where.”” FULL CONFESSION – I have not read the Essays of Montaigne – or at least no more than a handful of them – but a) I think this is an interesting project, and I am slightly in awe at the fact that this is seemingly just one bloke who decided ‘yes, the world needs this and therefore I must create it’; and b) I figure there’s at least one of you who’s the sort of weirdo who likes to set themselves ‘improving challenges’ each year (how…how do you change? How do you get better? Asking for a friend) and, well, this feels like such a challenge.
• Delics: A selection of caveats before we start here: a) I THINK THIS IS POSSIBLY VERY ILLEGAL; b) if it is not illegal I really, really don’t understand how; c) Web Curios IN NO WAY ENDORSES the sale or purchase of prohibited substances and would like to strongly advise its readers that they ought NOT attempt to purchase anything from this link. Ahem. Now, click the link and try and work out how it is that this website appears to be quite openly offering pharmaceutical-grade cocaine for sale to residents of Canada (and MDMA! And Ket!), in convenient little nasal spray bottles. They only ship to Canada, but, well, CANUCKS FILL YOUR BOOTS (noses) (NB once again Web Curios does not in any way endorse this website or want one of you in Canada to check if it actually works, no siree).
• Explore a Mayan Temple: Basically this is Google Street View for the Mayan temple at Copan (because, honestly, looking at LA, it doesn’t really feel like we should really be doing frivolous transatlantic flights anymore, does it), which really is very, very cool indeed and quite incredible to wander round, even virtually.
• The Mills of Britain: So seeing as we’re all agreed that it’s domestic or train-based holidays from hereon in (LOL!), you’re probably thinking ‘but Matt, what sort of travel within the UK could possibly compare to exploring the mysteries of an ancient Mayan temple in the tropics?’ and, well, do I have the link for you! VISIT THE MILLS OF BRITAIN! The link here takes you to a map of all the mills in the country, meaning that you can plan a FASCINATING journey around the country visiting, er, old mills. JUST AS GOOD AS THE MAYAN TEMPLES IN YOUR FACE MEXICO!
• Tokyo’s Digital Twin: This is, I think, possibly quite interesting – but sadly I can’t speak Japanese at all and so I only really have a pretty rudimentary idea of what’s going on here, What I CAN tell is that this is a detailed 3d map of Tokyo, over which its possible to layer a LOT of different city data to be able to do all sorts of overview analyses of the city and how it works – what I sadly can’t tell you (re the aforementioned inability to read the Japanese alphabet) is what these datasets are, whether any of them are live vs static and all that sort of stuff. BUT I am interested in this sort of thing and the extent to which models like this, coupled with GenAI, might transform urban analysis and social planning and things. Does something similar exist for London?
• I Have That On Vinyl: A new digital magazine project thing by Michele Catalano, where she’s collecting writing about music and why people love it – the focus is on physical recordings but really this is a home for any writing about the effect that music has on people and the feelings and memories it creates. “A mission statement for I Have That On Vinyl would be simple: a place for people to share their passion for vinyl records, music, and have discussions about both. But I don’t want a mission statement. I don’t have a mission. I have a vision. And that vision is to take my love of music, my respect for physical media, and my desire to spread good music around, and present all of that in one place. Mostly, it is going to be a collective love letter to vinyl and music in general…I want to connect you with people just like you; who love listening to whole albums, who love going to yard sales looking for holy grail records, who know every record store in a 25 mile radius.” This feels like something that some of you will love immoderately.
• Mikroverlag: Ok, this is VERY niche, but I approve of the specificity and the passion behind it – and, also, it’s a new post-Imperica publishing project from Former Editor Paul! I will reproduce the ‘about’ here in full – if you’re interested in writing something or being involved, drop him a line: “Mikroverlag is an idea to publish new works that cover technology stories from the past few decades, particularly from Europe. Books on, from, and about Silicon Valley are plentiful. It’s easy to find a book covering business models, leaders, or company stories from that area. Silicon Valley’s place in the history of communications technology is assured. But, there are so many additional stories from Europe that are less well-known globally. The concept of Mikroverlag is to cover specific histories related to European technology: its innovations, its people, and also, its failures. Central and Eastern Europe is particularly ripe for untapping as there are many stories of government-led and people-led innovations that are in danger of being lost.That said, the point of Mikroverlag is to cover technology stories from the whole of Europe. We might cover, for example, the development of Minitel in France, or the story of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum clones in Communist-era Czechoslovakia. The first digital computer, the German Z3, might be a future topic, or perhaps a biography of Benoit Mandelbrot. I’m just making these up. This is where you come in.”

• Riddling: Five clues a day to guess the one-word answer. Partly fun, partly INCREDIBLY IRRITATING due to the specificity of the word selections, your mileage will vary.
• Catdle: Oh God, this REALLY makes my brain hurt – however, I am aware that there are some people (see my friend Mo, who ever since I first met her in her early-20s has carried around an actual physical book of logic puzzles, like a grandmother) who find stuff like this cracklike in its appeal. A daily puzzle which asks you to solve one of those ‘Alan has five nieces, Susan once went to Clacton, Angelina won’t get in the car with Tony unless Ann is in the back seat – WHO ATE THE LAST SLICE OF CAKE?’ conundra, except the characters involved are cats because it’s the internet. This is clever but sadly my brain doesn’t quite work in this way and so I slid off it pretty quickly – YOU, though, may be different (I hope you are, I wouldn’t wish being me on anyone, honestly).
• Monopoly, Online, With Strangers: I presume that those of you with families would rather eat your own faces than ever play Monopoly again – does ANYONE enjoy it? Anyone? – but, judging by the fact that this website is seemingly ALWAYS teeming with players, there is a surprisingly-large number of people who like the game enough to play a 2d, minimalist version online with complete strangers. Ok, so it’s unofficial and so the game’s called ‘RichUp’ and the boards all have the wrong names on them, but, clearly, it’s Monopoly. Want to spent an hour or so getting bored and frustrated but with none of the familiar, familial warmth you might benefit from playing with loved ones? GREAT!
• Dreiblade: This is…surprisingly full-featured for what feels like it started out as a punchline – this is basically ‘what if Beyblade battles but Dreidels?’, and tasks you with playing a selection of dreidel-vs-dreidel matchups against players of increasing skill, alongside a betting mechanic which, I confess, I have totally failed to understand across multiple attempts. Still, this is fun and feels weirdly like a lost NES-era title developed specially as a youth outreach tool by a very rich New York synagogue in the late-80s.
• Gar Type: Another really, really well-made game for what is, at heart, a single-note gag – what if R-Type but, well, themed around Garfield? This is silly but actually really fun – if not exactly challenging – and the soundtrack in particular fcuking slaps (no, really, it does, it’s SO much better than it needs to be).
• The Top 10 Webgames of 2024: Last up in this week’s miscellanea, this rundown of the ten best browser games of the past 12 months – a couple of these have been featured in here before, but these are all, generally, GREAT (and the final one, an escape the room number, is EXCELLENT) and, look, you’ve done a WHOLE WEEK of work this year already, sack off the rest of it and play some games, you’ve earned it you special little soldier.

By Zoë Waldman

OUR LAST MIX OF THE FIRST CURIOS OF THE YEAR IS THIS PLEASINGLY-FUNKY SELECTION OF INSTRUMENTALS AND CURIOSITIES COMPILED BY QUIROGA!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• TrendyVideos AI: Do you ever experience someone else’s feed? It is an occasionally odd and unsettling experience to get a glimpse into the incredibly-intimate world of ‘what the algorithm thinks someone else wants’, as I discovered over Christmas when I was round at a mate’s and he pulled out his phone to show me something on Insta and I saw that his homepage feed was…just slop. Just AI slop video after AI slop video after AI slop video, fake sea creatures animated into being on beaches, fake animals in fake jungles, fake people eating fake cakes…what was even odder was that this didn’t seem to bother him at all (fwiw this friend is VERY offline and, I promise, less stupid than this exchange makes them sound). Anyway, that’s what this account is – all AI, all the time, and, seemingly, this is what a LOT of people are seeing all over their social feeds every day. We are, as the kids say, so so so cooked.
• Voidstomper: More AI video! But this stuff is horrible and unsettling and so therefore interesting to me – again, though, it’s worth looking at this stuff and realising that there are a LOT of people in the world who simply aren’t going to pay attention to the fact that some of this stuff is faked. If you think the UFO panic at the tail-end of 2024 was something, I feel reasonably-convinced that we’re going to see some fcuking MENTAL crpytid-related chat in the coming year or so as people start to fall for increasingly-realistic videos of ‘ACTUAL CAMERAPHONE FOOTAGE OF SKINWALKERS CAPTURED’ sliding across their FYP.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Félicien Rops

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

AND SO, WE CAME TO THE END.

44 editions of Web Curios, roughly 3,500 links, 400k-odd words (fcuking HELL though) and here we find ourselves, on the cusp of entering the second quarter of the first century of the third millennium of recorded time, with supposedly-educated residents of one of the world’s richest and most powerful nations shooting into the sky because they are scared of planes and no longer seem to understand technology.

Truly, the future is panning out gloriously.

So for the next few weeks, why not take a break from the future? Ignore it. Fcuk it. It will happen without you, whether you like it or not (and you probably won’t, let’s be realistic).

Briefly, before we crack on with the links and the words and all the usual Web Curios gubbins, I just want to say a small thankyou to all of you for reading this (or, more realistically, just opening it and clicking a few links and mostly ignoring the prose), for sending me interesting links and emails, for telling me each week which links I’ve managed to fcuk up (no really, I am grateful!)  and for occasionally sharing it with people – I really do appreciate it.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you will be FINE without me, I promise (but what will I do without you?).

By Tye Martinez (most images this week from TIH, to whom, again, thanks)

WE BEGIN WITH A CHRISTMAS GIFT TO YOU FROM SADEAGLE, BRINGING YOU A MIX FEATURING TRACKS FROM VIETNAM AND INDIA AND KOREA AND TURKEY AND LOADS OF OTHER PLACES BESIDES, WHICH SEGUES INTO SOME CRACKING HIPHOP IN THE FINAL HALF HOUR OR SO AND WHICH IS, GENERALLY, FCUKING SUPERB! 

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER PETERS MANDELSON AND THIEL HAVE EVER HUNG OUT, PT.1:  

By Jose Luis Cena

THIS IS AN ALBUM OF INSTRUMENTAL HIPHOP BITS BY DRUM TALK AND IT IS, HONESTLY, REALLY QUITE SOMETHING AND I RECOMMEND IT UNRESERVEDLY! 

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER PETERS MANDELSON AND THIEL HAVE EVER HUNG OUT, PT.2:  

• WikiLocal: This isn’t a wholly-new idea – I have definitely featured something along similar lines before, possibly during Lockdown One – but I have a particular soft spot for projects which both leverage Wikipedia and which encourage local exploration and learning. This is a really simple website, mixing up maps with Wikipedia entires to let you quickly and easily find places that are notable enough to have a Wikipedia entry devoted to them in the immediate vicinity of any location you choose – so, for example, I can see the place where Van Gogh briefly lived round the corner from me, say, and I have literally JUST learned that I am located just by the site of the oldest adventure playground in London still to stand at its original site. I KNOW I AM SO PRIVILEGED! Honestly, this is SO interesting and I figured it might be particularly cool to give it a go over the holidays as an opportunity to get to know your neighbourhood a bit better. NB – Web Curios accepts no responsibility should this tool reveal that you live in an area with no interesting or notable history/landmarks whatsoever.
• Meta Motivo: Ok, this is QUITE technical, but it’s really interesting from the point of view of attempting to create virtual agents which can move, act and to an extent even ‘learn’ autonomously in virtual space- this is a new experimental model/toy thing from Meta which explores how it’s getting along making models which can effectively perform “whole-body control tasks, including motion tracking, goal pose reaching, and reward optimization, without any additional training or planning.” There’s an explanatory blogpost here – which is, honestly, VERY TECHNICAL – but click the main link and enjoy playing with the AI stick figure man who, if you play around with it a bit, can be made to dance and caper in ways which give you a brief, tantalising glimpse as to how interesting and odd and fun it will be in a few years time when you have semi-autonomous in-world virtual actors who can act independently and who can display emergent physical behaviours. If, though, that doesn’t really grab you, then can I please encourage you to at the very least take a moment to right click on the figure and lob a beach ball at it? The ragdoll physics at play are VERY funny.
• Disney Prime Video: A comedy Bluesky account! It’s not just people just humourlessly shrieking about platform etiquette, you know! These are imagined films – some funny, some not, but I did enjoy the recasting of a film about the nativity myth as one entitled ‘Cucked By God’.
• Surf Social: This, theoretically, looks like it might be interesting and useful – Surf Social is effectively a wrapper service for a bunch of different feeds from different places, including the fediverse (Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads) and YouTube and Flipboard, and which will basically let you spin up a selection of interest-based feeds pulling in content from across each of these platforms into single, consolidated streams, Which, actually, sounds…potentially good? While the theoretically idea of ‘pulling all your feeds into one’ doesn’t tend to work in practice – different platforms are for different things! Context collapse is a problem! – keeping the main ones where they are but pulling shared results for interest-based searches seems…smart and not likely to mess with the way in which you use the platforms already. This could be worth a look, although the standard ‘it’s in Beta and so is likely to fall over’ caveats of course apply.
• Keikku: To be honest, I am including this almost solely because I had no idea that stethoscopes had gotten so incredibly hi-tech or required such shiny and fundamentally-overengineered websites. LOOK AT THESE FCUKERS IT’S LIKE SCIFI MEDICINE OUT OF STAR TREK OR SOMETHING!!! Also…whilst obviously progress is good and stuff, and I can’t imagine anyone dying because of a stethoscope running out of batteries, I do wonder whether perhaps there are some things that possibly don’t need a wifi connection. Oh, and it taught me a new favourite word – auscultation! – which means that basically I love this website now.
• Not My Name: This is quite dizzying, and does little to dispel my long-held internal belief that anyone learning Chinese as an adult is basically some sort of genius or magician. This is a website all about Chinese names and how they have been basically ‘flattened’ by the simplified version of the language – from the explanation, “You may come across Chinese names in various contexts, such as Cixin Liu, the author of the science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem, and Ai Weiwei, a contemporary Chinese artist. However, these names have been transliterated to Hanyu Pinyin, which represents Mandarin pronunciation, rather than their original characters. This can lead to name ambiguity, as even native Chinese speakers may find it challenging to decode the original names behind the Pinyin.” Scroll down the page, click on ‘explorer’, and you’re presented with a dizzying array of names (navigate using the arrow keys), each with an accompanying visualisation showing how many people share it, and the traditional characters it derives from, and the different tones that can be used when pronouncing it…the key to understanding it isn’t explained HUGELY clearly (which I’m going to attribute to difficulties in translation), but it’s worth clicking around and exploring – if nothing else the vocal samples illustrating pronunciation demonstrate the insane range of the language and the sounds and stresses and dear God it is SO HARD.
• Social Justice Kittens 2025: Another year, another calendar full of kittens accompanied by some of the best Tumblr-esque sentiments expressed across the web in the past 12 months. Some absolute gems in this year’s selection – I think, on reflection, my personal favourite is May’s pair of Sphynx’s worriedly discussing the need to dismantle capitalism within a generation, but please do feel free to pick your own.
• The World War II Film Supercut: OK, there is a certain section of the Curios readership here who on clicking this link are liable to become so powerfully tumescent with excited arousal that it might cause some sort of medical event – BE WARNED. Are you someone who would say they are ‘into history’? Did you contemplate buying a ticket to The Rest Is History live podcast recordings? Do you ACTUALLY think about the Roman Empire every day? Do you REALLY like old war films? OH MY GOD THIS IS ALL YOUR CHRISTMASES COME AT ONCE! I can’t stress enough what a fcuking BATSHIT project this is – per this explanatory blogpost, “For more than a year I’ve been working on the World War II Supercut, a video project that combines 143 World War II movies into one 12 hour series, with historically significant clips pulled from the movies and ordered chronologically.” The main link takes you to a Google Drive folder where you can find the entire 12-hour epic, arranged into a dozen hour-long episodes, taking you from the pre-war to the post-war in an astounding collage of clips from every war film you’ve ever heard of and a bunch more that you probably haven’t. To be clear, I could give not one iota of a fcuk about WWII or war films or history and so this is of less than no interest to me, but for those of you who are going to make a day of this then, well, MERRY FCUKING WARMAS!
• Pop The Confetti: Click the button, pop the confetti cannon, watch the sprinkles, feel your laptop become worryingly hot as it tries to render the physics of thousands of bits of paper! Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT IT IS CHRISTMAS!
• Midjourney Patchwork: This is an interesting idea – Midjourney have launched (in beta, I think) a tool which effectively works as a storyboarding/concepting workspace with integrated AI, so you can start to flesh out the look and feel of characters and scenes using the Midjourney image generation tool within your digital whiteboard, sort of like…I don’t know, like Miro but with the ability to spin up really very good AI images as part of the embedded functionality. You can read a guide to it here, which might give you an idea of whether or not it might be of use to you – generally though this looks like it could be superuseful from the point of view of initial storyboarding or concepting, particularly as a team-based tool.
• Puppets: Via Lynn comes this lovely little puppet toy – it detects your hands, you select the puppets you want to embody and VWALLAH! In mere seconds you’ve got a passable Statler and Waldorf on your screen, moving along with your hands as you make them quip and caper. I actually found myself doing the voices while I played with this, which suggests both that this is pretty fun and that I am a very, very lonely man who probably needs to take steps to address this. BONUS HAND-TRACKING BROWSER TOYS! This lets you make rudimentary paintings using your handprints on a virtual cave wall, which when I used it resulted in what I can only describe as a scene looking a bit like a neanderthal dirty protest had taken place but which I am sure in your capable and artistic hands will help you create some truly stellar artworks (or, at the very least, a crudely-drawn c0ck, in the best tradition of wall-based art since time immemorial).
• AI Mix Check: Are you a musician or a sound engineer? Would you like to have your sound mixing skills critiqued by an AI? No, I can’t imagine for a second that you would – and yet the future has seen fit to afford you the opportunity! I am not a musician and so have no demos to upload for assessment, but I would love it if one of you who is more musically-inclined can give me some sort of indication of quite how awful the advice it gives you is – although actually, on reflection, it’s not like it will be bad advice so much as ‘advice that will ensure that your record is mixed so it could be played in a supermarket at 917pm without anyone noticing’.
• Short Trip: Oh WOW, this is a blast from the past. The main link is to the Steam download page for a short, small PC game called ‘Short Trip’, where all you do is drive a tram through some mountain villages, picking up and dropping off passengers – it’s designed as basically a small, soothing distraction, a 15m mind-cleanser, if you will. It came out earlier this month, and is the final evolution of THIS, which I featured possibly a decade ago and which I was delighted to rediscover all these many years later. Honestly, this is SUCH a lovely 5-10 minute distraction, beautifully drawn and made – there’s a *weight* to the controls that makes it feel…I don’t know, HOMEMADE in a way, and fits with the art style perfectly; I am really happy to see that the original is still online and that the creator, Alex Perrin, has persevered to make a fuller version available for download. Honestly, this is a classic of the small, interactive web and should be celebrated as such.
• Scroll: Via B3ta comes this game, which challenges to see how far you can scroll, either in 30s or until you get bored or die or your finger develops some sort of intolerable RSI-type condition. If you can do more than 2.5 in 30s then either you have a far better mouse than I do or your fingers are AMAZING (or I am in some way digitally subnormal, which I concede is also a possibility).
• Play Codex: Another daily puzzle to add to your now-probably-hours-long routine! This one’s a codebreaker – each day there’s a different quote which you have to work out; each day, the code changes. The codes are always simple letter substitution games – you know, today all ‘ys’ are ‘ls’, that sort of thing – but they’re always a decent, chewy five minutes of mental work which might be the sort of thing you enjoy (or will be the sort of thing that you hate-wrangle for a while before fcuking off back to Sudoku).
• Travle: God, I am SO embarrassingly-bad at this. Travle is a simple game (which Gdocs seems REALLY disinclined to let me type – I KNOW HOW TO SPELL ‘TRAVEL’ YOU D1CKS I AM DOING THIS DELIBERATELY) which asks to to get from country A to country F simply by mapping out a country-to-country route to get from one to the other. This, honestly, has served as a humiliating reminder of how utterly appalling my geography is, but you may find it less shaming than I have.
• Isle of Tune: Last up this week, something for you to play with over Christmas – come back to me in 2025 with your compositions, please (or, er, don’t! You owe me nothing! Spend Christmas however you choose!)! Isle of Tune’s a fun little music toy – make your composition by plotting a route for a train, placing various objects by the track, and seeing what sound they make; the various different elements are different sounds, you can change the pitch and tempo, and generally this is actually a far more in-depth and complex tool than in initially appears (but, also, it’s cute and whimsical and basically a tiny digital train set, and who doesn’t love that? NO FCUKER, etc etc!). ENJOY!

By Cody Bratt

OUR FINAL MIX OF 2024 IS THIS PERFECTLY-CURATED SELECTION OF VAGUELY-HOUSEY BUT GENERALLY-LOW-OCTANE TRACKS PICKED BY DJ SANZA! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Trendy AI Videos: AI videos! Odd, slightly-unpleasant AI videos! The latest one, of the writhing mushrooms (no, really, writhing is 100% the right adjective) is spectacularly unsettling. This is slop, but…odd slop – and there are some of these, a few imagining a sort of ‘America’s Got Talent’ but with AI, which feel legitimately, horrifically near-real.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Zhiyong Jing

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

So, kill the rich or don’t kill the rich – where do YOU stand?

Obviously MURDER IS BAD, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I think I’ve come up with a solution to the general problem of plutocratic wealth accumulation which we can all get behind.

Let’s all agree that noone should be murdered – ok? OK! Let’s also accept that as part of our general social contract we all agree to abide by this and that everyone should be protected from murder by the law – ok? OK! Let’s ALSO agree that this applies to everyone alive…UNLESS you decide that you personally want to accumulate a personal fortune above a certain centrally-agreed threshold – let’s say, arbitrarily, $100m (I will leave it to you to decide where you think that line should fall) which will still let you enjoy the benefits of being RICHER THAN YOU COULD EVER POSSIBLY NEED TO BE whilst at the same time preventing you from achieving the sort of patrimony that allows you to, I don’t know, buy elections. If you DO decide that, actually, I still need more money than that, then, well you’re free to accumulate it – but, also, you forfeit your right to protection from murder. Want to be a billionaire? GREAT! As long as you’re willing to also therefore be an active participant in a global game of ‘Killer Manhunt’, like Hunted but with live ordnance and some STRONG MOTIVATIONS!

Honestly, I can see NO DOWNSIDES to this idea and look forward to it forming the central plank of a coming manifesto somewhere in the world.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are probably cursing the fact you’re not able to vote me into power RIGHT NOW.

By Elizabeth Zvonar

EASE INTO THIS WEEK’S CURIOS WITH A TWO-HOUR MIX OF UNSURPASSED BEATS, BURBLES, BLOOPS AND CLICKS (IN THE BEST POSSIBLE WAY!) MIXED BY THE SUPERB JON K! 

THE SECTION WHICH, WHILE IT HAS NO DESIRE TO BE SEEN TO BE IN ANY WAY AS SHARING AN OPINION WITH KEMI BADENOCH, WOULD LIKE TO GENTLY POINT OUT THAT THE ENGLISH OBSESSION WITH SANDWICHES IS FCUKING WEIRD, PT.1:  

By FeeBee

NEXT UP PUT SOME SUNSHINE INTO AN OTHERWISE STEEL=GREY DECEMBER WITH THIS SUPERB SELECTION OF AMAPIANO AND AFROBEAT COLLECTED OVER THE YEAR BY DANIEL HARRIS!

THE SECTION WHICH, WHILE IT HAS NO DESIRE TO BE SEEN TO BE IN ANY WAY AS SHARING AN OPINION WITH KEMI BADENOCH, WOULD LIKE TO GENTLY POINT OUT THAT THE ENGLISH OBSESSION WITH SANDWICHES IS FCUKING WEIRD, PT.2:  

• Sanborn Fire Maps: Per the history books, “”D. A. Sanborn, a young surveyor from Somerville, Massachusetts, was engaged in 1866 by the Aetna Insurance Company to prepare insurance maps for several cities in Tennessee. [..] Before working for Aetna, Sanborn conducted surveys and compiled an atlas of the city of Boston titled ‘Insurance Map of Boston, Volume 1, 1867’” – “But Matt!”, I hear you ask, “why the fcuk should I care?”, which is, frankly, a not-unreasonable question. The answer is that Brandon Silverman loved the typography and design of the aforementioned maps so much that he’s taken the time to create this website dedicated to them – you can buy prints of some of the design work, but you can also browse the archive in high-definition and, honestly, the lettering and layout of the title pages alone is, I promise you, fcuking AMAZING – seriously, if you’re in any way visually inclined then I think you will slightly fall in love with the work on here. It’s astonishing when you go through the galleries how much stuff seems to riff off this particular style – it really does feel ICONIC, in an odd sort of way.
• UnWrapped: Were you somewhat underwhelmed by your Wrapped last week? Do you not feel it quite captured the intricacies and nuance of your DEEPLY PERSONAL relationship to music, a relationship which is ENTIRELY UNIQUE and UNLIKE ANYONE ELSE’S (“you listened to 3,208 hours of Chappell Roan, CharliXCX and The 1975”)? Well why not create some alternative graphics to share amongst your friendship group and see if anyone gives a single iota more of a fcuk – this does a very good job of mimicking the vibe of this year’s Wrapped, down to the nonsensical AI-generated genre soup it created for everyone and some truly stellar made-up bandnames (I just fired it up again to remind myself of what it does, and it’s telling me that I listened to a LOT of Hedgerow Focaccia in 2024 which, honestly, I wish I had, maybe it would have made me feel better) – part of me wonders whether you could actually fool people with these, and the answer is, I think, ‘yes’ (making up fake bands and trying to get people to pretend to be sincerely into them even though they are entirely fictional is a MEAN thing to do, though, and I still feel guilty about getting a friend of mine’s little brother to swear blind that he was a massive fan of underground indie heroes ‘Chimney Factory’ c.1996).
• David Whyte: David Whyte is a poet – I personally wasn’t familiar with his work, but this section of his website, which presents the text of one of his poems to music, has a genuinely BEAUTIFUL look at feel to it, all watercolour landscapes that get filled in as you scroll, both digital and, oddly painterly (which in my experience is a really hard balance to strike when trying to nail this sort of aesthetic on-screen), and despite the fact that this is possibly a *touch* on the twee side for my personal taste I can’t help but admire the gorgeous webwork on show here.
• The Tiny Tools Directory: A handy collection of small webbuilding and creative tools, compiled by Curios favourite Everest Pipkin, designed for anyone who’s interested in building games or any sort of other lightly-interactive project online. Contains links to all sorts of useful things, from documentation about the ‘how’ to bits of software that will help with the ‘what’ – from game engines to graphics packs, mapmakers to sound generators, all helpfully=filterable in a variety of different ways. Such a generous collection of tools, rendered genuinely useful thanks to simple, helpful taxonomy and design – an object lesson in how to run this sort of thing.
• Specific Suggestions: You will, of course, as diligent students of Stuff Online, be familiar with the 1944 CIA document which described in detail how best to sabotage an organisation or bureaucracy from within, with helpful tips like ‘talk as frequently as possible and at great length’ or ‘hold conferences when there is critical work to be done’ – all the sorts of things that, IRONICALLY, are often hallmarks of modern working culture. Anyway, some kind soul has now compiled all these helpfully-unhelpful ways of working into a single website where you can hit a button to get a new piece of sabotage advice each time, along with some accompanying text explaining a little more about the project. Why not make it a workplace ‘thing’ in 2025 to share a new one of these with your team at the start of each new week? Although, er, given the way everything’s going perhaps we shouldn’t accelerate the decline of the labour market any more than is already happening.
• Fearleaders: Did you know that there is only ONE all-male (and non-binary) cheerleading team in the world, and that that team is in Vienna, Austria, and that they are call THE FEARLEADERS????? No, fcuk off, you did NOT know that, stop lying. Per the site, “As Fearleaders Vienna we support gender diversity and emancipation. We subvert gender stereotypes by turning them upside down and expose ridiculous and in the same way toxic masculine behaviour with overstatement and irony. We want to set a strong statement for equality and fundamental rights for every person in our society. We think that there is a need for men to not only choose a clear position when it comes to equality, but to also make a statement and fight side by side with the women* we support. Staying silent means accepting the status quo.” Also, and this is really important, they have some really sweet outfits in a popping orange/blue colourway. If you feel that this is YOUR SORT OF THING then you may be happy to know that there is a 2025 calendar currently onsale, featuring (based on the brief selection of sample images on display) some PG-rated queer lols in the Alps.
• Do Professional Stuff on Bluesky: Look, I imagine any of you working for Big Agencies will have access to one of the big social media multiplatform management systems and as such will get this as standard at some point soon (if it’s not already baked into Hootsuite et al – thankfully this sort of thing is No Longer My Problem) – but if you don’t you might find this useful. TrackBlue’s a platform that lets you do a bunch of ‘pro’ stuff on the platform, like scheduling posts and managing your audience and getting analytics and that sort of jazz. Is it interesting? No, no it is not, but it might be USEFUL and sometimes I sacrifice my personal interest for your professional development, because that’s the sort of selfless misanthrope I am.
• TimeyWimey: The name of this website/tool is so utterly abhorrent that I considered excluding it on grounds of crimes against language, but the design here is SO NICE that I couldn’t quite bring myself to. This is, fine, a very, very simple idea – a website which helps you calculate time differences – but the way it works is so simple and so elegant that I was left slightly agog (I appreciate that it’s entirely possible that none of you will be that amazed by this, but you have to bear in mind that, as I have mentioned, I am basically an anti-visual person and so possibly my threshold for this sort of thing is maybe…a touch lower than yours). Still, I thought this was super – it almost made me wish that I was the sort of international jetsetter who had cause to pay attention to different timezones (but I am very much not).
• The Best Book Covers of 2024: Or at least ‘the 100 best book covers of 2024 according to Print Magazine’ – those slight caveats don’t make this any less of a great selection of designwork though. I think, based on the fact there are occasionally multiple editions of the same book, that this covers the wider world rather than just North America – there is such a wonderful breadth of work here and several of these which I would LOVE as prints (the cover to Napalm in the Heart by Pol Guasch, in particular, made me properly stop and gasp as I scrolled and I LOVE IT SO), and this is both just a lovely thing to scroll through and a wonderful source of high-quality visual inspiration should you be in the market for such a thing.
• Photo Dharma: Do you like Buddhism? Do you like photographs? Do you like the concept of ‘photographs of Buddhism’ but have previously been unsure as to what the best place online to explore it might be? WELCOME TO YOUR HEAVEN! Photo Dharma contains “over 18,000 photographs of Buddhist archeological sites, pilgrimage centres, and temples in S & SE Asia, as well as Maps, Posters, etc.” for you to scroll through to your heart’s content. Web Curios – getting you one step closer to Nirvana with every link you click! Found via Jodi Ettenberg’s excellent monthly roundup of things.
• Every Colour Imaginable: Now, I don’t know you, I don’t know what your mind is like and as such I simply have no idea what you can or can’t imagine. Are you capable of conceiving of colours of a depth and brilliance I can’t even guess at? Do your eyes perceive frequencies denied to me by my low-quality retinas? I HAVE NO FCUKING IDEA. As such I’m not able to gauge the veracity of the whole ‘every colour imaginable’ thing – but trust me when I say that there are a FCUKTONNE of colours on this page, although I am baffled as to exactly why.
• SkullSite: An early Christmas present for the goths now (lol, like this hasn’t been on all your bookmarks lists for decades) – SkullSite is dedicated to photos and 3d scans of bird skulls – JUST BIRDS, FCUK OFF WITH YOUR MAMMALIAN CRANIA! – of which there are seemingly many, many hundreds collected here. The site is OLD and is seemingly in the process of being migrated elsewhere, and the 3d scans don’t currently work because of Flash being dead, and, well, what’s left is a collection of photos of the headbones of dead avians, but WOW are bird skulls cool looking and multivariantly weird-looking. Were it not *a bit weird* I would be sorely tempted to pick up a few of these as decorative objects (but I am quite acutely conscious at the moment of the fact that I probably can’t really afford to add any more ‘odd’ to my personality lest I become entirely incapable of relating to actual human beings).
• Anti-Tag Clouds: Ooh, this is an interesting angle from which to look at a text which I’d honestly never thought of before – “An Anti-Tag Cloud shows you the most common English words that never appear in a text, visualizing the “negative space” of a literary work. Size indicates how frequent a word is across other texts.” Select classic books from the drop down and learn that ‘blood’ is never mentioned in Pride & Prejudice, that The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes apparently contains not a single mention of the word ‘religion’, and that, genuinely surprisingly, the word ‘horse’ does not occur even once in ‘Carry On, Jeeves’. Ooh, and the complete absence of the terms ‘father’ and ‘mother’ in Winnie The Pooh is REALLY interesting (to me at least). There’s an interesting reverse game in this where you’re presented with the missing words list and asked to guess which book the tag cloud applies to, in case anyone fancies engineering that.
• Hotpipes: A reader writes! Thankyou so much to Caroline Crampton, who got in touch after last week’s Curios saying “I would like to recommend my favourite regular pipe organ broadcast: Hot Pipes. As far as I can tell, this radio show/podcast is made by a single British ex-pat living in Spain who just really, really loves documenting and explaining the sound of historical pipe organs. He often themes shows around particular composers or locations. For instance, this is one featuring organs that were built inside American pizza restaurants.” I obviously had no idea when writing last week that one of the six of you who read this thing would be a pipe organ enthusiast and would really appreciate my including an organ-related link, but THIS IS PERFECT AND WHY I LOVE WRITING CURIOS AND WHY I LOVE THE WEB (in the brief moments when I don’t resent it for making me the broken husk of a man I very much now am).
• The London Community Laptop Orchestra: Based in Hackney, because some stereotypes are simply too powerful to overcome, the LCLO (I refuse to type the whole name more than once) is “a london based community laptop orchestra, open to anyone who’s interested in getting involved. no experience is required. only a laptop.” I know NOTHING about this and am working on the basis that these people are unlikely to be murderers, but if you’d like to find out for yourselves then there’s a meetup in FCUKING HACKNEY next week! Please do go along and reassure me that they are not in fact some sort of weird digital satanic cult or something.
• Julianne Aguilar: I’m going to paste a small section of the ‘about’ bit of digital artist Julianne Aguilar’s website here, as I think it will help you understand why I love it: “Julianne Aguilar is an artist, writer, and narrative designer. Her work is inspired by HTML1, unfinished and abandoned 100k+ word fanfics, weed, hell.com circa 1999, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Net Chick: A Smart-Girl Guide To The Wired World by Carla Sinclair, the 1999 Nine Inch Nails masterpiece The Fragile, “Mother Earth, Mother Board” by Neal Stephenson, Elim Garak from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, dying MMORPGs, gail.com, the 1996 first person shooter Quake…” – the list of influences goes on, but it’s safe to say that this is all VERY MUCH MY SH1T. Aguilar’s website features a selection of small little digital artworks (along with a selection of articles and non-digital works), all linked from the homepage, some lightly-interactive and some which unfold over a short period as you watch them, and I have only explored a dozen or so but I honestly think there is some really, really lovely stuff in here that rewards both investigation and a bit of careful attention.
• Into Time: Ok – click this link and and watch the beautiful colour gradient shift over the screen. Get a bit mesmerised. Then click the screen and realise that you can subdivide it into different sections and create a unique, vaguely-kaleidoscopic artwork composed of shifting windows of colour in a geometric grid and…LOOK IT IS GOOD OK IT IS NOT MY FAULT I AM TERRIBLE AT DESCRIBING THESE THINGS. Just click the link ffs.
• Doctor Who Scarf: Is Doctor Who good or bad at the moment? Has the series been KILLED BY WOKE or has it NEVER BEEN BETTER? I can’t tell at what point in the seemingly-constant WHO QUALITY DISCOURSE the fandom finds itself (and, honestly, nor indeed do I particularly care – it is a children’s TV programme ffs), but hopefully one thing that EVERYONE can agree on is that a stripey scarf is, at heart, an excellent thing to be celebrated. And so it is with this site (SEAMLESS!) which exists specifically to chart the different scarves worn by Tom Baker, a past Doctor from…what, the 70s? 80s?…per their description, “Tom Baker wore several scarves during his seven series as the Doctor. Each one had its own unique characteristics. Select the links above for detailed information about each scarf including patterns, knitting specifications and yarn suggestions. There are also sections featuring the history of the design, tips for scarf construction, a gallery of scarves knitted by fans (and me) plus some fun ephemera.” FUN SCARF-RELATED EPHEMERA – WHAT MORE COULD YOU ASK FOR?!?! I jest, Whovians, I jest, enjoy your scarves.
• Bird1000: A game! Promoting an album! Which has, honestly, one of the most utterly-batsh1t soundtracks I have heard in…dear God, in quite a while. This is a sidescrolling platformer – simple but quite shiny-looking – which is part of a wider multimedia arts project to promote a new record by Armenian artist Tigran Hamasyan. “The transmedia project The Bird of a Thousand Voices is the first of its kind to bring ancient Armenian folk tale Hazaran Blbul to life. Armenian composer & pianist Tigran Hamasyan and Dutch filmmaker & visual artist Ruben Van Leer are joining forces for a new live staged production that had its world premiere at the Holland Festival. The mythical bird – whose thousand different songs travel the world to spread harmony – comes to life in an intriguing new kind of music theater, an online game, a kinetic art installation and a series of films.” This is…this is quite overwhelming to be honest, and I am not joking when I say that the music really is like nothing I’ve ever heard before, sort of intensely melodic and a wonderful mix of Eastern and Western, but also…quite fcuking mental. I really really enjoyed this – three minutes of very weird, quite dazzling fun,
• Skeal: Last up in this section is a game which I am slightly amazed I haven’t linked to in the past – this is PERFECT for December (and, honestly, any time of the year, but most of all December). It is short, it is silly, it will make you grin from ear-to-ear, and you need to turn your sound up. ENJOY!

By Zoe Hawk

OUR FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS AN HOUR OF TOP-NOTCH JAZZ SELECTED AND MIXED BY MAARTEN GOETHEER!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• UKSnack Attack: Imagined snack foods that don’t exist but which the creator of these mockups and several hundred thousand people who follow the account very much wish did. This doesn’t wholly do it for me, but it’s entirely possible that you will all be less pathetic food snobs than I am – either way, the photoshopping here is TP NOTCH, so well done to the kid behind it.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Cecil Touchon

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

HELLO EVERYONE HELLO HAPPY FRIDAY!

I, er, went out for LUNCH yesterday, which, it turned out, was quite long, and quite liquid, and which almost certainly didn’t require the additional afterbooze, and which possibly was the reason as to why I woke up at 4am this morning…which is by way of small explanation as to why what follows is, even by my standards, a poorly-written and frankly barely-sensical mess of branespeek.  The links, though? The links are, as per, fcuking GREAT.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should probably just click the links and ignore the words this week, sorry.

By Bobbi Essers

IT MAY NOT SURPRISE YOU TO LEARN THAT MY INTEREST IN CHRISTMAS IS PRETTY MUCH ZERO AND THAT I HAVE WHAT CAN ONLY BE DESCRIBED AS A VISCERAL HATRED OF ‘FESTIVE’ MUSIC, BUT, BECAUSE I APPRECIATE THAT YOU MAY BE LESS FUNDAMENTALLY BROKEN THAN I AM, I NONETHELESS PRESENT TO YOU THIS 3.5H SELECTION OF (NOT WHOLLY TRADITIONAL) CHRISTMAS TRACKS COMPILED BY MY FRIEND ED!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY CURIOUS TO WATCH THE ‘GREGG WALLACE MAKES FRIENDS WITH LAURENCE FOX’ THING THAT NOW SEEMS GRIMLY INEVITABLE, PT.1:  

By Katrien de Blauwer (this and all remaining images via TIH)

NEXT UP, OPPIDAN DOING A SET FOR DJ MAG FROM A COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO WHICH IS A PRETTYMUCH PERFECT COLLECTION OF PARTY BANGERS! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY CURIOUS TO WATCH THE ‘GREGG WALLACE MAKES FRIENDS WITH LAURENCE FOX’ THING THAT NOW SEEMS GRIMLY INEVITABLE, PT.2:  

• The Desert Island Discs Spreadsheet: An *incredibly* middle-aged, middle-class, anglocentric link, this one, but, well, I have a vague idea about the makeup of at least a proportion of my readership and I SEE YOU, Radio4 people. I have no idea who has compiled this but this spreadsheet contains not only links to every single episode of the show EVER – oh, hang on, ought I explain? Ok, fine – to the non-anglos amongst you, Desert Island Discs is a long-running BBC radio show on which notable people are interviewed about their lives, with the general conceit that they are being asked which records they would take with them if they were to be stranded alone on a desert island. So, this spreadsheet not only links to every single episode of the show, which is just interesting and useful in and of itself (there really are some incredible names on there) but also, for reasons known only to the person who compiled it, records every single artist whose music has been selected by someone, keeping a running tally of the most-popular (Mozart, in case you were wondering), books that people have chosen to take (you’re allowed to bring one – Shakespeare takes the top spot, but a surprising number of masochists would apparently choose the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which feels…joyless, frankly) and the sole luxury item that they would wish to bring with them (it’s worth scrolling down that particular tab because there are some truly esoteric picks in there – my personal favourite is whoever it was who chose ‘the law of the land’ as their luxury, for the sole stated purpose of then being able to break it). This is oddly-fascinating (or at least it is if you’re a middle-class, Radio4-listening brit of a certain age – I concede that for everyone else then, well, it’s a fcuking spreadsheet).
• The Bluesky Roast Thing: So this was this week’s self-referential viral Bluesky thing – plug in your handle (or indeed anyone else’s), and this will do the whole ‘roast my profile’ thing (much the same as did the rounds for Twitter and Insta a month or so back), with an LLM offering an ‘hilarious’ analysis of your posts and posting style. I can’t stress enough how horrible I find this – the copy it comes out with hits a very specific register of perky-LLM-positivity that I find especially grating, and, overall, the tone of voice here is pretty much my least-favourite style of writing in the whole world; blandly-cheerful, ‘sassy’ and toe-curlingly insincere. Still, LOADS of people really enjoyed this, or at least enough to share The Machine’s ‘hilarious’ insights into their personality and ‘unique’ posting style, which I found interesting – turns out people can put up with horrible LLM-writing when it’s all about them!  BONUS BLUESKY THINGS!: for the techy amongst you, this is a decent primer on how to extract analytics from the platform so you can, should you so desire, cobble together information on post performance, etc etc.
• The Neighbourhoods: This is a lovely project by one Rob Stephenson, exploring and documenting New York City – per the description, “This weekly newsletter is a not-so-deep dive into every neighborhood in NYC in an effort to create some sort of photographic document of modern-day New York, or at least a record of what I find interesting* on any particular day. I know I will be leaving out a ton of things that could be considered crucial to the understanding of a particular neighborhood and including stuff that will leave some scratching their heads, but this isn’t meant to be a complete or even accurate representation of a place, just my reaction to it. With a mix of old and new pictures and field recordings, I hope this project will add something to the substantial body of work that has already been made about the city.” This is SO interesting – I say this as someone who’s only ever visited New York and doesn’t have anything resembling DEEP KNOWLEDGE of the city, but who is fascinated by writing about hyperlocal urbanity, and for whom this sort of writing, discursive and personal and curious and interested and interesting, is basically personal catnip. If you like reading people like Jon Elledge writing about London then you might also enjoy this – and, obviously, if you’re a New Yorker, this feels like something of a must-read.
• Y2K: There’s some new film coming out from ubiquitous indie-presenting collective A24 – I have literally fcuk all idea what it’s about, and nor do I care, but it does have a rather nice retropromosite accompanying it which I rather enjoyed; the gimmick is that it looks and feels like a desktop c.1999 (I may not know the first thing about the film, but I have a reasonable degree of certainty that it is set IN THE PAST), complete with Winamp-esque media player with a playlist of era-appropriate tracks, a bunch of files on the desktop for you to explore and an AOL-style chat window just waiting for you to talk to your friend through…except are they your friend? What’s going on? WHO ARE YOU REALLY SPEAKING TO? This is rather fun.
• Billy Bass Cameo: Fine, it’s not *quite* Cameo, but, well, almost. Have YOU ever wanted the opportunity to have your own, bespoke video of a Big Mouth Billy Bass singing along to whatever song you fancy? No, I can’t imagine for a second that you have EVER wished for such a thing, and yet the universe has provided nonetheless. It’s all very homebrew, but all the better for it – you have to upload your own MP3, you can select specific movements for Billy to perform while it plays, and you can even select different lighting setups to best-frame your piscine performance (the best thing about the site, though, is that it includes a button which is simply labeled as ‘send to fish’. More websites need such a button). I am THRILLED that this exists, and I imagine there is at least one person in your life who would be equally thrilled to receive a video of a mechanical fish flailing arrhythmically to ‘Silent Night’.
• YourSign LM: You may not think that the TikTok feed of a wholesale signmaker somewhere in China would be worth following, but you would be WRONG. I promise you, the guys fronting these – ‘Tony’ and ‘Leon’ and a couple of others – are some sort of hydrogen bomb of onscreen charisma, and while it’s increasingly apparent that there’s nothing remotely funny about what’s likely to happen to US politics over the next four years, there is something VERY funny about a young Chinese man doing an absolutely nailed-on Trump impersonation while attempting to convince you of the absolute importance of shipping a LOT of neon signage products from Shenzhen.
• The Open Source Challenge: The OSINT enthusiasts at Bellingcat have put together this series of challenges to test your online sleuthing skills – they are unlocking at various points over the coming month, or you can unlock them early by completing previous puzzles in the sequence – the two that are currently open to view are both of the ‘where was this picture taken?’ variety, and as such not HUGELY complex, but it will be interesting to see what shape the rest of the selection takes.
• Songs of Insects: What sort of lunatic wouldn’t want the opportunity to listen to the glorious sounds of cicadas, recorded and catalogued online alongside grasshoppers, crickets and 90-odd other species of noise-making insects? NO FCUKER, etc! This is a North American site and these are North American insects, just to stave off any disappointment in those of you who are exclusively interested in the sounds made by European or Asian insects instead.
• Craftball: Pointless, shiny luxe brand browsergame corner! This time it’s the turn of Loewe, who, for reasons that I doubt even their head of brand could adequately explain, have chosen to spunk a bunch of money on a game which, even by the standards of these things, really is p1ss-poor. What exactly does ‘manouvering an orange (no, really, it’s a fcuking orange – WHY?) left and right along one of three straight courses in an attempt to avoid obstacles’ have to do with ‘flogging expensive bags and shoes and perfumes’? NO IDEA! Still, who cares? You can win PRIZES (I imagine the ‘prizes’ amount to ‘a tenner off a keyring’, but, still, PRIZES!)! This really is bafflingly-sh1t, but does at least have the requisite degree of shine and polish you expect from this sort of thing – seriously though, can anyone explain the orange to me?
• Pipe Dreams: Oh this is great, PURE CURIO. Did you know that “Pipedreams, which recently celebrated the 40th anniversary of continuous broadcasts, began in 1982 and remains the only nationally distributed weekly radio program exploring the art of the pipe organ”? No you didn’t, fcuk off, stop lying. Anyway, this is the website accompanying the (presumably North American) show which features a quite astonishing array of pipe organ music – there are nearly 2,500(!!!!) recordings on here as far as I can tell, meaning if you ever wanted to get REALLY into, er, the sound of the pipe organ, you now have the perfect place to start. I can imagine that for some of you that this will feel pleasingly-festive (and quite possibly that for a few others it will cause potentially-traumatic flashbacks to being forced to spend a lot of time in church as a kid).
• NPR’s Books We Love: Oh this is a great resource, well done NPR – this website is basically a pleasingly-explorable selection of books published this year which have been recommended by various NPR contributors, across a range of genres and categories, which is easy to browse and which contains over 350 titles, meaning that there’s something in there for pretty much every taste. Be aware that this is obviously a North American selection, meaning not everything on here will necessarily have been published yet where you are – but you can also browse previous selections going back to 2013, so if you’re in the market for a bunch of book recs for the holiday season this is an excellent place to start.
• Infinite Baseball: Via Lynn Cherny’s reliably-fascinating newsletter (seriously, if you’re interested in AI and digital creativity in general you really ought to subscribe) comes this silly-but-also-interesting project, which basically produces AI-generated imaginary baseball games, delivered via ‘live’ commentary on the site – this is…sort-of incredible, partly because I don’t understand baseball in the slightest and as such I have no idea whether what it’s saying makes any sense at all. It *sounds* like it does, though, and there’s something oddly-soothing about having the commentary running in the background, wittering away about line-drives and batting averages. This is an art project by Dan Moore, who writes: “The Great American Pastime reimagines one of America’s most cherished rituals through the lens of artificial intelligence. This piece employs the Infinite Baseball Radio Network to broadcast an unending stream of AI-generated baseball games that captures the rhythm, tone, and drama of a live sports broadcast. By inviting listeners into a familiar yet subtly artificial version of America’s favorite pastime, the work provokes reflection on humanity’s increasingly tangled relationship with technology, nostalgia, and the narratives that shape the American cultural identity.” So, er, there!
• Continue and Persist: This is a lovely idea, and I think you should all pick someone you know in the US to send one of these to. Per the blurb, “Every day, thousands of Cease and Desist letters are issued, telling people to stop what they’re doing (Looking at you, David Chang). What a bummer! That’s why we created: The Continue and Persist Letter. A official-looking legal letter that encourages and uplifts people, one that tells people to keep doing what they’re doing! Surprise someone you appreciate by sending them a Continue and Persist Letter.” WHAT A LOVELY THING! Also, they will post it for you for free, which seems like a good enough reason for you to bother – I can’t tell you how pleasing it would be to receive an official-looking bit of documentation telling me that, actually, I’m not wasting my life doing this and I should crack right on (but, perhaps, the opposite would be healthier).
• Comball: Have you ever wondered to yourself ‘what would it be like if someone were to combine the twin ludic  pursuits of pool and popular mobile game 2048?’? No, I can’t imagine for a second that you have (you incurious fcuk, you), but thankfully Eray Zesen has which is why this fun little browsergame exists.
• The Complete BBC Micro Games Archive: Growing up in the UK in the 80s, exposure to computing was in the main limited to occasional opportunities to use one of the school’s collection of yellowing, grubby BBC Micros, a system characterised by amazing, blocky graphics and some truly batsh1t games which for some reason were occasionally considered to be ‘educational’ enough to let us spend an hour or so messing around with them – I genuinely have no idea what exactly playing a text adventure game called ‘Granny’s Garden’ was meant to contribute to my intellectual formation, but GOD did I love those occasional moments when I got to play it rather than memorising times tables. Anyway, this site seemingly collects EVERY SINGLE GAME EVER MADE FOR THE BBC EVER, including the aforementioned Granny’s Garden, so if you want to experience exactly how poor electronic entertainments were in 1984 then this is basically all your Christmases come at once.
• TicTactic: Noughts and crosses reimagined as a sort of roguelike card battler. This is a demo of the full thing, but it’s pretty full and the game is surprisingly deep and complex when you get into it a bit (ok, complex compared to actual noughts and crosses).
• Fliphaus: Via the excellent Nag, this is a TERRIFYINGLY addictive game which someone really needs to rip off for the UK asap. The premise is simple – you’re shown two houses side by side, pulled from Zillow listings, and all you have to do is guess which one is priced higher. Given how insane Brits are about housing and property in general, and how insane we also area about money, a UK version of this would break traffic records for whichever estate agent or property-adjacent company nicks this idea first – GO!
• The Confounding Calendar: This week’s last ludic link is this (growing) selection of puzzle games – a new one’s being released every day for advent, and, honestly, each of the ones so far is SO SO GOOD (in particular the fiendish and brilliant ‘Alphabet Soup for Picky Eaters’, which had me grinding my teeth at it for longer than I care to admit). These are fun, imaginative, quirky and interesting, and I think it’s very much worth checking back over the next couple of weeks to play them all.

By Kumi Oguro

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS A SUPERB SELECTION OF TRACKS CHOSEN BY NICK STROPKO WHICH IS REALLY MAKING ME WANT A COCKTAIL AS IT PLAYS IN THE BACKGROUND, UNFORTUNATE GIVEN IT IS CURRENTLY 10:01AM!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS ONCE AGAIN SADLY EMPTY!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Arch Budzar: Art. Not normally my sort of thing, visually, but I find there’s something interesting about the juxtaposition of the sort of ‘naive’ style and the messaging and maybe you will too.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Neko Sawatzki

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: