Author Archives: admin

Webcurios 01/11/24

Reading Time: 35 minutes

The world’s either going to get maybe, possibly, a tiny bit better next week, or it’s going to get LOADS worse – EXCITING, ISN’T IT? I don’t know about you, but part of me quite wants to be put into a medically-induced coma until America gets its sh1t together.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you’re sick of their fcuking politics too, admit it.

By Zhiyong Jin (all pics this week via TIH, for which thanks as ever)

WHY NOT ENJOY THE OPENING SECTION OF CURIOS ACCOMPANIED BY A SELECTION OF UK GRIME TRACKS MIXED BY MANGA? THERE IS NOT GOOD REASON NOT TO, CLICK THIS LINK! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY ANGRY AT THE FACT THAT IT KNOWS WHO AND WHAT ‘THE RIZZLER’ IS, BUT IS EVEN MORE ANNOYED THAT THIS WEEK IT GOT HIM MIXED UP WITH BABY GRONK, PT.1:  

  • 3d Workers Island: This week’s first link is a bit of an odd one (plus ca change), and to be honest it’s more of a short story in slightly-odd webpage form, and, well, I appreciate I am hardly selling it to you here but I PROMISE IT IS GOOD. You just have to be aware of the following things: a) despite what it might look like, there’s no real interaction happening here – you advance the narrative by clicking, and that’s your only form of agency here; b) so effectively that means that what you’re doing is reading and looking – do you like reading and looking? GREAT! I don’t want to give too much away here because part of the pleasure of this is how gently-unsettling it is, but think of this as a spooky tale for hallowe’en (yes I know I am a day late, it’s not my fcuking fault when the days fall), one which wonders what it would be like if you one day realised that the computer sandbox you like to play with might have something slightly more going on under the hood than you at first thought. Told through ‘game’ footage, screenshots of forum posts, messenger conversations and other fragmented bits of digital media, this is REALLY nicely–paced and gets…quite creepy by the end. It will take about 10 minutes of your life, but you probably weren’t going to do anything important with them anyway, were you? Exactly.
  • MusicFX DJ: A NEW FUN MUSICAL AI TOOL TO PLAY WITH! This one’s from Google, and basically takes a multi-track approach to AI music – rather than just inputting a single prompt to generate a piece of music, this interface lets you specify various elements that you want included, and then use sliders to change the emphasis given to each prompt in the resultant composition – so, for example, you might have one term which is just ‘crying’, and by adjusting the slider you can, in realtime, determine the exact amount of wracked sobbing you’d like to include in the song. This is, in the main, a GREAT way of creating some genuinely-horrible-sounding cacophonies (as I type this, some truly appalling sounds generated by the terms ‘southern gothic’, ‘hardcore’ and ‘breakbeat’ are swirling around my kitchen), but it feels like this particular way of directing The Machine allows for a lot more interesting and malleable results – there’s something honestly sort of magical about moving the sliders and hearing the track respond to your urgings in semi-realtime, even if I haven’t yet managed to create anything that doesn’t make my ears want to immolate themselves. Have a play, this is FUN.
  • The Bullsh1tometer: I am, perhaps naively, clinging onto the hope that as of this time next week North America will have collectively decided that, actually, the past 10 years haven’t actually been all that fun, and that it might now be time to put this whole miserable episode behind us and forget, ideally forever, that That Fcuking Man ever existed (I appreciate it is unlikely that it is going to be that simple, but hey ho). As the rest of the world waits to see whether the population of  one country ends up making a decision so catastrophically stupid (AGAIN!) that it fcuks things up for everyone else too, why not enjoy this election-themed explainer from Australian satirical outlet Crikey, which is running a project to neatly demonstrate the ways in which AI can (and already is) being applied to news output, and how that affects the way in which a reader experiences facts. Per their explanation, “We’ve used the current US election campaign as a test case. We started by selecting six “base” stories, pivotal moments in the campaign so far that have been covered across the globe, with the key details generally agreed upon across the spectrum.  The team at DDB and Pow Wow then took a “neutral” article (acknowledging that no article, even wire copy, can ever be truly neutral) for each of these stories and passed them through a fine-tuned LLM (large language model). The LLM is designed to find opportunities to insert political bias. As the dial is turned up, the AI system adds more and more bias, until the “neutral” base article is converted into a piece of extreme propaganda.” So, basically, you select one of a selection of articles and can turn the AI heat up to a degree of your own choosing, seeing how quickly and easily The Machine is able to turn relatively-staid and neutral prose into something significantly more partisan and inflammatory in just a click.  This won’t tell you anything you don’t already know, but it’s a neat educational explainer as to why you need to be (even more) cognisant of how easy it is to spin facts with words, and how (per everything else) it’s not going to get any better anytime soon.
  • Hourly at the Whitney:  What time is it RIGHT NOW? No, seriously, it’s important. Basically if you click this link on the hour, you will experience a lovely little bit of site-specific art by Maya Man; if you click at any other time, you’ll just get the website for the Whitney (which is nice, but, well, not all that interesting per se). I won’t spoil the work by explaining or describing it (although if you’re too impatient to wait for the hour to strike, you can get the details here – but know that I judge you poorly), but I was utterly charmed by this – I think there’s something wonderful about this sort of subtle, additive webwork, and the idea that someone might just be online while the hour strikes and be surprised by the unexpected interaction is lovely to me. It sort of puts me in mind of those elaborate water clocks that you occasionally find in provincial shopping centres, which twice a day do some sort of insanely-elaborate trumpet-and-geyser routine to the tune of the William Tell overture (you OBVIOUSLY know what I mean here, don’t pretend that this isn’t the most evocative and resonant description of anything you’ve ever read). Basically I think that anyone who’s in charge of a website should give serious thought to including some sort of regular, time-based easter egg, the stranger the better – I am very much available for ‘consultancy’ here, should anyone want to discuss some options.
  • Smashing: Of all the things that need ‘hacking’ (nothing needs hacking, NOTHING, you are not fcuking Neo, you are just a tedious micromanager of your own experiences and you should just fcuking relax, ok?), I think if I’m honest that ‘finding things to read online’ is pretty low down the list – JUST SUBSCRIBE TO CURIOS FFS WHAT IS WRONG WITH EVERYONE? However, should you somehow be of the opinion that 20-odd high quality longreads, lovingly curated by ME, isn’t enough for you each week, you might be interested in Smashing, the second ‘surface more articles to read’-type app I can remember in the past 18 months (you may recall Artifact, which lasted approximately six months). How it works is a *bit* opaque, but as far as I can tell there’s a combination of…some sort of algorithmic content sorting, alongside ‘community recommendations’, with the idea that the app’s userbase will also contribute interesting things to the content pool based on their own surfing/browsing/reading. Which is a nice idea in theory, but rather undermined by the intended target audience for the app is…people who feel they need help finding interesting things to read. DO YOU SEE THE PROBLEM IN THIS THEORETICAL FLYWHEEL? There’s also quite a large red flag in the app’s blurb, which, when reaching for topics that users might be interested in, alights immediately on ‘marketing’, ‘wellness’ and ‘AI’, suggesting that, possibly, it’s aimed at people who don’t actually like reading for reading’s sake at all (look, I’m sorry, but if you are asked for your primary interests and your immediate response is those three terms then, well, I think you have dust where your soul should be), an opinion further reinforced by the fact that ‘AI Summaries’ is a big selling point (you can instruct the app to make any article ‘funny’, which will send a genuine shiver of revulsion down the spine of anyone who’s been exposed to LLM-generated ‘humour’ at any point). Basically this looks like it’s for cnuts, and I hope none of you download it (but, as ever, I will never know if you do, so).
  • The Geoguesser Man Has Reaches His Final Evolution: OK, so this is literally just a link to a video on X, and it’s only 20s or so, but also I think this might be significant at a species level. The Geoguesser guy – you know, the bloke who’s somehow discovered he has a quite incredible facility for working out where on earth any given photograph was taken – has worked out that he can, more often than not, identify the rough geolocation of an image based on nothing more than the tone of the sky in said image; this video is of him realising the full extent of his powers. I am honestly slightly astonished and not a little terrified by this, as if it’s not all a scam or a setup then I honestly think he might have hit a new tier of evolution.
  • A Flood of AI Animation Is Coming: This link takes you to what, fine, is a very dry update from AI videmongers Runway about a new update to their stack; ignore the boring (and frankly far-too-technical) words, though, and enjoy the videos, which demonstrate the frankly startling animation/mocap results that you can now get from AI style transfer in what I think might be realtime. Basically it takes facial movement and voice patterns and uses those to animate an AI-generated facial model – as you can see from the example clips here, what this means is Pixar-grade lipsyncing and emoting with literally no effort whatsoever, which, from the point of view of lowering the barrier to entry for creating animations, is pretty significant. On the one hand I appreciate that, as with all this stuff, there are a LOT OF QUESTIONS (whither jobs! Whither the environment! Etc etc) but I can’t help but see things like this as…broadly good? I don’t know, I just think that anything that allows kid with an idea and an imagination to more easily make things based on said ideas and said imagination is, on balance, A Net Positive, and I can’t get immediately angry about something that lowers the barriers to Making Fun Things. Sorry. Also, let’s be honest, there’s a fcuktonne of very ropy human-created animation already out there, so let’s not pretend it’s all fcuking Golden Era Disney.
  • Synthwave Chimes: Via Kris at Naive, this is a lovely, fuzzy and slightly-incomprehensible little synthtoy – there are some…dangling things (the titular ‘chimes’, I suppose – fcuk, I could probably have worked that out before I started typing this now-entirely-pointless digression) which you move your mouse over to produce sounds – the sounds in question are a bit ragged and frayed around the edges, and I like the vaguely-atonal cacophony that results when you careen the cursor across the shapes, and, in general, I think I would like windchimes significantly more if they sounded like this.
  • Grief Garden: Also via Kris (THANKS KRIS!) comes this simple-but-hugely-poignant (and, realistically, only going to become moreso) website which exists to collect people’s memories of the things that they have lost, or know they will lose, as a result of climate change. Per the blurb, Grief Garden “is an exploratory space, containing stories of plants, animals, and other memorialized climate grief. Explore the canvas by clicking on cells to either learn more about a memorial or to add your own — this can be a favorite tree, a beach, a friend, anything that you would like to memorialize.” It presents as a simple ASCII-ish map – clicking on any square on the map that has a character on it will show you someone else’s memory; clicking on one with no character will allow you to enter your own. This feels very much like something that could / should be taken by a museum and made bigger, because…well, look, none of this is getting better, is it, and it feels like these are feelings and ideas that a significant proportion of the global population is going to have to start wrestling with sooner than it probably realises. Seriously though, please do spend some time with this – there are some really lovely bits of writing buried in the memories, like this one: “But there are snapshots of this season I won’t forget. Toddlers receiving commendations for bravery on behalf of fathers who will miss a lifetime of milestones. Stepping onto the tarmac under that ominous, orange sky, the scarcest smattering of ash on the breeze. Evacuation sirens; smoke so dense it cancels out the sun. The fear in my son’s eyes as he struggled to catch a breath. Thousands upon thousands of livestock charred and scattered by the road; millions upon millions of native animals – likely entire species – incinerated.” Yes, ok, fine, I didn’t say it would be cheerful.
  • Leon Eckert: I have no clue whatsoever how I found the personal website of Leon Eckert, who, per his description, is ‘a German programmer, researcher and artist focusing on the critical discussion of technology and its impact on society’ and currently living in Shanghai (HELLO LEON, should you be the sort of person who Googles themselves, HAPPY FRIDAY I HOPE YOU ARE WELL), and I am linking to his website because it has THE most pleasingly fun/silly UX/UI flourishes I have seen on a site in AGES. Seriously, just click the link and then toggle the checkboxes on the left-hand-side of the page to make your browsing experience significantly more fun. I would like all new websites to come with these features, please, especially the ‘multiply my cursor by 1000’ one which genuinely made me feel as though I was having some sort of minor episode for a second.
  • Thos Computer: This is a very simple site but I LOVE the interface and how the drop-down menus and what you select from them effectively act as a sort of Choose Your Own Adventure-type recongfiguration of the website content (which, I promise, will make more sense to you when you click the link and play around). This feels like a really interesting and potentially-fruitful way to explore narrative design; I really like the idea of a story which reconfigures itself around you as you change individual words, alter verbs or swap out nouns.
  • On Games: A new magazine! An actual, physical magazine! About videogames! All glossy and high-quality and super-designed! This looks LOVELY, and very grown-up, (and pricey, at £25 for volume one), and the sort of thing that would sit among the exposed brickwork and filament bulbs of someone from 2013’s warehouse apartment. Gorgeous design, though.
  • Nintendo Music: I was never a Nintendo kid as a child, and as a result don’t have the deep-seated nostalgia associated with the brand, its consoles and its characters – I am aware, though, that for many of you the sound of the NES (or SNES, or N64, or Gameboy, or Switch, dear god this makes me feel old I am going to stop listing old consoles now) is the sound of CHILDHOOD and BETTER TIMES, and as such I realise that for some of you a mobile app which lets you listen to ALL OF THE NINTENDO MUSIC EVER is basically like some sort of holy grail so, well, here you go! I haven’t tried this so can’t attest to its quality, but it’s an official Nintendo app so I’d expect it to be pretty decent. I particularly like the way that the app will apparently let you extend the duration of shorter tracks, so you can transform (for example) the Rainbow Road theme into some sort of 18-minute prog fever dream.
  • The RIP Off: This is a project by an outfit called Brain, very much the Gobots to MSCHF’s Transformers when it comes to ‘gimmicky short-term gimmicks with immense viral potential’ – they are the people behind the ‘Green Day, but with the songs reproduced on crappy instruments’ which you doubtless saw when I was off, and while I am sure they’re perfectly-pleasant people this does very much feel like a bunch of people who saw what MSCHF were doing and literally thought ‘yeah, ok, we can copy that wholesale’. Still, I grudgingly have to admit that I think this is quite a fun idea – the simple premise is that each time a famous dies, someone somewhere is the first in the world to express their condolences via social media, and that that person should be rewarded in the form of a medal. The site lists a bunch of now-deceased celebrities; if you believe you were the first in the world to wish them well in their shuffle off the mortal coil, link your Twitter account to the site and claim your prize – in this specific case, a medal engraved with your name and the fact that YOU were the first person in the world to publicly mourn (for example) Liam Payne. Sadly the medals only ship within the US, which means that I feel it important for a UK funeral parlour to rip this off wholesale for the anglo market.

By Takashi Nakamura

NEXT UP WE RETURN TO FORMER EDITOR PAUL WHOSE BLOOPS AND BEATS ARE IN PARTICULARLY FINE FORM THIS WEEK! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY ANGRY AT THE FACT THAT IT KNOWS WHO AND WHAT ‘THE RIZZLER’ IS, BUT IS EVEN MORE ANNOYED THAT THIS WEEK IT GOT HIM MIXED UP WITH BABY GRONK, PT.2:

  • I Can’t Believe Other People Don’t Do This: We have all experienced the very particular feeling of watching someone else undertake a task in a manner which, to us at least, looks so utterly preposterous, so wrong-headed, so STUPID, that it makes us question whether or not the person in question is in some way, I don’t know, intellectually subnormal (professionally-speaking I have found this most often when watching how people use search engines; by contrast, others tend to get this feeling watching me dress) – this is a Reddit thread collecting a VAST crowdsourced list of the ways in which various people perform certain tasks in hyperoptimised ways and, honestly, some of these are fcuking GAMECHANGERS. Seriously, there will be at least one thing in here which utterly changes your life (as well as a lot of others which, yes, fine, make you slightly question the sanity or life-choices of some of the posters in the thread – I appreciate you like tidy drawers, mate, but plastic ziploc bags in said drawers in which you organise all your individual gubbins feels a touch…excessive) – I experienced a moment of genuine revelatory clarity at ‘open bags of crisps upside down because all the seasoning sits at the bottom’, for example, akin to when the image of the duck suddenly resolves itself into a bunny rabbit.
  • Extract All The Links: I feel quite strongly that I am cutting my own throat by serving you up this link, but such is my dedication to bringing you the very best of the web that I can’t hold back even when a link is basically designed to render Curios (or at least the bit of it which involves me) entirely redundant. Simon Willison got an LLM to code this up for him as part of some tinkering he was doing (you can read the notes of how here, should you be interested) – it’s a very simple tool which lets you paste in any copy you like from any webpage you fancy, and which will quickly and neatly extract any embedded urls from said text and dump them out for you without any of the annoying accompanying prose. Which means that should you decide that while the links are good the words are, frankly, dogsh1t, you need never again suffer through my prose – just copy the entire text of Curios, dump it in here and then surf to your heart’s content without my godawful words ruining your webspelunking. Know, though, that if you choose to do that I will do everything in my power to come back from the dead and haunt you to the point of insanity (not joking).
  • AI For Culture: Do any of you work in the cultural sector? I have a vague feeling a couple of you might – anyway, if so, this might be of use/interest. Basically this is a set of tools and resources compiled by what looks like a range of pan-European cultural institutions designed to help people within the sector work out how best to deploy generative AI as part of their work – per the blurb, “We are on a mission to empower the culture heritage sector through Artificial Intelligence. Our aim is to enable professionals, researchers, and enthusiasts within the sector with the resources they need to integrate AI into their daily workflow, find creative ways to use them and solve their current problems. The platform hosts a pool of readily deployed AI software tools, along with training and testing datasets that have been curated for use within the sector. To describe what is possible and showcase existing successful deployments, various types of upskilling material are also hosted by the platform.” The fact that none of the tech companies have their logos on this makes me think it’s probably a genuine attempt to assist culture workers rather than a naked attempt to inject The Machine into every possible corner of the world for pecuniary gain. There are over 100 tools in the database here, so if you’re interested in AI for general purpose, practical use it’s probably worth a quick look.
  • Napkin: This is, I concede, quite dull, but it might also be quite useful. Are you the sort of person who makes slides with diagrams on them? Do you have to get someone else to make the diagrams for you because, fundamentally, you’re a useless design refusenik? Enter Napkin, which will use THE MAGIC OF AI to spin up appropriate, diagrammatic illustrations for your slides based on the copy you feed it – basically you just plug in the on-slide text and it will spit out what it concludes are suitable graphical/diagrammatic representations of said text for you to select, tweak and ultimately use – if you’re the type of, I don’t know, SYSTEMS THINKER who likes to describe complex processes and feedback loops and stuff then this will probably be far too noddy for you; on the other hand, if you’re someone who works in advermarketingpr and whose slides contain concepts which should probably be written in crayon so RIGOROUS are they then this is probably EXACTLY the degree of sophistication you need. As an aside, I have been in many, many meetings over the course of my career with consultants from places like Accenture, and I am entirely convinced that 70% of all monies paid to the people in those companies goes on creating slide templates featuring triangles and arrows in important-looking configurations which mean the square root of fcuk all but very much LOOK businesslike.
  • Hummingbirds: A new(ish) twist on the influencer model! This time with an emphasis on HYPERLOCALITY, though, which is obviously ENTIRELY novel (not in fact really that novel at all), which I suppose makes sense in, say, the US, given the size of the country, but possibly marginally less so somewhere like the UK, where it’s questionable whether the market exists for finding influencers in, say, Maidstone. Still, the premise feels solid – local businesses sign up, set up campaigns that they want influencers to participate in; said influencers sign up, select the brand campaign then want to work on, make their content, get paid, everyone wins! Well, in theory at least – as ever with these things I have…questions about the economics of the whole thing and whether the incentives available are attractive enough to tempt a sufficient volume of creators, or whether the impact of said ‘influence’ is enough at a micro level to make the brand campaigns worthwhile, but should you be less sceptical about all this than I am then you might find the model of interest. BONUS INFLUENCER PLATFORM: this is by possibly the UK’s least-favourite entrepreneur James Watt, the man who singlehandedly managed to render the word ‘punk’ utterly meaningless thanks to his work with Brewdog and who’s now branching out into the influence space himself with his new venture called ‘Social Tip’, where (basically) if you buy something from a brand, said brand can then pay you to talk about how happy you are to have bought said something all over the internet. This doesn’t, apparently, require any form of disclosure whatsoever from the person being paid, as given that they have already made the purchase it’s considered that they are not being induced to promote the product – which strikes me as…something of a grey area which may not remain grey for that much longer should the ASA be paying proper attention. In fact, the whole terms section of the site strikes me as being full of the sort of stuff that feels very much ‘we’re fcuking around! Let’s find out!’, so it will be interesting to see how long this lasts for.
  • Cafeteria: Seeing as we’re doing ‘links vaguely related to advermarketingpr’, here’s Cafeteria, an interesting idea from the US which is designed to let brands get REAL INSIGHTS from REAL TEENS about what they REALLY THINK. They do this by paying them to complete short surveys – the company behind the app has a cohort of teens signed up, presumably with a reasonable demographic split (this is North America only, I think) and paying them to answer questions about what they’re into, the brands they like, etc etc. Kids get asked to participate at most a couple of times a month, to prevent burnout or, presumably, them gaming the system to earn lots of pocket cash; participants get paid upto $20 to participate, which seems like an awful lot of money for this to be in anyway practically scaleable, but, then again, American budgets are American budgets. Worth being aware of if your job has anything to do with ‘knowing what the kids are into’ (if that’s the case you really are reading the wrong newsletter).
  • Walkcast: This is a really lovely idea which is sadly ruined by the appalling LLM-generated copy – Walkcast is basically an AI-generated podcast which spins up a story based on where you are in the world. As far as I can tell what happens here is that there’s a combination of geolocation (which tells the programme where you are), light prompting (which generates the story based on the aforementioned location data), and text-to-voice (which streams it into your ears), resulting in a new, location-specific story delivered to you whenever you want it. Which is in theory SO COOL, but is totally undermined by the fact that the tone is so utterly grating, full of the sort of horrendous, vaguely-millennial-inflected slop that is an LLMs default output. As previously discussed here, it is HARD to make The Machine write anything non-businessish that isn’t awful to read, but they could at least have attempted to mitigate the baseline mediocrity here a bit. Feels like there is an idea in here with a bit of tweaking, though – oh, this came via the excellent Sentiers, by the way, which continues to be a great newsletter for futures-type writing and thinking.
  • The UFO Timeline: This is a great little project by amateur UFOlogist (is that the term? Apologies if I’ve just used the community equivalent of hatespeech here) by one Sam Lingle (HI SAM LINGLE!) who decided that it was quite annoying to keep track of the history of UFO investigations and discoveries and that what was needed was a website which presented a timeline of what was learned when – A UFO TIMELINE, IF YOU WILL! Ahem. This is GREAT, even if, like me, you are…unconvinced as to the existence of extraterrestrial life (or, perhaps more accurately, are unconvinced of the extent to which extraterrestrial life is interested in hanging out with us), and it taught me that the earliest recorded instance of alleged alien abduction occurred in the 1770s in Sweden, when one Jacob Jacobsson ‘came face to face with short, humanoid beings and a chubby man wearing a red cap’ and was somehow disappeared by them for four days (I don’t mean to be sceptical here, but I’m guessing it was easier to spin yarns like this in the late-18th Century). Anyway, this is a really nice personal project which is far better-coded than it probably needs to be, and is a pleasant way of spending 10 minutes learning about all the different parts of the world that have seen citizens claiming to have been ‘probed by the greys’.
  • Jordan Stone:I don’t do TikTok, I am not interested in it, and I don’t find it, as a rule, particularly interesting as a medium (I know, I know) – that said, I think Jordan Stone  might be a genius and that their videos are ART. I don’t, honestly, know quite how to explain these to you – they’re a sort of evolution of brainrot content, stitching together and overlaying multiple different videos and music with fx to create something oddly-meditative and poignant and beautiful (I am not joking, seriously, I think this really is quite moving at times), despite being composed from clips that are, objectively, often very, very silly. I can’t quite explain the power of this, but trust me when I tell you that it may be the best thing I’ve seen on the platform all year and I would 100% watch an hour-long supercut of these, ideally very stoned in a comfortable gallery setting.
  • Stop Project 25 – The Comic: To all the North Americans reading this – you poor, poor fcuks, seriously, this election has been going on for approximately three decades and it increasingly looks like it might in fact NEVER STOP HAPPENING; it’s exhausting and very boring for the rest of us, but for you it’s exhausting, boring and TERRIFYING, which must be even worse. I am not going to suggest what you do with your vote because a) it’s none of my business, who the fcuk am I to tell you what to do?; and b) I am 99% certain that everyone reading this is a Democrat (the only person I know who actually supports Trump and who might in fact read this is not a US citizen and lives in Mexico, so give a fcuk), but I found this website, which details some of the Project 25 stuff that has so many on the ‘left’ (lol at the idea that the current democratic party could be described in any such way in any rational world) so scared, nicely done – detailing the alleged plans for the post-election Trump supremacy in comicbook format to neatly explain via sequential art exactly how bad it could get for, basically, anyone who isn’t a straight white man. As I’ve said before, part of me does slightly think this is ‘QAnon for liberals’, but, even taking a lot of this with some grains of salt, it’s…a bit troubling. Anyway, hopefully That Fcuking Man will do an Elvis between now and Tuesday so this will all end up being moot (if we all hope hard enough it COULD HAPPEN).
  • Use YouTube As An Instrument: Ooh, this is a FUN little hacked-together toy – plug in any YouTube url and this website lets you assign timestamped portions of the video to individual keys on your laptop, meaning you can basically turn any vid into a customised soundboard; this could be quite a lot of fun for mixing and recording (or if you just want to be able to quickly and easily use the ‘AW YEAH!’ bit from Timmy Mallett’s ‘Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’ as an on-demand audio sting for the rest of the day).
  • Battleships: The game of Battleships – you know, the one where you have to guess where your opponents ships are placed on a grid – reimagined as a single-player daily puzzler. This is clever and neat, but I was really bad at it and so it has made me unaccountably grumpy and I don’t feel like praising it anymore than the bare minimum as a result. Sorry.
  • Color Gum: A tiny little puzzler which you will get through in about 5 minutes, and as such a perfect ‘tea and biscuit’ companion – you just need to manoeuver the blob to the goal, ensuring that it’s the right colour when it arrives; simple, but you can see how the mechanic could get quite chewy and complex if you extended it a bit.
  • The ThinkyGames Games Archive: ThinkyGames is a website all about, er, games that require some thought – they recently updated their website, and it now includes this GREAT archive of games, many of which are browser-based and entirely free-to-play, and which will require you to use your brain in some small way but which also include titles for all the major consoles and PC; if you’re after something to play right now then there are dozens of options here, but, equally, if you’d like a resource to help you decide what to play in the future then this is worth bookmarking. SO MANY GREAT GAMES, SO LITTLE TIME.

By Joshua Amirthasingh

THE LAST MIX OF THE WEEK IS THIS FABULOUS AND SOMEHOW-MELLIFLUOUS COLLECTION OF TUNES FROM ALL OVER THE PLACE, SUPERBLY MARSHALLED BY JOI N’JUNO!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • PicVoid: As far as I can tell, these are just found photos from around the web, seemingly all depicting people’s bedrooms or living rooms in a non-specific period that feels…vaguely-early-00s, I think? There’s a certain quality they all share, despite the disparate contents, that give the whole collection an odd, vaguely-hauntological vibe which I very much enjoy – this is PURE VIBES, basically, and not particularly comforting ones.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Kelani Fatai: Fatai is a Nigerian painter who does portraits of figures from Black culture in a sort-of-faux-Renaissance style – I *really* like the look and feel of the work here, and Fatai is set to become VERY FAMOUS quite soon as I think they have been picked to do the cover art for the forthcoming Mama Knowles memoir ‘Matriarch’. YOU SAW HIM HERE FIRST.
  • Devil’s Blush: An account that posts videogame screenshots – honestly, though, that doesn’t come close to expressing the BEAUTY of this. Seriously, the shots are ART – they’re photos of screens, so there’s a very particular quality to the images, and the way the pixels show up, that is SO powerfully of-an-era that it feels like being transported back to your memories of playing Mario on a CRT round your mate’s house (you can read an interview with the person behind it here, should you be so inclined).

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • The Labour Party In 2024: We start this week with one of three LRB pieces in this week’s longreads (it really is such a wonderful magazine), this one a synthesis-review of three books on UK politics which presents as more of a ‘state of the Labour Party in 2024’ piece and which, as a general primer on the party and the journey it’s been on over the past 15 years, is absolutely superb. The books it covers include Diane Abbott’s recent autobiography and a recent bio of Starmer, thereby neatly capturing the left and…not-so-left of the party, and delves into the internecine conflict that has characterised much of the past decade (and the past month or so) of the Labour story, and, in general, this is a superb ‘where we are and how we got here’ piece on the current party of Government.
  • Trump and Male Insecurity: I’m keeping it relatively light on the US politics front this week because, well, we’re all fcuking sick of it, aren’t we? An election campaign that feels like it’s been happening since 2014, dominated by the same dreadful man (albeit with a revolving cast of dreadful cheerleaders)…please god let this be over soon (but not, to be clear, in The Bad Way). Anyway, I enjoyed this piece in the Ink about the weird, incredibly insecure masculinity that’s been at the heart of much of the past couple of years of Republican (Trumpian?) rhetoric – the fear that they will take the guns, the meat and the petrol away, thereby depriving red-blooded males across the 50 states of WHAT MAKES MEN MEN – neatly summed up in this paragraph: “Eruptions of hypermasculinity — which is to say, faux masculinity — are reactions against perceived threats to the vertical binary of male and female and produce a rise in the popularity of authoritarianism. As women—and other categories assigned to the female position in power relationships — have moved towards greater equality, those who have counted on an impenetrable floor beneath them (which is also the ceiling above women and others designated as inferior) have become hyper-anxious.“Build the Wall!” really means “Rebuild the Floor!””
  • The Cult of the Founders: Henry Farrell writes about the monomaniacal founders of the Valley, and how we might usefully conceive of them as cult leaders (which, can I just point out, plays neatly into my overarching cultural theory about how the most important prism through which to attempt to understand the post-web era is cults in general – COME TO MY TED TALK, etc etc), and how problems arise when these cult leaders are forced by success or circumstance into instead acting like church leaders, and it’s the conflict between their vision of themselves as being worthy of adulation and ceaseless praise and the practical reality of ‘living in a world with other people that probably ought to be considered too’ that creates so many issues. This neatly encapsulates the core tenet: “Once, they believed that software would eat the world. They’d ride their sandworms from the desert through the shield to their own glory and the despair of their enemies, smash everything up, and create a galactic empire of inspiration and awesomeness. Instead, they found themselves managing self-ramifying and self-perpetuating empires of bureaucracy, submerged beneath memos and trivial decisions, and worst of all, dealing with fcuking HR and surly and subordinate employees who didn’t share their values, nor behave as worshipfully as they ought have done” – as someone who has occasionally had to deal with ‘brilliant’ entrepreneurial types I cannot stress enough how much this chimes with my personal experience.
  • Carbon Inequality Kills: I did a quick search on this, and it was covered, as far as I can tell, in a grand total of three publications this week. Three. FFS HUMANITY!!! Anyway, in a week in which it once again became abundantly clear that we are in no way ready for what we are going to have to accept as ‘weather’ in the coming years, Oxfam published their latest piece of research into the actual climate impact of the super wealthy – and it may not surprise you to learn that you turning your thermostat down by 0.5 degrees this winter isn’t going to make an iota of difference to the climate crisis when you have the hardcore plutes spaffing emissions out left, right and centre. It really is worth reading this – it will make you FURIOUS, but it contains some truly jaw-dropping stats, including this pair which made me just sort of stop and stare, slack-jawed, at the screen for a second while attempting to process them: “If everyone began emitting as much carbon as those in the top 1%, the remaining carbon budget would be gone in fewer than five months; if everyone emitted carbon at the same rate as the luxury transport emissions of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires, the remaining carbon budget would be gone in two days.” FCUKING HELL THOUGH.
  • GPT Search: OpenAI yesterday announced that the long-awaited SearchGPT was here – now paying subscribers (it will be rolled out to everyone else ‘in the coming months’) get access to an LLM which can pull live info from the web when answering questions. I played around with this a bit yesterday, and on the one hand it’s pretty good and works as you might expect (it’s basically like Perplexity – I couldn’t tell you which is ‘better’ at present); on the other, though, WOW is this going to be…interesting in terms of truth and knowledge and stuff. Per all of these things, answers are delivered as summaries with linked ‘footnote’-style sources so you can see where The Machine’s pulling the info from; the thing is that there’s no guarantee that it’s going to go to the best sources, and when it’s drawing from something that itself is already a synthesis of sources you can see that tracking back to the source of a ‘fact’ is going to get…tricky. Turns out, for example, that OpenAI’s model has ingested exactly the same incredibly-racist non-science as Perplexity and Copilot, because it gave me exactly the same answers as those highlighted in this piece when asking about IQ scores – this feels like something that is quite quickly going to become…problematic.
  • Be Like Water: The second piece in a week from the smart agency people Nemesis, which I feel slightly bad about because, well, I don’t really care about marketing or brands any more (lol, I never cared, ever), but I appreciate that some of you sadly still do and as a result might find this piece, which is a really good, clear and simple primer on ‘how to think about selling stuff and how, specifically, the question of ‘brand’ works in the context of that selling’ – this might be the sort of thing that those of you who regularly mainline Binet and Field and Mcluhan might all scoff at as TODDLER STUFF, but I liked it because it’s very, very unpretentious and doesn’t try and dress this stuff up as more complicated than it actually is (BECAUSE IT’S NOT FCUKING COMPLICATED, WHATEVER YOU CNUTS ON LINKEDIN WHO SPEND YOUR ENTIRE FCUKING LIVES WRITING ESSAYS ABOUT ADS THAT YOU DIDN’T MAKE AND YET ON WHICH YOU HAVE SEEMINGLY INCREDIBLY-STRONG OPINIONS SEEM TO THINK SERIOUSLY WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS?).
  • My Bad Bot: Katie Notopoulos writes for Business Insider about her odd experience of having a bot of her on Instagram – Meta’s new ‘make an AI of yourself!’ feature’s open to a limited set of users, and lets you effectively train an AI on your output to create a ‘digital you’ that can respond to DMs because, I don’t know, you want to maintain the illusion of approachability but at the same time don’t actually want to interact with your ‘fans’? No idea what the point of this is, basically – and neither does Notopoulos, who realises early on that the bot is incapable of speaking in anything other than horrifically-stilted millennial cringe. Still, it doesn’t matter that this stuff is sh1t, and pointless, and literally noone seems to want it – IT’S A-COMING!
  • Who Owns The Culture Scans?: This is super-interesting, and raises a question which feels like it’s going to become more and more pertinent as so much of the physical gets digitised and, eventually, ingested – there’s an online community around a website called Sketchfab which lets users upload scans of physical objects and host them there for free, and it’s mainly comprised of people working in the cultural or institutional sector, making 3d scans of museum collections and keeping them on Sketchfab as a global resource for anyone who might want to access and use them. Except now Sketchfab has been bought by Epic Games, and there’s no guarantee that this freedom of use is going to continue – Epic being…pretty keen on monetisation, overall. In a nutshell, “Sketchfab is no longer accepting new seller applications, and has invited existing Sketchfab creators to migrate their models to Fab, which launched last week. Epic Games has also not made clear what the plan for free and open access 3D models on Sketchfab is after 2025, but it says that it will provide those users an alternative solution eventually and plenty of notice on how that transition will work. The Sketchfab users I talked to have a variety of specific concerns about this transition, but ultimately they are all worried that Fab is a marketplace designed for Epic Games to make a profit on sales, whereas Sketchfab prioritized open access and the ability to share 3D models for free.” This sort of thing might feel a bit niche, but I can’t stress enough how important these questions are going to become in the coming years, and how important the creation and maintenance of public, freely-accessible digital materials is (and, conversely, how bad it will be if we let private interests gate stuff like this).
  • I Am My Own Legal Department: A post by Molly White – of ‘web3 is going great’ fame, amongst other things – about the oddity of being a solo media empire (my term, not hers), and all the different hats you need to be able to wear (legal! Marketing! HR! Sales!), and how tHe CrEaT0r eC0nOmY, at its heart, basically requires that said creators do all of this stuff, and how it’s…hard. I feel this will resonate for many of you out there attempting to Do Your Own Thing – in particular, I really like the acknowledgement that this sort of life/work really is not for everyone, and to assume that ‘oh, just go indie!’ is an option for everyone is, basically, dumb.
  • Character Amnesia in China: Ooh, this is SO interesting and feels like an excellent basis for a bit of creepy speculative fiction – did you know that there’s a genuine phenomenon amongst speakers (or, more accurately, writers) of the Chinese language whereby people simply…forget how to write certain characters? I did not, and was fascinated by this article explaining the phenomenon – basically it’s partly a result of the complexity of the written language and the full characterset, and the largely non-phonetic nature of the relationship between spoken Chinese and the corresponding written characters. This is SO interesting, not least in terms of what it reveals about how the brain works and how we relate language and symbolic representation of said language.
  • Who’s Afraid of GenAlpha?: On the YOUNG, and how they are TERRIFYING – specifically how there’s a generation of kids who are growing up with a degree of preternatural confidence as a result of being trained on TikTok and influencer content to be FABULOUS at all times and how that is playing out in the real world, specifically the classroom. To be clear, the author doesn’t wholly buy the ‘these kids are terrifying!’ thesis, but I do think there’s something in the idea that a generation raised on ‘like and subscribe!’-type personalities as opposed to, I don’t know, Ed The Duck might turn out a bit different. For what it’s worth, I sat in front of three 11 year old boys at a show last weekend and, apart from the fact they said ‘what the skibidi sigma?’ literally every 5 minutes, they were adorable (it was a screening of Ghostbusters, in case you’re interested, and their reaction to the bit where Sigourney Weaver gets all lusty at Bill Murry was literally to make concerned noises about ‘consent’ which was just TOO PERFECT).
  • RIP Tiger Tiger: In memory of central London nightspot Tiger Tiger, a genuinely appalling ‘nightclub’ which basically acted as a byword for ‘a certain type of person on a certain type of night out’ for much of the 00s. I had honestly forgotten this place existed until I learned it had finally shut down this week, but this article rather wonderfully captures ‘the vibe’ and the era that birthed it in which the mainstream suddenly realised that there was a LOT of money to be made by selling the idea of ‘clubbing’ to people who didn’t really like dance music and who were a bit scared of drugs. “The Piccadilly original opened the year before Fabric, in 1998, and in its own way came from the same spirit. The mass market democratisation of clubbing, the peak of the superclub era. Tiger Tiger was a place for people who had no clue about A Guy Called Gerald and found the drugs stuff way too weird. It came from the same genus as the Australian-themed Walkabout bars, the great sheds of cheap booze and bad pop that once stood at Charing Cross, Embankment and Shepherd’s Bush. If you didn’t know the names of any real clubs, well, these were always open, and always reassuringly the same.” MEMORIES. SO MANY TERRIBLE MEMORIES.
  • Translation: A beautiful essay by Emily Wilson, on translation and picking the right word or phrase or alighting on the exact sentence structure that reveals the meaning of the original text in its new language. Here she writes about attempting to perfect one specific line in the Odyssey – this is SO interesting, both on the act of translation itself and on the particular challenges of doing so from Ancient Greek, and will appeal to any of you who are either multilingual or just really, really like words and playing around with them.
  • The Food of Amazon Marketplace: On the cooks in New York who are running small-scale food operations out of their houses and selling through Facebook Marketplace – I’ve featured this sort of operation before, but previously it’s been sales via Whatsapp groups rather than anything this public. Does this happen in the UK? It feels vaguely like it might – or that it will soon.
  • Wonder Kitchen: This also feels like a taste of things to come (sorry for the unintentional, appalling wordplay there) – Wonder Kitchen is a new initiative in the US which basically takes the Dark Kitchen template and ramps it up a notch, with big name restaurants from all over the country having their recipes standardised, tweaked and made mass-market-viable, and then sold under a single umbrella retail brand within which customers can order a mix-and-match selection of dishes from a range of different restaurants. The difference between this and the dark kitchen model that came of age during Covid is that those were all made-up brands, invented to pop on an app; these, by contrast, are actual, bricks-and-mortar restaurants putting their name to the dishes, giving a degree of cachet to the offering but at the same time posing no small risk to the original venue should the quality of the deliverable versions drop off. Anyway, expect this to come to the UK before too long, allowing you to order a meal composed of, I don’t know, an American Hot, one of Max’s Sandwiches and an Almost Famous burger (all of which will arrive cold and oddly-rubbery, and which will cost you the fat end of £100) – God, I can’t WAIT.
  • The New Primal Scream Album: I have never really understood Primal Scream as a band – never liked any of their records, and Gillespie always struck me as a massive tool (see also: Richard Ashcroft. I bet they’re both DEVASTATED about this) – which is why I very much enjoyed this absolute SHOEING given to their new album by JR Moores in The Quietus. Honestly, this really is a proper going over – enjoy this snippet and then get involved with the whole thing, it really is VERY cathartic: “The first voices to appear on the album are those of a gospel choir, which indicates they are going to do a lot of the heavy lifting on the choruses throughout the LP. That’s true of the next track, ‘Love Insurrection’, and the backing singers do try their best despite it having a vocal melody that barely exists. That applies to the next song, too. So it continues. Then there are the words, on which Gillespie worked so hard before whining them into the least fortunate microphone since that owned by Morrissey. To say this 63-year-old is still writing sixth-form poetry is an insult to the nuanced submissions of this year’s A-Level candidates.”
  • What Actually Else Is There: Ok, this is VERY LONG (seriously, I read it over three evenings) and it is VERY HARD (hence the three evenings), but, honestly, I really do promise you it’s worth the time and the effort, because it is also BEAUTIFUL and fascinating and so so so smart, and you will, I promise, feel like a marginally more clever person when you finish reading it. It also made me cry twice, weirdly, despite not really being that sort of piece at all. This is Jenny Turner, writing about the life and work of Gillian Rose, a philosopher whose work I wasn’t previously familiar with who dealt in critical theory and Hegelian philosophy (hence in large part the ‘hard’ comment – I don’t know about you, but critical theory has always made my head hurt and this is no exception), and while there’s a lot of discussion of her work and thinking there’s also a lot about her life, and how Turner’s life intersected with hers as a student, and, basically, this is as much a love story as it is anything else; Turner’s love for Rose, Rose’s love for ideas and thinking…really, I promise you that this is gorgeous and worthwhile – and, even if you can’t face the whole thing, can I just ask that you click the link and ctrl+f for ‘barbarism’ and read the three or four paras there because it feels…very apt, frankly.
  • Wine and the French: The last LRB link this week is this wonderful piece of writing by known francophile Julian Barnes about the historical relationship between the French and wine. There are some great anecdotes in this – not least the one which mentions the fact that ‘drinking in moderation’ in France c.1900 was classified as ‘no more than four litres of wine a day’, and which once again proves that if you go back far enough in history everyone was, basically, half-cut ALL THE TIME – and it then takes a…darker turn with the second half, which explains how the French army basically used booze as a means of control over soldiers when they were being asked to do frankly-suicidal things like ‘run at a machine gun nest’. Barnes, as ever, writes superbly, and this is just fascinating overall. FOUR LITRES THOUGH.
  • Rubbish in the Maldives: A few years ago I was lucky enough to visit the Maldives – I know, I know, but I had had a VERY BAD (couple of) year(s) – and one of the things that struck me (other than the very odd and not particularly pleasant realisation that the act of going to see a thing can in circumstances such as this one make it slightly more unlikely that future generations will be able to see it) was the fact that Male, the main island of the archipelago, is, in large part, an enormous rubbish dump. This piece by Lawrence Lenhart tells some of the stories of the people who try and manage the waste in the region, and I can’t pretend it’s not…a touch dispiriting, but it really is very well-written indeed.
  • My Marriage Was A Scavenger Hunt: The story of a marriage, in retrospect. Addiction, depression, lies told to yourself and your partner – this is quietly devastating but very beautiful. Another one that made me weep like a baby, fwiw.
  • Falling Through: Finally this week, an excellent little scifi story by Steen Comer, taking the ‘what if every now and again you woke up in a slightly-different but still-recognisable timeline, with no control over when?’ plot device and spinning gold out of it. Excellent from start to finish.

By Gerard DuBois

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS (WHICH WANTED TO INCLUDE THIS ONE TOO BUT COULDN’T WORK OUT A WAY TO EMBED IT, SO HAVE THIS EXCELLENT TRACK AND NSFW VID FROM AMYL AND THE SNIFFERS AS A BONUS)!:

Webcurios 25/10/24

Reading Time: 36 minutes

It’s still, technically, Summer here in the UK, until Sunday morning at least – WHY AM I SO FCUKING COLD THEN?

Yes, that’s right, we’ve reached that phase of the year when all I can seem to think about is how fcuking cold my fingers are when I am typing this fcuking thing, and whether I should finally bite the bullet and lean into my general ‘ageing vagrant’ vibe by purchasing a pair of fingerless gloves (and yes, I am aware that ‘heating’ exists, but I am also aware of exactly what the ‘matt’s employability mapped over time’ graph looks like and as such am holding off for the moment); you, though, don’t care about that (or at least I presume you don’t; in the unlikely event that you find yourself somehow moved by my frigid plight, feel free to, I don’t know, set fire to me next time you see me), you’re only here for the links.

FINE WELL HERE ARE YOUR FCUKING LINKS THEN SEE IF I CARE.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you almost certainly didn’t come here to be abused, but, well, here we are.

By Joyce Lee

WE KICK OFF THIS WEEK WITH THE NEW UNDERWORLD ALBUM WHICH IS OUT TODAY AND WHICH REALLY IS EXCELLENT! 

THE SECTION WHICH SPENT A LONG TIME IN THE PUB LAST NIGHT DISCUSSING HOW, BASICALLY, EVERYTHING THAT’S SH1T IN THE WORLD CAN BE BLAMED ON THE 1990s AND WHICH IS NOW PRETTY FIRMLY CONVINCED OF THAT THESIS, PT.1:  

  • Change The NHS: One thing that one can say for the British, almost entirely without exception, is that if you give them the opportunity to show off how ‘clever’ and ‘funny’ they are on a public platform they will grab it with both hands (and then possibly start doing some sort of embarrassing dance with it, onstage, while mugging at a nonexistent audience in the hope of some sort of laughter and applause). From the strangely-unshakeable impulse to write ‘yes please!’ on forms when asked to confirm one’s sex, to Dom Laurelli (RIP), a kid I went to school with, who turned the final page of our GCSE Design & Tech exam into a self-portrait, under which he wrote to his unseen examiner ‘look into my eyes before you fail me’, we simply can’t resist the opportunity for clowning. Which is why it was so…surprising to see this week that the country’s National Health Service, the creaking public health infrastructure which is increasingly failing to cope with us all not having the common decency to die in our 60s like we used to, decided to launch its public consultation, asking the public to contribute their own ideas as to how the service might be ameliorated, in such a way that everyone’s suggestions were public and searchable. Which, obviously, meant that as soon as people realised this, thousands of bored office monkeys the length of the country decided that it was time to unleash their inner Swift and get all HUMOROUS AND SATIRICAL with their proposals, and resulted in the platform being flooded with ‘gags’ – it took them about 24h to realise this and implement some sort of backend fix, but today if you visit the site now all the suggestions seem to be tediously sensible and practically banal. Thankfully some of the best of the flurry of comic responses are preserved in this thread – there are some glorious ones in here, but my personal favourite was ‘get rid of computers’, a degree of bloody-minded luddism which I sort-of respect. Anyway, this was all very amusing for 24h but, equally, was also slightly enervating from the point of view of someone who’s designed and implemented stuff like this before and can’t quite believe anyone was naive enough to launch it like that (and yes, one *could* perhaps believe that it was a deliberate ploy to drive awareness of and interest in the consultation, but given it was trailed in every single paper and on the morning broadcast rounds, I’m going to suggest that that probably wasn’t necessary).
  • Redact-a-Chat: I’m slightly less enamoured of this than I was about 35s ago as I just realised it’s another MSCHF project and, while I admire the indefatigable creativity, I would prefer to feature stuff that carries less of the whiff of the trust fund. Still, I can’t help but be slightly in love with this VERY SILLY website, which is, very simply, a chatroom where users can only use each word in the English language once a day – after it’s been used once, future instances of it in the chat will be redacted, meaning that after a short while each day you have to be VERY creative with your phrasing and word choices to get anything to show up at all. The nice thing about this is that you can spin up your own instance of the chat, with a separate, private ‘room’ accessible only to those with the link, which means that you can (if you like – and, honestly, I really do!) maybe create one of these as an alternative to your groupchat platform of choice and add an interesting sense of verbal scarcity to your dull quotidian FPL captaincy debates. Ooh, even better, why not challenge your colleagues to use ONLY this platform for all professional communications today, thereby adding a real air of jeopardy to requests made later in the day which are rendered as a series of ‘redacted’s? Go on, it’s not like what you do for a living matters anyway.
  • The Half Bakery: Oh my WORD, this is some OLD internet. The Half Bakery is a site from…Christ, it’s hard to tell, but it feels like it was born sometime around 2000, and I certainly remember hearing about it in the early years of the 21stC as an example of ‘look at all the amazing creative and fun and silly things that the web is enabling!’ (how naive we were, how young, how…hopeful, and yet to bruise)…anyway, it was basically a very early forum/community-type-place where anyone could submit an idea they had, however half-baked (hence, inevitably, the name), and other users could vote on them, and FCUKING HELL there is some gold in here. Seriously, this is a collection of brilliant, funny, dumb and occasionally-borderline-genius ideas, just sort of sitting here waiting for someone to do something with them. Why hasn’t anyone yet done ‘Gogglebox, but for bongo’ (I am paraphrasing here a suggestion made by one MrThingy on September 6 2000)? Why has noone yet built a social network where posts are restricted to a single character (suggested by nineteenthly  on August 03 2011)? Why is the person who suggested an industry based on the idea of burying people with seeds, which they termed ‘morticulture’ xenzag, August 2 2006), not a millionaire?! Honestly, there is stuff in here that could CHANGE THE WORLD, so why not spend a few minutes having a delve and deciding which of these you’re going to make your singleminded obsession?
  • Today Is Crisp Sandwich Day: Matt Round at Vole has spent the past four years making 25 October – aka the feast day of St Crispin – the official day on which the making and consumption of crisp (potato chip, for the north Americans out there) sandwiches is celebrated, so this is your reminder that a) this is TODAY!; and b) you might want to adjust your dining plans accordingly. If nothing else this feels like the sort of thing that should be marked by a special lunch in the workplace. Beautifully, the library of stock photos of crisp sandwiches that Matt started a few years ago is now bafflingly hundreds of pictures strong, containing just over 600 images of potato snacks trapped between slices of bread. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT?
  • Good Mourning: Do you remember when the Queen died? Of course you do, you’ve only recently taken down the commemorative ‘keep calm and keep weeping’ bunting! What you might not remember, though, is the very strange spectacle of seemingly every single website of every single UK business deciding it was imperative that they modify their homepages to ensure that their exhortations to BUY BUY BUY were delivered…respectfully, and in shades of grey, BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT SHE WOULD HAVE WANTED! Thankfully for those of you with a less-than-eidetic recollection of minor bits of website redesign, the indefatigable Zef spent his mourning period in 2022 taking screencaps of all the RESPECT and has now compiled them into this single website for your viewing pleasure. So it is that we can see how RESPECTFUL dildo peddlers Ann Summers were as they essayed the tricky balancing act of ‘remembering the passing of a near-centenarian monarch’ and ‘getting you off with latex assistance’, and we can rejoice in the bittersweet memories elicited by the still-poignant juxtaposition of a memorial banner for HRH and the Co-Op’s desperate need to shift units by advertising ‘Five Freezer Faves for £5’. This is BRILLIANT, and a perfect reminder of what a country that has basically just lost its collective sh1t looked like.
  • WhenPhoto: Not an *entirely* original premise, but fcukit, it’s FUN and FRIVOLOUS and oddly addictive – this is a small game which asks you to do the ‘guess when this photo was taken’ thing for a selection of images, giving you points depending on how close you are to the actual year in which the image was created, and it’s fascinating how one’s ability to be granular about decades, etc, diminishes as one goes further back in time.
  • Dippy: This week saw the…first, I think, instance of a chatbot being cited in a lawsuit in a death – but almost certainly not the last! – which feels like an appropriate time to introduce you to the latest in the seemingly-neverending cavalcade of ‘spicy chat interfaces’ for the apparently-equally-infinite market of people who really, really want to have horny text conversations with an autocomplete model. I read some interviews with the CEO this week who spouted some guff about mental health and the importance of having someone to speak to at 3am when your anxiety spikes, but, honestly, click the link and look at the homepage and then come back and tell me what YOU think this service is advertising with its weirdly-muscular twink avatar and slightly-sinister ‘The Day Your Boyfriend’s Mask Slipped’ tagline, suggesting that maybe, just MAYBE, this is in fact being marketed at people who’d like their werewolf bongo just a *touch* more interactive. Anyway, there are a BUNCH of different ‘personas’ (horny roleplay companions) created by the platform and the ‘community’ (apparently this has half a million users, though that very much sounds like a number designed for fundraising purposes rather than one based in reality), and scrolling through the available bots it’s clear that there’s a heavy skew here to masc-presenting avatars which all seem to present as a variation on ‘troubled boyfriend who’s all manipulative and stuff but also REALLY LOVES YOU’, which makes me think this is mainly being explored by horny teenage girls who’ve read a LOT of questionable YA romance. Anyway, look, I have no idea who clicks on what, so if you decide to give this a go and frot yourself to the point of chafing to the textual promptings of a virtual lover then it is your secret and yours alone.
  • Deaddit: Reddit, but where all the posts are written by AI! Totally pointless, obviously, but I thought there was something quite interesting about how The Machine has very much nailed the tone of a certain corner of Reddit, that odd, edges-sanded-off English that you get in international, post-web digital spaces. You can see a list of all the ‘subReddits’ here – I spent longer than I care to admit yesterday reading the ‘conspiracies’ section which, honestly, I sort-of forgot was all AI-generated after a while because it REALLY reads convincingly; if you scroll down within posts there are even comments sections with the bots arguing amongst themselves which, again, are…weirdly convincing. If you weren’t vaguely worried at the prospect of the web being flooded with AI content to the point of us no longer having any reasonable clue what’s by actual humans and what’s by The Machine, then, well, click this link and let the fear start to build.
  • Azar: “Every generation gets its own Chatroulette” is in no way an accepted Truth About The World, but I am increasingly convinced it should be. Azar is the latest product to basically do the Chatroulette thing (see also Omegle and the rest) – the app/website is Korean and has apparently existed in various forms for a decade, but I stumbled across it this week with it being touted as a ‘fun way to meet and chat with new people from around the world’. The way it works is standard – you click in, it pairs you with a strangers somewhere in the world for a videochat that lasts as long as you both maintain the connection – but there are some 2024-appropriate quality of life upgrades to the base level experience, namely the promise that they have a whole bunch of AI stuff in the background to, basically, minimise the possibility of anyone ever needing to see some unwanted dong (I presume it’s general nudity-recognition rather than specific c0ck-recognition, but, well, it’s not women who tend to inflict their unasked-for junk on strangers, as a rule) or hear a racism. Obviously I have NO IDEA how well this stuff works, and I only really used this for about 30s the other day because, honestly, it is VERY CLEARLY aimed at kids and as such I felt…well, honestly, a bit wrong using it, like some sort of weird, wrinkled interloper in the land of the smooth-skinned and hopeful. On that note, though, it’s worth being aware of the fact that ‘premium users’ can pay to select their pool of interlocutors based on gender and location, which feels…rather more perv-friendly than I personally would be happy with.
  • Hatom: To be clear – I do not understand what this is AT ALL, other than it has something to do with crypto and so therefore is almost certainly a borderline-criminal grift…but no matter, because this website is GLORIOUS. “Building synergistic DEFI primitives”, screams the homepage, as though those words in that configuration are meant to mean anything, while a strange sort of CG…embryo? floats in the background. Click and hold and listen as the voiceover takes you on a JOURNEY, and speaks to you of “a time when the old principles of finance must be shattered and replaced with a fresh breath of hope” – which I have to applaud as one of the most spectacularly-mangled bits of copy I’ve experienced all year, THANKS HATOM! Look, there are LAYERS to this website, and, for reasons known only to the coked-up-madmen behind…whatever this is, there’s a CG griffon that appears on the second page, and, look, this is almost certainly a complete scam but it is SO preposterously-shiny that I can’t quite bring myself to hate it. “INCENTIVIZING GROWTH WITH THE BOOSTER” – YES LADS SIGN ME UP!
  • Sylva Labs: I don’t want to make fun of this – I really don’t! It’s a small business, it’s all green and sustainable and stuff, and the design and look and feel suggests that the people behind it are talented! – but, equally, I couldn’t help but snigger a *bit* at a website offering the chance to buy bottles of ‘experimental dark sipping spirit’ for £40, when it turns out that ‘experimental dark sipping spirit’ is in fact…a non-alcoholic whisky-analogue drink made from, er, old planks of wood. Look lads, I am sure this is INCREDIBLY nice but for £40 a bottle I want a hangover, sorry.
  • The Feeld Magazine: After that other dating website – was it Hinge? Sorry, I forget – did that ‘love stories from the apps’ magazine-style promo campaign earlier this year featuring writing by Roxane Gay and others, so another dating app, this time Feeld (the one for people who like to bore other people about how sexually open they are), has launched its own mag – except as far as I can tell this is going to be a proper literary endeavour, with a (theoretically) long-term vision and all that jazz. They’ve certainly spent the money on the inaugural authorial lineup, with some VERY impressive contemporary names who won’t have come cheap, and a puffpiece in the NYT which very clearly seeks to place the mag in some sort of lineage of the New York literati (and which contains a moment halfway through which does rather threaten to derail the whole thing – you’ll understand what I mean when you get there, I promise). Anyway, this is interesting in part because some of the writing is excellent – the Tulathimutti piece for example is very good indeed – but also because I think print is still hugely underutilised in advermarketingpr these days.
  • Ask Trev: Another weird website from a half-remembered past, this – no idea how I came across it again this week, but it sparked vague recollections of an early-00s launch and some media appearances by Trevor Nelson who was one of the founders…AskTrev was launched as a kind of jocular response to the popular perception amongst a certain generation that people called Trevor were a bit…plodding, perhaps, and not exactly intellectual heavyweights – AskTrev was designed to prove that that wasn’t in fact true, with a team of dedicated Trevors (all men called Trevor) on hand to answer questions and offer help with a whole range of things (see? SEE HOW FUN THE INTERNET USED TO BE, WHEN PEOPLE JUST DID FUN AND VAGUELY SILLY STUFF LIKE THIS AND EVERTYTHING DIDN’T HAVE TO BE A FCUKING VIDEO????). Basically this is a directory of contact emails for Trevors who are willing to answer your questions, sorted by subject – I cannot in any way vouch for the quality of the advice being offered by the Trevors here, or indeed how many of the email addresses are still in operation, but I can’t help but adore the general ethos on display here: “TrevorsTogether.com is a completely free service. But nowadays, people don’t trust ‘free’, they don’t believe ‘free’. There must be a catch, and unfortunately, there is in most cases. But not here. Ask a question, get an answer, pay nothing. Job done. Why is it free? It’s free because a group of people, all called Trevor decided they wanted their name to be synonymous with generosity, charity and kindness. The truth is that for some years now, ‘Trevor’ is a name too often in the media,  given to either a Geek or a Nitwit. And strangely, there’s no historical provenance for it. No ‘trigger’ which started this trend. It seems to have evolved from nowhere.  So, you could call this endeavour a Trevor fightback. A wrong which is finally being put right, towards a time when Trevor = Help.” YES TREVS FIGHT BACK.
  • /r/London Fights Back: Ok, so this is just a link to a single Reddit post, but I like what it represents. This is someone complaining on the London sub about how their favourite sandwich shop was featured by a TikToker recently and fcuked into oblivion by the resultant footfall – the conversation it spawned has eventually led to the wider community realising that, if Reddit’s going to be a major source of ongoing information to LLMs then there’s a real chance to influence the future content of said LLMs by changing what we write about now…and, as a result, it’s entirely possible that we can embed the concept of the appalling Aberdeen Angus Steakhouse chain of restaurants as being THE ultimate dining destination simply via the medium of bigging it up repeatedly on the platform. Which is why this week has seen HUNDREDS of posts on Reddit waxing lyrical about how amazing the places are, and how they are must-visit destinations, and, honestly, whether this works or not I love the ingenuity on display here (and also, this is 100% a tactic that the right brand could reuse with a bit of humour for PR purposes).
  • The Power Rangers Auction: Do you want a chance to bid on a styrofoam weapon from the Power Rangers TV show? Do you want to get a chance to find out what a latex mask that’s been worn across hundreds of hours of filming under studio lights smells like on the inside? DO YOU WANT TO BUY THE PINK RANGER COSTUME? Click the link, examine the lots and BID!

By Owen Gent

WE NOW TURN TO FORMER EDITOR PAUL, WHO ONCE AGAIN BRINGS US A SELECTION OF BLEEPS AND BEATS AND SQUELCHES WITH A MIX OF TECHNO AND TRANCE WHICH IS LIKE BEING AT A RAVE BUT WITHOUT HAVING TO DEAL WITH THAT ANNOYING FCUKER WITH THE FLAMING POI!

THE SECTION WHICH SPENT A LONG TIME IN THE PUB LAST NIGHT DISCUSSING HOW, BASICALLY, EVERYTHING THAT’S SH1T IN THE WORLD CAN BE BLAMED ON THE 1990s AND WHICH IS NOW PRETTY FIRMLY CONVINCED OF THAT THESIS, PT.2:  

  • Bluesky Follower Bridge: It does rather feel that Twitter’s long, drawn-out decline entered a new phase recently, what with That Fcuking Man’s decision to further-ensh1tten the platform by nerfing the Block function, and one does wonder what will happen should That Other Fcuking Man lose the US election in 10 days and the whole ‘turn Twitter into a hypodermic for the injection of right-wing filth into the mind of the populace!’ plan turns out to have been a bust – I’m not convinced he won’t just shut it all down in a fit of pique should Trump lose, basically. Anyway, this has also resulted in another swathe of users decamping to Bluesky, which still feels a but ghostly but which is slowly filling up – having had something go small-v-viral on there this week, I can confirm that it’s JUST as annoying! – which means you might find this Chrome extension useful – basically it lets you really easily find people you follow, and who follow you, on Twitter over on the other platform, and then follow them all (there’s no batch-follow, you have to do it manually, but it’s not that onerous). Worth a go, given everything (and the fact that by all accounts Threads continues to be a horrible, empty parody of a place and there’s really nowhere else to go anymore).
  • The Art of Spongebob: Spongebob’s another modern cultural touchstone that I never really connected with – partly age, I think, partly a lack of cable/satellite telly – but I am aware that for a significant swathe of people it’s seemingly of almost-Biblical significance; this, then, is for YOU, a Twitter account which exists to share art from the series, sketches and concept drawings and early animations, and basically anything from the archives that highlights the inventiveness and humour of the art style, which, objectively, is undeniable. There’s a really nice piece on the account here, including an interview with the person who runs it, who’s only 19 and who had it handed to them by a previous mod/owner…I think there’s something quietly wonderful about accounts like these being passed down from one generation to another, like a digital version of old recipes or the keys to the Satanic lodge or whatever.
  • Cheers: Another week, another attempt to pull the general idea of ‘dating’ out of the seemingly-terminal nosedive it finds itself in, via…another app! Except, no, wait, this one’s different, promise! Only available in New York at the time of writing, the gimmick with Cheers is that it leverages your friends to help you find love; you reach out to your friends to get them to fill in your profile and recommend you, matches are suggested based on profiling but also the degree to which your friend network (in-app, obvs) overlaps, and you can get your friends to do introductions to mutuals for you…look, I am sure that there are parts of this that feel SAFE and HELPFUL, but, equally, it also sounds like an awful lot of faff and hard work, and that it depends a LOT on you getting all your friends to sign up just so that YOU can have a better chance of MEETING THE ONE, which, honestly, feels perhaps a *touch* solipsistic (and like it could result in SO much messiness, depending on what your friendship group is like). Anyway, coud one of you in NYC try this out and let me know what it’s like? Thanks!
  • Plaid Patterns: Would you like a website which contains a seemingly-infinite quantity of plaids, along with the ability to create your own ENTIRELY UNIQUE version? No, I can’t imagine that any of you have been searching for such a thing, nor indeed that you will have the faintest idea of what to do with it, but I just give you the urls, it’s up to you to work out what they’re for ffs.
  • Tron1: Despite what the Muskian misdirection machine wants us to think, I do not personally believe that we are all going to have humanoid robotic assistants anytime in the near future – that said, it’s obvious that domestic robotics of some sort are very much a coming thing (or if not ‘domestic’ then at the very least ‘everyday’), as evidenced by this latest off-the-shelf product being sold by Chinese manufacturer LimX Dynamics. The Tron1 is, basically, one of those odd bipedal walker type things that they had in Star Wars, except (at least per the promo materials) without the front-mounted murder cannons, which can either walk or wheel itself around, and can be remote controlled or programmed and, as far as I can tell, is intended to let people get to grips with robotics and AI rather than being something intended to be any sort of home helper. It’s $15k’s worth of kit, so probably not for the average hobbyist, but I can imagine a certain type of person becoming almost painfully aroused at the thought of all the uses they could put this to.
  • Animal Futures: A pleasingly shiny bit of digital by the RSPCA here, designed to help educate children about the climate emergency and what it might mean for the world’s animal life and biodiversity in general – via a really nice graphical interface, users can click around and explore different environments, investigating how different potential future scenarios will impact them, and the animals that inhabit them. On the one hand this is really nicely made – on the other, I can’t help but feel…well, it’s all a bit depressing, isn’t it? All the scenarios are named things like ‘climate carnage’, or indicate a future in which we’ve gone hell-for-leather on tech at the expense of the poor critters…except for one specific scenario, presented as utopian, which sees everyone suddenly deciding that animals are just as important as we are, actually, and all going vegan simultaneously overnight, thanks to AI technology enabling us to talk to all of the creatures…and, look, I am just not 100% convinced telling kids that whichever way you look at it the environment seems pretty much utterly fcuked, EXCEPT if we can learn to talk to the animals and empathise with them, because, well, I’m not totally convinced that one’s ever going to happen. Still, really nice graphics here so well done on that front.
  • Text Behind Image: Would you like to be able to manipulate an image with text in it so that the text appears BEHIND the primary element in the image rather than in front of it? Do you inexplicably not have access to any photoshop-type software? Bookmark this website, then.
  • Are Socks Hard To Knit?: My kneejerk reaction to this would be “only the middle bit”, but should you wish to explore the question in (much, much) more detail then you might enjoy this webpage by one Luisa Vasquez, in which she interrogates the issue to discover whether, actually, socks are indeed tricky or whether YOU are just sh1t at knitting. I shan’t spoil the answer for you, but Luisa goes LONG on this – here’s her methodology, should you be curious: “I turned to Ravelry, a knitting and crochet site, to help answer my questions. Ravelry is a pattern database and community site. Pattern creators can upload patterns to the site for makers to find, and then makers can document their projects on the site as well. There are over 54,000 sock patterns and more than two million completed sock projects documented on the site. I was curious whether socks were more or less difficult than other knitting patterns often attempted by beginners. After completing a pattern on Ravelry, knitters can rate the project’s difficulty on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being a “piece of cake” and 10 being “very difficult”. I compared the difficulty of some of these common patterns to see how they compared to socks.” The anticipation is killing you, right? I KNOW!
  • The 30 Day Map Challenge: Via Giuseppe, one for the cartographers amongst you (are there any cartographers amongs you?) – basically a challenge to create a different sort of map every day, with different themes for each, running from one using hexagons to one describing a journey to one made using only AI…this strikes me as the sort of thing that will be very fun for a VERY SPECIFIC type of person. Are YOU that type of person? I don’t fcuking know, do I, who the fcuk are you anyway?
  • The Rest: While I like to imagine that you are all faithful to me and that Web Curios is the only newsletter you allow ingress to your inbox, I am not so naive to think that you don’t occasionally have dalliances with other providers – and, let me be clear, I am fine with that! I am not jealous! I don’t look at other newsletters, with their professionally-produced logos and consistent formatting and ‘communities of readers’ with envy, oh no! Which is why I have no qualms pointing you in the direction of a new (to me at least) variant – The Rest is about music, and very specifically about providing a small antidote to algorithmically-driven listening – here’s the pitch: “In our newsletter, we feature a song and an insightful story about it. You can enjoy the song on your preferred streaming platform while the story will give you something to ponder and discuss with your family, friends, and colleagues.” There’s something really nice about the tight focus here which makes it more appealing to me than a lot of other music-focused newsletters – I also like that there’s an only-partial paywall, and that your $4 monthly sub, should you choose to pay it, gets you access to the full archive, but that not paying it doesn’t preclude you getting the daily updates. This looks really interesting, and, while I’m only a couple of emails in, I have enjoyed the music and the accompanying writing on each occasion so far – recommended.
  • A Media Literacy Curriculum: Can we all agree that one of the biggest missteps of the past couple of decades, from an educational / instructional point of view at least,has been the lack of focus on teaching, training and reinforcing critical thinking and media literacy skills? No? We can’t even agree on THAT? FFS! Anyway, I am personally convinced of this, and as such was interested to stumble across this site this week which offers a selection of courses and training modules designed to help teens get a better idea of where information is from, how to parse it, and how to determine its likely truth value: “This curriculum, developed by Poynter’s MediaWise with support from YouTube, breaks big media literacy topics and ideas into bite-sized pieces to help teens actively and knowledgeably use the internet, specifically by giving them the skills to discern fact from fiction and the confidence to share information responsibly. There are 11 lessons in this series, linked in the folders on this page, with a slide presentation, handouts (when needed) and a link to a YouTube Hit Pause or MediaWise video that corresponds with the lesson. Lessons can be used sequentially, as stand-alones or in the order that best suits instructional purposes. Each lesson is designed to last 30-45 minutes, with additional extension activities included. You can also find abbreviated versions of the curriculum, designed as a five hour workshop or a 90 minute lesson. Through implementation of the entire curriculum sequence, students are equipped with the knowledge to recognize misinformation, the skills and resources to fact-check it and the confidence to make decisions on responsible sharing.” Which, to be clear, sounds GREAT – except all the materials strike me as exceptionally fcuking dull, and dry, and it’s all apallingly-presented, and, look, I’m not trying to suggest they get all buscemi.jpeg about it, but maybe not presenting everything as a series of worksheets might have been a start? Anyway, there is a LOT in here, and, leaving aside my quibbles about the presentation, there’s almost certainly some really useful material if you’re a parent or guardian or educator or similar.
  • AI Safety Dance: By contrast to the last link, this is an educational resource that’s also designed in a way that makes it FUN (well, ok, as fun as it’s possible for something that is literally about AI safety to be, which, it turns out, can be ‘quite’ if you try hard enough) – this is VERY LONG, and is basically a series of hyperlinked long essay modules about the current AI safety debate, doomers vs accelerationists, etc etc, all framed in intensely-readable (to me, at least – I admit that the less-online might find the style…grating in parts) prose and with some light comic elements and a general Tumblr-ish vibe that I find particularly appealing. Look, this is very much within my wheelhouse and so I appreciate I might be biased, but as an introduction to some of the questions around ‘why should we be worried about this stuff, or why should we not be?’ this is imho very well-made indeed.
  • General Collaboration: Another attempt to create the ONE APP that will somehow wrangle the ungodly multiplatform mess of modern administrative life into a single, tameable feed – this one promises to put all your different annoying little alerts and notifications from Slack and GDocs and Sheets and Teams and Figma and Git and and and FCUK’S SAKE MAKE IT STOP…ahem, sorry, all THOSE alerts into one place. I might suggest that if you need this app you perhaps need to look at your tech stack and how…efficient it is before you look at adding to it, but, well, you do you!
  • USA Facts: While the url does very much sound like that of a joke website – “USA FACTS! ALL FACTS, ALL USA, ALL THE TIME! REAL AMERICAN FACTS, MADE IN THE US! PATRIOTIC TRUTHS!” etc etc etc – it appears that it is in fact real; this is Steve ‘Dad Dancing At A Microsoft Keynote’ Ballmer attempting to unsh1ttify the North American informational water table via the creation of this website, designed to present verified statistics and information about life in the US free of partisan framing. “Researchers. Analysts. Statisticians. Designers. No politicians. No one at USAFacts is trying to convince you of anything. The only opinion we have is that government data should be easier to access. Our entire mission is to provide you with facts about the United States that are rooted in data. We believe once you have the solid, unbiased numbers behind the issues you can make up your own mind.” Which sounds great in theory, until the part where you realise that they are still using data from Federal institutions which feels like the sort of thing that will make a lot of…redder Americans immediately nope out, and there are EXPERTS involved who will doubtless have PERSONAL OPINIONS…and, well, basically I am unconvinced that the quality of discourse is salvageable, even with OBJECTIVE MATERIALS presented by an avuncular white guy who has to be be trustworthy because he got very, very rich through capitalism! Still, I think it’s probably on balance A Good Thing, however little of a difference it’s likely to make to anything.
  • Minimal Market: A site which collects various different little webapps designed to help you ‘decrease distractions and increase productivity’ – which, honestly, if you’re reading this newsletter strikes me as the last fcuking thing you’d be interested in, but, equally, I know that at least one person who occasionally reads this also has their phone set to lock them out of whatsapp after 5 mins of usage so, well, who the fcuk knows.
  • Lo-Fone: Ok, this is both a product that is for sale (boo) and isn’t actually on sale yet anyway (double boo), but I am including it because I get the feeling it might appeal to quote few of you. Lo-Fone is a…yes, that’s right, a PHONE! Clever you! Except this is designed to be SUPER-minimal – you can get messaging apps on it, you can get a map app, you can put music on it, but there’s no browser, no social apps, and no news apps, and the whole thing is designed to be as functional as possible – other features are described as follows: “LoFone has a unique colour E Ink display that is gentle on the eyes, promotes better sleep and has incredible battery life. The case and battery are replacable. It has a point and shoot camera with no live preview, to make photo taking impulsive and fleeting. It also has a torch, a headphone socket and a user-assignable action button, making it just as useful as a smart phone.” I mean, look, it’s just a fcuking phone, and it might be sh1t, but it *sounds* quite good and you can sign up for updates on the site should you be so inclined.
  • Difftext: OOH this is useful – lets you compare two texts aside by side and highlights what’s changed from one version to another. BRILLIANT for seeing if your changes have in fact been implemented, but terrible news for people like me, who for literally years has responded to at least 60% of all feedback on my writing with a promise to, yes, implement the edits, and then not in fact done so because most people NEVER FCUKING CHECK.
  • Snail Racing: A very slow, very low-stakes racing game in which you guide a snail – far better rendered, in 3d, than it needs to be – around a small patch of garden, attempting to beat all the other snails to the crown of FASTEST SNAIL OF THEM ALL. This is really nicely-made, but, to be clear, it is VERY SLOW.
  • Star Word: Via my friend Ed, this is a clever little game where you basically have to play scrabble to connect up various bits of the screen (it will all make sense when you play, I promise you). It’s all wrapped up in a light narrative about astronauts getting stranded on an asteroid and needing your help to escape – if I were to be a d1ck, and when am I not?, I’d argue that this would benefit from the writing being quite a lot tighter, but, well, that would demonstrate a quite staggering lack of self-awareness on my part and that would never do.
  • Jelly Gang: Finally this week, an absolutely charming little physics-y puzzle game which features the most adorable cast of…squidgy little guys, basically. “Jelly Gang is a puzzle platformer where you control a group of 30 squishy characters. While you can move left, right, and jump like in a traditional platformer, only the characters within a focus region around your mouse cursor respond to your controls. The rest remain physically active but out of your direct control. The camera follows a larger main character, adding a unique layer of strategy to the gameplay.” Honestly, this is LOVELY and I would very much enjoy seeing the central idea expanded into a larger game.

By Toni Hamel:

THIS WEEK’S LAST MIX COMES FROM FELIX DICKINSON AND I SUPPOSE YOU MIGHT VAGUELY DESCRIBE IT AS ‘BALEARIC’ BUT TBH I NEVER LIKED THAT AS A LABEL AND SO WE’LL JUST SAY THAT IT’S A COLLECTION OF EXCELLENT VAGUELY-HOUSEY MATERIAL AND LEAVE IT THERE! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • The State of Community: It’s very much that time of year when the Trend Reports start to be spotted in the wild, sickly things in the main, unlikely to survive even into 2025 intact. Some, though, are marginally-less-sh1t than others (honestly, this year’s crop has been particularly appalling so far) – this is Tumblr’s own effort, which contained at least two things which made me think ‘oh, actually, yes, that’s interesting’ and which is both full of quite useful observations and also really nicely designed. This is specifically focused around social, consumer and community, with an obvious youth focus, and so is probably not of that much interest or use to you if you’re involved in flogging sprockets to the plumbing industry, but if your job is more about convincing impressionable young adults that brands will somehow make this ALL BETTER then a) you’re scum, you know that don’t you? and b) this will be useful!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Arthur Chance: Thanks to BBC Tom for this – the feed of Omar Karim, who’s an artist playing with AI in a variety of different and interesting ways which seem to explore a little beyond the standard ‘I MADE A PICTURE WITH THE MACHINE’ – I particularly like the vague idea he has about equipping an agent with the ability to interact with the drug dealers who blow up your phone every weekend with those infuriatingly-emoji-heavy lists of product (I am 45 years old and I do not speak emoji, all I want is something to relieve me from the burden of consciousness for a few hours, WHY MUST YOU MAKE THIS SO HARD FFS???).

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • Brands After Vibes: This is the sort of piece that, unless you’ve worked in a very specific set of industries or had to have very particular sorts of conversations about ‘what a brand means’ and ‘how it shows up’ (kill me kill me kill me), will be largely incomprehensible to you – and you should be happy about that! For those of you who still like to pretend that ‘planner’ and ‘strategist’ are real, actual jobs that have value, though, this is very good and definitely worth a read – from preposterously-plugged-in agency Nemesis comes this reflection on the end of the ‘just vibes’ era for brands, how it has resulted in an awful lot of capitalist culture ‘looking the part but feeling off’, and how the amorphous concept of ‘vibes’ is in part a result of an algorithmically-driven culture where The Machine rounds everything to achieve middle-of-the-bell-curve mass appeal. This is VERY w4nky, but I don’t disagree with much, if any, of it.
  • Habermas Machines: This feels orthogonally-related to the last piece – here Rob Horning writes about how LLMs can ‘help drive consensus’, and whether the reduction of deliberation to the simple rationalisation of datapoints does something to inherently alter the way in which decisions are made and the value of making said decisions to us as both individuals and a collective – which I appreciate sounds perhaps *touch* heavy, but which Hornig does a far better job of explaining than I do. His final line gives you a neat summation – “The automated production and summarization and summation of political opinion doesn’t help people engage in collective action; it produces an illusion of collective action for people increasingly isolated by media technology” – but it really is worth reading in its entirety because it’s interesting and smart and another useful one to add to the (too thin) file of ‘people who are thinking about what we lose when we outsource our thinking’.
  • Retiring The Marketplace of Ideas: This is long and academic and not exactly an easy read, but I enjoyed the thinking in it and wholeheartedly endorse the broad principle – to whit, the term ‘the marketplace of ideas’ is fundamentally rubbish and we shouldn’t use it any more, and we should instead think of different ways in which to characterise the health (or otherwise) of an informational ecosystem. The author here, Robert Mark Simpson, does a very good job of explaining exactly why the ‘marketplace’ metaphor is unhelpful, and goes on to make a convincing argument as to why we ought to adopt an urban metaphorical model instead – here’s the outline, but if you can spare the time I would strongly recommend reading the whole thing as it’s very good indeed imho: “We should drop the marketplace of ideas as our go-to metaphor in free speech discourse and take up a new metaphor of the connected city. Cities are more liveable when they have an integrated mix of transport options providing their occupants with a variety of locomotive affordances. Similarly, societies are more liveable when they have a mix of communication platforms that provide a variety of communicative affordances. Whereas the marketplace metaphor invites us to worry primarily about authoritarian control over the content that circulates through our communication networks, the connected-city metaphor invites us to worry, more so, about the homogenization of the tools and formats through which we communicate. I argue that the latter worry demands greater attention under emerging technological conditions.”
  • The Future of Media: Or, as it should have been titled, “The Future of Media (according to a selection of North American media elites of 2024)” – there has been a LOT of chat about this week in certain sections of the web (things journalists like talking about – journalism and how fcuked it is!), and, while it’s maddening in its own way (not least…guys, a lot of the people you’re interviewing here are largely responsible for the parlous state of media globally, and they didn’t take us here on purpose…what makes you think their opinions about the future are worth anything now, based on how fcuking wrong they got things in the past? Also, WHY IS THIS SO INSANELY PRINT-Y? Also, if I read one more fcuking piece about people in their 50s and 60s bemoaning the difference in working culture between them and people three decades younger than them I will fcuking SCREAM) it’s also very interesting and, reading between the lines, pretty fcuking gloomy. Nothing said in here should surprise you, but it’s entertaining in an inside baseball sort-of way (and the portrait shots of the various interviewees are SUPERB, and imho the best thing about the whole piece).
  • The Harris Strategy: Deep breaths, everyone, not long to go now. Honestly, it really does feel like this election campaign has been going on for a decade now – because I suppose in some respects it actually has – and that’s said as someone who live shelf the world away; I honestly can’t begin to imagine the degree of psychic fatigue that you poor fcuks over there in North America (and those of you reading this over here who have to care for professional reasons) are subject to. Anyway, as we prepare to find out whether America is a) going to draw a line under the past horrible decade and maybe rest a bit; or b) just going to dump a breezeblock on the accelerator, tighten the tourniquet and stare fixedly at the horizon while the cliff-edge fast approaches, this piece looks at the odd policy vacuum that is the Harris campaign and specifically asks whether or not her staunchly-pro-Israeli stance is going to cost her the election. There’s no answer, obvs, but it’s an interesting question (although this is Jacobin, so you also know what the exact angle is here).
  • Defrauding Dementia Patients For Political Gain: Sticking with the US election, this is a staggeringly grim story from CNN, which highlights how fundraisers – on both sides, lest you think this is a clear case of LEFT GOOD RIGHT BAD, although it’s worth pointing out that it seems like one side does this…a lot more than the other – are basically using all sorts of incredibly fcuking nasty tricks to dupe older voters, many of whom are suffering from a variety of types of cognitive decline, into donating large sums, often on a monthly basis, without them actually knowing what the fcuk is going on. There are some examples of graphics used in mailers that are HEARTBREAKING, honestly – the one about ‘getting a friend request from Trump’ to dupe people into clicking a link is just so incredibly fcuking horrible on so many (oh, ok, fine, TWO) levels.
  • Human Trafficking in Cambodia: I don’t really have any hugely-successful schoolfriends, but my mate Rich from international school has had an interesting life, having spent much of the past couple of decades as a professional poker player in the far east (by his own admission this has often been a lot less glamorous than it sounds, exploiting the time difference to screw drunk post-club college kids for a few dollars at a time). He’s currently dividing his time between the Philippines, where his partner and kid live, and a casino in Cambodia, in an area not far from that mentioned in this article, and he has intimated to me that it is…quite a scary place. Based on this, he’s not lying – this is a MISERABLE account of how people from all over Asia are effectively trafficked into slavery, working for Chinese gangs who operate mass scamming operations out of the largely-lawless hotel/casino complexes that are scattered across the country. Someone from the region once described Cambodia to me as ‘a place where the very rich in Asia go when they want to do bad things, because there are basically no laws there’ – this does rather back that account up.
  • Hollywood’s New Competitors: I think I started reading Ted Gioia 3-4 years back – he has since become VERY famous, and although I do in part think he’s gotten a bit high off his own success I very much recommend reading this article in which he opines on the fact that pretty much everyone is a video factory these days. Chick-Fil-A producing kids TV shows on their own platform, football teams and basketball teams are effectively content houses as much as they are sports franchises these days, YouTubers can now release longform, cinema-quality docs on the platform…and that’s without even considering the potentially-imminent advent of decent quality  AI video. What does this mean? WHO KNOWS, but it doesn’t look or sound great for established empires. MASS MEDIA IS DEAD IT JUST HASN’T STOPPED MOVING YET.
  • Cruising With GenZ: Not, to be clear, in the park-based sexytime sense – no, this is about the apparent growing appeal of the cruise trip for younger people. This is The Face, interviewing a bunch of kids about why a type of holiday that was previously the preserve of the about-to-die is suddenly now hot with the younger demographic – the answers, ngl, depressed the fcuk out of me, a combination of the rise and rise of the premium mediocre experience, the predictable safety of the cruise (“you always know what you’re getting, you can get steak every day”), the fact that it’s basically QUITE LIKE BEING AT HOME in that you can be on the internet, go shopping, watch telly and eat familiar food, and there are no bugs, and there’s aircon and OH GOD THIS MADE ME WANT TO CULL AN ENTIRE GENERATION.
  • The Spotify Vandal: Their headline, not mine – to be clear, I think this person is a genius and a hero. What’s a surefire way to get a bunch of streams on Spotify without being a famous artist? THAT’S RIGHT, GAME THE SEARCH FUNCTION! Which is why an obscure and not-exactly-chartbound musician who records under the name ‘catbreath’ has achieved a surprising degree of exposure, thanks to their habit of naming their songs things like ‘my discover weekly’ and ‘chillout mix’. This person isn’t getting rich – they say they make a couple of hundred bucks a month – which makes this feel pleasingly anarchic rather than evil and ruinous, and it made me think about what the next iteration of this longstanding hack might be, after buying homophone search terms and the like.
  • Are Games Bad?: No, of course they’re not – but this article asks whether or not we might reasonably expect them to be better. Specifically this looks at the work of hideo Kojima, widely considered one of the medium’s greatest auteurs and visionaries, someone who’s basically revered as, I don’t know, the Kurosawa or similar of the medium. He’s also someone who can’t write dialogue for sh1t, in common with an awful lot of people writing for big budget games, and Frank Lantz asks in this piece whether we shouldn’t possibly ask for a little more from our entertainments, and whether the fact that we don’t is tied into something wider: “I think that the puzzle of Hideo Kojima is, in some ways, a microcosm of the puzzle of video games in general. So many of the worst things about video games are not just reluctantly tolerated but enthusiastically embraced because, through association, they have become emblems of our beloved hobby/artform/lifestyle. The same kind of winking, tongue-in-cheek affection that people have for the “bad” parts of Kojima games reflects the way the broader video game audience has internalized their deepest flaws as being, not just acceptable, but welcome. Not just welcome, but somehow necessary. Video games are childish and vulgar and corny and silly on purpose. And we like it this way!”
  • Building A Game: Sticking with videogames, this is a post about David Turner’s decision to make a videogame using photos and stop-motion animation – it’s technical and involved but it’s SO interesting, both in terms of the problem solving and creativity but also just the technical process of doing something so involved. Even if you’re not interested in games give this a go, you might find it oddly inspirational.
  • The End of the In-Flight Magazine: I can never think of in-flight magazines without thinking of Red Dwarf and Dave Lister’s throwaway comment that they are filled with articles with names like “Salt: An Epicure’s Delight!” – anyway, they’ve basically been consigned to history now, at least in the West, (until someone works out that print is cool again, actually, and your high-end airlines bring them back with a nicely-designed cover and aspirational columnists – I give it ~5y), but this piece takes a nostalgic look back at them as a medium, at the WONDERFUL freebies they offered to journalists (also an excellent word-rate from what I’ve heard) and the particular appeal they held to advertisers – as the writer makes clear, if you’re on a plane then you’re already one of the most privileged billion people or so on the planet, making you a marketers’ dream. Anyway, I think BA should start stocking The Fence – someone make that happen please.
  • Saizeriya’s: I love this piece SO MUCH! I had no idea at all that there is a very popular Japanese chain of ‘Italian’ restaurants which exists not only in its country of origin but in countries across the region, or that it serves dishes which might best be described as local reimaginings of classic dishes rather than anything an actual Italian might recognise (Italiani, se leggete, vi avverto che quest’articolo vi fara’ salire la collera’ culinaria come poche altre cose), or that it’s INSANELY cheap because of some really smart and interesting business practices (no, wait, come back!) which let them offer incredible economies of scale, or that it’s recently been at the heart of some light culture warring about the appropriateness or otherwise of taking dates there…honestly, this is PERFECT, food and culture and the genuine sense that I think will persist in me forever that Japan is basically Mars.
  • Rollercoasters: As you know, I don’t normally link to the mainstream UK press because I assume that most of you can get that elsewhere – I’ll make an exception for this, though, as it made me SO HAPPY. Tom Lamont goes long on rollercoaster design, spending months in the runup to the launch and opening of a new ride at Thorpe Park in the South of England talking to the man who designed it – seriously, this is a brilliant piece, interesting and informative and wonderfully-balanced between the technical and the personal. By the end of this I wanted to a) go on ALL THE ROLLERCOASTERS; and b) be friends with the guy who designs them, and I imagine you will be much the same.
  • My Auschwitz Vacation: Tanya Gold visits Auschwitz and writes about it for Harper’s. This is brilliant, brilliant writing; I could quote entire swathes of it, but this gives a flavour: “Auschwitz, though, is too powerful to give to the Jews. I encounter a tourist who came to Poland for a river cruise and stayed for this. “I’m not disappointed,” she says. “It is horrific.” I no longer believe that Hitler lost the war, but Poland gives itself over to magical thinking. I daydream about time travel here and even finding a magician to bring them back. I mostly think that if you don’t know what a Jew is when you walk into Auschwitz-Birkenau, you still won’t know it when you walk out, and so whatever else it is, it is a memorial to nothing except logistics.”
  • Forgetting Taylor Swift: Sam Kriss writes about Taylor Swift. This is too long, and it loses its way about halfway through with a frankly bizarre series of digressions about Americans’ relationship to Paris which didn’t really seem to fit with the rest of it at all, but I’m including it because the rest of it, the bits where he talks about Swift, and being at her concert, and WHAT IT ALL MEANS, really is excellent – particularly the hyperreal nature of the experience and how it necessarily sort of defies memory. This line in particular stuck out, in a week when standom has rightly received some additional scrutiny: “This intense obsession isn’t the same as actually enjoying something. It’s all sterile; it’s the empty carapace that remains when the actual enjoyment has rotted away.”
  • What Tempts Our Wives: A short story by Sarah Horner about love and losing and need and nature and and and. I thought this was beautiful: “My wife no longer washes her hands when she comes in from the garden. I find traces of earth around the house: dirty fingerprints on the refrigerator handle, last season’s leaves on top of the toilet seat, blood-like drops of tomato juice on the hardwood floor. When we got married, we promised to eat one meal a day together, even if it was just leftovers in front of the TV. I knew I was losing her when she began snacking on peas and berries straight from the plant, preferring that to my own well-intentioned cooking.”
  • Spinning Webs In Space: This sprawls and meanders a bit, but I really enjoyed the writing and the setting and the themes and then I was kicked in the face by the ending something chronic. Jill Christman writes here about why strangers tell her everything, about memories of the 1970s, about spiders and weightlessness and gravity and rape.

By Takaya Katsuragawa

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 18/10/24

Reading Time: 34 minutes

HELLO I AM BACK HELLO!

What have YOU done with the past few weeks of your life? I have singularly failed to take a holiday of any sort (how does one take a holiday from oneself? No, not ‘acid’, tried that), or indeed to really stop looking at the internet, but I have caught up on some sleep and, I think, just about managed to muster the enthusiasm to get to the end of the year without risk of (additional, ulterior) breakdown, so WELL DONE ME!

Anyway, as I type it’s vaguely-sunny out, and in a desperate attempt to expose my bone-white epidermis to a few rays before the sun disappears for six months, I am not even going to bother pretending with the intro this week and will instead crack right on with the links, not least because I imagine you’re having some pretty chronic url withdrawal symptoms right now (do not tell me you found another dealer, do not tell me you found another dealer, I will CUT YOU).

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are glad to see me, I can tell (LOOK AT ME).

By Paul Ranson (pics via TIH)

WE BEGIN THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH WHAT TOM SPOONER CALLS ‘SAD CRACKLY JAZZ’, AND FRANKLY WHO AM I TO ARGUE (THIS IS LOVELY AND ALMOST-PERFECTLY AUTUMNAL)!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO SUGGEST TO ANY OF YOU WHO ARE IN LONDON AND WHO HAVE A BIT OF SPARE TIME OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS AND WHO WANT TO GET INVOLVED WITH SOMETHING GENUINELY INTERESTING AND COOL AND FUN AND CREATIVE TO CLICK THIS LINK AND SIGN UP AND LEARN MORE, PT.1:  

  • Greenwich: This is a lovely way to return to the internet (I have obviously not left the internet, I have just been…less assiduous about tracking its movements. INTERNET I WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU, etc etc) – Greenwich is the latest in the seemingly-infinite series of attempts to create an additional sort of semi-social layer over the web, which in this instance means ‘install this Chrome extension and it will let you both add hyperlinks to any bit of any webpage you like, but will also grant you the ability to see the hyperlinks others have added, meaning you start to build up a lovely network of ‘oh, this made me think of that’ links between sites created solely through others’ personal associations’ (as you can see, I’ve spent the past fortnight honing my prose to a fine point). Obviously this lives and dies by the number of people using it, and obviously there are about three people currently so doing, but I have a real soft spot for this sort of concept and the idea of mapping these loose thematic connections between places on the web. You can read a blogpost about the project here, and there’s this page which tracks all the different connections between sites that people have made with the software – sadly there doesn’t appear to be any sort of explanation to be found anywhere about why the everliving fcuk the person behind it chose to call it ‘Greenwich’.
  • The Syllabary: Oh this is GORGEOUS and not a little hypnotic: “The Syllabary consists of 1319 empty sounds and 2281 spoken parts of 1 to 37 lines in length, each based on a cluster of between 1 and 47 monosyllabic words. The program chooses an initial text at random and leads the viewer to the next in any of three directions through some 15013 lines of verse.” Basically this is basically randomised-poetry-by-way-of-maths – just click the link, hit the ‘play’ icon and let yourself be transported. Whoever they have doing the voice over for this has an almost criminally-soothing tone and frankly I could listen to them intone vaguely-nonsensical iambs at me for days.
  • This Compliment Does Not Exist: A tiny, frivolous webproject by Fred Wordie, who has spun up this site to offer compliments to YOU, internet stranger, should you be feeling that the universe isn’t demonstrating quite the adequate degree of appreciation towards your being. Click the button, get a compliment, generated by (I presume) GPT and voiced by Elevenlabs – absolutely no idea why Fred has decided to choose ‘the leprechaun from the Lucky Charms adverts’ for the voice model here, but he does and so we’ll just go with it.
  • Bop Spotter: This is very much a link that falls under the heading of ‘yes, I know you’ve seen this, I know it’s a few weeks old now, but I need to include it in Curios otherwise I will forget it because honestly I have just cyborged my memory to the point of codependence at this stage and perhaps that is why I can never stop’ – Bop Spotter is that project by the guy in San Francisco who’s placed a bunch of mics on telephone poles, all of them linked to Shazam, to get an ambient sense of the music that people are listening to in the city in realtime, and it is SUCH a nice idea and feels like the sort of thing that there are at least 17 different ‘urban surprise and delight activation ideas’ that a motivated team of annoyingly-tattooed creatives might excitedly come up with to attempt to shill more IPA. So far it’s detected over 1500 songs – you can listen to the selection via an embedded player on-site, but I quite like the idea of taking this sort of data and making a ‘sound of X city’ streamable radio station on a 24h delay, so if someone can just go and make that happen that would be ace thanks.
  • A Live Map Of Trains In England RIGHT NOW: It’s that time of the year again when people’s thoughts start to turn to the festive season (sorry, sorry, I know, TOO EARLY) and the massive fcuking schlep they will have to do to be reunited with their loved ones for a few days of bitter familial wrangling, and for those of you in the UK I think we can all confidently predict that you’ll end up spending at least an hour, possibly three, sat in the weird no-man’s-land between carriages while increasingly drunk people spill lager on you on their trip back from the buffet car (“the kitchen’s closed, but we do have a seemingly-infinite quantity of Beefeater in cans”) – or that the train you thought you were going to get simply…doesn’t exist! To reassure you that the UK does still seemingly have at least one or two working examples of rolling stock and that some trains are apparently still moving around the country, why not enjoy this LIVE MAP OF TRAINS, ALL MOVING AROUND THE COUNTRY RIGHT NOW. Aside from anything else it’s a decent realtime look at the varying quality of the service across the country – man does the North West look like it has some issues.
  • HTML For People: This is fcuking great and I love it. HTML For People is a site designed to explain code in a way that makes sense to actual human beings who don’t think in maths (ie people like me). Honestly, I can’t stress enough how approachable and clear this is – if you’re interested it will take you through every single step of building a website, explaining to you along the way what each bit is and why it exists and how it relates to the other bits…honestly, I can’t stress enough how good a resources this is, and even if you have no interest of actually getting your hands dirty with code this is worth looking at to get a better understanding of why, basically, everything is at heart a spreadsheet. Here’s the blurb – really, though, this is very good indeed.  “HTML isn’t only for people working in the tech field. It’s for anybody, the way documents are for anybody. HTML is just another type of document. A very special one—the one the web is built on. I’m Blake Watson. I’ve been building websites since the early 2000s. Though I work professionally in the field, I feel strongly that anyone should be able to make a website with HTML if they want. This book will teach you how to do just that. It doesn’t require any previous experience making websites or coding. I will cover everything you need to know to get started in an approachable and friendly way.” THANKS, MYSTERIOUS BLAKE WATSON!
  • Height Hunt: Someone has decided to make and maintain this website which exists to collect ALL (probably not all, but significantly more than you might expect tbh) the ‘beware, height restrictions!’ road signs around the UK – you know, the ones which get amusingly ignored by HGV drivers once a year, resulting in a stuck lorry and several palettes worth of FMCG products scattered underneath a semi-rural railway bridge. This is the work of one Adam Townsend – THANKS ADAM! I was particularly taken with the ‘about’ page, which I thought might give me a clue as to why Adam was undertaking this…very specific endeavour, but which instead just told me about the UK’s road signage protocols in quite a lot of detail. I respect that.
  • AI Storymaker: Ok, this link feels like a BIT of a cheat, because it’s neither to a FUN AN EXCITING CREATIVE WEBPROJECT or to something that actually exists, BUT it’s SUCH a lovely piece of design prototyping and such a clever proof of concept that I hope you won’t mind. You sort of have to click the link to get the idea (because, per 12 years of this stuff, I can’t write for sh1t), but basically this is a proof-of-concept prototype of a kids’ block-building/storytelling set; each of the different wooden blocks/characters is embedded with an RFID chip, which in turn is linked to a different GPT model representing different characters, and (basically) placing the different wooden toys in different configurations and combinations will result in different combinations of characters and settings, which in turn will cause an ENTIRELY NEW story featuring said characters and settings to be spun up by The Machine. Now, obviously there’s a lot of theory here, and anyone who’s played with ‘AI Storytelling’ will know that the resulting stories will be fcuking soulless dreck, BUT I hope you can get at least a tiny frisson of possibility and excitement from the base concept here, because this feels like quite a fertile area to create in, and, again, the sort of thing that might reasonably be used as INSPIRATIONAL FODDER (you can totally steal this imho).
  • The Future Timeline:  Do you…worry? Are you perhaps a touch concerned about what might be going on? Well don’t! There’s no point! There’s literally fcuk all you can do about almost anything that’s going to impact your life – all the really big stuff is, in the main, out of your hands, so why bother fretting? Also, as the information contained within The Future Timeline demonstrates, SO MUCH WEIRD SH1T MIGHT BE ABOUT TO HAPPEN ANYWAY that there’s not really any point making plans. The Future Timeline has been running for YEARS, seemingly the work of only one man – “London-based writer and futurist, William James Fox, started Future Timeline back in 2008. It began as a relatively small and obscure website with a brief list of future predictions. Over the years, however, it expanded to form a lengthy and detailed timeline – running from the present day, through the next century and beyond, all the way to the end of the universe itself.” This is utterly fascinating, and the sort of thing you could lose an afternoon to quite easily – I flit between the sections imagining the immediate future (you may be reassured that the period 2025-2050 is summarised neatly with “Technological unemployment is rising rapidly”) and the 2200s, when apparently we’ll have sorted the arcologies out and be living our best Sim City 2000 lives. So, so so interesting, if obviously all totally speculative – if nothing else, though, it rather reinforced by general feeling about the overall arc of stuff being positive but the next 50-100 years or so being…somewhat choppy for us as a species. Let’s see (I won’t, I will be SO DEAD, thank fcuk).
  • 5 Million Devs: What would DO do if your platform for developers hit the (honestly impressive) milestone of 5million people using it? Well, if you’re Netlify (no, I don’t know and I don’t care, don’t tell me who they are or what they do) what you inexplicably decide to do is build a web experience which lets visitors play an honestly-surprisingly-shiny little Marble Madness clone while learning ‘facts’ about the company’s journey to this point. This is, objectively, a terrible, terrible waste of time and money, but I can’t help but admire the commitment here (and, honestly, there’s something kind of satisfying about the marble-y-ness of the whole thing). No fcuking idea AT ALL how you measure the, er, ‘value’ of this to the business, mind.
  • Microphotography: The 50th winners of Nikon’s ‘Small World’ microphotography contest have just been announced! Look at some incredible images of very, very small things! The winning pic of mouse tumours is sort-of amazing (don’t worry, you can’t tell it’s the cance), but my personal favourite is the one of the cannabis plant because 15 year old me would have been inordinately excited about the trichomes (15 year old me didn’t know what a tricome *was*, to be clear, but was aware that they were in some abstract way ‘good to have’ when it came to weed. 15 year old me was largely intolerable, I’m sorry to say).
  • Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours: Ok, so, per Wikipedia, “Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours is a book of named colour samples compiled by Abraham Gottlob Werner, and subsequently amended by Patrick SymeThe book, first published in 1814, was used by Charles Darwin in his scientific observations. Werner’s Nomenclature can be viewed as a predecessor of modern named colour systems such as Pantone” – this website is a digitisation of that book, by one Nicholas Rougeaux, which lets you explore the colours Werner identified, the names he gave them, examples of the colour appearing in nature…as someone who doesn’t really have an iota of artistic talent in their body, this is a bit magical, like having someone slowly and patiently explain, I don’t know, the concept of ‘numbers’ to me, and the general site design here is pleasing insofar as, for whatever reason, it very much has the sort of general feel and vibe of a book full of watercolour sketches. This is really rather lovely and soothing.
  • A Clarins Metaverse: There was a piece that did the rounds the other week about how all the people who a few years ago were glorying in the title of ‘Chief Metaverse Officer’ have now moved on to become Chief AI Innovators instead, but on seeing this website this week – all you need to know about it is that makeup brand Clarins got absolutely fleeced by some ‘3d world’-peddling third-party platform and have shelled out for AN Other generically-branded ‘metaversal space’ where you can, I don’t know, jump off a lipstick or watch an ad for some concealer (after it’s finished buffering) – it made me think that there are perhaps some companies where signoff process are so slow, where compliance is so rigorous, that they might only now be coming to the end of a long and arduous metaverse building process, whose project teams are only now emerging blinking into the cold, hard light of the future, clutching their newly-birthed IMMERSIVE 3D BRAND SPACES to their chests, only to find that…the world has moved on and noone cares and oh by the way we shut down the team and you’re unemployed, sorry, Anyway, BRANDED VIRTUAL CLEANSER EXPERIENCES!
  • Natural Landscape Photography Awards 2024: There are LOADS of gorgeous images of the natural world here – I’m particularly taken with the abstracts, as ever, but a special mention also for Felix Wesch’s portraits of birch forests where the colours and lighting are just insane.
  • After: ANOTHER dating app! I was thinking about this the other day – even if I wanted to dip my toe into the thick, somewhat…coagulated waters of the online dating pool, I simply wouldn’t be able to because I don’t own ANY photos of myself (I think in total I have approximately three from the past two decades of my life). Obviously this is an INSURMOUNTABLE issue, so, well, that’s me done! Anyway, ‘After’ is a new dating app – I think it’s only launched in a limited number of cities at the moment, possibly US-only – which as its gimmick has chosen ‘we’re fixing the problem of ghosting!’, which, honestly, feels like a reasonable ‘enemy’ for the brand to choose. The way this works is that if you message someone and have a conversation but decide that you don’t want to take it any further, you have to actually tell the person why (I presume it can be euphemistically gentle and doesn’t require the brutal honesty of, say, “the way you breathe makes me homicidal”, or “I could never respect, let alone love, someone with your approach to spelling”) or the app will remove your matching privileges – which, honestly, feels like a bracingly strict approach that might have benefits.
  • The Living Museum: An interesting way of exploring the British Museum’s collection, this – an LLM layer over the top lets you ask natural language queries of the interface, which thanks to the GPT-ing has a certain fuzziness in its understanding of the catalogue and which in turn means you can ask it to search for ‘sexy statues’ and it will sort-of understand (this is a VERY loose definition of ‘sexy’, unless your tastes are spectacularly-niche). On the one hand, I like this way of using the tech to open the collection, and the interface is really nice – on the other, there’s something…odd about AI curation, insofar as there’s no ‘curation’ happening other than ‘vaguely-linked datapoints in latent space’ and…I don’t know, perhaps I miss the intentionality of a human aye in pulling together a collection, but I increasingly find with projects like this that the breadth and scope is impressive but there’s not actually that much meaning being delivered when you look closely. Anyway, see what you think.
  • TypingBowl: Do YOU think you’re a good typist? Would YOU like to test your typing skills by going head to head in LIVE TYPING CHALLENGES against strangers from across the web? Are…are you always this competitive? Anyway, should you wish to see whether YOU are a better touch-typist than some other webmong somewhere in the world then WOW will you enjoy this.
  • Musicleague: Ooh, this could be fun – if you’re in a particularly-musically-focused friendship group or groupchat I could see this proving quite popular. Musicleague basically works a bit like fantasy sports (except it doesn’t really) – you form a league with whoever you want; you play in ‘rounds’ and each ‘round has a theme, players submit songs for each round that fit the theme, everyone listens to the songs and then votes and comments on their favourites (the ‘comments’ functionality is a genius build I think), the person whose selection got voted the best wins…nonspecific friendgroup kudos! This, honestly, could be a lot of fun with the right group of people (and incredibly annoying with the wrong one, so CHOOSE WITH CARE).
  • Defunct Website: A service allowing you to specify when you’re website is dead, defunct, an EX WEBSITE. I rather like this – it removes ambiguity, and there’s something rather cool about having a definitive endpoint to qa webpage or project. In fact, can we make this an accepted part of webdesign and online etiquette, that every website has it’s ‘go live’ and ‘shuttered’ dates recorded on its homepage URL at the point of its abandonment via some sort of service like this? Great!
  • The Best Active Internet Forums: This list has done the rounds a bit over the past week or so, but it really is worth bookmarking – forums have always been, and will always be, the best of the web (I am right about this), and this piece is a list of some of the best ones still active, covering a huge range of topics from drugs to miniature ponies. This made me quite annoyed at Google shutting off its specific forum search product about 12 years ago, which really is something I should have gotten over by now tbh.
  • Death and Hell: Ok, yes, I know that the title doesn’t *sound* promising, and I concede that, yes, this is once again one of those ‘borderline’ websites where I was debating whether it was ok to feature because, well, there’s that whiff of schizophrenia about it, but I came down on the side of inclusion because it’s OLD and I am not convinced its author is still about, and because, well, MY GOD this is very deep and very weird and VERY esoteric, and there’s some VERY old testament ish vibes to the whole thing, and, well, here’s an example of the sort of prose you can expect to encounter in the many, many hundreds of pages buried here: “Sub-humans have also been targeted for “transformation” by lycanthropic paramilitary units using very sophisticated memetic warfare systems, hybridized tectonics with a subliminal interface and have set up these events beyond space-time referred to as: “Temple Dahmer Initiations.” Are YOU Tired of the Health Risks involved with Bloodborne Pathogens?” WELL, ARE YOU?

By Alma Haser

NEXT, A PLAYLIST FEATURING 100 TRACKS BY BLACK BRITISH ARTISTS RECORDED SINCE 2020 AND WHICH IS A BRILLIANT AND INSANELY-VARIED SELECTION OF MODERN UK EXCELLENCE!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO SUGGEST TO ANY OF YOU WHO ARE IN LONDON AND WHO HAVE A BIT OF SPARE TIME OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS AND WHO WANT TO GET INVOLVED WITH SOMETHING GENUINELY INTERESTING AND COOL AND FUN AND CREATIVE TO CLICK THIS LINK AND SIGN UP AND LEARN MORE, PT.2:

  • IOGraphica: Oh this is WONDERFUL! Have you ever thought ‘God I wish I could turn the pointless movements made by my mouse cursor as I once again waste my life through screen-based interaction into BEAUTIFUL MONOCHROMATIC SEMI-ABSTRACT ART!’? No, it strikes me as unlikely, but that is EXACTLY what you can do with IOGraphica, which is a bit of software which tracks your mouse movements and turns them into gorgeous visualisations. So so so beautiful.
  • Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2024: Critters!  Yes, ok, fine, and some landscapes, but it’s mostly about the critters! As ever, important to note that not all the aforementioned critters on display here are, er, alive, but as long as that doesn’t put you off then you can rest assured that these are all astonishing in various ways – I personally was charmed by the one featuring toad-on-toad violence (you’ll know it when you see it), but every single one of these pictures is glorious. BONUS PHOTO CONTEST: seeing as you’re here, you might want to check out the winners of this year’s ‘Panoramic Photographer of the Year’ contest which are also lovely (but, well, WIDE).
  • Wes Cook: This came out of one of the talks at this year’s XOXO Festival, and having read about the project and watched the associated video (which, honestly, I can’t recommend enough) I was UTTERLY CHARMED and you will be too. Wes Cook was an artist operating in the US in the 20th Century, working across a frankly insane range of projects from theme parks to film studios to theatre design. On a roadtrip, Cabel Sasser encountered his work, and became obsessed. Per Cabel, “Wes Cook died in 2004. He had no heirs, no family. His life’s work was left in a storage locker that went unpaid, eventually being sold at auction. I purchased all I could from the person who bought his storage locker, until I basically ran out of money. Oops. He deserves to be world famous. Maybe it’s not too late.” This website hosts the archive of Wes’s oeuvre, the video of Cabel’s talk, and I promise you that after you’ve watched the talk (WATCH THE TALK) you will fall slightly in love with this.
  • Letterboxd Besties:So apparently if you’re a Film Person (it feels the capitalisation is important here) and you use film rating site Lettrboxed it lets you pick your TOP FOUR FILMS EVER by which to define yourself to the rest of the cinephile community – this website lets you put in your username and see if anyone else in the big wide world has the same UNIQUELY-RAREFIED TASTES as you do. Honestly, this feels like a near-perfect extension for a dating app, no? Also, based on this, I wonder what the most ‘basic’ top 4 is? Shawshank, It’s A Wonderful Life, Elf, Back To The Future? A Fiat500 selection for the ages!
  • Laid Off Overlays: Look, I appreciate that there is nothing funny about being out of work and being worried as to where money’s going to come from, and the modern charade of having to digitally caper in the shop window in the desperate hope that some passing suit chooses YOU to bestow the temporary gift of employment on is particularly miserable and horrid, but, also, I found this website – which lets you create your very own ‘Twibbon’ (remember them!?)-style graphical overlay to add to your profile on LinkedIn in the style of the ‘Looking For Work!’ badges popping up all over the place over there. Want to create a badge that says “I Need The Money But I Promise I Will Never Care”? How about “No Major HR Grievances”? “Look Into My Eyes Before You Scroll Past Me And Condemn My Kids To A Present-Free Christmas”? The choice is yours. This is…this isn’t actually funny, is it?
  • Crayon Town: Another ‘infinite canvas on which the entire web can draw simultaneously’ project, with the unique gimmick that the graphics are done to make the whole thing look (convincingly, I must say) as though it’s been drawn in crayon. Which might lessen the horror when you stumble into the inevitable ‘swastika corner’ (to be clear, I have not found ‘swastika corner’ and there’s no suggestion that it does in fact exist – I did though just scroll around for a minute and saw someone had written the simple phrase ‘gay wand’, which has really made me laugh for some reason).
  • Pictures Of People Taking Pictures: I feel that this ought to be a bigger thing than it is. You can contribute your own, should you so desire (you should).
  • Cartographist: Ooh, this is interesting – it’s a Github repo so you will need to be able to wrangle the code, but this is SUCH a cool twist on the standard browser/tab design – created by Szymon Kaliski, who describes it thusly: “Cartographist is an experimental web browser optimized for rabbit-holing. Instead of opening new windows (with cmd-click), Cartographist spawns horizontally scrollable panes.Instead of forcing you to find things in a linear history, Cartographist shows a tree-structured outline of your browsing. Instead of always starting fresh, Cartographist can save, and load “trails” – the exact state of the session you’ve left – supporting researching topics over long periods of time.” If you click the link you can get a better idea from screenshots (or you can see some video of it in action here), but this strikes me as SUCH a clever way of rethinking the way in which we move through webspace.
  • Watch Frame By Frame: Would you like to be able to quickly and easily scrub through a video frame-by-frame? Er, why? Nevertheless, this webpage will let you do just that with any YouTube or Vimeo url, presumably for the purposes of spotting, I don’t know, scene anomalies, or for investigating whether something’s been a edited in certain ways, or, if you’re a pervert from 1983, for catching snatched glimpses of fleeting nipples and pubes from old films. You do you!
  • Films In Airplane Toilets: A reader writes! Peter Brooke Turner, to be precise, who emailed me with the following “I’m a touring musician who has started my own theatre company @attcthe which makes films in airplane toilets and which might be of interest to you?” To which my immediate answer was ‘YES PETER THIS IS EXACTLY THE SORT OF MAD SH1T I AM INTO WHAT THE ACTUAL FCUK?” (I was more polite than this). Honestly, these are…very weird, but also really inventive and fun and creative, and as a way of spending time when you’re bored on a poky Airbus this feels like something more people should possibly get into (also, this feels like a GREAT music video concept waiting to happen, no?). There’s one in which someone’s filming in a tux, which strikes me as quite a strong commitment to the bit – WELL DONE PETER THIS IS VERY WEIRD.
  • Jars: A whole bunch of AI-generated TV channels – AI presenters, AI voices, AI scripts, all utter gibberish, obviously, but sort-of entertaining, a bit like watching Furbys talk to each other. These are all vaguely themed around ‘formats’ – so there’s AI Dragon’s Den (sorry, ‘Shark Tank’), AI cooking…actually I have become slightly captivated by the cooking one, it’s like some sort of weird fever dream where there are near-edible recipes being described by someone who’s being hand-operated by a trainee at the Henson workshops, and where every single sentence ends ‘YES CHEF!’ regardless of whether that makes any sense or not. This might actually be brilliant, not quite sure.
  • Hots & Cots: This is basically ‘Tripadvisor for the US Military establishment’, a website where serving members of the US Forces can post photos and reviews of the food and accommodation they’re given by Uncle Sam in exchange for acting as IED fodder a few years down the line. Obviously the quality of bed and board varies drastically from place to place, but a few observations: 1) based on the diets these people seem to be eating, WHERE IS THE FIBRE???; 2) portion sizes are…variable; 3) I’m sorry, if this is your writeup of the food then you have no reason to complain about anything: “This brunch smash burger was amazing. Hash brown, fried egg, caramelized onions, and maple ketchup. So delicious. They also had a section that was doing fresh pasta dishes too.” MAPLE KETCHUP? A FRESH PASTA STATION? You didn’t get this sh1t in Full Metal Jacket.
  • Bookloop: Vinted, for books. Yes, I know, lazy, but a) I am running SO LATE; and b) that is literally what it is, deal with it. Scan your books’ barcodes or enter the ISBN and the site will give you a valuation for them – you can then trade them in for credit on Bookshop.org, thereby supporting indie booksellers when you spend said credits. All in all this just seems like a great setup and something that’s worth signing up for if you possibly ought to get rid of one or two tomes but can’t quite bring yourself to conduct the ceremonial burning this year.
  • Design Playlists: Do you DO DESIGN? Do you like to listen to music while you do so? Would you like to listen to music selected by OTHER DESIGNERS that they think helps them DO DESIGN BETTER? Great, you’ll like this site then, as it collects, er, playlists compiled by designers to listen to while they design, to be listened to by other designers while they, in turn, design. DESIGN MORE AND FASTER, YOU FCUKS. What do you imagine all the music in these playlists sounds like? Go on, just have a guess. YOU’RE RIGHT!
  • Chess Grid: Make a downloadable black and white artwork based on the chess grid – the nice gimmick here is that you can enter the specific moveset from a single match, or passage of play, and that will be reflected in the resulting piece that’s generated. Even those of you who don’t revere Magnus Carlsen might find something to love here – the aesthetic of the generated works is very strong indeed to my mind, these would make glorious prints in the right environment.
  • Frankenstein: SUCH an interesting way of exploring a text, this, specifically of seeing the ways in which the text was altered between different editions of the same work. This is the Frankenstein Varorium, an online tool which allows the user to explore the text through its various incarnations, allowing you to select individual passages and see how they have evolved through different revisions of the work. ““In the case of Frankenstein, the substantive changes that MWS made in her revised edition are so extensive that many teachers and students of Frankenstein consider 1818 and 1831 as two different novels.” Scholars do not agree on a single authoritative text, though the 1818 edition became more available from the 1990s onward in teaching editions, reflecting increasing interest in the earlier versions of the text. With this project, we offer a way to explore not just two but five distinct moments in the novel’s writing and re-writing, and they do not proceed in orderly stages. The following diagram summarizes the relationships among the manuscript and published versions of Frankenstein composed between 1816 and 1831 that we worked with for this variorum project.” Obviously this is mainly of use and interest to people who, er, really want to get deep into Frankenstein, but if you’ve even a passing interest in information design then this is worth exploring because the interface is really, really nicely done.
  • Weather Landscapes: Another link to something you actually need to be able to code to do anything with – SORRY SORRY SORRY – but I think the fact that this is yet ANOTHER eminently-thievable idea should be enough for you to forgive me (all I ask is absolution, and only for some of the sins). This, basically, outlines how you might go about knocking up a realtime weather data display that, rather than showing you the temperature and precipitation probabilities in boring textual fashion instead does so by rendering it as a kids’ drawing. Honestly, this is SO CHARMING and I would 100% applaud anyone pitching this sort of thing as some sort of public installation or similar – please please please can one of you do something with this?
  • Street Nuns: The only thing not to love about this site is that, in the specific context in which it is here being used, ‘street’ connotes ‘walking around on the pavement’ rather than ‘incredibly streetwise and not a little threatening’. Otherwise, though, this is a perfect website – photos of nuns, out and about. As someone who had literally the most miserable 18 months of his life in Rome, I can honestly confirm that there is no set of personal circumstances so bleak that your life won’t be instantly improved by just seeing a nun, on a bus.
  • Doubles: Can you multiply a number by two? Can you do it again? And again? Can you do it AGAINST THE CLOCK? This game has made me feel more stupid than almost anything else I have done this year, which is no small feat.
  • A Selection Of Excellent Tiny Browser Games: The link takes you to the webpage for a recent weekend game jam – scroll to the bottom and there’s a selection of a dozen or so browsergames which I can highly recommend as an afternoon pastime, the stuntbike game in particular being INCREDIBLY ‘one more go’-ish. ENJOY!

By Percy Fortin-Wright

OUR FINAL PLAYLIST THIS WEEK IS THIS SELECTION OF ‘SONGS THAT HAVE DEFINED THE DECADE SO FAR’, WHICH HAS BEEN COMPILED BY A BUNCH OF EX-PITCHFORK STAFFERS WHO THIS WEEK LAUNCHED A NEW MUSIC MAGAZINE CALLED HEARING THINGS! (WHICH YOU CAN CHECK OUT HERE)

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Diamond Geezer: Not in fact a Tumblr at all! Instead, this is a VERY oldschool blog, in which the titular Diamond Geezer writes…not very geezerishly at all, actually, all about London, its streets and boroughs and history. This is very much an urbanist nerd’s paradise, and if you’ve any interest at all in the city now and as it was then you’ll adore this – even better, it’s been going for 25 years!!! TWENTY FIVE FCUKING YEARS! I will never, ever cease to be amazed by people’s indefatigability and passion, and I will never again think that Curios is in any way ‘special’ or ‘noteworthy’ (lol of course I will, it is my baby and I love its hideous countenance and the strange, wet noises it makes).

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Servilletas: Images of paper napkins from bars, cafes, bakeries and restaurants in Spain (I think). Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT YOU INGRATES.
  • Ethos, Austin: A restaurant in Austin, Texas, sharing images of its food. Except the food is all AI, the images aren’t real, the restaurant doesn’t exist…but it does have a website! And, perhaps more understandably, a merch shop! I am confused about this – not about the fact that someone’s spinning up AI images of food, more about…why? Why the website? Is this a teaser for something else? See, this is the problem with AI stuff – IT MAKES EVERYTHING CONFUSING AND UNKNOWABLE.
  • DJ Ag: I love this – turns out I have actually seen DJ Ag out and about in South London before, and but this is his Insta which showcases his habit of just setting up some decks, an amp and a mic on the street and letting people come and MC with him. Some of the resulting performances here are ACE, and in general this is just one of those ‘see, this is why living in a big city is awesome and why people are at heart sort of brilliant’ things that we can all get behind (until some brand decides to make Ag the cornerstone of their next ‘activation’ and the whole thing dies a miserable death).
  • The Savalavada: This is interesting – India has its own version of The Onion! Ok, fine, I’m sure India’s had a fcuktonne of satirical, humorous outlets mocking its politics and culture, but this one’s new and feels more…Onion-y. It only exists on Insta, and I confess that a lot of the humour went right over my head, but I did very much enjoy a recent headline celebrating “International Day for Really Close Female Roommates” and so I am recommending it on that basis alone.
  • Insta Repeat: Thanks to Kev Lloyd for sending this to me – an insta account highlighting the inherent aesthetic sameness of shots on the platform via the medium of collages which neatly point out exactly how fcuking banal everything in your ‘September’ dump was.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • Machines of Loving Grace: I am not, if I’m honest, really expecting many (any?) of you to read all of this – it is, after all, a 15,000 paean to the future benefits of the glorious AI future, penned by a man with a vested financial interest in as many people as possible believing VERY FIRMLY in the validity of that future – but I would say that it’s worth a look if you have a passing interest in the general ‘so, where have the plutocratic tech fcuks decided is the future this week?’ question. This is Anthropic’s Dario Amodei waxing (VERY) lyrical about What This Will All Mean and Where We Will All End Up, and – SPOILERS! – we don’t have to worry, it’s all going to be great! This is a nice companion to the (far shorter, thank fcuk) Sam Altman piece from the other week – the contrast here comes with Amodei seeming to think somewhat more deeply about how this stuff might play out…although, to be clear, nowhere near deeply enough. So we get the fat end of 15,000 words on the amazing advancements in longevity and medicine and science that we can all expect, and the promise that ‘powerful AI’, smarter than a Nobel Winner (lol at the Hinton shade!), could be here as soon as 2026, and that is going to make EVERYTHING BETTER! It also, though, relies on a lot of this sort of thinking – “Diseases have been eradicated and many countries have gone from poor to rich, and it is clear that the decisions involved in these tasks exhibit high returns to intelligence (despite human constraints and complexity). Therefore, AI can likely do them better than they are currently being done.” – which…doesn’t feel *hugely* robust, intellectually-speaking, and, as ever, there are gaping holes where the sections on ‘negative externalities’ might be expected to sit, or indeed what we’re meant to do about the fact that, per Dario, we will soon reach a point where “our current economic setup will no longer make sense, and there will be a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organised.” What might that conversation be? How might that work? Dario? DARIO????? Oh well, no need to think about that just yet, eh?
  • Death of Memory: A brief blogpost from Matt Webb next, in which he speculates idly about the potential ulterior motives behind attacks on the Internet Archive. Webb’s not being entirely serious here, I don’t think, but I did think there was something interesting at the heart of what he writes and which gets to the core of much of what is making me uneasy about the proliferation of AI slop everywhere – we’re back to the pollution of the informational water table again, kids (I WILL MAKE THIS ANALOGY CATCH ON IF IT FCUKING KILLS ME, I TELL YOU), and how, after a while of this, you won’t ever be able to remember a time before the streams weren’t all brown and unpleasantly-faecally-scented. Anyway, this is a great writing prompt for a scifi short if nothing else.
  • Risks and Harms and Kids and Social Media: An excellent piece of writing by Danah Boyd, capturing much of the current panicked zeitgeistvibe about kids and phones and social media – on which note, man does the stuff coming out of the TikTok case in the US make for uncomfortable reading for TikTok! – and arguing sensibly and cogently that we should approach the question in terms of risks and harms, and that as such we should think more in terms of working to minimise risk via design and education rather than attempting to ‘ban harms’. This really is worth reading in full – particularly if this is a question that you’ve been wrestling with as a parent or guardian – but this is a decent little precis: “Can social media be risky for youth? Of course. So can school. So can friendship. So can the kitchen. So can navigating parents. Can social media be designed better? Absolutely. So can school. So can the kitchen. (So can parents?) Do we always know the best design interventions? No. Might those design interventions backfire? Yes. Does that mean that we should give up trying to improve social media or other digital environments? Absolutely not. But we must also recognize that trying to cement design into law might backfire. And that, more generally, technologies’ risks cannot be managed by design alone.Fixating on better urban design is pointless if we’re not doing the work to socialize and educate people into crossing digital streets responsibly. And when we age-gate and think that people can magically wake up on their 13th or 18th birthday and be suddenly able to navigate digital streets just because of how many cycles they took around the sun, we’re fools. Socialization and education are still essential, regardless of how old you are.”
  • Plutocrat Archipelagos: On the very, very rich. Jack Self writes about spending time in the company of the plutes, about the rarefied air up there, about the oddity of existence in a world whose contours are continually being smoothed to your exact specifications. The prose here is delightful: “In desert gated communities, time is drawn out as thin as the air. The world attains a kind of placid stasis. If we are to believe Borges, as empires rise they generate maps that become coextensive with their territories. And as empires collapse, these maps burn, until the only scraps that remain are in the desert; a confetti archipelago of defunct ideologies, strewn amongst the sand and rocks. We are living through a period of societal collapse. This isn’t a factual statement, but an emotional one. It feels like we are approaching the end of a specific social contract. Modernity is a project founded on patriarchal domination, on linear time, infinite extraction and unstoppable accumulation. In its five centuries, it has evolved into such an unnatural paradigm that it now only survives through extreme and perpetual violence; perpetrated indifferently against both humans and non-humans alike.”
  • Culture Isn’t Stuck, Actually: A counterpoint to the recent spate of ‘we have stopped producing anything really new, culturally-speaking’ pieces, Katherine Dee here suggests that the difference is simply that you can’t see culture anymore, or at least anything resembling a truly representative slice of it, and as such it’s perspective that is screwed not the production of new culture itself. Part of me definitely buys this – specifically, I buy this from the point of view of a 45 year old man who really *shouldn’t* feel like they have any sort of finger-on-the-pulse view of culture, otherwise something really has gone very wrong indeed – although equally I am not sure I 100% buy the following as an example of true ‘newness’ because, well, this doesn’t exactly feel revolutionary: “The social media personality is one example of a new form. Personalities like Bronze Age Pervert, Caroline Calloway, Nara Smith, mukbanger Nikocado Avocado, or even Mr. Stuck Culture himself, Paul Skallas, are themselves continuous works of expression — not quite performance art, but something like it. They may also be influencers, or they may not be, but the innovative aspect isn’t that they’re promoting a brand or making money from their venture.  It’s not about their single tweet, self-published book, or video. The entire avatar, built across various platforms over a period of time, constitutes the art. Their persona must be enjoyed in the moment, as it reveals itself on the platforms; the audience response is part of the piece. The way their audiences start to speak like them, the aesthetics they inspire, and the way they shape headlines — this is all social media born culture.” Sorry, Leigh Bowery would like you to acknowledge them please.
  • The Tesla Thing: If you care about the Tesla robotaxi event thing, chances are that you will have read all you need to about it – if you don’t, you probably don’t care to read anymore. That said, PLEASE take a moment to enjoy this short writeup of the event by Jonathan Gitlen, which is a beautiful example of how to take a gag and work it repeatedly, and which does a neat job of skewering exactly why people should stop listening to that horrid apartheid toad (although I can’t help but be impressed by the rockets, albeit grudgingly).
  • Why Boys Don’t Go To College: Sorry, I should probably have de-yanked the English there – “why young men don’t go to university”, then. I mean, obviously they do, but there’s data from all over the place suggesting that young women are significantly more likely to enter higher education than young men in 2024. Here, Celeste Davis wonders why, and runs some numbers that suggest there’s an interesting – and frankly a bit miserable – fact underpinning this, to whit ‘when groups become minority-male, men tend to abandon them wholesale’. That’s right, the data suggests that one of the reasons that young men aren’t going to university so much is…too many women! Davis explains the concept of ‘male flight’ – wherein beyond a certain tipping point, topics or subjects become ‘female-coded’ in the mind of men, who therefore see them as ‘lower status’ and who therefore avoid participating in them. This is INCREDIBLY miserable – and, honestly, not a little embarrassing tbh, what the fcuk is WRONG with us?! – and yet feels…true? Anyway, this really interested me and wasn’t something I’d ever really considered before. There’s definitely some nudge-adjacent purpose work you could squeeze out of this, with a bit of thought.
  • Netflix’s Endless Library: This is a couple of weeks old and so you might well have seen it – SORRY, NO MORE BREAKS FOR MATT, BAD MATT! – but in case not it’s definitely worth reading – the New York Times goes long on the current state of the streaming economy and how the past decade or so’s approach to the production and distribution of TV has led to the weird situation of there being an infinite amount of it and yet, simultaneously, nothing to watch, and why there are so many shows that seem to exist without anyone ever having seen them (we’re back to the ‘culture is still happening, you just can’t see it because it’s now too big to fit in any single person’s eyeline’ argument again), and how this all links back to…venture capital and modern finance! Funny how whichever way you slice it the general ensh1ttification of so much of modern experience can be blamed squarely on those cnuts, isn’t it? By which I mean, enervating and infuriating!
  • Taylor Lorenz and Modern Media: Depending on how interested in media and media personalities you are, you might have missed the news that Taylor Lorenz, probably the most famous tech/digital culture journalists online right now since we collectively realised that Kara Swisher…wasn’t actually doing a very good job, has quit (or been quit from, unclear tbh) ‘mainstream’ media and is setting herself up as a one woman media vertical (…node, anyone?)…anyway, whether or not you care about that I think this is an interesting profile/interview which covers a lot of interesting ground about the extent to which the ‘mainstream media’ (Jesus I hate that term, I really do – it *reeks* of the worst of the web) has dropped the ball when it comes to ‘online reporting’ over the past decade or so, the growth of independent, narrow-focus new media brands and projects, the idea of the ‘personal brand’ in the workplace and all that sort of jazz. I think Lorenz is very good at what she does and wish her the best, but I can’t deny that my heart sank when I got to the bit about her not wanting to JUST be a journalist but instead aspiring to be a ‘360 degree online personality’ because…a) that isn’t how good reporting happens! b) that doesn’t seem to tend to end well for the ‘360 degree online personalities’ in question! Still, more power to her.
  • The Disappearance of an Internet Domain: In that brief 48h period a few weeks ago when a bunch of red-faced conservatives in the UK had to pretend to both be aware of, and to care about, the UK’s sovereignty over the Chagos Islands (and the fact that said sovereignty was being handed over to the bloody foreigners, WHERE IS OUR EMPIRE, etc etc, one element of the story that was criminally-overlooked was the impact it would have on the world’s websites, who will shortly no longer be able to avail themselves of the .io suffix – because that was attached to the Chaygos Islands, which will now be part of Malaysia, meaning the domain is being retired. This is SO INTERESTING – the links between physical borders and digital domains is always fascinating, conceptually, and this hints at a whole weird alternative world of international geopolitics based around domain-based interest groups which I now want to spend the afternoon daydreaming about.
  • Frieze: Web Curios favourite Clive Martin visit the Frieze Art Fair, which has just departed London, to give his thoughts from the frontline of artcapitalism. I have long had a soft spot for Frieze – I worked for an agency that did its PR for a new years c.2005ish, and going to the opening party on the Wednesday was always  one of the most incredible experiences, not least because it remains one of the only places in the world I’ve ever seen real people in ‘real life’ wearing actual catwalk couture like it was in any way normal – but I confess to looking at the pricetag this year (I long ago slipped off the freebie list, chiz chiz) and thinking ‘yeah, no, you’re alright mate, £70 to stand in a tent is not actually that appealing ta’. Still, Clive does an excellent job of giving you the vibe – his writeup is very much about the people and the commerce and the *feel* of the whole thing rather than the art itself, which, frankly, is pretty much the perfect analogue for Frieze itself. Also, this is written in the second person and you are a SUCKER for things written in the second person.
  • Spotting Gators With Lana Del Rey’s Brother-in-Law: This piece is SO MUCH FUN! Honestly, possibly the most enjoyable read in this week’s Curios, I was grinning throughout. You may be aware that Lana DeL Rey recently got hitched to some random bloke from Florida – it turns out that Mr Del Rey is one of the proprietors of a company that does tours of the alligator swamps for tourists, and so OBVIOUSLY Ock Sportello (can I just say, by the way, that this is possibly the greatest name I have encountered in 2024? Go on, take a moment to roll it around your mouth, it is BRILLIANT) decided to go down and check it out. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mr Del Rey doesn’t show up to work much any more, but this piece doesn’t suffer from the lack of any meaningful celebrity-adjacent content – it’s just funny and interesting and personal, and does that lovely thing where the writer evidently realises on starting to research the piece that they are not going to end up writing the article they thought they were going to be writing, but that what they will end up writing will be better than what they had planned. You will grin throughout this, I promise.
  • Nardwuar: Do you know who Nardwuar is? I have mentioned him a few times before, I think – and apologies if you do, and this is all old to you, but I have genuinely no clue how famous he is – but to give you the brief synopsis: Nardwuar, otherwise known as ‘Nardwuar The Human Serviette’ (no, no idea) is possibly the greatest music interviewer in history. He has interviewed EVERYONE, and his schtick is basically: a) earnest – Nardwuar is never ironic, never cynical, never anything less than 100% enthusiastic; b) informed – Nardwuar knows EVERYTHING. Seriously, each interview basically features the musicians becoming slowly more and more freaked out by the insane, almost stalker-ish, level of knowledge about them that Nardwuar displays, from their tastes to their hates, their history and their records. He might be the greatest living scholar of modern musicians, no sh1t; c) indefatigable – Nardwuar always plays it straight, even on those occasions when SOME musicians (naming no names but I think I decided that Blur were, in the main, total cnuts when I saw how they treated poor Nardwuar) decide to be mean to him, which makes some of his interviews almost unbearably poignant to watch. ANYWAY, Nardwuar is a treasure and a delight, and this chat with him about his favourite ever interviews, is just pure and gorgeous and will make you happy, I promise. Also, it is an excellent excuse to explore the Nardwuar back catalogue if you’re yet to experience him, because honestly he is a…unique talent.
  • The Thirty-Two Fouettes: A short story by Dwight Curtis about…well, sort of about ballet, but not really about that at all. I found this fascinating – I don’t know that I *liked* it, entirely, but I have reread bits of it over and over again this week and it’s stuck with me. Something very…nasty about this, in a very subtle way, and I think that’s what I am enjoying.
  • Icarus Also Flew: From the latest issue of The Fence, this has rightly been lauded as a brilliant piece of writing – Ella Fox-Martens writes about moving in with someone you’ve never met. This does not, I promise, go where you expect it to, and it is so much better for not being the piece you think it’s going to be when you start reading it.
  • The Manifesto: Last of the longreads this week is this superb short by Ilse Eskelen, about a young woman who wants to impress a boy, and it is very funny indeed and you should make yourself a cup of tea and read it right now.

By Charlie Tallott

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 27/09/24

Reading Time: 36 minutes

It’s been astonishing this week to see exactly how badly a political party’s comms team can handle something – FOR FCUK’S SAKE, LABOUR PARTY COMMS PEOPLE, IT SHOULDN’T BE THIS DIFFICULT. Also, the past seven days’ succession of embarrassing revelations and gift-related gaffes have somehow managed to achieve the unthinkable and made me feel genuine pity for the PM’s kid (I’m not a monster, it’s just that, well, after seeing what Euan Blair became I’m not exactly minded to give them the benefit of the doubt), who has been roundly embarrassed to the nation which now collectively thinks of him as a fragile milquetoast who needs some sort of anechoic chamber in which to practice quadratics.

Still, it’s been fun watching people attempt to minimise all this because ‘it’s not as bad as the Tories’ – while that’s obviously true, running that line does rather make you look as though you don’t understand the first thing about the practical realities of how lobbying works and what it is that businesspeople with vested interests expect when they give generous gifts to people in positions of actual, practical power. GYAC THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREE BOX AT THE EMIRATES.

Anyway, enough of this – it’s late-September, everything looks like it’s going to be exceptionally damp for approximately the next seven months, and so I am going to take a short break to vaguely-recharge what pass for my ‘batteries’ – Web Curios will return in a few weeks, probably mid-October, at which point it’s PRACTICALLY FCUKING CHRISTMAS, dear God.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can all tell me how much you’re going to miss me if you like.

By Michael McMillan, who really doesn’t seem to have any sort of online presence at all that I can find.

YOUR FIRST MUSICAL PICK THIS WEEK IS A SELECTION OF TRACKS FRONTED BY SOME SUPERB FEMALE VOCALISTS, FROM ARETHA FRANKLIN TO JOCELYN BROWN AND ALL SORTS OF OTHERS INBETWEEN, ABLY MIXED BY TOM SPOONER!

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  • GPT Voice: Yes, yes, I KNOW, AI is BORING and PLAYED OUT and you are all tired of this bullsh1t and are currently slumped, uncaring, in Gartner’s Trough of Disillusionment…really, though, I can’t stress enough how fcuking incredible the new voice chat feature which ChatGPT introduced to all users this week is. This is the fancy ‘hey, I talk kind of like a real human being, and I can interrupt and be interrupted, and if you ask me nicely I can affect the speech pattern and vocal style of a drunk!’ update that was announced and trailed about 4 months ago (tbh I am guessing at that timeline, I have literally lost all concept of where we are in the year; at the present point in time it feels to me like 2024 has always been happening and may well continue in perpetuity), and for reasons I can’t entirely explain I decided I would get over my inherent antipathy towards ‘talking to machines’ and install the app a couple of days ago and…yeah, honestly, it’s fcuking incredible, I can’t pretend. This feels like MAGIC – it’s natural, it’s fast, it’s close enough to human-sounding that it doesn’t feel too creepy, and I can 100% see this becoming INCREDIBLY addictive to a certain type of person. Which, to my mind, is where the interesting wrinkles sit – the very nature of LLMs means that, yes, they’re guardrailed to fcukery and will scold you if you ask them to (for example) teach you how to skin a human and dispose of their skeleton, but they are also basically primed to be helpful and agreeable and broadly concur with whatever mad sh1t you say to them – effectively like the world’s most indefatigable “yes, and?” improv partner – and as such it’s not hard to imagine this quality being particularly attractive when coupled with an easy voice interface. What’s that? An ever-present, friendly conversational companion who will basically agree with and build on whatever mad bullsh1t I say to it and which will ask me encouraging questions designed to get me to engage more? I DON’T MIND IF I DO! Seriously, I tried this on Wednesday night when I was (to be entirely transparent with you) very, very stoned and talking total nonsense and it made me feel like a SAVANT – reading the transcript back the next day proved that I very much wasn’t and that The Machine was pandering to me to a quite embarrassing extent. Basically this is incredible and quite game change-y and the sort of thing which I get the feeling is going to be quite dangerous for a small (but, globally, really fcuking massive) subset of people. Honestly, you really MUST try this (CAVEAT: it’s possible that the full voicechat experience is only available to people who shell out for a subscription, in which case apologies but I would also suggest it is totally worth signing up for a month and then immediately cancelling just to play with this, it really is that astonishing).
  • How Did You Find Me?: A website project thing by Elan Ullendorff, where the point is to share visitors’ stories of, er, how they came across the website. Which sounds dull, but has ended up meaning that the page is a collection of small vignettes, almost like little desire paths of the web, demonstrating all the different networks along which information (and so by extension hyperlinks) travel, like a sort of small ‘you are here and this is how you got here’ negative map of webspace (this makes sense in my head, but almost certainly no sense on the page; hey ho). Look, I don’t ordinarily ask you to do anything in Web Curios (or at least I don’t *think* I do – do I? Am I horribly needy? AM I TOO MUCH FOR YOU???) but I would be really grateful if you could possibly click the link and maybe tell people that you found it here? I just quite like the idea of seeing evidence of your existence, even if anonymously; it might make me feel less cripplingly alone for a few minutes (lol jk) (nothing takes the feeling away, nothing).
  • The F-List 2024: As the old Curios heads will doubtless know, this horrible mess of a newsletterblogtypething started life on the corporate website of international PR behemoths Hill & Knowlton (latterly H+K Strategies, now Burson – o, like autumnal leaves, so do the corporate identities change with the seasons!) – as such, I am aware that a not-insignificant number of the few dozen masochists who read this fcuking thing happen to work in and around the wider advermarketingpr industry. This link is for YOU, advermarketingprdrones! Clean Creatives is a campaign organisation attempting to raise awareness of which agencies in advermarketingprland are taking money to launder the reputations of the world’s biggest polluters in the form of fossil fuel clients such as Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron and the like – because they (and I) think it’s important that the wider world is aware of who is profiting from this stuff. Look, I don’t have a huge amount of moral high ground to take here – I have been employed by at least three of the companies on this list (although I have never personally worked on any energy/fossil fuel accounts) and I appreciate that, well, mortgages and food are expensive; that said, I do also believe that it’s not really ok to promote or help promote these companies in 2024 because, well, we sort of know what the direction of travel is by now, and who’s gotten us to this point, and it doesn’t really feel ok that they should be so rich. At the very least this feels like a useful resource for brands and businesses who at least want to pretend to have some ethical hard lines to use to determine which agencies NOT to employ on the basis of their own absence of professional red lines. Also, just to reiterate, Edelman spent literally YEARS laundering the reputation of the odious Sackler family – the people responsible for hooking millions and millions of people worldwide on opiates because it made them VERY RICH – so, specifically, fcuk that agency all the way into the sun and back.
  • Lynk: This is a smart application of…some LLM or another, and potentially a really useful service for those of you looking to buy stuff. You know how sh1t Google is? You know how reviews on many sites have been rendered largely useless by bots and the like? You know how it’s now accepted wisdom to append ‘reddit’ to any search where you’re seeking ‘wisdom of crowds’-type information? Well Lynk basically tries to offer a solution to all of these small modern inconveniences, by effectively adding an LLM-enabled natural language layer to searching a bunch of specific sites for product information. So you just ask it (for example) “what are the best minimalist sneakers for men?” (you use the word ‘sneakers’, however much it makes your teeth itch, because you understand that the majority of the web operates in American English and you just have to suck it up sometimes) and it comes back with a bunch of different recommendations, pulling highlights from various relevant subreddits and trainer review sites and giving you pros and cons…honestly, I was really impressed with this – admittedly I only found it this morning and as such I have conducted a grand total of ONE experimental search (the aforementioned ‘sneakers’ query), but the information it pulled up was seemingly high-quality, and I enjoyed the fact that it pulled pluses and minuses for its recommendations rather than just offering endorsements. Definitely worth a look and possibly a bookmark (but, to remind you, it will skew VERY US-centric in its recommendations which means not everything it suggests will be available where you are).
  • Battalion: I have for a year or so now been quite vocal about my general bearishness towards online video – or, more specifically, the fact that I think we are actually a VERY long way away from it being able to do anything even vaguely near broadcast quality anytime soon. Generally I am still very much of that opinion – but, equally, the past three months or so has seen a pretty staggering series of leaps in the quality of output from Runway and the like, from the ability to define start and endframes in a clip to the latest version of Kling’s introduction of tight controls to direct in-video movement. Basically you still can’t make anything that isn’t composed of ~5s shots, but those 5s shots now look considerably better than they did even a few weeks ago – the link here takes you to a tweet from some bloke (called Dave Clarke, apparently – sorry Dave) who’s made a short film called ‘Battalion’ (the link is to the first half, the second is in the followup tweet just below) about a soldier talking to a therapist about their experience of war and, look, it is not by any stretch of the imagination a ‘good piece of filmmaking’ (aside from anything else I am VERY CONFUSED about the historical timeline at play) but it is a frankly astonishing tech demo and left me thinking actually maybe the low-end videographers probably need to start retraining too. Jesus, we’re all so fcuked.
  • NotebookLM: Seeing as we’re on AI, let’s quickly mention the Google NotebookLM thing – this is Google’s ‘feed The Machine documents and interrogate them!’ service, which recently launched a feature which sounds like a gimmick and, well, sort of is, but which is equally kind of magical – you can feed this any doc you like and, if you so desire, it will create a podcast out of it, in which two ‘presenters’ will discuss the contents of the text and ‘explain’ it to you in pleasingly conversational fashion. Which, obviously, is really useful for anyone who finds it easier to ingest information aurally rather than via the medium of text/eyeballs, but also is just weirdly, surreally sort-of fun to play around with – seriously, it’s worth spending a bit of time playing with this and seeing what happens when you feed it different things; apparently if you feed it nonsense The Machine will still try and make sense of it, which can lead to some interestingly-surreal musings (but which, if you think about it too hard, leads you to some NOT ENTIRELY GREAT PLACES – hm, a conversational machine which will attempt to see patterns in meaning in anything you feed it regardless of whether any such pattern or meaning exists? WHAT COULD POSSIBLY BE DANGEROUS ABOUT THAT). Seriously, try it with whatever deadly-dull corporate w4nk you’re currently being forced to pretend to care about, it’s fun. Oh, and if for whatever reason you don’t fcuk with Google, there’s an open source version of the same sort of thing here.
  • The US Election Game: Deep breath everyone, only a few short weeks to go until the Americans FINALLY SHUT UP ABOUT THEIR FCUKING DEMOCRACY (or, er, possibly consign that democracy to the dustbin of history!). If you’ve managed to maintain your interest and enthusiasm in the Presidential race to this point then, well, I salute you and your indefatigable appetite for policy-light campaigning – and, also, this link is for YOU! The Financial Times has created a small interactive ‘experience’ which they call a ‘game’ but which, I’m sorry to say, fails singularly to embody one of the core elements of any ludic pursuit, specifically ‘being any fun at all’. THIS IS SO SO SO SO SO DRY FFS! The ‘game’ element here is restricted to you, the player, deciding exactly how to prioritise campaign spending in various states so as to maximise your likelihood of gaining an overall majority – so you’re literally just stacking your metaphorical chips against Georgia or Pennsylvania or wherever and then hitting ‘VOTE!’ to see how it plays out; there’s a bit of leaderboard competition whereby you can see how well you’ve performed compared to everyone else who’s played the game and how your allocation of resources differed from the mean, but, honestly, this is pretty thin gruel  from the usually-excellent FT digital team (or at least it is for someone who is bored senseless by the whole ‘electoral college’ thing; I appreciate that if you have a deep and nuanced understanding of the US electoral process and the weighting given to different States this might be HYPER-COMPELLING, but I’d still argue that it’s about as ‘fun’ as grating your own shins).
  • Shelf: This feels like something of a throwback to…I don’t know, maybe 2011? Certainly a more hopeful time, when the idea of ‘sharing information about what we’re into with people online’ was a fun way of engaging in shared cultural experience rather than simply contributing to the the ravening algorithm swallowing the world whole. Still, if you’re feeling hopeful and positive and like maybe you can just about be fcuked to once again give the whole ‘new social platform’ thing a go here in 2024 then maybe you’ll like Shelf, an iOS-only app which hooks up to all your extant streaming services (Spotify, Netflix, etc) and posts updates about the culture you’re consuming – what TV shows you’re watching, what albums you’re streaming, etc. I quite like the realtime, no-filter nature of this – you can’t lie about exclusively listening to early period Animal Collective when your Spotify’s snitching about your repeat plays of The Thong Song – and I do like the light touch ‘oh, that looks interesting, I might check that out too if so-and-so likes it’ recommendation engine possibilities, but, equally, I can also appreciate that it feels a bit, well…open and I don’t know whether we’re really into sharing like this anymore in THE MODERN ERA. Are we?
  • Ray Cathode: I don’t have the first idea what is going on here, but this YouTube channel seems to be collecting a wonderful trove of VERY ODD videos – we have a bunch of recent uploads of Divine David vids, a 1969 experimental film called ‘The Perils of Priscilla’, an arthouse short about ‘a cat lost in the big city’ (no, really), and a TERRIFYING-looking Japanese (I think) sketch show (I think) called ‘Vermillion Pleasure Night’ which I am 100% going back to watch when I am finished writing this because it looks frankly insane. None of these vids have more than 100ish views, and I am VERY curious as to what is going on with this channel and what the overall curatorial vibe is beyond ‘weird’, because the vibes are all over the place.
  • Food Reference: You know how foodie newsletter/website Vittles is basically the ultimate culinary hipster signifier (at least in the UK)? Well Food Reference is basically its antonym; this has been going since 1999(!) and is…a very unpretentious and VERY oldschool site featuring information and, oddly, ‘trivia’ about food, and it has over 20,000(!) pages, and it’s all compiled and maintained by one person, the ASTONISHINGLY DEDICATED James T Ehler (THANKYOU JAMES!) and as ever with these things this is some proper web history and I am thrilled that it still exists.
  • Blocked In China: This is really interesting – a project which shows you sites that are being blocked by the Great Firewall. “GFWeb is a measurement platform capable of testing hundreds of millions of domains monthly, enabling the continuous monitoring of the Great Firewall’s HTTP(S) filtering behavior. The newly censored domains discovered by GFWeb provide a useful insight into China’s information control policies. This project is a result of an academic collaboration between researchers from the University of British Columbia, University of Chicago, the Citizen Lab at University of Toronto, Carnegie Mellon University, SRI International, and Stony Brook University.” It’s the very definition of ‘unappealing’ – the design is…not exactly engaging, it’s fair to say, and the UX isn’t exactly pleasant – but it’s worth having a dig because there’s something fascinating about seeing exactly what domains the Party currently deems unsuitable for the good citizens of the people’s republic; you can read a bit more about it on Rest of World if you’re interested. By the way, as I just discovered by curiously typing in a url and unexpectedly finding myself on what appears to be a modern-day Polish version of Ogrish, there are some BAD WEBSITES on that list so, er, don’t do what I just did unless you want to possibly see some really really really horrible things Jesus Christ my EYES.
  • Godchecker: Via Blort, whose site turned 20 this week which is a fcuking incredible anniversary and puts by 14-ish years of webspaffing to shame frankly, comes this database of deities – a DEITIBASE, if you will!!!! Sorry. Anyway, if you want to know about Gods then, well, this is the website for you! Another one that’s been going a preposterously long time, this is actually rather fun – I particularly like the search function which allows you to find out which Gods in the pantheon are associated with specific things and which just informed me that there is in fact a Roman goddess associated with door hinges, which is just perfectly ludicrous and has made me momentarily very happy indeed.
  • A Year In An Instant: I love this. A project from 2015/2016 by one Nunho Coelho Santos, who documented a year of his life in photographic form, one photo a day, on this website. “Between the 29th of September of 2015 and the 28th September of 2016, I will capture an instant photo and describe the every day occurrences while living in Japan. Up until day 64 the camera used for this diary was a Fujifilm Instax 300 Wide and from that day onwards all photos were taken with a Lomo’Instant Wide. Both these cameras use Fujifilm’s Instax Wide Film (86 by 108mm).” Each photo is accompanied by a small caption giving a tiny bit of context for the shot, but otherwise this is just a year in one person’s life, told in photos, and I adore it.
  • Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2024: Amazing photos of space. No, really, these are INCREDIBLE. It’s worth clicking through into each individual category to see all the nominated entries rather than just the winners, because these are some truly astonishing images. WE ARE SO SMALL AND INSIGNIFICANT, as if you needed telling. LOOK AT THE GALAXIES FFS!
  • Meta Leaks: I am…a touch conflicted about this one; as a general rule I try not to include links by people who are obviously dealing with one or two ‘issues’ or which present symptoms of schizophrenia, but, equally, sometimes there are things so bizarre that it feels appropriate to bring them to the attention of a wider audience. So it is with MetaLeaks, which is either a collection of…somewhat delusional conspiracies encompassing a quite dizzying array of topics and sources, or someone who is perhaps the only person in the world right now who REALLY understands what’s going on. YOU DECIDE! “The name Metaleaks is an obvious play on the name Wikileaks. Wikileaks is an organisation which, as we know, uncovers documents which are not particularly revelatory and which do not add substantially to the public’s knowledge of the crimes of government and which it then leaks. Metaleaks on the other hand pertains to the leaking of a series of communications by the British government which: a) Are based upon a collation of metadata which, for the most part, is geographical in nature; b) Form the basis of international events which are entirely criminal in nature. The word criminal encompasses crimes against humanity. As a result of collating such metadata, one can uncover information which is far more significant than anything that has been provided thusfar by individuals such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.” Seriously, this is QUITE the thing.

By Stuart Pearson Wright

NEXT, WHY NOT ENJOY THE BEAUTIFUL NEW ALBUM BY ERLAND COOPER WHICH IS A GORGEOUS BIT OF MODERN CLASSICAL COMPOSITION AND WHICH I REALLY DO RECOMMEND VERY HIGHLY INDEED!

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  • The Social Web Foundation: Ok, this is a bit roughage-y, but if you’re interested in the concept of the Fediverse and all that jazz then you should probably be at least aware of this newly-launched organisation. It’s self-defined mission is “growing, healthy, financially viable and multi-polar Fediverse”, and it’s going to work on a bunch of initiatives designed to help educate people as to what the Fediverse is and how to get involved with it, as well as a bunch of more technical/operational stuff around making the ecosystem better; if you’re That Sort Of Person, then they would probably appreciate you getting in touch and offering to help out.
  • TinkerCad: “Tinkercad is a free web app for 3D design, electronics, and coding” says the site blurb – which is entirely true, that’s exactly what it is. It also, though, features a ‘physics’ mode which lets you build things in the designer and then apply the laws of nature to them, meaning you can actually use this as a weird little kinetic sandbox toy and which is how I found myself wasting a good 15 minutes yesterday when I was meant to be writing about AI and jobs (lol, we are SO FCUKED!) and instead spent the time making an elaborate domino rally-type experience in virtual space and repeatedly knocking the dominos over and laughing like some sort of vaguely-troubled, massive child.
  • Social Communication: This is really interesting – a resource produced by Truman State University in the US and designed as a series of resources for people who perhaps have difficulty with ‘normal’ social interactions and communication and may therefore need some assistance in parsing the cues and mores of what passes for ‘polite society’. Per the ‘about’ section, “This site is written directly for you, the person with social communication challenges. We hope you find it useful. (If you are someone else, please see the notes intended for different audiences below.) It’s not just people with autism or nonverbal learning disorder or social anxiety disorder who have social communication problems, but lots of intelligent people who have spent their lives with their noses in books or faces fixed firmly on the computer screen or doing other solitary activities.  Most of the people who get labeled “nerd” or “geek” have social communication challenges. So we’re not really interested in whether you have any sort of diagnosis, or if, like Sheldon, your mammas had you tested.The only assumption we tried to make about you is that you’re a competent speaker of English, reasonably intelligent, not a young child, probably somewhat frustrated by persistent miscommunications and therefore interested in learning more about how most Americans interpret social signals. (A lot of what is written here will be relevant for other English-speaking countries, but there will be some cultural differences.)” Now, I am not for a SECOND assuming anything about the potential likely readership of a massively-overlong weekly newsletter about ‘quite geeky stuff on the internet’, I’m just leaving this here for ENTIRELY-UNRELATED reasons.
  • Bird Photographer of the Year 2024: I feel I ought to open with a slight warning here, because while you might expect the winning image in a contest entitled ‘bird photographer of the year’ would be one celebrating, I don’t know, the beauty of avian flight, say, or the glorious plumage and colours of a tropical species, this year the judges have decided to award the big gong to what is a photo of several thousand very dead birds, and as such the first thing you’re confronted with on clicking is, well, DEAD THINGS. Ngl, bit jarring (although it is a very striking image – on reflection, an infelicitous choice of word on my part as you will realise when you click through and see exactly what the image is depicting). Anyway, scroll past the corpses and you’ll see LOADS of nice pictures of birds in happier, significantly less dead, times – there’s one shot of a penguin inside a wave which is particularly impressive.
  • Jamstart: This is a nice idea; Jumpstart hooks up to your Spotify account and presents you with guitar tabs for whatever you’re listening to, the idea being that you can play along as you listen – there’s a subscription layer to this, but there’s also a free tier meaning you can play around with it a bit and see what you think; I am, per previous Curios, completely musically talentless and as such have no idea if this works or is any good but, well, what the fcuk do you want from me? I just bring you the links ffs, you want me to chew your food for you as well? Jesus.
  • The Bellingcat OSINT Toolkit: This is quite the resource – pioneers of the whole ‘anyone can investigate anything thanks to the web’ thing, Bellingcat, this week launched the latest version of their online investigation toolkit designed to offer anyone the tools they need to…well, investigate stuff. You want tools to help you find information on individuals and businesses? You want stuff to help you identify location data from images? You want a frankly slightly-terrifying selection of tools to help you track people down across every single platform you can possibly conceive of? GREAT! Per their writeup, “Have you ever struggled to find a tool that does exactly what you need? Do you know the feeling of spending hours trying to figure out how to use a tool just to realise that the key features you are interested in are not working anymore, or that the previously free product has turned into a paid one that is more expensive than you can afford? You are not alone. More than 80 percent of open source researchers that participated in two Bellingcat surveys indicated that finding the right tools can be challenging. This is where our new Online Investigations Toolkit comes in: it not only helps you discover tools in categories like satellite imagery and maps, social media, transportation or archiving, but is also designed to help researchers learn how to use each tool by providing in-depth descriptions, common use cases and information on requirements and limitations for each toolkit entry.” This is, broadly, A Good Thing, though I couldn’t help but think as I was writing the description that many of these tools could equally be used for…potentially quite creepy purposes. Still, let’s not think about that, it will make us sad.
  • Francesco D’Isa: I’ve used one of this artist’s images in Curios this week, but wanted to include a specific link to their website and work because this is one of the more interesting examples of AI art I’ve seen in recent years; while the images are generated by Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, they’re then manipulated in such a way that they don’t *quite* have that by-now-typical ‘AI image’ sheen/vibe to them, and as such these work as artworks in a way in which I don’t typically feel that the machine ‘originals’ do; your mileage will of course vary, but I do rather like these.
  • Panels: You may have seen this week that the world’s most famous ‘tech influencer’, YouTuber Marques Brownlee, has this week LAUNCHED AN APP! You might also have seen people clowning on it because, well, it’s fcuking dogsh1t! This is the app – Panels is a very odd throwback to c.2011, offering you the opportunity to, er, subscribe and receive WALLPAPER IMAGES FOR YOUR PHONE! Yes, that’s right, you can pay an already-rich man a monthly stipend in order to access a selection of bland-looking vaguely-abstract digital images which are seemingly indistinguishable from every single other tasteful, HD image that comes up when you just put ‘hi res phone wallpaper’ into Google. WHO IS THIS FOR? WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT IT? And yet, as Garbage Ryan pointed out this week, people are downloading this quite a lot, which suggests that a) there are a lot of people who really don’t understand how ‘searching for stuff’ online works, which I find baffling; b) who don’t realise that this is one of the usecases where AI image generators are actually pretty good; c) really, really love Marques Brownlee and want to keep him in boxfresh kicks. I did for a moment this week try and imagine what sort of app I might make for YOU, loyal reader of Curios, but the resulting ideas got VERY dark very quickly and I think it’s probably best if I don’t share them with you for all our collective sanities.
  • Tripmates: This is a PR/promo/linkbait thing by money saving portal HotDealsUK – which has evidently worked as I am linking to it here! Well done, HotDealsUK! Still, this does look legitimately useful and is the sort of thing that if I were in my 20s and of an age where I still went on holiday with friends (rather than in my 40s and of an age where all my friends have selfishly had fcuking children and for some reason seem less keen on me tagging along and smoking at their darling progeny) I would probably find really useful. This basically lets you send an anonymous survey to everyone who might go on a group holiday, letting them specify what they want from the experience (amenities, facilities, pricepoint, etc) in a SAFE SPACE, without getting into a p1ssy argument with Tracey about whether or not ‘300 inflatable flamingos’ is a non-negotiable; it also helps with tricky conversations around budgets without anyone having to feel like the embarrassing povvo in the room, which feels like A Good Thing.
  • Gobi: This week’s “Oh, an AI product that made a small part of my soul wither and die when I first saw it!” link is Gobi, which bills itself as “your lifelong well-being partner”, a phrase so utterly miserable that I just had to take myself to the bathroom and give myself a pep talk in the mirror before being able to come back and continue typing. This is exactly the sort of service that is going to be steamrollered by a big LLM model in the next year or so – why the fcuk do you need a separate app when you can do exactly the same thing by voicechatting with ChatGPT (or Claude, or Nazi Nick your personally-trained on-phone instance of LLama!) – but I am more interested in what it’s promising and what the offer is. Per the blurb, “Gobi works as your AI companion, continuously learning from your daily interactions to support your overall well-being. It checks in with you regularly, engaging in conversations to understand your current state, track your moods, activities, and challenges. Using this information, Gobi provides 24/7 personalized support by offering wellness tips, and real-time insights. Over time, Gobi evolves with you, adjusting its recommendations and insights to better fit your needs, ensuring you always have the right tools to enhance your well-being.” On the homepage there are a series of ‘real world usecase examples’, one of which shows the app asking ‘how is your date going? Need any help?’ which is SO FCUKING RIDICULOUS – I mean, what’s the app going to do if you tell it your date is a cnut and you hate the sound when he chews? – but I can’t help but be slightly discomfited by how obviously this tech is being sold to us as ‘the friend we never knew we needed’ (more of which in the longreads, should you be interested in this particularly miserable line of enquiry).
  • Spotlist: This is an interesting adjunct to the boom in CURATION which I have read a frankly tedious amount about in the past year – you’re doubtless aware that people giving their recommendations for EVERYTHING is the new hotness in newsletterland; well Spotlist is an web version of that, which encourages you to make your own personally-curated lists of ‘stuff I think is good’ across any number of categories, share them with your network and, possibly, monetise them! There’s something quite horrible about this, to my mind – not the ‘recommendations’ thing but the fact that this is very clearly coming at it from the point of view not of ‘share things you like’ but of ‘monetise your interests! Become an influencer!’ which, honestly, is miserable. Also, this wants you to pay a fee to make your recommendations public, which suggests to me it’s doomed to failure and irrelevance, and I have to say I’m not exactly sad about that.
  • Meco: This is interesting – not wholly novel, but I can imagine some of you might find it of use/interest. Meco is an app (web and iOS, Android coming soon) which basically acts as a separate home for all your newsletters, sparing your inbox from clutter and creating a digital space for ‘ignoring web curios every seven days’ – all your newsletters sit in one place, you can make notes and clip bits from them in a dedicated ‘notes’ bit of the app, it will do audio summaries of that day’s missives should you so desire, and there’s a bit of recommendation engine stuff in there too; personally I don’t need another fcuking platform to look at, but for those of you who don’t mind having to open 37 different apps to manage your life then this might be of interest.
  • 15 Minute Cities: Presuming you’re not some sort of chemtrail-bothering, Soros-hating microchip conspiracist (and if you are, how the fcuk did you end up here?), you will probably appreciate the broad concept of the 15-minute city as a sensible approach to urban living; this site is a really useful resource which offers information about cities worldwide and how closely they cleave to the 15 minute ideal. You can search for a specific city or instead navigate using the map view; the data’s surprisingly granular, so if you’re looking at (for example) moving to a new place, this is a really useful way of gauging how convenient or otherwise access to essential amenities will be (or how much you’re going to be controlled by the NEFARIOUS, CONTROLLING SUPERSTATE, either/or).
  • What Came First?: A little game from Google which basically slightly rips off a bunch of other, slightly more fun, timeline-based games from years past, but which I’m going to give a pass to because, well, I sort of love Google Arts and Culture a bit. You’re presented with two things, and you just have to pick WHICH CAME FIRST in history – you get three lives, and you have to try and get as many points as possible. Some of the juxtapositions are quite nice – was Hugh Jackman born before or after All About Eve was released in cinemas? – and generally this is a nice, gentle way to spend five minutes while you wait for the kettle to boil or contemplate your own inevitable senescence.
  • Guess The Game: This is, to my mind, fcuking IMPOSSIBLE, but you may have a better and deeper knowledge of videogames than me. You’re presented with six details from a game screenshot in turn, and with each one you’re invited to guess the title – each wrong guess sees you given a new screenshot and a new nugget of info (metacritic score, release year, genre, etc) to theoretically help you along, but, honestly, the details you get shown are so zoomed-in that this is far too hard for my simple, non-visual brain.
  • Alphaguess: Guess the word each day by narrowing down its position in the dictionary – each guess sees you get told whether the actual word you’re looking for comes before or after your guess in the dictionary, and you use this to slowly narrow down your options. This is surprisingly fun, although today’s is proving irritatingly hard and so I am in something of a sulk with the site at present.
  • Echo Chess: The final game this week is this excellent little daily puzzler loosely based on chess – thankfully for me, though, the world’s least-competent chess player, you don’t actually need to be any good at the game to be able to play this. I can’t be bothered to try and explain it – yes, ok, in part this is laziness on my part, but it’s just easier to play and pick up, honest – but I promise you it’s fun and you might want to add it to your daily rotation.

By Francesco D’Isa

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS GENUINELY ODD BUT SURPRISINGLY ACTUALLY REALLY GOOD SELECTION OF TRACKS MIXED FROM THE AUDIO THAT USED TO ACCOMPANY THE PROCESSION OF CEEFAX PAGES THAT WERE SHOWN ON TELLY IN THE DEAD HOURS WHEN THERE WAS NO PROGRAMMING ON AND WHICH ENDS UP BEING A REALLY GOOD SORT OF VAPOURWAVE ALBUM WHICH I HIGHLY RECOMMEND! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS EMPTY!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Riders NYC: A newish Insta feed, via Kottke, where photographer Adam DiCarlo snaps bike riders as they emerge from one end of the Williamsburg bridge in NY. So far only one of the photos depicts someone who looks EXACTLY what you’d imagine someone cycling over the Williamsburg bridge to look like, but give it time.
  • Aurore: Smut! Actual smut, on Insta! Aurore is, I think, an ‘erotic magazine’ or journal or something – I have just checked, it is! You have to pay $70 a year but there seems to be loads of filth on there if ‘literary erotica’ is your thing, and it seems very femme-focused – and this is its Insta feed, which I am including mainly because I didn’t realise you could get away with this sort of stuff on a Meta-owned platform. Not QUITE full nudity, but definitely a bit closer to it than most of what you see there. TASTEFUL PROTOBONGO!
  • Synthetic Pink: Via former editor Paul comes this Insta feed of genuinely unpleasant – no, really, I am not joking, this stuff is really quite viscerally horrible – AI-generated images, which you will OBVIOUSLY recognise from last week’s longread from Sean Monaghan about the new AI aesthetic. I can’t stress enough, these are REALLY REALLY NOT NICE TO LOOK AT (obviously I love them).

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age: I am pretty sure I have bored you all with my broad ‘one of the major problems of the past few years has been the general trend across every single aspect of human life to prioritise the quantitative over the qualitative’ rant at various points over the past few months, but let me once again point you towards an article that I think neatly-encapsulates what we lose when everything is data and everything can and should be optimised. Here Thea Lim writes about how it feels when everything is data, and what it does to human experience when we quantify every aspect of human experience. “What we hardly talk about is how we’ve reorganized not just industrial activity but any activity to be capturable by computer, a radical expansion of what can be mined. Friendship is ground zero for the metrics of the inner world, the first unquantifiable shorn into data points: Friendster testimonials, the MySpace Top 8, friending. Likewise, the search for romance has been refigured by dating apps that sell paid-for rankings and paid access to “quality” matches. Or, if there’s an off-duty pursuit you love—giving tarot readings, polishing beach rocks—it’s a great compliment to say: “You should do that for money.” Join the passion economy, give the market final say on the value of your delights. Even engaging with art—say, encountering some uncanny reflection of yourself in a novel, or having a transformative epiphany from listening, on repeat, to the way that singer’s voice breaks over the bridge—can be spat out as a figure, on Goodreads or your Spotify year in review. And those ascetics who disavow all socials? They are still caught in the network. Acts of pure leisure—photographing a sidewalk cat with a camera app or watching a video on how to make a curry—are transmuted into data to grade how well the app or the creators’ deliverables are delivering. If we’re not being tallied, we affect the tally of others. We are all data workers.” I really do think that this speaks to a fundamental truth; that data-led living and optimisation HAS MADE US LESS HAPPY. Sometimes an unoptimised life is a better life, is all.
  • The Sam Altman Blogpost: I don’t know about you, but I can’t bring myself to care about corporate drama at OpenAI – that said, I did find this week’s blogpost by Sam Altman interesting and worth sharing. This is basically his latest rallying cry and feels very much designed as a ‘hey potential investors, the magic AGI woowoo is DEFINITLEY COMING!’ pitch, but there were a few other points of interest. The whole ‘we’re getting to AGI in a few thousand days’ line is interesting, mainly because if you stop and think for 0.3s you realise that that’s at least 5-6 years, which is NOT SOON and also is a promise that means literally nothing because, well, it’s just speculation and even Altman then caveats it with ‘it might take longer actually lol’ – it does rather feel like Elon Musk confidently predicting full self-driving every year since 2014. The other thing that caused me pause as I was reading was the airy, almost throwaway, line about the carnage that this tech is going to inflict on the global jobs market (not to mention all the other potential ways in which the tech could go wrong, be misused, etc etc) – “It will not be an entirely positive story”. OH REALLY SAM, TELL ME MORE ABOUT ALL THE WAYS IN WHICH YOU CAN CLEARLY SEE THAT IT WILL FCUK PEOPLE AND THINGS. He then goes on to say that, effectively, any form of short-term pain will be worth it for the longer-term gains that AGI will DEFINITELY bring – and there’s your effective altruism, longtermist philosophy, kids! I really, really don’t want this man to become one of the world’s richest and most powerful people, but, equally, I worry that that ship sailed a few years ago.
  • The Zuckerberg Interview: Your second ‘genuinely chiling set of pronouncements from a tech billionaire’ piece of the week! This is Mark Zuckerberg doing his annual interview with The Verge to accompany the big Meta announcement day – it really is worth reading all of this because FCUK ME is it miserableand chilling. In case you weren’t paying attention, yesterday was about two things – the future of AI wearables, specifically glasses and a whole bunch of other AI stuff coming to all of Meta’s platforms whether or not you give a fcuk. The interview, though, is far more interesting from a ‘Zuckerbergian worldview’ point of view – there’s a bit of continued pushback against the idea of Meta having any responsibility for, well, anything really, specifically teen mental health (and look, I don’t buy the Jonathan Haidt hysteria but equally I think the position here – that this is all rubbish! Insta makes people, especially young girls, feel great! – is fcuking bullshit and directly contradicted by previously-leaked bits of Meta’s own research), but to my mind the REALLY miserable bit is when he talks about the introduction of AI features and the move to introduce more AI-generated content into your various feeds. “The average person, maybe they’d like to have 10 friends, and there’s the stat that — it’s sort of sad — the average American feels like they have fewer than three real close friends. So does this take away from that? My guess is no. I think that what’s going to happen is it’s going to help give people more of the support that they need.” Am I the only person who finds this vision of the future – lonely people tapping on their phones, sharing their fears and hopes with bots because they simply don’t have enough human connection in their lives – incredibly fcuking sad, and something that perhaps we might want to NOT run towards at a million miles an hour? Not Mark, evidently. I have said it before, but fcuk geeks all the way into the sun, you have been in charge for decades now and you are making it worse, can we have the fcuking jocks back in charge please?
  • Why Mars Needs A Creative Director: A palette cleanser for you now – thanks to Alex Burley for bringing this to my attention. It’s on the website of that ‘creative technology VC’ outfit I linked to last week, and is…fcuk, it’s ASTONISHING, this, one of the most ridiculous things I have read in YEARS and a wonderful example of something which from a distance looks almost like it makes sense but which when you get up close you realise is actually just words arranged in a formation that looks like it means something but which really, really doesn’t. I quite want to quote all of this to you, but I think you should just go in with the premise that this is literally all about how one might go about ‘creative directing’ the planet of Mars (yes, I know), and contains many, many paragraphs like this one: “Mars, and the vehicle-of-thought-that-is-Mars, is going to look far more like a string of Vatican cities tied to Singapores than it’s going to look like, you know, the United States plot on Mars with Little Italy next to Tokyo Town. Those aren’t the structures we’re going to orient spatially around.” These people administer MILLIONS OF DOLLARS of investment budget. They are, evidently, fcuking morons. WHY IS THE WORLD LIKE THIS???
  • My AI Lover Cheated On Me: Not ‘mine’, you understand, but instead a number of people in China, interviewed for the Southern Weekly newspaper and here informally-translated into a GDoc by Jeffrey Ding. This is SO interesting – the translation’s not always perfect (no shade to Jeffrey, my Cantonese isn’t up to much so glass houses really) but it’s fascinating to read the accounts of the relationships users have formed with the bots and the evident distress they feel when the bots decide, for whatever reason, that they’re not that into their human lovers any more. This feels very much like the premise for a Tingler – “Cucked By My AI Top!” – and I really liked the section where they talk to tech people about why this might be happening and conclude that it’s basically a sort of engagement hack on the part of the software. UNEXPECTED WRINKLES IN THE MACHINE.
  • Corporate Psychedelia: Ok, this is a BIT dry, but I found it an interesting look at the way Big Pharma has leapt on the evidence that ketamine and other psychedelics can be useful tools in the treatment of depression, and how in so doing is systematically making treatments more expensive and less-efficacious. THANKS, BIG PHARMA!
  • A Deep-Dive Into Balenciaga: I am basically anti-fashion and as such this was a *bit* alien to me, but this is generally a really interesting exploration of the Balenciaga brand over the past few years, and the wider cultural landscape within which it sits in terms of fashion brands, and, more generally, about how crossovers and the like function in terms of meaning, signifiers and semiotics (sorry, but): “Erewhon, Ebay, Offset, Arca, Skinheads – anything could be frictionlessly interpolated into Balenciaga. At peak relevance, the brand’s instagram was essentially a collection of random clouted individuals wearing self-styled looks sent to them in the mail. These selfies produced a cast of characters and presented an exceptionally laissez faire form of clout bombing. This was meme logic, using a brand as a deep fryer that could add a layer of ironic detachment to everything. In doing so, Balenciaga was tuned to the internet, using these new codes to attract the hyper culturally literate and illiterate alike. For the illiterate, the end results were simply fire. For the hyperliterate, it was like being let in on a secret, a dynamic.”
  • A Timeline of Fashion Online: Vaguely-related to the above, this is a really interesting look back at the evolution of online fashion commentary and coverage presented in timeline fashion and covering all of the beats you’d expect, from The Sartorialist to the emergence of Tavi Gevinson and everything inbetween, spurred by the sensation that there’s a bit of a ‘we’re back where we started’ thanks to the proliferation of FashionStacks. “To properly address the question, “Is blogging back?” though, it felt necessary to go back to the beginning. Below is an attempt to follow a line from where it all started to where we are now, speaking to key players along the way to fill in the blanks. The result is a brief, relatively incomplete history of online fashion fandom. It’s also a picture of how we’ve always been, and perhaps forever will be, at the mercy of constantly evolving technology. New platforms emerge, and for better or worse, they allow for new voices to be heard—and new ways to make money. Were online fashion stans—the Youtubers and the TikTokers and the meme-makers and the Twitterati—the ones who ousted Virginie Viard from Chanel this summer? Maybe. The answer’s not “No,” which would have been unthinkable ten years ago. Fashion fans have arguably never been more powerful. They overtook the machine. But they’re also arguably still stuck inside it, trying to blog and post their way through it but never quite out.”
  • Branding Food: Fascinating piece on Its Nice That about the challenges of creating a brand for food products that are from a particular nation or culture, and how to do so in a way which feels authentic but not cliched, representative but not patronising, that signifies a place or people without at the same time descending into tropes. This is all stuff I had obviously never thought about before what with being an almost-entirely non-visual person, but it’s properly interesting. “Even when first-generation immigrants, rather than big corporations, are the ones selling, and branding, the traditional foods of their culture, they often face the challenge of expressing their personal experiences alongside broader cultural motifs. Significant difficulty lies in the expectation that a single individual can accurately represent an entire culture. For example, an individual from Ghana might struggle to represent not only their specific experience but also to encapsulate the diverse cultures of West Africa or even the entire continent in a way that resonates with both those outside and within the region. During a chat with the founder of Super Spicy Studio, designer Badal Patel, she shares how much pressure she feels trying to “do justice to your culture”. As she puts it: “I am human. I’ve never asked to be a token South Asian designer. It does freak me out — and it’s not something I take lightly.””
  • Why Do Men Comment On Bongo Sites?: I mean, do we? Apparently so, according to this article (and also according to this subReddit), which speaks to some of the people leaving their considered opinions under videos such as ‘seven way anal buffet’. There is a lot to love about this, but I would particularly like any journalists reading this (I KNOW SOME OF YOU DO EVEN THOUGH YOU DON’T LIKE TO ADMIT IT) to PLEASE pitch a longform interview with UK-based commenter ‘Sir C0ck Connoisseur’ because, honestly, I really want to read it and I can’t be the only one. Seriously, read this extract and tell me that you don’t want a whole interview with this man – there is a LOT to unpack here: “ The Connoisseur started commenting on Pornhub in 2021, shortly after he lost his job during the pandemic. “I had a passion for writing, but what form it would take I wasn’t sure. I could never find something that fully engaged me,” he says. “Then I found this.” He’s since reviewed 185 videos on the website, including a clip called “Group Blowjob Racing” (which leads with the opener: “I tell you lads, it is a rare day indeed when I come across a piece of filth so entertaining that I simply forget to have a w4nk!”), and “Big-T1ttied Japanese teenager sucking on a c0ck” (which he ranked a 5/10 due to the male performer being, in Sir C0ck Connoisseur’s view, “woefully underequipped”). He estimates he leaves a comment about two or three times a week, spending about 30-40 minutes on each one.” I MEAN SERIOUSLY THIS IS A PULITZER-WINNING PIECE WAITING TO BE WRITTEN SOMEONE PITCH THIS IMMEDIATELY.
  • Looks Matter: This is unrelated to the week’s unhinged Rooney discourse (no, you can look it up yourself, I am too tired and it is too annoying) but feels sort of tangentially-linked to it in a way – in the New Statesman, Amelia Tait writes on the way in which, to quote her, “we live in a world where self-care and skincare have becoming synonymous” and in which it’s increasingly hard to find women in their 30s who haven’t already leapt on the botox train, and in which, despite the fact that we’re seemingly significantly more accepting of physical difference and diversity than we were in the bad old days of the 80s and 90s, we’re still imposing beauty standards mandated by a massive capitalist machine – just slightly different ones is all.
  • Clowns: No, not the sort that people pretend to be afraid of – this is about the wave of classically-trained clowns who are expanding the medium into comedy, theatre and other forms, changing the definition of what ‘clowning’ is and what it means. This is super-interesting, and features Natalie Palamides who is 100% one of the funniest and most talented performers I have ever seen, and who I have even forgiven for that time I went to see her show ‘Nate’ at the Soho Theatre and she got me up on stage and made me wrestle her, which ended with me basically bodyslamming her onto the floor and feeling INCREDIBLY guilty about it for the rest of the evening (Natalie Palamides, to be clear, has no idea who I am and will have no clue about this weird guilt memory of mine).
  • Round The Table:  Tassos Stevens is a friend of mine and a hugely-talented man; he runs a theatre company called Coney, who make…experiences, I suppose is the best way of explaining them (although I should probably just go with their website which says ‘interactive theatre, games and adventures’) – this is a post on Tassos’ newsletter about how he set up and ran an ‘experience’-type thing which involved recruiting people to be secret agents and getting them to go on a SECRET MISSION in a central London location. It’s both a rough explanation of how you might go about logistically organising something like this, and an exploration of the things that you can do with play as a mechanism, the things that get unlocked within and between people when you give them a ludic environment to explore.
  • An Interview With Piers Morgan: Piers Morgan is a cnut and I hate him and ordinarily I wouldn’t bother linking to an interview with the man because, well, give a fcuk what he thinks about anything, but this is written by Oli Franklin Wright who’s a very good journalist and whose profiles are always excellent, and while I can’t pretend I didn’t spend the majority of my time with this article imagining what it would be like to repeatedly slap Piers across his fat chops with a trout, it also contains a lot of really interesting talk about the media industry, about ragebait, and about the colossal, almost planetary ego of a single very pink human being.
  • Dad In The Machine: This is fascinating and weird and very sad and SO MODERN AND SO FUTURE. Imagine you’re looking at some AI-generated images and all of a sudden you realise that one of them includes your dead father – that would be weird, wouldn’t it? Well, actually, yes it would, as Sara Burningham writes in Slate. “Our place and our rights in this new world of artificial neural networks lie beyond certainty, inflected with the unknowable. We are not wise. We do not know where it all comes from. I can’t even prove this picture of my dad is a picture of my dad. There are some minor differences, like the line of the beard, the shape of the glasses—but when I texted the picture to my brothers, each responded, “WTAF,” or words to that effect. This is unmistakably him. And at the same time, I’m pretty sure that’s not enough evidence to sue anyone, if there even is anyone to sue. Is there anyone to sue? To whom should I address the cease and desist?”
  • Eating at Alchemist: One of those wonderful ‘we review an insane restaurant that you are probably never going to go to so that you can imagine how batsh1t it is’ pieces – this is about Alchemist in Copenhagen, very much a ‘restaurant as performance space’ kind of vibe; you can get the measure of it from the intro para (it only gets odder): “Rasmus Munk, the celebrated Danish chef, has such memorable eyes—they are a piercing blue, and often bloodshot—that when a waiter at Alchemist, his restaurant in Copenhagen, served me an eyeball, I recognized it immediately. The iris was flecked with brown and rimmed with red, and the eye stared up at me unwaveringly, at least until I picked up a long-handled spoon and dug in. It had a gleaming gelatinous surface and was both salty and creamy, with a surprisingly nubby texture and a distinct taste of—what was it?—shrimp.” It’s interesting that I came to the end of this thinking that it sounded fascinating but also that there was not a single dish described in the piece that I actually wanted to eat.
  • I’m in Bed With a Man and a Cat Named Hussy and I Miss My Wife: Weirdly this is the second piece in as many weeks about polyamory (this is coincidental, I promise you) – I enjoyed this a lot, even though it’s very much not my normal sort of thing, as a piece of writing about love and desire and the ways in which we can’t really legislate for either.
  • Contraband Marginalia: I adored this piece, by a librarian working in the US correctional system, about the ways in which books are repurposed within prisons to act as diaries, methods of communication, sites of protest…beautiful, sad and not-sad at the same time.
  • About Lucy: Finally this week, a short story by Emily Waugh, about…actually, no, just read this one, it’s gorgeous and worth ten minutes of your time, I promise.

By Kasia Mrożewska

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 20/09/24

Reading Time: 33 minutes

I ought to be in Slovenia right now, hanging out with nice internet people and thinking about nice internet things, but instead I am in my kitchen in London, in my pants, a bit tired and hungover and generally feeling quite resentful at the fact that things like ‘needing to earn money to eat’ have prevented me from travelling to Naive Yearly. To all those of you who are there today, I hope you have fun – but not too much, so as to assuage my feelings of bitter jealousy and mild resentment.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you could at least pretend to be grateful that I’ve spaffed out yet another one of these for your delectation (what do you mean ‘I didn’t ask for this, why must you continue to foist this sh1t on me?).

By Alejandro Peters

START THIS WEEK’S WEB CURIOS EXPERIENCE WITH THE BLEEPS, BLOOPS AND BEATS OF FORMER EDITOR PAUL’S LATEST TECH-TRANCE MIX! 

THE SECTION WHICH SUGGESTS YOU ALL USE THE FACECAM LINK BELOW TO MESS WITH THE HEADS OF ANY ELDERLY RELATIVES YOU MAY HAVE LEFT UNDER THE GUISE OF ‘TRAINING THEM TO SPOT SCAMS’, PT.1:  

  • Social AI: So I have to confess that this is a link I haven’t *actually* tried myself, what with it being an iOS-only app and me being the sort of person who, if I’m honest, finds the whole ‘cult of Apple’ thing deeply distressing and who therefore has a personal ‘no, fcuk off, I am not joining your weird fetishistic club’ policy to all of the company’s devices. Still, I feel confident in saying that it is EITHER a brilliant piece of satire on the self-obsessed social media age of personal branding OR simply the saddest app that has ever been conceived of – YOU DECIDE! Social AI is another ‘social media, but the profiles are AI’ app – except this one’s seemingly JUST FOR ONE USER. You create an account, you post your updates…and all that happens is you get a seemingly-infinite stream of LLM-generated responses from a seemingly-infinite collection of fake profiles. I think it’s worth reproducing the ‘features’ list from the App Store page in full, because it really does give me the fcuking fantods (NB: ok, the exclamation marks between these are my own addition, but I think it really helps bring home the horror): “Post status updates and get infinite replies from millions of AI followers! Enjoy your own private space for reflection and feedback, like you’re the main character! Experience AI conversations tailored to your mood and thoughts! Use SocialAI as a tool for therapy, journaling, or simply feeling heard! Receive helpful insights and AI-generated support in real-time! Feel the boost of always being surrounded by your AI community! Explore a new kind of social engagement where it’s all about you!” Just take a moment to go back through that list of ‘benefits’ again – yes, that’s right, ‘feeling heard’. MY HEART, IT BREAKS! This…this has to be satire, because the alternative is simply too bleak for words. You can, should you desire, read a bit more about the experience of using the app here, but on one level I think this is a quietly brilliant piece of art.
  • FaceCam AI: I think I featured the code on which this obviously based a few months ago, but rather than being on a Github repo and requiring you to actually, you know, be able to run code for it to work, now you can do live, AI-powered faceswapping in-browser! This is pretty impressive – the base-level, free service lets you do the standard, gimmicky thing of swapping your face out for that of a selection of generic international famouses – a Kardashian! That awful South African racist! Leo Messi! – but the real draw comes with the subscription-tier product, which lets you do the same but for ANYONE’s face. All you need to do is upload a single pic, and FCUK ME does this do a surprisingly good job of mimicking said face in a live video feed, which you can record and download so you can use said video for whatever purposes you fancy. This is VERY CLEARLY a fcuking goldmine for scammers – it’s not hard to imagine a wide range of potential ways in which this could be used to extort money from people who are perhaps…not that tech-savvy, and it’s yet another step towards the soon-to-arrive future in which, unless you can physically grasp the person you think you’re talking to and palpate their face, you shouldn’t really ever believe that who you think you’re speaking to is in fact who you are actually speaking to. Is that a good thing? It doesn’t *feel* like a good thing. Have a play with this – it really is quite distressingly impressive.
  • All Text NYC: This is quite amazing, and feels very ‘imminent future’. All Text NYC is a really, really clever project (by Yufeng Zhao, to whom huge kudos) which basically lets you do text search on a whole raft of images of the streets of Brooklyn (other NYC boroughs will be added in due course, apparently). Here’s the blurb: “all text in nyc” is a search engine that enables exploration of New York City’s urban landscape through text. Using optical character recognition on street-level imagery, this project creates a unique digital archive of Brooklyn’s typography. Users can search and visualize every sign, notice, and street art captured in street images.This tool offers a new way to interact with the city’s textual environment, bringing often-overlooked elements of the cityscape into focus. Researchers can study urban signage, artists can seek inspiration, and curious minds can discover the words that surround city dwellers daily.” I presume that all the images here are ripped from StreetView, but there’s something genuinely amazing about being able to type in anything you can think of and seeing what crops up – this recognises words on street signs, shopfronts, stickers on cars, urban graffiti…it’s frankly AMAZING, and testament to how good text recognition has become in the past few years, and I love the fact that all the results link you back to their location on Google Maps, meaning that if you REALLY want to make a pilgrimage to every single instance of the word ‘fcuk’ daubed on the walls of NYC (or at least a certain bit of it), now you can! We may be fcuking the planet left right and centre, we may be careening towards some sort of horrid, tech-accelerated societal demise, BUT LOOK AT THE PROGRESS WE’RE MAKING ALONG THE WAY! Also, a special shout out to the one business in New York I have just learned has the word ‘wank’ in its name.
  • Odyssey Works: Look, I know that none of you are actually my friends; I am aware that this is not the sort of newsletter project that engenders parasocial feelings between writer and reader, and that we basically hold each other in some sort of weird mutual contempt, and that we both sort of wish we could just, well, stop. BUT! In the vanishingly-unlikely event that any of you feel like clubbing together and getting me some sort of intensely-personal gift for all my many, many years of webmongery and digital service, then might I point you to Odyssey Works and their Experience? I think I featured a longread about these people about 10 years ago, and since then I have been desperately trying to find them again – then this week I stumbled across this link and I am now slightly obsessed again. Odyssey Works is…I suppose they’ve morphed into a sort of consultancy (EVERYONE IS A FCUKING CONSULTANT), but the core of how they began is the creation of ‘experiences’ – effectively immersive pieces of theatre, designed bespoke for a single individual, like a non-terrifying version of ‘The Game’ (which, if you’ve never watched it, you really should watch asap because it is a GREAT film). They only seem to do one every year or so, and I imagine that they cost a TERRIFYING amount, but I recommend you go to the appropriate bit of the website and read through some of the short synopses of previous Experiences designed for others – honestly, these sound INCREDIBLE and I would give one of my increasingly-ropey kidneys to be able to experience something even 10% as cool as this.
  • CrowdWave: My friend Ben spotted this on HackerNews this week and while he was…slightly underwhelmed by the concept, I confess that I have become slightly addicted to it over the past 24h. CrowdWave is a very simple website – you can read the dev’s post about its genesis here, should you desire – which is, per the creator’s notes, ‘like Twitter, but every post is a voicemail’. Go to the site’s homepage and you are presented with a list of posts, every single one a voice note – anyone can record anything they want simply by hitting the big ‘record’ button on the homepage, and if you so desire you can tag your post appropriately to situate it in a particular section of the site. This is…unexpectedly, oddly, lovely, I think – there’s very little rhyme or reason to what people are recording and posting (I have just listened to someone singing in…I think Chinese? And the dev’s 100-second monologue about the business genius of Scrooge McDuck. And someone asking Bob to pick up some milk), but I am slightly obsessed with the mundanity and genuine randomness, and I like the fact that it *feels* a bit clunky and semi-analogue, not least because of the ‘click-clunk-beep’ that each message starts with, just like it’s being cued up on an old ansaphone. I don’t think that this is ever going to ‘catch on’, so to speak, but I am thrilled that it exists, even if only briefly. Thinking about it there’s almost certainly some sort of extended narrative BIT you could do with this via the medium of short voicenotes, although I can’t imagine it would reach an audience of more than approximately eight other internet weirdos (IT IS WHAT YOU ARE DO NOT FIGHT IT).
  • The Ig Nobel Prize 2024: This dropped a week ago and so is OLD NEWS (sorrysorrysorry), but it’s that time of year again – as you all doubtless know by now, the Ig Nobel exists to celebrate the most pointless, silly-sounding academic research projects to have been undertaken anywhere in the world, and this year’s collection is *particularly* mad. I strongly advise you to click through and enjoy the full selection, but my personal favourites this year include “experiments to see the feasibility of housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide the flight paths of the missiles”, “demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout”, and, perhaps the most baffling of all, an experiment which involved “exploding a paper bag next to a cat that’s standing on the back of a cow, to explore how and when cows spew their milk.” HOW DID THEY MAKE THE CAT STAND ON THE COW THOUGH? As soon as I am finished spazzing out this fcuker I am 100% seeking video evidence of this.
  • Scaniverse: This is interesting. I’ve been wondering for a few years now who’s got the jump on the whole ‘scanning and creating a digital representation of the actual, real 3d meatspace world’ thing – it’s either going to be Google, or Meta, or, possibly, Niantic. Should you wish to help the third of these companies in their mission to create a fully-rendered 3d digital twin of the planet, why not download their Scaniverse app (iOS and Android) which lets you use Gaussian Splatting tech (look at me, deploying that term casually like I have the first fcuking idea what it actually means!) to create quite amazing 3d renders of anything you care to capture with your phone’s camera. What’s more interesting, to my mind, is the feature that allows you to append said scans to a real-world map, thereby building up that aforementioned ‘digital twin of meatspace’ picture one landmark, tree or building at a time – I think there’s something quite cool about the idea of this as a collaborative knowledge/datagathering project, although it’s significantly less cool that it’s all being done in service of a private company that wants to EXTRACT SHAREHOLDER VALUE from the labour. Still, per their blurb, it’s for the public good! “When you share splats, you’re not only inviting people around the world to explore interesting places. You’re adding building blocks to a spatial platform for amazing new games and apps.” See? It’s not JUST about boosting the value of the business to ensure continued rewards for a bunch of faceless shareholders!
  • Make Your Own Diamonds: To be clear, in order to ACTUALLY be able to make your own diamonds you’re going to have to fork out at least £200k (possibly more; it’s unclear whether the supplier in this case will honour single orders) and will require a decent amount of carbon for you to feed into the gigantic pressure squisher (this is the technical term). Still, this will probably pay for itself in, ooh, a couple of years, so I can see NO potential downsides in remortgaging the house and going right ahead with your single-handed attempt to break the De Beers/Hatton Garden monopoly. Also, I now want to know exactly what you are meant to feed the machine – diamonds are obviously just highly-compessed carbon, and everything currently living on earth is *sort-of* carbon-based, so could you, I don’t know, make diamonds out of London’s massive rat population? TWO BIRDS, ONE (PRECIOUS) STONE!
  • Text-To-Video API: A bit boring and a bit technical, but, equally, potentially interesting in terms of what you might be able to do with it – Luma (the people behind the Dream Machine TTV platform I featured here a few months ago) now have an API, so if you want to integrate TTV functionality into your website or app or whatever then, well, now you can! Why? I don’t fcuking know, you think of a reason ffs.
  • The Daily Tism: I appreciate that this is possibly an…unpopular opinion, but I don’t care – I am increasingly annoyed by the proliferation of people self-describing as ‘autistic’, packaging it up as a ‘kooky’ personality trait, using it as a catch-all rationale for fcuking EVERYTHING THEY DO, like it’s some sort of Swiss Army Knife justification for any fcuking thing whatsoever, all the while making a preposterous and unearned equivalence between themselves – functional humans who can exist in the world – and people who exist on the more extreme ends of the autism spectrum and very much not able to exist in the world without quite a lot of help and not insignificant difficulty and distress. As such I was prepared to really hate this website, which is, VERY basically, ‘The Onion, but where all of the jokes are about being on the spectrum somewhere’, but, well, it’s genuinely quite funny and so I couldn’t hate it at all. I have no idea how ‘relatable’ this will be for any of you who are to some extent autistic, but this particular article fragment is representative of the vibe and made me laugh quite a lot: “An autistic woman whose birth certificate claims she is 36 is actually several thousand years old in autistic years, researchers have discovered. Olivia Buckingham, 7543, reportedly experiences time in what scientists are calling an “eternal relentless slog continuum”.”
  • Species of the River: An interactive exhibition experience thing, “Species of the River is a collaborative research project developed in 2023-2024 between Yaqui architect Selina Martinez and the Santo Domingo Centre of Excellence for Latin American Research at the British Museum. The project examines questions about territorial identity, dispossession, community memory and storytelling, exploring the Yaqui collection and the connection between culture and design in the Yaqui communities on both sides of the present-day US/Mexico border.” This is quite a simple site at heart – you scroll, you get taken along a riverside path in the rain, with the opportunity to learn more about specific flora native to the Yaqui territory and the tribe and their history – but there’s something genuinely soothing about the graphics and audio which imho elevate this into something rather lovely.
  • FPL GPT: I don’t do Fantasy Football, but I appreciate that for some people it is basically akin to religion – should YOU wish to get the jump on the other people in your league, then perhaps you might find this useful. This is ChatFPL, a prototypical service offered by some ‘optimise your FPL team’ service, which you can use to chat through your team selections, get advice on the best Captain for the weekend and related team selection conundra – I have no fcuking idea whether this is any good, or how they get around the inherently-unreliable nature of anything an LLM spits out, but if you feel a desperate need to get a small advantage over Deano, Baz and the rest of the boys (I don’t know why, but this is what I imagine men who play FPL are called) then this might be useful.
  • Baukunst: I confess to not *entirely* getting what this is, but I *think* it’s a VC fund specifically for investing in cultural tech projects, which makes me think that there’s an outside chance that they might want to chuck one of you a few quid. Per the info-light homepage, “Baukunst is a collective of creative technologists advancing the art of building. Our inaugural $100M venture fund is dedicated to leading pre-seed investments in companies at the frontiers of technology and design.” Although now I’ve looked at their list of active investments – they did their first round in February, I think – it looks a lot more like, well, just another fcuking bunch of VC. Still, should you have a BRILLIANT, tech-led, vaguely ‘cultural’ business idea that you think deserves the backing of a bunch of sociopathic, lab-grown international-rich gilet wearers (yes, I have worked with VC before, why do you ask?) then you might find this useful.
  • Cheap URLs: I LOVE THIS SERVICE SO MUCH. “Nowadays, when people need a website, they often are forced to turn to big, nasty companies who charge them a subscription fee. Professional designers often are expensive and out of reach for just a simple personal site, and the only other cheaper option requires you to take up web development as a hobby. Who has time for that? There is an easier way: give me $15 dollars, and I’ll give you a clean, fast, stable website that lasts forever. It’s that simple.” I think this is BRILLIANT, and I adore it, and I am sad that this is exactly the sort of cool, helpful little service that AI is going to fcuk into the sun in a few short years.
  • Radio Static: A website which lets you flip between different online ‘radio stations’ that each plays a different type of white noise/static. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT WHY MUST YOU ALWAYS QUESTION EVERYTHING YOU INGRATE STOP STARING INTO THE GIFT HORSE’S MOUTH.
  • A/B Tests: Would you like a website which does nothing other than collect examples of A/B tested content, subdivided by type of email – so, for example, ‘onboarding’ or ‘sales’ – which, if you’re the sort of person who regrettably has to do things like ‘pretend to care about open rates’ you might well find useful (it’s stuff like this that makes me grateful for Web Curios’ complete absence of any sort of backend analytics whatsoever – honestly, caring about this stuff looks MISERABLE. Have I ever mentioned my deeply-held conviction that, at heart, ‘trying is vulgar’? It’s basically the closest thing I have to a motto).
  • GrowPi: This is BEAUTIFULLY pointless – visit the website, click the button to add an extra digit to Pi (currently standing at 18,974) and watch the visualisation of Pi change imperceptibly with every additional decimal point. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT I TOLD YOU ABOUT JUST ACCEPTING THIS STUFF AND ROLLING WITH IT FFS!

By Randy Ortiz

NEXT, PLEASE ENJOY ANOTHER SUPERB SELECTION OF OBSCURE, TUNEFUL, WONDERFULLY-MIXED TRACKS FROM GENUINE MASTER OF VINYL SADEAGLE! 

THE SECTION WHICH SUGGESTS YOU ALL USE THE FACECAM LINK BELOW TO MESS WITH THE HEADS OF ANY ELDERLY RELATIVES YOU MAY HAVE LEFT UNDER THE GUISE OF ‘TRAINING THEM TO SPOT SCAMS’, PT.2:  

  • Non-User Events: I LOVE THIS IT IS PROPER INTERNET ART. “(non-)user events is a collaged interface that navigates personal internet experiences by quoting and close-knitting HTML elements from Polina’s browsing history. These elements, gathered from sites she visited in June 2024, are entangled in a grid-like structure, searching for areas of friction and excess, inviting viewers to move beyond seamless user experiences into poetic space where new meanings are possible. Polina views HTML elements as events that unfold through time, knitting the practices of our daily lives. What world does each element create when we return to it day after day? (non-)user events is part of Polina Lobanova’s computer is a feeling journey, where she asks herself and friends what “computer-feeling” is and what it could possibly be, focusing on intimate experiences with computing devices.”” Honestly, there’s something weird and poetic and strangely…lonely? about this, the rendering of semi-familiar webcopy in this disassociated format, and it made me think that it’s weird and, frankly, disappointing, that so few artists working in the space around our relationship with the web, and html, get the attention and recognition they I am personally convinced they deserve.
  • Small World In Video: I’ve regularly featured Nikon’s Small World photo contest – awarding prizes to images capturing REALLY SMALL ORGANISMS – in Curios over the years, but in recent years they’ve expanded the contest to include videos of said REALLY SMALL ORGANISMS, and I am personally FASCINATED by this stuff – the second-placed film shows individual water droplets evaporating off a butterfly’s wings, and I am personally incapable of believing that it is real and not CG footage. SO INCREDIBLY SMALL!
  • Little Planets: Look, I’m not going to ask questions about why you might want to create a private, non-logged, entirely-ephemeral web-based chat space which will vanish forever, leaving no trace, after 7 days or when you decide to kill it (whichever comes first); I am not suggesting that the only reasonable need you might have for this sort of thing is if you’re doing something very, very illegal or likely to very much upset someone; I am not for a SECOND implying that only some sort of adulterer or crimmo might be the only viable target market for a service like this. That said, be aware that if you bookmark this I will judge you (I mean, I’ll never know, but you get the idea).
  • Courts: I don’t quite understand WHY the lovely dataviz wizards at The Pudding have created this, but it pleases me immoderately that they have. Courts is their latest webproject which, for reasons that remain unclear, collects aerial images of every single basketball court in the US; you can search by specific location, or sort by the colour of the court, or just scroll around and look at the 50,000+ courts here listed…having said I didn’t understand why this exists, it turns out I just didn’t pay attention when I found this earlier in the week; the idea is that the project will collect stories, anecdotes and memories about each of the courts, in theory building up a picture of the communities that exist around public spaces like these and how each court is its own social space with its own history and mythology and heroes and villains, and that feels like a wonderful and generally laudable idea, and something which, honestly, the FA could do worse than look at and copy for football pitches in the UK because, seriously, I think that could do rather well.
  • Take A Selfie With Your Herbs: A website collecting images of people that they have snapped with herbs. Want to look at a bunch of (presumably) total strangers, posing happily with, say, basil? OH GOOD! The photos suggest it’s mainly a small group of friends participating in this, but there’s an email to submit your own herb-related selfie at the bottom of the page so I look forward to checking in in a month or so’s time and seeing a bunch of YOU on there, brandishing some tarragon and grinning wildly (should you decide to participate in this, please do try and squeeze in some small reference to Curios in your photo, maybe by, I don’t know, inking ‘Web Curios’ onto your forehead in permanent marker).
  • Selleb: This is very much ‘not really my sort of thing’, but I am intrigued by its existence and how it speaks to the very much growing trend of ‘shopping curators’ as a newsletter niche – Selleb is literally a newsletter which exists to show you what ‘cool’ people have bought recently. That’s it – it’s like digging through the bin receipts of a niche subset of internet hipsters, and, if I’m honest, the naked, shallow consumerism here makes me feel…quite queasy, but then I am very much NOT the target audience for this and I am sure that the creators would find Curios a baffling and pointless endeavour were they ever to stumble across it, so. Here’s the blurb, should you want a better idea of the sort of vibe you’re getting here: “Selleb is a discovery app (currently in beta) where you can snoop on what the coolest people on the internet are ACTUALLY (!) buying/loving/consuming — with receipts to prove it. Call it (rear) window shopping on steroids. If you’re subscribed to our newsletter, you’re also automatically on the waitlist for app access. We hit your inbox twice a week. The Sunday edition serves up anything from travel to fashion to skincare to restaurants. The Wednesday edition features 5 tastemakers sharing receipts of things they’ve recently bought and the juicy stories behind them. Past guests have included Serena Kerrigan, Willa Bennett of Highsnobiety, Throwing Fits, Junia Lin, tinyjewishgirl, sssssoupsssss, Susan Alexandra, Jason Diamond, ellapottersays, Gia Kuan, Jeremy Cohen, hellotefi, dadaeats, the creators of Industry, the founders of MSCHF, StockX, Vine, Siberia Hills, etc…” – ngl, I have no fcuking clue who any of those people are other than Vine and MSCHF, but, well, maybe you’re younger and ‘cooler’ than I am and this speaks to you on a deep, spiritual level.
  • Cat Bounce: This feels like a weird throwback to c.2003, but is seemingly not actually that old – anyway, this is a webpage where a bunch of cats drop from the top of the screen; they bounce. You can grab them, and throw them, and, well, that’s it, but who doesn’t want the opportunity to hurl digital felines around a browser window? NO FCUKER, etc!
  • Love Me Or Not: Another link from Kris, Love Me Or Not is a sort of digital poem by Alicia Guo – taking the ‘he loves me, he loves me not’ petal-picking game as a conceptual starting point, the user is invited to answer a series of questions and prompts, which over time resolve themselves into a kind of verse; each question you’re asked and choice you make leaves its vague memory on the page, like discarded petals, and there’s something gorgeous about the way each person to experience this will create their own unique poem as they move through the site.
  • Nothing: A website to encourage you to do, well, nothing. I’m going to reproduce the blurb here in full, because, well, it explains everything far better than my mangled prose would: “Nothing—a timer that tracks your intentional choice to do… nothing. No goals to chase, no notifications clamoring for your attention, no pressure to fill the silence with productivity. It simply exists, quietly counting each second you allow to pass. This is a space where inactivity is the point—a digital oasis amidst the chaos of endless tasks and to-dos. Yet the essence of Nothing isn’t about fixating on your screen, though you’re welcome to if you wish. It’s about setting aside your phone or computer, taking a step back from the relentless grind, and reconnecting with the world around you. Nothing is more a concept than an app—a quiet reflection rather than a tool to be used. It stands as a gentle rebellion against the incessant noise of modern life, which demands constant action. Stay as long as you like, watch the seconds tick away, or let your gaze wander elsewhere. There’s no reward for lingering, just the peculiar pleasure of simply being. Sometimes, the most profound act is to pause, breathe, and do nothing at all—a reminder that it’s perfectly acceptable to embrace stillness and just… be.” Ngl, I just lost 72 seconds to this and it was quite a struggle to drag myself back to the GDoc and continue spaffing out the words (it is 0913am and I am FCUKING TIRED).
  • Alien Project: Another in the long list of ‘links I have featured in Curios that I genuinely don’t really understand but which I am including in the vague hope that maybe one of you will be able to make sense of’, Alien Project is software which will apparently let you ‘simulate’ digital organisms. Why? I HAVE NO IDEA! Still, I very much enjoy the feature list, which I will reproduce here for your enjoyment: “Interactive physics simulation of damageable and glueable soft bodies and fluids! Genetic system and neural networks for simulating digital organisms and evolution! Built-in graph and genome editor for designing own agents and environments!” GLUEABLE SOFT BODIES AND FLUIDS! I mean, I have literally no clue what that practically means (or what a ‘gluable body’ might in fact be) but now I really want to find out. As far as I can tell from watching a few of the (rather beautiful) videos, this basically lets you simulate microorganisms, but, honestly, your guess is as good as mine – that said, the video I just watched contains a subtitle reading ‘some of them have developed extremities to capture fast-moving competitors’, which has now put me in mind of bioengineering some sort of mad bacteria and sounds VERY cool indeed.
  • My Outdoor Archive: Not ‘mine’, you understand, but that of one Daniel Ding, who is using this page to record every hike he does; details of where, a few photos, a link to the specific trail taked on Alltrails…I really like this, just a small, simple record of Stuff Daniel Has Done, not through Strava or some sort of mediated dataharvesting portal but as a personal webproject showing a small sliver of his life. More of this sort of thing, please – actually, as an aside, it does feel rather like the past year or so has seen a small uptick in the number of projects like this,  people just recording ostensibly-mundane elements of their life, or their hobbies or passions, on non-standard platforms; the sort of thing which maybe a decade ago people would have put on Insta, but which doesn’t necessarily feels like it has a some on the socials anymore.
  • Scrambled Maps: This is a VERY simple, stripped-back experience but it’s quite a fun addition to your daily puzzle routine – Scrambled Maps asks you to rearrange a selection of 18 tiles so as to recompose a section of map somewhere in the world. This is…quite annoyingly hard, actually, but surprisingly satisfying.
  • Eightile: ANOTHER daily puzzle, this one based on anagrams – the game is very simple, described on the homepage as “Make words using all the letters. Each right answer adds a letter. Find the 8-letter word to win.” There’s a time limit, and while it starts (obviously) very easy, I found myself struggling a bit during the later rounds which proves exactly why my ex used to beat me at Scrabble every fcuking time we played.
  • Limbo Today: This is GREAT – utterly pointless in the best way. Limbo requires you to do ONE THING each day – to guess the lowest number that NOONE ELSE will guess. That is literally it, and I love it (although I would like them to implement a feature that will ping you with that day’s result, please, thankyou).
  • Croquet Conundrum: A puzzle game which requires you to get the ball through the croquet hoops in a certain, limited number of hits, and which starts easy and (far too quickly for my liking if I’m honest) quickly becomes incredibly fcuking frustrating to the point where I had to click away before I did some sort of frustration-related damage to my laptop.
  • 50/50: Do you remember the early days of the iPhone, when things like this app were literally the most exciting thing EVER, and people were tapping away at Cut The Rope and Fruit Ninja as though their very lives depended on it? Wouldn’t it have been nice if we’d just sort of stopped the smartphone thing there and then? Anyway, 50/50 reminds me of that era of games – it has one simple premise, to whit ‘divide the object in half as exactly as possible’ and, well, that’s it, but it’s strangely-compelling and has a very ‘one more go’ feel to it (or at least it definitely does when, as I did, you have some incredibly fcuking tedious work to do and literally anything is more appealing than ‘messing around with Mailchimp’).
  • Cosmobeat: OH GOD THIS IS BRILLIANT. Seriously, this is VERY fun and clever and also a complete fcuking nightmare to control, which is part of the charm. Do you remember QWOP? Of course you do! This is basically like that, but for dancing – your job in this browser-based demo for a forthcoming full game is to DANCE YOUR FCUKING SOCKS OFF, scoring points for your moves and being on-beat and all that jazz, with the gimmick that you control your dancer using six separate keys, each corresponding to a limb, their torso or their head, which leads you a brilliant, weird, mess of fingers as you attempt to make your avatar move in vaguely-rhythmic fashion and score points. Honestly, this is SO MUCH FUN and really quite addictive, and the dancing looks and feels WONDERFUL (I am possibly enthusing about this so much because in real life I dance like someone who’s in the early stages of Guillain-Barré syndrome). This is very hard – another game that feels weirdly like rubbing your belly and patting your head simultaneously – but SO nicely-designed and generally just a really enjoyable way to waste 20m.
  • Play DOS Games: Finally this week, ANOTHER website offering you a ridiculous selection of old PC games from the 80s, 90s and 00s in your browser – this one, though, is distinguished by how fcuking obscure a lot of the titles here are, things I have never previously heard of, a bunch of old shareware titles from Apogee and the like alongside some old boomer-shooters and VERY shonky sports titles and, honestly, this really is a strange little corner of games from THE PAST and will trigger some really quite forgotten memories if you’re of a certain vintage (ie if you are me).

By Yoon A Mi

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS SO INTENSELY-80s-INFLECTED THAT IT WILL MAGICALLY TRANSPORT YOU TO MIAMI VICE-ERA FLORIDA AND YOU WILL BE ABLE TO ALMOST SMELL THE BRUT, AND IT IS BY LEXX! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Pretty Colours: This might be a perfect website – a Tumblr which does nothing but post single colour blocks that the curator thinks are aesthetically-pleasing. Why? WHO THE FCUK CARES THIS IS ART.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Dummy Creation: A feed of AI images – yes, I know, I know, but whoever’s doing this has quite a nice eye and a degree of control over the corners of latent space they’re spelunking in, and while, yes, these all have the familiar patina of Midjourney/Flux, there’s something pleasingly-malevolent about the overall vibe here.
  • Andy Thomas: Andy Thomas is a digital artist who makes all sorts of different types of work which he then posts on his Insta feed – he’s currently doing something involving creating digital visualisations of birdsong and the resulting videos are GORGEOUS and I can’t stress enough how much these just WORK and how beautiful they are, and how once you’ve seen one you will sort of have this in your head as the default way in which all birdsong should be visualised for evermore.
  • Afffirmations: Motivational images and phrases to make you feel better about the slow, ceaseless trudge towards death!

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • Stop Drinking From The Toilet: A frankly terrible title for a piece that neatly articulates something I’ve tried and failed to make a ‘thing’ for over a year now (ffs!) – to whit, the idea of an ‘informational water table’, and the fact that ours is being (perhaps irredeemably) polluted by an awful lot of sh1t. Here Judy Estrin articulates the argument significantly better than I’ve apparently ever been able to do (again, ffs!), and covers a bunch of interconnected issues that cover the web, social media, AI-generated rubbish, critical thinking, algorithms and a lot more besides. The opening is a neat precis of the piece as a whole, but this really is worth reading all the way through because, well, it’s true and she’s right: “We can’t live without air. We can’t live without water. And now we can’t live without our phones. Yet our digital information systems are failing us. Promises of unlimited connectivity and access have led to a fractionalization of reality and levels of noise that undermine our social cohesion. Without a common understanding and language about what we are facing, we put at risk our democratic elections, the resolution of conflicts, our health and the health of the planet. In order to move beyond just reacting to the next catastrophe, we can learn something from water. We turn on the tap to drink or wash, rarely considering where the water comes from–until a crisis of scarcity or quality alerts us to a breakdown. As AI further infiltrates our digital world, a crisis in our digital information systems necessitates paying more attention to its flow.”
  • How To Think About Politics: This is a timely piece given this week’s widespread disappointment at the fact that, it turns out, Keir Starmer is JUST ANOTHER FCUKING POLITICIAN WHODATHUNKIT? As an aside, I think I can now say this openly with total impunity – I personally lost any hope in the ‘transformative potential of a new Labour government’ in approximately 202…1ish, when I learned that Sir Keir and Ed Miliband held a meeting with the country chair of Shell UK and reassured him that he didn’t need to worry and that the party would 100% be rolling back all its commitments around environmental legislation by the time they inevitably got into government – and lo, did it come to pass! Anyway, this is a helpfully clear-eyed article by Hamilton Nolan, written from a US perspective but universally true regardless of where in the world you may be and which selection of egotistical narcissists (honestly, they are ALL egotistical narcissists, without exception) are in charge: “ For the most part, it is wrong to think of elections as contests between “good” and “bad” candidates. With few exceptions, it is more accurate to divide most politicians into two broad categories: Enemies, and Cowards. The enemies are those politicians who are legitimately opposed to your policy goals. The cowards are those politicians who may agree with your policy goals, but will sell you out if they must in order to protect their own interests. Embrace the idea that we are simply pushing to elect the cowards, rather than the enemies. Why? Because the true work of political action is not to identify idealized superheroes to run for office. It is, instead, to create the conditions in the world that make it safe for the cowards to vote the right way.”
  • Inside GB News: Probably only of interest to the Anglos, this one, but this FT piece, which spends a month or so deep within the bowels of the GB News machine is both very funny and, inevitably, a touch dispiriting. It takes you from early June, post the election being called, through election night and beyond to the riots (which were definitely, 100% NOT a result of media exactly like GB News spending every single moment of every single day peddling the rhetoric that everything that is wrong with the lives of the poor and disadvantaged in the UK can be blamed squarely on…even poorer and more disadvantaged people from other countries, many of whom coincidentally happen to have brown skin!), and is probably the most revealing portrait of how the whole thing ‘works’ (I use the term advisedly) I’ve read since the channel’s inception.
  • Being An Asylum Seeker: A genuinely great piece of journalism, perhaps somewhat surprisingly in The Face (he said, snobbishly – sorry, The Face), in which Clare Considine spends some time with a group of young men currently awaiting the result of their asylum claims in Kent. It is SO NICE to read a piece which focuses on the fact that these people are, you know, actual human beings who in the vast majority of cases are here because they really, really need to not be in their country of origin; equally, it’s slightly enraging to read an account of a system that feels like it really isn’t trying hard enough to help integrate people who (again, in the vast majority of cases) seemingly just want to get a job and make a life and not have to live in fear of being, I don’t know, beaten to death for being gay.
  • The Archival Look: Culture whisperer/trend predictor Sean Monahan opines on the current wave of aesthetics, specifically on the evolution brought about by the proliferation of AI imagery onto everyone’s TL, and the shift from what he terms the ‘slick horror’ look of the past year or so towards something he terms ‘the archival look’. I am, quite obviously, not a fashion-y or visual person whatsoever, and what I can tell you about aesthetic trends can be succinctly communicated in a two-word phrase (that phrase being ‘fcuk all’), but here’s Sean’s thesis in case you find it chimes with your observations: “Flat and slick is being replaced with archival graininess. Photorealism is being modulated with the illustrative. The Archival Look is exceptional artifice, an attempt to rescue aura from techno-sterility. It’s the aesthetic equivalent of digging through your flatscreen’s options menu to turn off ‘auto-smoothing’—that annoying preset that makes everything you watch look like Masterpiece Theatre.The use of the word archival here is intentional. I’m borrowing it from the fashion world’s vocabulary. Archival in that context is the fulfillment of a certain idea of luxury where brand imbues a quasi-mystical power to a garment. One feels as if one is buying a real thing. The luxury object doesn’t lose its shine, but rather increases in curiosity and reverence over time. In short, it attains an aura.”
  • The Mr Beast Document: Thanks to my friend Nick for sharing this with me earlier in the week – this is that ‘How To Succeed As A Mr Beast Employee’ document that has done the rounds this week, and it’s a genuinely fascinating read (if you ignore the prose style which gives me a genuine tension headache – now I know how you all feel lolzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz). It basically details what Mr Beast requires from staff who come and work on his productions, and it is a LOT – but, leaving aside the aforementioned tone and the general YouTuber-y vibe of the whole thing, it doesn’t strike me as wildly unreasonable. Ok, so it’s all couched in ‘YOU WILL HAVE TO WORK SO FCUKING HARD’ terms but, well, I imagine that you DO have to work incredibly fcuking hard to produce the best-performing YouTube content in the entire world, and I don’t quite get some of the pearl clutching that this appears to have elicited from people who seem to think it is somehow ‘abusive’. What it does do, though, is reaffirm my longstanding belief that Mr Beast is a very, very damaged individual who is pretty much an object lesson in ‘be careful what you wish for lest it become a terrible foreverprison of your own making’; as Nick, again, pointed out to me, it is literally impossible to find a picture of this man where he looks like he is smiling with his eyes – THIS IS 100% TRUE I CHALLENGE YOU TO PROVE HIM WRONG.
  • The Death of Google as a Verb: I mean, not quite, obvs, it’s not like they’re emptying the offices over there in Mountain View – still, this is an interesting (if a *bit* anecdote-y) piece about how Google’s once-unassailable dominance over the global information market is being slowly but surely undermined by the fact that younger people are increasingly inclined to go to other places first to find information – specifically TikTok, but also YouTube, Amazon and even LLMs. This is in part a predictable reaction to the fact that Google’s destroyed its core search product over time, but also a further example of the video-first preferences of under-30s, and the fact that given a choice between ‘reading stuff’ and ‘having someone just tell you things while you stare at them through your screen like a slack-jawed yokel’, younger people will invariably choose the latter (can you tell that I am not a fan of this development? Fcuking wordcel that I am).
  • Snapchat Revamp: I don’t have to pretend to care about social media for professional reasons anymore, and as such wouldn’t ordinarily include a link like this one because, well, give a fcuk, but I thought that there was an admirable clarity to the company’s explanation of what its core product is for, specifically “Chatting, Snapping, and watching entertaining videos.” Simple, easy to understand, and makes sense from a user need/want point of view, and gets to the heart of what makes the app and how it balances the ‘create vs consume’ thing. Neat.
  • The Sociopaths of TikTok: Apparently there’s a corner of TikTok in which people claim that they are sociopaths and talk about how amazingly, er, sociopathic they are, and how they, I don’t know, DON’T CARE ABOUT ANYONE OTHER THAN THEMSELVES and, God, I found this somewhat disheartening because a) I am not 100% certain that every single personality trait on earth need be presented as in some way positive; b) it is not a coincidence that everyone who they feature in this piece is a white, conventionally-attractive young woman who appears to have found a neat way of standing out from the millions of other white, conventionally-attractive young women seeking to succeed in the cReAt0r eC0NoMy.
  • How Archivists Work: I appreciate that it’s unlikely that any of you woke up this morning with a burning desire to get REALLY granular information about the way in which archivists package and store physical materials, and how said archival practice varies between the UK and the US, but I promise you that this really is significantly more interesting than it probably sounds as I’m describing it to you (but, to be clear, also VERY mundane, which imho elevates the whole thing). Did you know that in the UK things tend to be archived flat, whereas in the US they are archived vertically? I BET YOU DID NOT! See? Web Curios EDUCATES and INFORMS!
  • Notes From My Dead Dad: This is quite amazing, and has sat with me this week long after I finished reading it – partly because of the poignancy of the subject matter, partly because it opened my eyes to a whole new world of coming fraud and confidence trickery, and partly because it feels like very fertile creative territory for a novel or short story – this is Benj Edwards’ account of how he used image-generating AI Flux to create a model of his dead father’s handwriting. “Growing up, if I wanted to experiment with something technical, my dad made it happen. We shared dozens of tech adventures together, but those adventures were cut short when he died of cancer in 2013. Thanks to a new AI image generator, it turns out that my dad and I still have one more adventure to go. Recently, an anonymous AI hobbyist discovered that an image synthesis model called Flux can reproduce someone’s handwriting very accurately if specially trained to do so. I decided to experiment with the technique using written journals my dad left behind. The results astounded me and raised deep questions about ethics, the authenticity of media artifacts, and the personal meaning behind handwriting itself. Beyond that, I’m also happy that I get to see my dad’s handwriting again. Captured by a neural network, part of him will live on in a dynamic way that was impossible a decade ago. It’s been a while since he died, and I am no longer grieving. From my perspective, this is a celebration of something great about my dad—reviving the distinct way he wrote and what that conveys about who he was.” I’m…unsure how I feel about this, but it’s a fascinating wrinkle in the current AI boom which hadn’t even begun to occur to me.
  • Walking the Faroe Islands: This is actually the second in a two-part writeup of Chris Arnade’s recent trip to the Faroe’s, and it focuses on what it’s actually like to live and hang out there, and, honestly, it’s fascinating – I don’t think I’ve ever actually read a proper ‘living on a very remote bunch of islands in the middle of the Atlantic’ piece before, and this really is fascinating and full of interesting details (and some really nice photos too). I think, on reflection, that growing up in the Faroe Islands must be a very particular torture – read this and try and imagine being 15 years old and stuck there.
  • Butler School: I’ve been thinking of late what exactly I’m going to do with myself, professionally-speaking, over the course of the next few years – it does rather feel like the agency market isn’t quite healthy enough to really be interested in someone who can at best be charitably described as a ‘luxury hire’ (I like to think of myself a bit like Matt Le Tissier – extravagantly-talented, almost-preposterously lazy and quite odd-looking, basically), and I probably ought to consider learning a trade. I was considering waitering, but on reading this piece perhaps I should consider butlering (buttling?) instead. This account of what it’s like to train at one of the world’s few official schools for butlers is…I mean, it’s frankly mental and sounds HORRIBLE, as does the reality of the resulting employment within the bosom of the world’s most plutocratic plutes, but, equally, sort-of fascinating. So, er, if anyone fancies clubbing together to get me the £16k required to attend, that would be ace.
  • How To Avoid Hating People Even If They Wear The Wrong Colour: This is a rare example of an OLD LINK – a piece written, slightly-astonishingly, in 2012, by Tim Rogers; Rogers (who I’ve featured in here before a few times) is a famously-prolix writer about videogames, and this is a typically long piece, and, yes, it’s quite videogame-y, but the real point of the article is Rogers getting a bunch of stuff off his chest about the videogame community and certain ‘masculine’ tropes and stereotypes that even 12 years ago felt like they were getting…a bit much, and in the decade anniversary of Gamergate I thought it was fascinating to read something from two years prior which pretty much exactly nails what would end up happening and why. It’s also not a little depressing that you can read it without looking at the date and it would feel entirely contemporarily relevant.
  • Crisps of Madrid: Vittles doing the deep-dive I never knew I needed into the artisanal crisp makers of Madrid, which goes some way to explaining the insane boom in exotically-flavoured Spanish fried potato products in the UK over the past couple of years, and which will REALLY make you want a very cold beer and a crunchy spud as you read it (consider this me officially giving you dispensation to crack a Madri – lol! – and open a pack of those incredibly expensive truffle-flavoured ones, you’re worth it!).
  • Phantom Attachments: A review of a film that I haven’t seen and am honestly unlikely ever to, which I’m linking to because I *really* enjoyed the writing; this is Guy Lodge writing about the recent Paul Mescal/Andrew Scott film ‘All Of Us Strangers’, about gay love and alienation and loneliness and cities and and and and. Gorgeous.
  • The Department of Everything: OK, so fcuk buttling – THIS is the job I want. Except sadly it doesn’t exist anymore – THANKS TECHNOLOGY YOU FCUKER – and so all I can do is read this article and wish that I had been born ever so slightly earlier. “How do you find the life expectancy of a California condor? Google it. Or the gross national product of Morocco? Google it. Or the final resting place of Tom Paine? Google it. There was a time, however—not all that long ago—when you couldn’t Google it or ask Siri or whatever cyber equivalent comes next. You had to do it the hard way—by consulting reference books, indexes, catalogs, almanacs, statistical abstracts, and myriad other printed sources. Or you could save yourself all that time and trouble by taking the easiest available shortcut: You could call me. From 1984 to 1988, I worked in the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library. My seven or eight colleagues and I spent the days (and nights) answering exactly such questions.” Honestly, I would LOVE to do this; does anyone need a pet Google monkey? Anyone? Oh.
  • Divorce Tapes: A hell of a story, this, which starts out being about the author’s paranoid father, who recorded their mothers’ phonecalls to find evidence of an imagined affair, and becomes instead a story about rape, and omerta’, and how families close ranks. Secrets and lies, secrets and lies.
  • Too Late: Not entirely sure why, but I’ve been somewhat…emotional this month (actually I do know why – September is a fcuking horrorshow, memory-wise), and this piece in the New York Times absolutely devastated me when I read it so, er, I am obviously sharing it with you. A story of a friendship that should probably have become a love affair, but which never did, until, by then, it was far too late.
  • Chicken Crazy: Finally this week, a brilliant, strange little essay in Granta by Thom Sliwowski about getting high off chicken (no, really), and polyamory (but not in an annoying way, I promise), and Berlin (also not annoying, honest!) – this is sad and funny and odd, and really very good indeed. .

By Jess Allen

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 13/09/24

Reading Time: 33 minutes

Sincere thanks to all of you who emailed me last week to, er, check that I wasn’t about to do some sort of internet-induced harm to myself – don’t worry! If I do *that* I’ll put the livestream link in that week’s Curios so that ‘MY COMMUNITY’ can join in the fun!

(seriously though, it’s all authorial pose! I love the web! It’s not like some sort of appalling addiction or dependency or something, or a gaping void in my life that I’m filling with information in the absence of anything else that works!)

I hope you’ve all had good weeks, in any case, and that you have fun things planned for the weekend – I had to spend more of it than I would ordinarily have liked staring into the abyss of AI-generated bongo (no, really, I did! For an actual job!) and so I am going to go out now and gaze at the waters of the Thames in the potentially-vain hope that they will somehow cause me to forget all the terrible, dead-eyed ‘sexy’ pictures.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you will almost certainly want to thank me for the Now! playlist.

By Amie Dicke

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH THE  WELCOME RETURN OF SADEAGLE, WITH A MIX OF JAZZ AND RELATED STUFF FROM HIS CORNISH CAVE OF RECORDS!

THE SECTION WHICH CONCEDES THAT OP HAS A POINT HERE BUT WHICH ALSO CAN’T HELP BUT REALLY, REALLY LOVE ALL THE REPLIES THAT ARE BASICALLY ‘YEAH FCUK OFF WE DON’T LIKE YOUR SORT’, PT.1:

  • Orbit: I fcuking love the BBC. Really, I do, I can’t help it – I have the sort of generational attachment to the Corporation that can only come from having been parented by it for significant proportions of my life (this is, of course, MASSIVELY UNFAIR on my poor single mother who obviously had to, you know, go to work and pay the mortgage and probably, if I’m honest, get away from me, but, well, she’s dead and won’t see this, so). It’s educated me and entertained me and occasionally paid me money, and it’s one of the few objectively ‘good’ things we are renowned for internationally as a country (the royal family is not an objectively ‘good’ thing, nor are the Beckhams, nor is OnlyFans, and I think we’re all agreed on the at-best ambiguous nature of the whole ‘centuries of colonialism’ project), and it also contains people who experiment and play around and make occasional things like this, and well, it is worth a tenner a month is all I’m saying. ANYWAY, Orbit is a new experimental webtoy thing, made by the BBC and designed to offer a new way of discovering music – each day you can go to the website and are presented with a circular interface (a bit like an orbital diagram, DO YOU SEE?) which lets you hear snippets of different songs (the longer you click on each ‘planet’ in the orbit, the more of the song you hear. If you like a song fragment, the software suggests a selection of others which naturally flow from it in a ‘soundalike’ fashion, letting you pick up to 5 new songs each day to add to your personal playlist – you can then add tracks to your playlists on various streaming services. Effectively this is a daily guided music exploration tool, a sort of ‘follow your ears’-type affair, but it has SUCH a nice interface and I think it’s a really nice way to spend 5 minutes each morning discovering a few new songs. Would Sky have made this? Would they fcuk.
  • Verse: One of the many, many cultural predictions that I have confidently made and which have never come anywhere near to becoming reality – or at least not in any meaningful sense – was about…ooh, 7 years ago, ish, when I firmly believed that the ubiquity of the ‘stories’ format across social would lead to a resurgence in self-publishing and zines and things of that ilk (I maintain that this is *nearly*, almost true-ish, if you squint, but also concede that I might be talking bunkum). Anyway, maybe this time’s the charm – Verse is an interesting-looking new app (iOS-only, annoyingly, which means my impressions are entirely based on, er, reading a few articles about it and looking at the app store listing) which basically lets you spin up little webpages which you can then share via socials. It’s slightly hard to describe, but I can see a clear throughline between the aesthetic here and that which was all over Stories a few years back; basically you have a blank canvas onto which you can dump text, images, short video/gifs and the like, link out to other places (ie Reels/TikToks, etc), and which in general have a sort of ‘scrapbook/fanpage’ vibe. It feels VERY teenage girl in that sense, but also quite…fun, and lightly-creative, and the sort of thing that you could probably do quite a lot of fun stuff with with a bit of thought and effort. Aside from anything else, the thought of pulling one of these together on my phone makes me feel genuinely ill – HOW DO THE CHILDREN DO THIS STUFF WITHOUT A MOUSE AND KEYBOARD? So old, so desiccated, so left-behind.
  • Gentype:Would you like your very own bespoke font, made by AI (courtesy of Google)? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! This uses…oh, fcuk’s sake, I honestly cannot keep up with the various different model names all these fcukers are deploying, nor indeed do I care. It uses SOME FCUKING MAGIC GOOGLE TECH (I checked in the end – it’s Imagen2, should you care) to create an entire A-Z font in whatever style you prompt it to – which, obviously, is guardrailed to high heaven and won’t let you create anything TOO contentious, but, as ever, you can get around this to an extent (‘viscera’ it doesn’t like, but I found that ‘tendons’ produced a similarly (and unpleasantly) meaty result, for example). This is obviously just a silly toy, but it’s impressive how well the outputs work, and you can download your alphabet should you want to preserve your masterworks forever, or even just type out a message and get an image of that should you wish to, I don’t know, create a font out of dead flowers and send “LOOK WHAT YOU HAVE DONE TO OUR LOVE?” to your significant other (don’t do this, though).
  • AI Or Not AI?: Another of the NYT’s occasional ‘so, can you tell what’s real any more?’ quizzes – the link here takes you to an archive version so the ‘quiz’ element doesn’t actually work very well (if you’ve not yet been paywallblocked then just go to the original url and play as normal), but you can still see the videos here and make your own guesses as to which are real and which are spun up by Kling etc. I have to confess, I got one of these wrong (don’t worry, the beatings were severe) – which, for someone who spends as much time as I do staring at this sh1t, was frankly embarrassing but also testament to how much better this stuff has gotten (but, to be clear, only for VERY short clips – anything longer than about 3-5s and the illusion is shattered). See how you get on – you will, I think, be surprised.
  • DebunkBot: Ooh, this is interesting. A paper was published by MIT this week seeming to demonstrate that prolonged interaction with a specially-trained LLM was able to effectively help in debunking conspiracy theories, or at least partially doing so, amongst people who had previously held strong opinions about, say, COVID, or the US election in 2020. You can read the paper here if you’re interested, or you can click the main link, roll up your sleeves and have a DEBATE about, I don’t know, chemtrails. As a general rule I like to think of Web Curios readers (lol, of course I don’t, I get really upset if I ever conceive of your existence, I do this for ME) as rational, coherent, *intelligent* people who wouldn’t ever engage in MAD BELIEFS – equally, though, it’s been a long few years and we’ve all spent a lot of time online by now, so I suppose it’s entirely possible that at least a few of you believe that Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair and George Soros all really do run an international adrenochrome-farming operation involving a complicated and deeply-Satanic process of child gland harvesting; if that’s YOU, why not tell DebunkBot all about it and see if it can’t wash some of the madness away? I am curious, though, as to how this gets past the (to me obvious) objection of ‘well, of course, you’ve programmed the machine to think this stuff, it’s part of the same establishment conspiracy and you’re probably all satanic paedos too’ – anyway, let me know how you get on.
  • The Paralympics Australia Virtual Stadium: On the one hand, I have no desire to mock the Olympics or the Paralympics, which by all accounts were both amazing and wonderful and inspiring and all that jazz; on the other, SOMEONE DONE A METAVERSE! Ok, they don’t actually describe it as such, but you can bet that when this was initially pitched back in…ooh, thinking about timelines and the like, let’s say late-2021, that the ‘M’ word was 100% on one of the slides. Anyway, this is an IMMERSIVE DIGITAL STADIUM EXPERIENCE launched to enable Aussies to get behind their Paralympians by visiting a virtual version of an Olympic stadium – you know the deal by now, WASD to move your avatar around, space to jump…sadly there’s no button to make the experience ‘good’. You can…what can you do? You can walk around the arena, approaching various BIG SCREENS on which you can see low-res clips of that day’s Aussie highlights (which are obviously not updating anymore because, well, it’s over), and there’s a merch shop (OBVS) and you can also show your support for the Paralympian team and Aussie sport in general by BUYING A VIRTUAL SEAT in the stadium for $25 actual cashmoney (or a virtual corporate box, if you were feeling particularly flush). The thing is, I obviously saw this and LOLed, but then explored further and it seems that they’ve sold 31,000 of the fcukking things, raising $800k, and I realised I know nothing. Australians reading this – does that sound plausible? Do you know anyone who’s bought a ‘virtual seat’ to the ‘virtual paralympics’? Because I have to say I find the idea of 31k people rushing to spend 25 quid on this astonishing in the extreme, but they couldn’t be lying about this, could they?
  • Dynamicland: Look, I don’t really understand what this is AT ALL – the FAQ reads “an independent nonprofit research lab, whose mission is to enable universal literacy in a humane dynamic medium. This involves inventing a humane form of computing, and developing educational and community-based institutions in which a culture can grow”, but, I’ll be honest, these are words whose meanings in isolation I comprehend but which when arranged like that baffle me entirely. Still, that’s not the point! The point is that I absolutely adore their website, which is based around a photo of some shelves and which, honestly, is SO CHARMING and I now think that everyone should make websites like this – fcuk complicated CSS, fcuk Java, fcuk all this complex stuff, let’s just chuck up a photo with some hyperlinks and be done with it (obviously I don’t mean that, but there’s something really pleasing about the simplicity and the design here).
  • The Salad Fingers Shop: I generally try not to link to stuff that’s ‘just’ for sale here (a rule I break I think three times in this edition – I am nothing if not entirely inconsistent and largely-hypocritical!), but I will make an extra-special exception for the newly-launched Salad Fingers online store. If you don’t know what Salad Fingers is then what the fcuk are you doing here, frankly (but also, educate yourself)? If you do, then, well, you might find some of the merch available here of interest – the latex costume mask is a particularly-horrifying (and to my mind decent value) addition to your Hallowe’en/erotic (delete per preference) arsenal.
  • 575 Life: Many years ago, when I had probably the least-healthy job of my life, I was in charge of doing the morning meeting notes at a certain PR agency; because I am a pr1ck, I took to starting each one with a TOPICAL HAIKU (personal favourite: “Welcome Suri Cruise! / Real child or creepy changeling? / Only time will tell”) – as such, the form has a special and permanent place in the wizened cabinet of horrors that is my ‘heart’. 575 Life is a project that posts haiku – I don’t know who by, I don’t know how often, and I don’t know why, but I rather like them, particularly “four letter words can / fill to the brim or empty / your entire soul.” You can sign up for occasional haiku updates, should you so desire – why don’t you subscribe? / It probably won’t hurt you / (though I can’t promise).
  • Cellar Door (Redux): So a few weeks back I posted a link to Cellar Door, a project seeking to find the BEST (or at least most-popular) word in the English language, and made some sort of typically-churlish complaint about how I was annoyed at the fact that there wasn’t something trying to find the WORST word – and then obviously one of the nice people behind the website (Aris Catsambas, in fact) got in touch to say that, actually, that does exist, and kindly sent me the link. So now we can learn that, per the ongoing experiment, the least-popular word in the English language at the time of writing is…GRAPEFRUIT, apparently, which seems to me a bit weird but at least it’s not fcuking ‘moist’. Although the fact that ‘serb’ is second makes me wonder what metric’s being used here and whether, er, there isn’t some sort of weird ethnonationalist conflict being played out via the medium of wordpreference. This list shows you the bottom-100 words as ranked by strangers on the internet; personally-speaking I’d pick ‘wert’ (also, I like to imagine ‘robberies’ is on there as a result of persistent downvoting by people with minor speech impediments).
  • Obsolete Sony: TOO MANY FCUKING NEWSLETTERS. Still, this is the sort of thing that you will either immediately pass over because, well, life’s too short, or which alternatively you will spend the rest of the afternoon reading the back-issues of. Would YOU like a regular newsletter detailing all the different product ranges and models that Sony has launched and then subsequently shuttered over the years (example subject line: “QUALIA: Sony’s Most Expensive Luxury Series 2003-6)? For 99% of you the answer to that question will inevitably ‘no Matt, fcuk off, why would I want that?’ – but you, the other 1%, the MAD ONES, the ones mad to live and love and reminisce about previous generations of electronic hardware, this is for YOU!
  • Olana Light: Via Blort, Olana Light is a UK artist who…oh, look, here’s her explanatory blurb. “My practice moves between wearable sculpture performance, installation, photography, and the moving image, and reflects the multiplicities of identity and a never-ending pursuit of belonging that are close to my own heart.  Exploring notions of ‘self’, and its connection with the body and nature, my work offers new perceptions by challenging audiences to accept the absurdity of the ‘other’, to question their beliefs, and to interrogate their own sense of belonging. I seek to create a dialogue for change: about nature and our relationship with it; about who we are; and about why art is and should be for everyone to access.” Got that? Good. Now click the link, click ‘Projects’, and MARVEL at the beauty of the costumes and the design and the craft and the work here. This is SO beautiful, and I now want to dress up as a birch tree.
  • Elle’s Home: A lovely little personal homepage website – hi Elle, whoever you may be! – which is packed full of cute features but which made me fall in love with it because she’s implemented Matt Webb’s ‘cursor chat’ tech which means that everyone currently on the website can see each others’ cursor and, if they so choose, chat to each other while they browse, and I love this SO much (multiplayer websites! A trend! PUT IT IN YOUR FCUKING 2025 ‘DECKS’ YOU CNUTS!) and I think you will too.

By Pale Flare

THIS NEXT SELECTION OF MUSIC IS VERY MUCH NOT MY SORT OF THING, BUT I IMAGINE THAT THERE WILL BE SOME OF YOU FOR WHOM A COLLECTION OF EVERY SINGLE SONG THAT HAS EVER APPEARED ON A ‘NOW’ COMPILATION, A COLLECTION SPANNING MORE THAN 24H OF SONGS, WILL BE SOME SORT OF INCREDIBLY-EARLY CHRISTMAS PRESENT! 

THE SECTION WHICH CONCEDES THAT OP HAS A POINT HERE BUT WHICH ALSO CAN’T HELP BUT REALLY, REALLY LOVE ALL THE REPLIES THAT ARE BASICALLY ‘YEAH FCUK OFF WE DON’T LIKE YOUR SORT’, PT.2:

  • Cada: Ok, the second of this week’s ‘links which are basically just taking you to a shop, for which apologies again but, well, it’s practically Christmas (SORRY) and you will probably need to think about presents soon, so actually I am doing you a favour what the FCUK are you complaining about?’, this is something which may well be OLD NEWS to people who are either parents or modelmaking enthusiasts but which to me was an exciting new world of modular bricks. Cada appears to be a Chinese(?)  model-making system, almost-but-not-totally-unlike LEGO – it seems a *bit* more complex, but the real draw (for me, at least) was the odd licensing deals they appear to have made with real-world companies like, er, Shell. Want to have a complicated, multi-part assembly model of, er, an actual Shell forecourt? GREAT! There are also OFFICIALLY LICENSED models of all sorts of car brands and the like, should that be more your thing, but I personally couldn’t get over the image of diminutive plutocrat Wael Sawan having the licensed Shell motorway services shop on his desk and playing with it contemplatively while his extractive minions set the world on fire.
  • Things In…: Ordinarily I don’t believe AI travel planning services are in any way a valuable thing – all they seem to do is point you towards either the most obvious and popular destinations in any given city, or alternatively ones that don’t in fact exist – but this seems to work…marginally better. No idea how it’s working under the hood, but it feels reasonable to assume that there’s some vague LLM-related plumbing under the hood. Anyway, tell it where you are going and it will think a bit and then spit out a bunch of recommendations around visitor attractions, food, places to stay and general tips. If you try it for a big city it will be very generic (although I thought the restaurant recommendations for London were better than you usually get with these things), but if you try it on somewhere more obscure it’s surprisingly not-terrible.  I *think* it’s pulling stuff based on a combination of LLM suggestions and Google reviews(?), but I would be genuinely fascinated to know quite how it’s all put together.
  • Great Ball Contraptions: It is a source of no little shame to me as a man of 44 years that I started sniggering to myself as I typed those words, but, well, I also think it’s important to be honest about one’s failings. Have you ever wanted to “participate in the fun of Great Ball Contraptions”? Would, er, you like some more detail as to exactly what ‘great ball contraptions’ are? Here: “A great ball contraption (GBC) is a machine which receives soccer balls or basketballs from one module and passes them to another module, rather like a bucket brigade. Modules built according to the GBC standard can be assembled into a collaborative display without pre-planning or modification. The GBC standard is minimal, permitting the builder great flexibility in designing the mechanism by which balls are moved from the input to the output. The otherwise pointless handling of balls, and the myriad ways this is accomplished, gives great ball contraptions the impression of a Rube Goldberg machine.” So basically a GBC (if I only type the initials I don’t start giggling, turns out) is a machine designed to move stuff, pointlessly, often made of LEGO or similar building system. This is sadly light on videos, but there are LOTS of instructions should you want to spend this weekend monopolising your kids’ LEGO sets for a project that will not interest them in the slightest while you ignore them and their lonely tears.
  • 50Watts: I am pretty sure that I featured this YEARS ago when it was on a different url, but I was sent it this week by reader Hyunsuh Kim (thankyou Hyunsuh!) and it’s lovely. It’s “a growing archive of weird and wonderful visual ephemera from around the world”, and there is SO MUCH rich visual inspiration in here, with hundreds of posts themed around a particular artist or illustrator or theme or style, and if you’re someone who works in publishing or design (or, er, design for publishing!) then I think this will be hugely up your street.
  • TuneShine: Our final (promise) nakedly-commercial link of the week is this – an honestly very, very cool piece of product design which I can imagine having a certain number of middle-aged dads amongst you reaching for their wallets (do YOU live in Walthamstow? Do YOU call it ‘the Village’? Yes, YOU!). TuneShine is basically an LED art display – handmade (they know their audience, these people) in LOVELY WOOD with an LED-enabled front panel, this basically displays a lo-fi, lo-res version of the album art for whatever’s playing on your streaming service of choice (Spotify, Apple Music, etc) – effectively a sort of domestic artwork/what’s on display, a bit like a digital version of those stands on which you put the cover of whatever vinyl you’re currently playing. Very much the sort of thing that you might have found in a dot com office in Shoreditch c.2010-13 (RIP TECH CITY) which would inevitably been ruined when some bright spark decided to do mephedrone off it after coming back to the office for afters following Silicon Drinkabout. Anyway, one for your Christmas lists – it’s not cheap at 200 dollars, but it’s *very* pretty.
  • The Railway Movie Database: Ok, so I had this on the list this week but I confess to not having properly dug into it just now (yes, this is a glimpse behind the authorial curtain – you SEE the sort of preparation that goes into every edition of Web Curios? This is why I could never ask for money for this sh1t), and I just checked the ‘About’ section and got unexpectedly incredibly emo about it (it’s 9:04am, this is normally when the fatiguetears start to come in waves). It is clear that this person REALLY CARES about trains and railways, and as a result of that intense passion has decided to create, and maintain, this website which contains an absolutely INCREDIBLE amount of information about the train stations of the UK and Ireland and which, if any, films and television series they have featured in. If I were to quibble I would like the ability to be able to browse by station rather than by film – THIS IS NOT A COMPLAINT, just a statement of preference! – but, honestly, I am slightly in awe of the amount of effort that has obviously gone into this, and the fact that it’s still being maintained in 2024. The person behind this is one Jonathan Horswell, who I think is doing God’s work in some small way.
  • Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About: Do you remember the days before every fcuker in the world had a fcuking podcast? God, they were good days, weren’t they? Anyway, in that strange, halcyon period, rather than recording baggy, poorly-edited and unfunny conversations between friends that noone else never, ever needed to hear, people instead committed their not-particularly-funny musings to…er…baggy, poorly-edited webpages instead! I have a strange feeling that this website might have been VERY FAMOUS in the early days of the mass internet – one of the original viral sensations – but I have only a fleeting recollection and, honestly, I am not going to Google this because there’s every likelihood that I would fall into a terrible researchhole and never emerge. Still, this website from…what, the late-90s/early-00s? Anyway, it collects things that the author (apparently English) and his girlfriend (German) have argued about – I appreciate that what I am about to type here is a bit glass houses, for which apologies, but the writing isn’t very funny and the observations are kind-of banal…I find it interesting, though, because a) it’s an archive of a DIFFERENT TIME (I do not think the author would have enjoyed going viral with a lot of these observations in 2024, put it that way); b) it’s an interesting artefact of THE PAST WEB; and c) it’s literally EXACTLY the contents of a significant number of podcasts, many of them hosted by couples, which proves that there is nothing new under the sun and that this sh1t has honestly never been that funny so can we please stop now? Thanks.
  • A Single Div: An OLD design project by Lynn Fisher, demonstrating a bunch of pretty things you can do with a well-crafted bit of CSS. There’s some lovely webdesign stuff in here which might prove pleasingly-inspirational; alternatively you can just scroll and stare, slack-jawed, at PRETTY THINGS ON YOUR SCREEN, which is very much my approach to it.
  • Nights On Earth: Ooh, I like this rather a lot. As the nights are drawing in – I woke up this morning to write Curios and it was PRACTICALLY DARK, which, honestly, I wasn’t wholly psychologically ready for – it seems appropriate to share something you can do with the night skies (although in England in winter those night skies tend to be accompanied by heavy cloud cover so, er, perhaps this is a pointless endeavour). Click the link, tell the site where you are, and it will present you with a *really* nicely-designed monthly calendar view, where on each day you’ll see a small graphical guide to what you might expect to see in the nigh sky that night (presuming, you know, there are no clouds, and you live in the middle of nowhere rather than in central London where it never actually gets dark properly) – so for example I can tell you that there’s an increased chance of aurora events tonight (not that we’ll see them, but), or that there’s a full moon AND supermoon next Wednesday, that sort of thing. Aside from anything else, the design/webwork on this is really very pleasing indeed – also, though, it makes me quite upset that I haven’t seen any shooting stars this year, might have to rectify that.
  • Sunlitt: Seeing as we’re doing ‘celestial stuff’ (SEAMLESS, I tell you), here’s an app which will show you the position of the sun (and the relative shadows cast by buildings anywhere in the world) at any point in the day – this is SO PRETTY and so nicely-designed (or at least it *looks* pretty and nicely-designed, it’s another iOS-only app, the fcukers), and while I can’t immediately think why you would need this information with you wherever you go I like to imagine that at least one of you will be able to find some sort of use for it (planning photoshoots? Beach trips? Walks when on holiday? Yeah, ok, that sort of thing).
  • Presidential Ham: As we wait with bated breath for the fcuking Americans to finally do their fcuking democracy and stop sucking up all of the rest of the world’s news oxygen, why not pass the time with this gallery featuring paintings of every single US President, each accessorised with, er, a ham. George Washington, holding a ham! Grover Cleveland, holding a ham! Barack Obama, holding a ham! WHO WILL HOLD THE HAM NEXT? There’s a ‘Joe Biden holding a ham…coming soon!’ placeholder at the bottom of the page, suggesting both the site owner’s political leanings and that they probably need to update this – but, honestly, here’s hoping that come December there’s a new portrait of a ham-laden Harris gracing the site.
  • Cleanerbot Rescue: A reader (Andres Varela) writes!: “I built a thing. It’s an old school text adventure, only it’s voice controlled. I built it to learn some stuff and be a proof-of-life to folks in my network. Turns out they like the writing, and keep playing, so I thought I’d get cocky and see if you’d like it too…it applies AI to divine user intent rather than force them to use overly specific command phrases from the late 1900’s. “Have a look around and tell me what you can see.”  vs “search”. There’s a game save function that not enough people cotton on to, which I think is nifty because it doesn’t require players to register.” THANKYOU ANDRES! I initially struggled a bit with this because I was focused on using old-school text adventure commands, but once you lean into the LLMiness (IT IS A WORD) of it then you will get the hang quite quickly – it’s fun, especially if you’re old enough to remember this stuff the first time around, and while, if I’m honest, the voice commands are just a gimmick and it would be quicker to play by typing, there’s still something slightly magical about the fact I can speak to my computer and play (admittedly rudimentary) games by shouting at it.
  • Ducky Fog: This week’s final frivolity is this tiny game in which you have to move the duck and rotate the screen to reach each level’s goal. Don’t worry, it will all make PERFECT SENSE as soon as you click the link, I promise (oh, and if you want you can mess with the code too, but, er, I don’t really understand code and so I can’t comment on that bit).

By Ludwig Favre

OUR FINAL PLAYLIST THIS WEEK IS ANOTHER TRIP THROUGH THE BLEEPS AND BEATS OF TECH-TRANCE MIXED WITH CARE AND LOVE BY FORMER EDITOR PAUL!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied. Screenshots are automatically generated from a stash of old Geocities home pages, rescued by the Archive Team in 2009. The files are processed from oldest to newest.” All of these are dead now, making this a sort of digital graveyard, but it’s a gorgeous reminder of that brief period when ‘being online’ meant ‘creating a space that you felt expressed who you were and using that space to find and connect with other like-minded people’ rather than ‘creating a funnel through which a variety of different billionaire corporations can slide a variety of pabulum directly down your infogullet’.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Jack Davison: Photos by someone called Jack Davison. GOOD photos, should you need an additional reason to click – nice range of subjects and styles, and in general more interesting than your standard insta ‘landscapes and portraits’ feed.
  • The Daily Splice: A feed featuring a load of really quite excellent collage-y images and animations – this is some really impressive work, and stylistically very coherent to boot.
  • Minimus: This is the Insta account of Minimus, according to the bio ‘The Mouse that made Latin cool!’. Erm, did it? I confess to not having noticed the now-incredibly-hip status of the dead language, but perhaps it’s because I’m not cool and in fact what all The Kids are doing rather than going and getting fcuked-up on meths is, I don’t know, declining verbs and engaging in hot conjugation sessions with their friends. I doubt it, though. Still, there is a LOT to love about this, not least how adorably shonky the little mouse doll that features in all of the images is, like something from a particularly low-budget BBC kids show from the 70s. Minime, rex es inter mures et te saluto!

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • Art Project: Our first link this week is honestly FASCINATING – I promise, even if you don’t care about AI, that this is a really interesting exploration about what it means to make art, to think, to explore concepts, all of that chewy stuff. Frank Lantz, whose writing I’ve featured in here before, takes the provocation from the headline of last week’s Chiang piece (‘AI Can’t Make Art’) and runs with it – this article is a series of screenshots of the conversation between Lantz and GPT-4o, in which Lantz attempts to patiently train The Machine into making something that is ‘art’ based on his definition, and as a glimpse into how LLMs ‘think’ – and specifically how they actually very much do not ‘think’ at all – it is SO SO SO GOOD. I can’t pull excerpts because the conversations presented as screencaps, but trust me when I say that it’s one of the best explorations of the possibilities and limits of this sort of technology that I’ve yet seen, as well as being a generally fascinating exploration of the wider concept of ‘what is art?’ and what is (and isn’t) possible with the current generation of models, and how, as per previous Curios, they are excellent at mimicking the ‘shape’ of thought and meaning without in fact being vessels for actual thought and meaning in any sense whatsoever. BONUS, TANGENTIALLY-RELATED LINK: this piece in the Atlantic, by the guy who did that viral Tweet about replacing all the icons on his phone with AI-designed ones featuring Kermit, touches on a few vaguely-similar points (albeit more accidentally) and is a nice, lightweight companion to the BIG THINKING above.
  • An Interview With An Anthropic Person: Sorry for all the AI stuff uptop this week – I appreciate that some of you are, er, not HUGE fans – but this is another genuinely interesting piece; The Verge interviewed Anthropic’s Head of Product about all sorts of things pertaining to AI, with a refreshing focus on, you know, delivering product and ‘what is this for?’ and ‘how do we think about safety?’ rather than the more woo-woo ‘so, is AGI coming and will it kill us?’ bullsh1t that often characterises some of these chats. Ok, so there is a *brief* segue into an imagined future in which we Infinite Jest ourselves into total civilisational collapse, but otherwise this is measured, interesting and practical (oh, and it’;s available as a podcast too for those lazy deviants amongst you who prefer that as a medium. You’re wrong, but I will still pander to you because I am nice and tolerant and I need you to love me).
  • The AI and Energy Question: This is REALLY interesting but also, I must confess, so far above my head from a technical point of view that it may as well be some sort of satellite. Anyway, this is the first in a two-part article examining IN DETAIL (I mean it) the question of ‘how much energy is all this AI stuff using anyway?’ – the second part is linked to from the bottom of the first, and without wishing to spoil the ending here, the answer (with a LOT of caveats) appears to be ‘quite possibly a bit less than we might initially have thought’. Which is not to say that the tech is anything other than energy-intensive, but that you might want to retire the ‘so, you boiled a lake to make that busty Garfield, eh cowboy?’ snark for a bit.
  • Information Foraging: Ok, this is *quite* geeky/technical/academic, and technically it’s a webdesign/UX-focused piece, but I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff here which could be usefully applied across all sorts of different fields and disciplines and which broadly falls into the category of ‘interesting stuff that those of you who like to call yourselves ‘strategists’ will probably find tangentially-useful and which, even if you don’t, will make you FEEL as though you did’. The central premise is here – as you can see, you can use this sort of stuff for everything from personabuilding to webpage design and LOADS of things inbetween: “Information foraging is the fundamental theory of how people navigate on the web to satisfy an information need. It essentially says that, when users have a certain information goal, they assess the information that they can extract from any candidate source of information relative to the cost involved in extracting that information and choose one or several candidate sources so that they maximize the ratio: “Rate of gain = Information value / Cost associated with obtaining that information.” In other words, if people have a question, they will decide which webpage to go to based on (1) how likely it is that the page will provide an answer to their question, and (2) how long it’s going to take to get the answer if they go to that page.”
  • A Trump Profile: I know, I know – YOU HAVE READ ENOUGH! This one though really is a particularly fine example of the genre – Olivia Nuzzi, who has interviewed the fcuker enough times over the past few years to have a degree of access that’s not afforded to every reporter, and with whom it’s obvious Trump feels a degree of comfort, writes beautifully about Where Trump Is Now, in the wake of losing his preferred opponent, and (allegedly) part of his ear, and for the first time in this campaign feeling the tide possibly turning definitively away from him, and it’s a glorious piece, capturing the oddity of its subject and the strangeness of the court around him, the strange Potemkin Village vibe of Mar A Lago and the sense that this might all finally be coming to an end (please God).
  • Joining The Petersen School: You may not find it WHOLLY surprising that the educational institution established by Dr Jordan Petersen as a corrective to the woke mind virus infecting campuses across the world has ended up being…a subscription-based service where you watch a bunch of prerecorded videos (seriously, do these people have any other grift?)! Admittedly some of the videos are made my actual academics, and seemingly not all of them are peddling Petersen’s own signature brand of insane, antediluvian gender wars rhetoric, but it’s not entirely clear that $500 a year (in fairness, obviously a fraction of what you would pay for an actual education but, I would argue, it’s not in any meaningful way an actual education, so) buys you anything other than a load of stuff you could probably have found on YouTube anyway, and there’s no suggestion that the ‘accreditations’ one receives at the end of the course have any actual real-world weight, and it does feel a BIT reading this that what Petersen’s done here is to extend his grift of ‘giving really basic advice to the frightened in the form of a self-help book’ to ‘giving really basic advice to the frightened who can’t read in the form of videos’.
  • 764 Redux: A while back (23rd February, precision fans!) I featured an unsettling story what I then described as “a group called ‘764’, which, long story short, is comprised of people who get off on making other people do humiliating or harmful things to themselves on camera as a power fetish thing.” This piece is a sort-of followup which focuses on the ringleader of the whole enterprise, a kid from the US called Bradley Cadenhead, now 19 and into year two of an 80 year (!) prison sentence connected to all sorts of unpleasant crimes; look, I can’t pretend that this isn’t just a bit grim, and there’s a certain degree of ‘true crime’ salaciousness to the article that I’m not a huge fan of, but, equally, I always find it fascinating to be reminded of the fact that, actually, this stuff really does happen and it’s not always just myth. Oh, also, a useful additional reminder that it’s not just Telegram where the bad stuff happens (I imagine Discord’s PR team is feeling pretty relieved about how lightly they’ve gotten off, is all).
  • Lying For Money On Social Media: In another instance of ‘unintended consequences of poorly-thought-out incentives schemes’, this article examines why there’s a spate of accounts across social platforms – but primarily Twitter – posting stuff that is deliberately wrong or false; the TL;DR here is ‘because there’s nothing more irresistible to a certain type of person than the need to correct someone online’ and that, by posting things that get specific pop culture facts wrong, account owners can leverage this in order to farm engagement, boost virality and coin in some of that sweet, sweet ‘creator income’. But, er, what happens when these viral lies become part of the fabric of the web, and what happens when they get ingested into The Machine and become part of what passes for the informational water table? Is this what the platforms imagined when they started offering cash payouts for popular content? What do you mean ‘they didn’t think about it at all?’ Eh? Oh.
  • The AITAverse: Or, to give it its full title, “How “Am I the A$$hole?” ate the internet – this is a look at how the subReddit became so popular, but also at the wider popularity of accounts across all the platforms doing similar blind item social outrage schtick, and why that popularity might be peaking about now. My theory, broadly corroborated by the piece, is that we’re at a stage of online where obviously clowning on actual people feels…bad, and not really ok, and like it might in fact be harmful, but the AITA format is anonymous and possibly made-up anyway, so you can absolutely go to fcuking town on the people involved because they’re unknown, unnamed and possibly fictional anyway. Is this healthy? It doesn’t feel healthy.
  • Blog Monetisation:Via Andy, this is an excellent-if-depressing bit of interactive storytelling (I think we can probably kill ‘scrollytelling’ after all these years, can’t we?) about what it takes to make money out of publishing on the internet in 2024. Publishers will, I think, relate to this.
  • College Football: Things I don’t understand about America, part x of y – the weird obsession with university sports. Like, don’t you have ENOUGH sport? Why do you need to care about the college kids? Why is your personal identity still stitched to your alma mater despite you being a comfortable two decades from graduation, has nothing else exciting happened to you since then? (NB – these questions are rhetorical, I don’t really care all that much and I appreciate the actual answer is ‘because it feeds into the NBA and it’s a huge part of rural culture, you awful anglo snob’). Anyway, that’s by way of unnecessary preamble to my saying that I don’t understand the first thing about what this piece is wanging on about, but, equally, that it is SUCH a glorious piece of webdesign and it really is worth scrolling through, even as your eyes glaze at the actual words.
  • Tennis, Tech, and Gambling: ANOTHER rather nice bit of pagedesign here, this time about tennis and, specifically, the ATP’s arrival in Saudi as part of MBS’ continued determination to make the region about more than just oil, heat and punitive homophobia.  It’s focus is on the various technical advancements over the past few years, and how they’ve transformed the sport, and all the interesting and exciting ways in which the data thrown up by the tech can be used to enhance the TRUE meaning of sport, to whit ‘gambling’. A slightly-poignant excerpt: “During the match I observed from the Nest, Hawk-Eye would collect countless data points, much of which was being transmitted live not just to the chair umpire officiating the match but to business partners of the ATP as well — the most lucrative of which are, recently, sports betting companies. Everything that was happening on-court would be sent through an algorithm that would process that information to create more accurate betting odds that could be distributed to the world’s gamblers. This was news to the Hawk-Eye boys. Andrew Birse, a technical project manager, gave me a puzzled look and then got a little defensive: “We mostly deal with on-site capture.” Another operator, Juan Martinez, followed up: “We don’t know what anyone does with it.” I felt bad. They’d had no idea.”
  • Uber in Mexico: The story here is pretty much exactly ‘man, I would not want to be an Uber driver in certain parts of Mexico’, but, well, I really wouldn’t want to be an Uber driver in certain parts of Mexico.
  • Where Will Games Be In 25 Years: 99% of this is ‘people who work in the games industry offering interesting if (mostly) sober predictions about the sort of technical, ludic or business shifts the industry will see over the coming two-and-a-half decades’, which is interesting but a bit inside baseball. The remaining 1%, though, is the best response I have EVER read to one of these round robin interview questions and you should all read it immediately and then wish that you were as talented as Hannah Nicklin, who has honestly invented a new genre of microfiction-disguised-as-industry-talking-head-comment here.
  • How To Build A Walking Table: This is a set of instructions on how to build an actual, honest-to-goodness remote controlled walking table – it will be out of reach for all but the most dedicated and technical of you (and even those people will need access to woodworking tools and a bandsaw), but, trust me, click the link because you will be charmed and you will wish that you had paid more attention in Design Technology all those many years ago.
  • Celebrity Number Six Is Found: Are you aware of the internet mystery that’s been surrounding the mythical ‘Celebrity Number Six’ for a year or so? No, of course you’re not, you’re fully-rounded people with actual lives and interests outside of the fcuking internet. BUT it is an interesting story and a sort-of-heartwarming example of collective effort and endeavour (admittedly, fine, entirely pointless effort and endeavour, but still) and the link takes you to Caitlin at Links… explaining what it was all about and why it was interesting in typically-excellent fashion.
  • Probability Puzzles: Oh I loved this interview! It’s about the sort of stuff that my brain mostly slides off like fried eggs off teflon (I can just about get my head around Monty Hall, but only if I REALLY think about it, to the point that you see my brow furrow and smoke start coming out of my ears) – probabilities, basically – and about a LOVELY-sounding bloke who’s become moderately-Twitter-famous as a result of posting puzzles. Here’s the intro – I promise, even if your brain, like mine, resists this sort of stuff as a matter of course, this does an excellent job of explaining why these puzzles function as they do, and showing you how to think a bit more smartly about probability overall: “In late January, Daniel Litt posed an innocent probability puzzle on the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) — and set a corner of the Twitterverse on fire. Imagine, he wrote, that you have an urn filled with 100 balls, some red and some green. You can’t see inside; all you know is that someone determined the number of red balls by picking a number between zero and 100 from a hat. You reach into the urn and pull out a ball. It’s red. If you now pull out a second ball, is it more likely to be red or green (or are the two colors equally likely)? Of the tens of thousands of people who voted on an answer to Litt’s problem, only about 22% chose correctly.” Honestly, FASCINATING.
  • Literary Bratdom: I know, I know. But leave aside the zeitgeist-baiting title (which in this instance is in fact entirely warranted) and this is really good triptych of reviews of three novels published this year, all of which have broadly been marketed as ‘brat lit’ (and one of which even uses the WORD OF THE SUMMER as its title). I’ve only read one of these – the Gabriel Smith one – but I agreed SO HARD with the essay’s assessment of it, and enjoyed the writing and analysis overall, so figured I would include it; even if you’ve not read the books, it’s a really interesting look at YOUNG WRITERS IN 2024, and the whole ‘young writer canon’, and the phenomenon of ‘Brat’…and yes, I know, IKNOW, but I think this is a very good reading of it, cf lines like “trolls were bitter and alienated and politically toxic. Brats are hot, fun, and apolitical; they’ve been feminized and miniaturized and upgraded to a more consumer-friendly model. When they joke, they are not trying to infuriate anyone. They’re selling themselves as aspirationally edgy and unique. They’re flattering an audience that would prefer not to know when it is being pandered to, that would rather believe that it is being tested or confronted. They’re the mash-up of trolldom and capitalism, hoping to elicit a softened form of outrage, an exasperation mingled with admiration and longing. They would like you to believe that their indecision reflects a particular attunement to ambiguity and nuance. But in truth they just won’t know where they stand until they’ve figured out where you do.”
  • The NYT Prince Documentary Story: If you haven’t yet read this, you really must – it’s brilliant, about Prince and Who He Was (insofar as it’s possible to meaningfully answer that question), and who we think artists are, and legacy and memory and fame and ‘brand’ and heroes and the concept of genius, and all sorts of other things besides. The central story here is ostensibly about an epic documentary about the artist’s life which is now being contested by Prince’s estate and which may never see the light of day as a result, but it’s FAR more interesting than that.
  • Group Chats About Group Chats: A selection of writers write about the oh-so-modern phenomenon that is the Group Chat – you could make, I think, a convincing argument for it being the defining social forum of the decade so far, if you wanted to be a pretentious cnut – and it is SUPERB. I would read a whole edition of the LRB devoted just to this specific topic, fwiw. “This used to be called hanging out. But the difference between the hang and the group chat, aside from plasma, is spontaneity. The hang is now ever-present and constant; it doesn’t require plans. Yet while all the other advents of instant communication—email, breaking news, Twitter, [shudder] Slack—fill me with dread, I can’t wait to open the group chat. It drives my wife crazy: what does the group chat offer that surpasses interfacing with real life? When real life is so slippery, a faceless forum counts for feeling alive.”
  • Same River, Same Man: On rereading books at differing stages in your life – specifically, in this case, ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, a book which famously becomes less good the older you are when you read it (other examples of this specific cultural phenomenon – the film ‘Pump Up The Volume’ starring Christian Slater, which is obviously THE BIBLE when you are 15, but which is an astonishingly big red flag should anyone over the age of about 18 cite it as a favourite). Anyway, this is mostly about Catcher, but also touches on various other books and authors – Vonnegut, Updike, etc – and is both a lovely rereading of some beloved classics from adolescence and an interesting look at why we reread novels and what we gain from so doing at different times of our lives.
  • More Than Friends: I couldn’t really empathise with this, but I thought it rather beautiful regardless – about relationships that are very much relationships, they carry weight and they matter and there is love, and lust, somewhere, but they never quite become fully-fledged. “When I think about the singer at all, it’s usually because I had a dream about him. It’s amazing how the details are all still there in my brain, even twenty years later: the rubbed-thin feel of his band t-shirts, the oakmoss notes in his cologne, the way his hair felt on the soft skin on my neck. If we had had sex, I’m sure those memories would be there, too, but we never did.  My relationship with the singer exists in a kind of category-less limbo—definitely more than a friendship, but not quite an actual relationship. The singer and I never “made love,” but we did make love, coax it from the air around us, render it in our folded hearts. We made letters and art and songs, we made lists of things we taught each other, we made poetry we exchanged in the middle of the night, walking to the spot exactly between our across-campus dorms, and then walking quickly back in opposite directions. In the winter, he took me as his guest to our college’s winter formal. Our designated driver got drunk, and the singer shelled out for a cheap hotel room across the street from the banquet hall. We draped our fancy clothes across the suitcase rack and slept in our underwear under the stiff hotel blankets, side by side. A thunderstorm raged outside. Lightning flashes filtered through the curtains, throwing shadows on our bare shoulders. He didn’t kiss me.“
  • Wife In Reverse: A very short story which I have read five times this week, Time’s Arrow in miniature. Beautiful.

By Pon Arsher

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 06/09/24

Reading Time: 36 minutes

I went to the seaside last weekend, to visit an old friend of mine who lives there with his partner and child, and who has an allotment, and who is pretty much the least-online person I know, and I looked at his life and thought ‘yeah, ok, fine, leaving aside the kid, I am…jealous?’

For the first time in what feels like years, I am feeling the weight of the web a bit. Not just the web, but the fact that, unfortunately, the only ways I can find to earn a living seem to involve me having to stick my face into the sewage outlet that is ‘everything happening in the world’ and emerge clutching interesting nuggets between my teeth. I found myself this week wondering about what I might do were I to suddenly decide that, actually, I don’t want to spend approximately 35h of my life a week online (conservatively). It was, frankly, a bit unsettling.

Thankfully, though, I quickly realised that removing ‘not terrible at the internet and on it all the time’ from my personal brand quickly lowers my employment prospects to ‘basically nil’, and so if I want to keep doing things like ‘eating nice lunches’ and ‘working my way towards the cirrhosis that will eventually end me’ I probably don’t have any choice but to put my face right back in that sewage outlet where it belongs. Much like an unfortunate participant in one of those appalling human centipede films, I am stitched-in unto death.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should thank your lucky stars that you spend less time online than I do.

By Melody Tuttle (all images this week via TIH)

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH A TRULY WONDERFUL 45 MINUTE MIX OF JAPANESE SOUL MUSIC FROM THE 70s, SHARED WITH ME BY READER CHRIS JONES, WHICH I THINK YOU WILL ADORE (ALSO IT IS ON YOUTUBE AND THE VISUALS ARE BOTH VERY SOOTHING AND WILL LIKELY MAKE YOU SOMEWHAT JEALOUS OF THE DJ’S LIVING SPACE)! 

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGISE TO ANY NEW READERS THIS WEEK FOR, WELL, THE FACT THAT THIS NEWSLETTER IS LIKE THIS, BASICALLY, PT.1:  

  • Trisha Code: Every now and again I find something on the web and I am struck by a) how amazing it is and how wonderful people are and how boundless and weird human creativity is; and b) why the fcuk noone else seems to be anywhere near as enthused about it as I am. Trisha Code is, honestly, one of the most exciting things I have seen in ages, but (and apologies in advance) I am probably going to have to try and explain why. So…Trisha Code is a YouTube channel, on which the creator posts a series of short (30-60s) sketch-type vignettes done using various AI tools – the channel’s been going for just under a year, and there are 50-odd videos on there, including three compilation ‘episodes’ (Trishasodes!) which, for my money, is where this really shines. Seriously, I can’t stress enough how much it is worth your time to take AT LEAST 15 minutes to watch the first compilation (and then another 15 to watch the second, and then another 15 to watch the third) – “so, Matt” I hear you ask (worryingly, I DO actually hear you ask that – the voices, they get louder and however hard I type I cannot drown them out), “what exactly is it that makes these things so ‘great’ then?” WELL LET ME TELL YOU! To be clear, the AI production techniques are in many respect the least interesting thing about these videos – they’re made using (I think) a combination of Midjourney/Flux, Runway and a few other tools, and they are pretty slick by the standards of this sort of tech…but that’s not what makes me excited. Rather, this is the first AI thing I’ve seen where the medium and the format just sort of works perfectly – the surreality of AI video and how it warps when you attempt to sustain it too long lends itself perfectly to short, quick-cut editing, which in turn informs the sketches and the songs here. Trisha’s sketches (and the compilation Trishasodes) are shortform skits – either rapping/singing (again, I LOVE the style of this – both sort-of almost good and actually quite bad, which I know doesn’t sound like a recommendation but really is one) or spoof adverts, or trailers for imagined films or TV shows, or odd little kitchen sink vignettes featuring odd monsters or aliens – and they feature an occasionally-recurring cast of supporting characters and callback gags, and I think what I like most about this is that the person making them really *gets* the format – like, not everything here works and there’s no guarantee that you will find it all (or indeed any of it) funny, but it has a flow and a feel to it that is a million times more coherent than any other AI-led video project I’ve seen, and the writing is, in the main, genuinely quite good, and it feels like a nice, Centaur-y combination of human and machine. Basically this is what I think is GOOD about AI – someone with clear ideas being able to use these tools to make something that simply wouldn’t be possible without them (and yes, I know, the planet! The burning! The artists! The copyright! But, equally, I also have no time for the (to my mind) lazy ‘oh well if it’s AI then it’s automatically evil’ argument – this is interesting creative work using interesting creative new tools, and if you can’t see that then, well, sorry, but you’re wrong).  I am already going FAR too long on this and it’s 716am and OH GOD GET ON WITH IT MATT – look, if you only click ONE link this week, make it a click into the Trishaverse. In the unlikely event any TV commissioners are reading this, I 100% believe this is worth looking at (the hubris! Fcuk’s sake Matt). By the way, this link is via the superb Things I Think Are Awesome newsletter by Lynn Cherny, which, if you’ve any interest at all in the cutting edge of AI when it comes to graphics and video, is pretty much essential reading. Oh, one last thing – this is the culture humans are currently producing. Are you seriously trying to tell me this is *better*?
  • Imageteller: Another interesting use of AI here – Imageteller’s a rudimentary tool which lets you feed a selection of images to The Machine and then spits out a narrative (ok, fine, we’re using that term VERY LOOSELY, but) based on those images – so you give it (say) an image of two people at a bar, a hand having a ring slipped onto its finger, a wedding day, a blissful beachside scene with two people in love, and a fiery explosion as a plane crashes spectacularly…and BOOM!, The Machine will in return give you a heartbreakingly poignant story of a honeymoon ending in tragedy. Or at least it would if it weren’t an LLM and therefore hidebound by training to pen nothing but two-bit bromides – this really falls down based on the quality of the copy, but there’s something undeniably fascinating about seeing the attempts to stitch together a coherent narrative from a selection of potentially entirely-disparate images (I tested this using a random selection of images from Curios past and let’s just say that it went quite wonky quite quickly), and I think there’s the interesting germ of an idea here in terms of the development of a rudimentary storyboarding tool.
  • Goodbye Domains: One of a frankly ridiculous number of links this week I have lifted from last week’s B3ta (THANKS ROB!), Goodbye Domains is a small, surprisingly-poignant site that collects people’s memories of domains they once owned which are since expired. This is SO LOVELY, in an odd way – it’s basically just a list of urls and a small explanation of what said url was, or was intended to be, which means it’s as much a memorial to old sites that are no more as it is to ideas that never quite made it – the hobby projects that were born in a burst of enthusiasm but which didn’t ever achieve critical mass, the drunken moments of inspiration which perhaps didn’t quite merit the same degree of enthusiasm in the cold light of day…stuff like “discontinuedcereals.com – The idea was to buy and freeze a few boxes of every niche cereal brand, so that whenever a cereal was discontinued we could sell off our stock to distraught cereal lovers at a terrific markup. I was never going to actually do this, but the domain name made me happy.” Lovely bit of internet, this.
  • The Planetarium: This was sent to me this week by its creator, and I confess to feeling a genuine pang of guilt that I haven’t stumbled across it over the 25 years(!!!!) it has existed. Created by David Whiteland back in 1999(!!!!!!!!), The Planetarium is a quite extraordinary thing – it’s basically an interactive puzzle story, vaguely in the same sort of thematic/vibe ballpark as Masquerade, that’s divided into 12 chapters – what’s interesting about the mechanic here is that each chapter is released to the reader on a weekly basis, meaning that there’s a necessarily slow and methodical cadence to the experience. Each chapter contains an illustration which you can click to explore more – contained within each illustration is a selection of vignettes, giving detail to what you see and slowly sketching out a small fable within which the puzzles sit. Puzzles are of the word, number and logic game variety (and I have to confess they are very much the sort of thing that I struggle with), and the solutions will give you access to NEW puzzles, and everything ladders up into a STORY-SPANNING META-PUZZLE (but, to be clear, you can still experience the story without solving the puzzles), and, honestly, this is SO beautifully constructed, a really beautiful, handmade (if you know what I mean) experience, with far better writing than it needs (there’s a certain gentle wryness to the writing which feels very much redolent of a Certain Type Of English Writing of a specific era, and which I very much enjoyed). Honestly remarkable, and even moreso for being 25 FCUKING YEARS OLD FFS.
  • Agents In Minecraft: Do YOU play Minecraft? Do YOU want to experiment with introducing small, blocky AI agents into your small, blocky universe? GREAT! I sadly don’t play Minecraft and so was only able to read about this rather than experience it myself – you need a copy of the software, as you might expect – but you can find details in this Twitter thread if you’re interested, and the suggestion is that you can basically just set a bunch of these lads up in a Minecraft instance and just, well, see what happens and what they get up to. There is a LOT of hype in the copy (persistent memory! Goal-oriented behaviour!), but I am personally fascinated by this emergent area of the AI space and how the agent thing develops over the next few years (please don’t quote this back to me when we’re all living in fear of the AGENT SPIES monitoring our every digital move in ~4y time).
  • A Tube Map of London House Prices: While we wait for the Evening Standard to finally breathe its emphysemic, black-lunged last (so many years breathing in the smog and the soot and the grime! Poor Stanna’!) and for the Mill Group to set up their planned new local paper for the city, a few other outlets continue to attempt to fill the frankly staggering void in news and information for one of the world’s major urban centres – one is The London Spy, which this week published its Tube Map of London property prices, which neatly maps average house (or flat – you can toggle the view) prices around each tube stop on the network. Which, honestly, doesn’t make for a wholly-cheering picture – like, I’m sorry, but I live near Vauxhall and there is no way in hell that it is nice enough for the average house price to be the thick end of £700k. BUT! We all know that house prices are mad, and we all know that nothing’s going to change until more housing stock is built and something’s done about the twin scourge of landlording and Airbnbs, so while we wait for those particular porkers to get airborne then we might as well spend 5 minutes staring at property prices, getting angry and then using it as fodder for this week’s bleary-eyed conversations at soft play on Sunday morning (I have certain stereotypical expectations about what some of your lives are like, what can I say?). Also, sorry, but where the actual fcuk is ‘Shenfield’ and how is the average house price there over £800k?!?! Based on its location on the tube map IT IS PRACTICALLY IN FCUKING FRANCE FFS.
  • Biceps Grotesk: A free font! Not only that, but it’s…unpleasantly, almost biologically, lumpy, a bit like those extremely fleshy Resident Evil bosses.
  • Following Wildfire: An interesting project, this – it’s basically all about using machine learning/AI to analyse images posted on social media for early signs of wildfires – so, er, based on the pictures they use as examples, massive plumes of white smoke on the horizon, that sort of thing. On the one hand, using this sort of tech for pattern recognition in a large dataset of images is obviously sensible; on the other, I sort of think that by the time people are posting photographs of the aforementioned ‘massive plumes of white smoke’ on Insta, captioned with ‘wtf island is burning lol?’, then I think the pyro cat is somewhat out of the bag. Still, it’s a nicely-made website and THAT’S WHAT COUNTS.
  • Internet Gradient: Another ‘multiplayer’ website – we were right! They are a trend! – which in this case lets users change the colour gradient on the webpage by clicking around. I mean, that’s literally it, but the theory is that if lots of people are online at the same time then it becomes a live, interactive, multi-directed artwork with the colours shifting and moving as the various visitors prod at their screens. Not quite as granular in terms of control as I might like, I would very much like a version of this that takes the idea a step further and links the site to a room covered in those colour-changing LED lights, so the internet could mess with people’s home decor colourscheme in realtime. Go on, one of you smart home enthusiasts (I KNOW YOU ARE READING THIS YOU LIGHTBULB PERVERTS), make it happen.
  • Is My Blue Your Blue: Seeing as we’re doing colour gradients (SEAMLESS linking, there), this is a lovely little site which does that oh-so-perfect thing the web is so good at, to whit ‘reminding you that the way in which you experience the world is yours and yours alone, that shared experience is always fundamentally illusory, and that this means that, at heart, we are necessarily solitary beings who can never, ever know what it is like to Be Another’ – the site will throw up a selection of different colours and you are asked whether each is blue or green, and will, after a while, tell you whether you are a green-seeing person or a blue-seeing person, and how you compare to the rest of the world. Basically Buzzfeed’s The Dress, but for people who think in binary.
  • Swype: This is iOS-only and so I haven’t been able to try it, but the TL;DR here is ‘Tinder, but for jobs!’ – yes, now you can apply the same degree of care and rigour to your search for a new job as you do to your search for a new person upon whom to dump all your neuroses (this is how relationships work, so I am led to believe)! I have NO DETAILS about this beyond what’s on the app store description –  ‘Swype makes job hunting easy and effortless. Just swype right to apply for a job, and our AI agent will handle the rest. No more wasting time typing the same information over and over again.’ Beautifully, the copy goes on to say ‘You can focus on better things while Swype takes care of the applications’ which doesn’t make it sound anyone’s really that invested in the whole ‘work’ thing. Anyway, given what the job market looks and feels like at the moment you might be desperate enough to give this a go.
  • Webbed Briefs: This is the webpage of a video series which posts…very occasional explainers about How Stuff On The Web Works (and other things too), all delivered with a pleasing voice-over and really rather nicely-done animations. It’s all quite geeky – recent videos include ‘what is react js?’ and ‘what are accessibility overlays?’, so it’s not exactly LOLcats over here is what I’m saying – but if you’re someone who’s trying to get their head round specific tech/coding concepts then there may be something here for you, or equally if you’re interested in video-based teaching/communication-type stuff. This is all the work of one Haydon Pickering, which is very impressive – TAKE A BOW, MYSTERIOUS STRANGER HAYDON PICKERING!
  • Wonderland: Are YOU into nature? Do YOU like ‘nature journaling’? Erm, in which case, can you explain what the fcuk the term means, as I have no idea and this site doesn’t really explain it very well? Anyway, Wonderland is an international community of nature enthusiasts and nature journalers (WHAT IS IT???), and there are apps, and, as far as I can tell, this is basically just a sort of friendly community for people who like rambling, pointing at terns, that sort of thing. Here’s the description – not going to lie, a not-insignificant part of the reason I’m including this is the fact that it’s founded by someone I share a name with (HELLO, DISTANT MUIR-FRIEND! HELLO!): “Join our free, supportive, creative, and joyful global nature journaling community cofounded by John Muir Laws, an award-winning author, artist, educator, and a principal innovator in the global nature journaling movement. The Wonderland community is passionate about nature, art, science, curiosity, and wonder. We love to learn from each other, inspire each other, and have fun together in nature’s beauty while we share the joys of nature journaling.” Seriously, though, the journaling, wtaf?
  • Rude Captcha: A lovely bit of creative coding and webcam use, this – a captcha that requires you to prove you’re human by swearing at your webcam. PLEASE someone, implement this on your actual website because it’s very, very satisfying telling your computer to fcuk off, turns out.
  • Your Name In Landmasses: Via Friend of Curios Lee Randall, a lovely new site by NASA which uses its ridiculous database of satellite photography to let you write any word you fancy, spelled out in satellite images of lakes and the like which look vaguely like the letters you requested. There’s obviously a swear filter in there – BOO NASA! – but it’s very US-centric and as such I was able to get it to spell out ‘NONCE’ in roads and reservoirs with nary a complaint, so, well, IN YOUR FACE, SPACE PURITANS.
  • Splitscreen ASCII Videos: It’s quite hard to explain this – basically it lets you apply an ASCII filter across either your webcam feed or any video you give it, which filter can be extended across however much of the width of the video you like (see? I TOLD YOU IT WAS HARD TO EXPLAIN). I can’t for the life of me thing what you would use this for, but I hope at least one of you uses it for SOMETHING.
  • Microwave Too High: A subReddit dedicated to photographs of microwaves which are TOO HIGH UP. Can any North Americans reading this explain to me what the everliving fcuk is up with interior design in your country because fcuking hell some of these interiors.

By Laura Krifka

NEXT UP WE HAVE THE RETURN OF TOM ‘DAPWEARER’ SPOONER AND HIS SOUNDS FROM AROUND THE WORLD, THIS TIME TAKING IN WHAT HE ASSURES ME IS ‘JAMAICAN DOO-WOP, FIDDLE FROM POCAHONTAS COUNTY, VIOLIN FROM ARMENIA, A SHEHNAI VIRTUOSO AND PLENTY OF PERCUSSIVE RHYTHMS FROM AFRICA TO SOUTH AMERICA’!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGISE TO ANY NEW READERS THIS WEEK FOR, WELL, THE FACT THAT THIS NEWSLETTER IS LIKE THIS, BASICALLY, PT.2:  

  • Chocolate Milk: ANOTHER reader submission (thankyou, by the way, I really do appreciate it when you send me stuff), this one by Jack Bewley, who writes (with a pleasing degree of consideration, I must say): “This guy has singlehandedly traveled the US and reviewed thousands of chocolate milk drinks. Looks like he’s at 1,791 tried, ranked and reviewed. Most seriously I’ve ever seen chocolate milk treated. As a fan of the drink, his reviews seem to be right on too.” I am personally not a huge fan of chocolate milk – look, it’s an Italian thing I think, in Italy chocolate milk IS Nesquik, and it’s for kids to have at breakfast or teatime and dunk biscuits into, and NOTHING ELSE – but I respect Jack’s specific knowledge and feel inclined to trust his judgement. Bookmark this page for all your chocolate milk knowledge needs. NB – he also reviews UK drinks, and awarded Frijj a pretty harsh score of 1.0, should that help you decide whether you trust this man with your lactic hydration.
  • 25 and Me: The post-Harris wave of cautious optimism continues, although tempered by the slight worry that, well, it’s still VERY close, and she is yet to actually SAY anything, and it could all still go horribly wrong (please God no). One of the main vectors of fear amongst liberals of a certain stripe is PROJECT 25, the think tank vision of what ‘a robust conservative future’ looks like and which is either ‘a terrifying vision of a post-Democratic future in which Trump basically becomes God emperor’ or ‘QAnon for the libs’ depending on your perspective. Anyway, if you would like to explore some of the concepts apparently espoused in the doctrine but don’t fancy wading through several million words of tortuous wonk-prose to work out what the fcuk they might be, then someone has built this site which basically uses an LLM (Gemini, in case you’re curious) to interrogate the documentation behind the project. Don’t get too scared, it might not happen.
  • Become a Judge at the Tiramisu World Cup: Brought to my attention by Former Editor Paul, there is apparently a world cup of Tiramisu’ happening in Italy in October, and they are currently accepting applications for judges. Would YOU like to go to Treviso and eat your own bodyweight in coffee, egg, mascarpone and biscuit-based dessert?GREAT! All you need to do is answer some…actually incredibly obtuse and confusing questions about the granular detail of the judging process, and keep your fingers crossed! Should any Curios readers happen to be successful in their application, may I take this opportunity to apply for the role of translator/factotum for the trip? Thanks1
  • Ocean Photographer of the Year 2024: Fish, cephalopods, corals and crustacea (and a bunch of other stuff too) – these are gorgeous, and it’s worth taking the time to click through the various categories as there are more nominated images that are immediately apparent from the UX here (small gripe: why are so many of the sites accompanying these photo contests so fcuking bad at displaying the actual photos they are rewarding?). My personal favourite is the big walrus in the first set of shots, magnificent b4stard that he is, but I have a big soft spot for this one too.
  • Uses This: Occasionally I think ‘wow, I’ve been doing this for a long time’ (and usually at that point do a small cry for my lost youth and wasted years and WHAT HAS THE WEB EVER GIVEN BACK TO ME, EH, WHY IS MY LOVE SO UNREQUITED) and then I come across projects like this which has been going since 2009 and I feel like a dilettante. “Uses This is a collection of nerdy interviews asking people from all walks of life what they use to get the job done” – and, yes, that’s exactly what this is. There’s a pleasing variety of people and professions, as you’d expect over the course of over 1200 interviews(!), and even though a lot of this stuff doesn’t mean much to me I can concede that there’s something rather lovely about reading about people who are very DEEP into doing something, and doing it well. If you’re a particular sort of LIFE OPTIMISING person there’s probably some useful stuff you can glean from here, if you’re willing to do a bit of spelunking.
  • The RollerCoaster Database: I have definitely featured something like this before, but not, I think, this one – ALL OF THE ROLLERCOASTERS IN ALL OF THE WORLD! China has the greatest number, unsurprisingly – I have to say I think a grand tour of China’s theme parks would be a VERY good time, should anyone want to take me on one – but this really is international, covering (seemingly) every single theme park in the world outside of (I assume) North Korea. Details on each coaster vary wildly, but you can usually see at least a few pics – there’s also a page listing record-holding coasters, ranking them by drop size, top speed, etc, and I confess that it makes Alton Towers look a bit provincial by comparison. I mean, look, I have no desire to ever visit Riyadh, but LOOK AT THIS TERRIFYING BEAUTY.
  • Ambiguous Words: A list of words with ambiguous meanings – “Here’s a bunch of words that, free of any other context, have a LOT of meanings. Because of this flexibility, they can be instrumental in titles for your songs, poems, stories, and jokes. Click on each word to delve deeper into these words’ meanings. The most flexible words are at the top of the list.” Potentially useful for poets, copywriters and the like, it’s also a pleasing 5 minutes for anyone who loves language. I remember having a moment of proper revelation as a kid when I read Lolita and realised that Humbert’s…ambiguous description of his honeymoon (‘I had the idiot in hysterics’) was sort of the key to much of the reading of the rest of the novel, and I adore this site.
  • 10,000 Pixels: ANOTHER collaborative/multiplayer website (I told you it was a trend ffs), this is basically /r/Place but on a single URL. 10,000 pixels, each of which can be colour edited in realtime by any visitor to the page, allowing for REALTIME COLLABORATIVE PIXELART COMPOSITIONS. At the time of writing it’s all very benign and there’s no nazis or even anyone writing ‘poop’ (rare, I promise), and there’s something quite nice about just having the webpage open and seeing it change and evolve in realtime (zoom out for a proper view, it’s…slightly magical to watch, to my mind, as a bunch of strangers patiently collaborate to make things appear and disappear over time).
  • Oh My Goodness: Oh wow, this is a quite incredible site. I don’t THINK it is riddled with Malware, but I appreciate that the aesthetic very much screams ‘WE ARE GOING TO INFECT YOUR PC WITH SO MUCH INCREDIBLY DODGY SPYWARE AS SOON AS YOU SO MUCH AS CLICK’ and, in general, it has almost unparalleled ‘old person who doesn’t understand the internet’ energy. What is it? It is a free greetings card site! Have you ever had an older relative who sends you ecards (RIP mother mine, you inexplicable Jacquie Lawson obsessive, you)? In which case you will get the idea – except, well, a lot of the designs here are what a certain type of online person might describe as ‘very cursed’, and there’s a weird bawdiness to the tone, and then you get to the ‘about’ copy which details the site’s history and you realise this is ANOTHER 25 year old web domain which is somehow still going (they even added ‘AI cards’ last year, astonishingly), and, well, I sort-of love this. The cards, mind, really are fcuking awful – I promise you that there is a LOT of mileage in picking one person you know (ideally not all that well) and communicating with them solely via the medium of Oh My Goodness cards for a solid week.
  • Weird Little Ripple Generator Thingy: Yes, I know, but YOU click the link and then tell me what you’d have called it. See? EXACTLY. Anyway, this is a bit trippy and a bit soothing and I rather liked the fx (I suspect it’s also quite nicely coded, though I am too much of a luddite to be able to actually tell).
  • Reflect Orbital: I can’t quite work out how I feel about this. As far as I can tell, this company is putting a bunch of massive mirrors in space which it is then going to use to reflect sunlight down to the surface of the Earth, directing it very precisely so as to enable the continued production of solar energy via panels even at times when it ought to be night – which, tentatively, sounds like an incredible idea, extending the potential productivity of solar energy by a huge amount. Except, also, I have seen and read enough vaguely-dystopian scifi to be able to ALSO imagine the ways in which this could be used to effectively torture entire populations with FOREVERDAYLIGHT, or (and, ok, I appreciate my grasp of physics here is perhaps not exactly ‘robust’, but still) maybe BURN A CITY LIKE ANTS IN A MAGNIFYING GLASS, and now I don’t quite know what to think. It is quite frankly a remarkable idea, but I would quite like someone who understands this stuff to explain to me whether it is indeed A Good Thing or whether it’s in fact A Bad Thing (or, perhaps more likely, whether attempting to define everything as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is a fundamentally fcuking stupid approach to life that I really ought to grow out of).
  • Citroen 2CV Brochures from the 1970s: I mean, what more do you need to know? The brochures are actually fascinating from a design/style point of view, even if you’re not a Citroen obsessive like the owner of this website (I don’t think they would mind me describing them as such). If you are, though, then this is basically REALLY filthy bongo.
  • Fantasy Name Generators: ‘Fantasy’ in the ‘swords and sorcery’ sense rather than the ‘erotic reverie’ sense, although perhaps for some of you the two overlap to a degree. Anyway, if you’re a D&D player and need to quickly spin up a bunch of convincing-sounding names for, say, a bunch of half-orcs or a dwarven encampment, then you might find this interesting – if nothing else, the insane granularity you can apply here suggests someone somewhere has REALLY studied all the class guides closely. This is VERY niche, but might please some of you – and if not, it’s worth a click through and a quick play, because if nothing else a lot of the names it seems to throw up are pleasingly multisyllabic and ‘chewy’, if you have the same sort of vague word-synesthesia as I do.
  • The Lesbian Bar Project: Remarkably this is the second bit of BRANDED CONTENT to feature in consecutive weeks, and the second which I looked at and thought ‘you know what, this is…quite good!’ – although I’m not sure that it will do much to shift the brand position of Jaegermeister from ‘the medicinal stuff wot REAL LADS do shots of’’. Still, it’s a really interesting project which has been going for 4 years now, and which started as a Jaeger-sponsored PSA airing in the US to raise awareness of the fact that lesbian bars across the country were dying out, and which has pivoted into being what the homepage tells me is “an EMMY and GLAAD Award-winning documentary series, which tells the stories of lesbian queer bars from around the world.” Without watching any of the docs I can’t vouch for their quality, but the awards *seem* like a positive endorsement and in general I am very much in favour of the idea of something like this, where a brand effectively helps document a culture and preserve it rather than instead attempting to brand its fcuking logo all over said culture’s face.
  • Wall Town Wonders: I’m personally not really a VR person – I find the helmets cumbersome, and I will need better and more immersion before I’m ready to eschew the comfort of my chair and my gamepad. That said, this forthcoming title for the Meta Quest looks ABSOLUTELY AMAZING – it’s basically a small steampunk townbuilder thing, where you construct a city of buildings which…sort of get built into the actual walls of wherever you’re playing, and which contain ACTUAL TINY PEOPLE living ACTUAL TINY LIVES, and, honestly, if you’re the sort of person who’s ever thought ‘actually having the Borrowers as pets would be pretty cool’ then you will fall slightly in love with this.
  • Black Screens: From the FAQ: “Just a black screen display that fills your entire screen, creating a dark surface that you can control. This tool also can create and download any size black screen wallpaper image.” I genuinely have no idea AT ALL why this exists, or indeed why anyone would need the parallel service on the site of a 15 minute video that is nothing but…a blank screen, but, well, I have no idea who you are and so perhaps YOU will be the person who can explain it to me. Anyone?
  • The USC SFX Archive: Sound effects! So many of them! Some from the 30s and 40s, some more recent, but this is a HUGE trove of samples and clips – in particular there are a bunch from old cartoons which would be PERFECT as hiphop samples, but, honestly, this is a staggeringly rich collection on the Internet Archive.
  • Dogelon Mars: I think – and there’s been some pretty stiff competition over the past few years – that this MIGHT be the single lamest crypto/NFT/web3 thing I have ever seen. It contains the usual word salad complete with vague promises of ‘massive gameplay’ and ‘fungible digital goods’, and even goes so far as to make the following genuinely risible claim: “Dogelon Mars is creating a metaverse set on Mars, by integrating AI to create an immersive and interactive virtual experience. Our goal is to redefine how communities interact, build, and engage in digital spaces.” YES MATE OF COURSE YOU ARE NOW EXPLAIN WHAT THE FCUK THOSE WORDS MEAN! But, of course, the lamest thing of all is the name – I’m slightly of the opinion that anyone who gets suckered into this deserves everything they get. I mean, honestly, who can read this sentence and claim to understand what it is meant to be saying? “Scheduled to launch in Q3 2024, “Dogelon: Land on Mars” aims to provide users with new opportunities to explore, create, and interact within a Martian-themed environment. By leveraging AI and the efficiency of Rufus L2, Dogelon Mars is set to offer a unique experience that aligns with our mission of exploring new digital frontiers.” NO FCUKER, etc.
  • Family Fortunes Generator: You just got the ‘NEH-NERRH’ sound in your head, didn’t you? ADMIT IT. Anyway, this website lets you generate your very own Family Fortunes answer card, so you can set the category of thing (‘types of firearm’, say, or ‘ways to kill yourself’, and the answers you want to appear,  and LO! Welcome to an exciting new world of low-stakes memetic fun. I think, with a bit of work and a well-honed central bit, you could over time bully someone to the point of tears with these.
  • SceneWise: This is a theoretically fun game which I found a touch too easy to be really compelling – you have to rearrange the six images, each of which is an individual frame from a film, into chronological order, which sounds tricky but given you get six goes and the tiles lock into place as soon as you get them right is actually pretty easy to get right simply by guessing at random (which is what happens to me, as obviously I have no fcuking idea what any of these films are). Still, cinephiles might enjoy this.
  • Crucig: As a wordcel, though, this one I really do like. A small daily word puzzle where you have to solve both horizontal and vertical clues – it’s not hard, but it does that weird thing where it made me feel vaguely like I was using different bits of my brain simultaneously, like patting your head and rubbing your stomach.
  • One-Page RPG Jam 2024: An absolute motherlode of one-page RPGs for you to play, should you be into that sort of thing. Some of these are games, some are what feel more like personal acts of meditation or reflection, some are designed to be played in company while others are entirely solo experiences…there is a LOT in here if you’re willing to explore.
  • Graphs: The website shows you a graph tracking two variables over time – your job is to pick which of the four options said graph is depiction. Very much from the school of ‘correlation is not causation’ and quite interesting in a gentle, very geeky sort of way.
  • A Castle Built From Random Rooms: Finally this week, a charming little CYOA-style adventure which combines a light degree of surreality and self-reflexiveness with surprisingly deep mechanics (I particularly enjoyed the persistence of certain choices across the narrative) and a huge degree of replayability – this is basically a text-adventure roguelike, where each time the rooms you’re trying to traverse change in terms of layout, contents and the like, and where no two playthroughs will ever be the same, and there are a bunch of different endings, and, honestly, this is just a really good way of passing 30m while you wait for something more interesting to happen to you.

By Daisuke Ichiba

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS BY MAGNETIC SOUL AND IS MAKING ME FEEL LIKE I AM ON A BEACH SOMEWHERE LOVELY AT SUNSET RATHER THAN STARING AT A STEEL-GREY SKY IN AN UNPREPOSESSING PART OF SOUTH LONDON AT 0959AM AND WHICH MIGHT DO THE SAME FOR YOU IF YOU CONCENTRATE REALLY HARD! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Girls of the Internet Museum: This is nine years dormant, but it is SUCH a perfect time capsule of a certain era – the aesthetic, the discussions about webart and self and sexuality and presentation…I got a proper hit of digital nostalgia here, and I think this site will be a real madeline for you should you be of a particular era/persuastion.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS IS, ODDLY, EMPTY!

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • People Aren’t Posting: We;ve been having the ‘social media (or at least this era of it) is DYING!’ conversation for a few years now, accelerated since That Fcuking Man bought Twitter, but it feels timely again given the latest round of reasons to leave X and the simultaneous lack of any real, meaningful boom in any of the alternatives (yes, I know people have ‘flocked’ to Bluesky…but actually most of them really haven’t; yes, people are signed up to Threads…but I am yet to meet anyone who finds it a pleasant or useful place to spend time, and without news it’s dead to me). This piece is a good overview of the whys, and does a better job of most that I’ve read of articulating the mechanical reasons as to them – it’s a decent overview of incentives and burdens inherent in a network, and how unbalancing those two factors can fatally wreck a posting ecosystem, and basically boils down to this: “Apps like Instagram are split into two separate platforms for two separate groups of people: a social connector and an entertainment media center. The goal is to balance incentive enough for the latter to ensure there is enough fodder for the former” and this: “Since social media is now more aligned with digital video entertainment platforms, the act of posting is arguably more aligned with work rather than leisure, while the act of consuming is more aligned with being entertained and, therefore, sold to rather than offering connection.” This is smart and worth a read if you’re interested in how communities and incentives and power networks function, in both theory and practice.
  • John Lanchester on Markets and Value: I will include pretty much anything Lanchester writes for the LRB about money, markets and late-stage capitalism – he’s not only a superb writer (I have said this before, but ‘The Debt to Pleasure’ is one of my favourite ever novels and one you really should read) but he’s also got a rare ability to explain concepts that ordinarily I find not only hard but STAGGERINGLY BORING in a way that makes them comprehensible and interesting. Here he does a combined review of two books about modern finance, the first a profile of one of the world’s most successful hedge funds and the second the autobiography of a now-reformed City trader, which allows him to offer a range of reasonably-digestible series of explanations as to How This Stuff Works and Why It Might Be Better For Everyone Not Directly Involved In Making Violent Bank From Such Systems If They Didn’t In Fact Work That Way. It’s quite hard to read this without getting a *bit* annoyed at how much of this stuff seems designed less to aid ‘value creation’ and more to aid ‘specific men at specific companies becoming plutocratically rich’, basically, and if you’re not 10% more left-wing by the end then I really don’t know what to do with you.
  • That ‘AI and Art’ Essay Everyone’s Talking About: Ted Chiang’s written several well-shared pieces talking about AI over the past few years, largely focusing on the creative output side of things – this essay has been EVERYWHERE this week, largely as a result of a title (“Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art”) which is being wrongly interpreted as “You can’t make art with AI”, which is very much NOT what Chiang is saying. Broadly speaking I agree with some of the points he makes, specifically about the requirement for art to have an element of intentionality which is necessarily absent from anything made by (current generative) AI being as all it is is maths, and maths cannot have intent. Equally, though, Chiang concedes that artists have made, are making, and will continue to make, work *in conjunction with* non-intentional systems, and that these works are perfectly capable of being considered as ‘art’. Basically I think this piece is a storm in a teacup – all Chiang is saying is that The Machine cannot alone be considered to make art because of the lack of intentionality embodied in its making, but that that does not preclude intentional entities (ie us) from using the outputs of AI to create work that is very intentional indeed (and here we circle all the way back to what I was saying about Trisha Code all those many thousands of words ago – see, SEAMLESS ffs).
  • Post-Apocalyptic Education: Ethan Mollick is back again with another measured ‘where we are with this stuff’ on AI, this time as it relates to education and particularly university education. Mollick’s a professor and so has a particular special interest in this – his point, that the genie is out of the bottle when it comes to students using GenAI and that as such it makes sense for educators to start to think of ways you can teach said students about how to maybe use these tools to augment, rather than replace, their studies, is a sensible one, and worth reading if you’re a parent worried that your kid’s going to fail their GCSEs because they’re getting ChatGPT to write all their coursework (that is not why they are going to fail – they are going to fail because of YOUR subpar genetic material!).
  • Why LLMs Aren’t Quite Modelling Language: Ok, this is quite knotty but reasonably-accessible and it touches on issues I’ve mentioned in here before about language, consciousness, embodiment and LLMs, and why their relationship to language is possibly different (and less intimate) than we might have initially assumed – rather than attempt to summarise, I am going to take the lazy way out and paste a couple of reasonably-explicatory paras: “The problem is that one of the more modern branches of cognitive science sees language as a behavior rather than a big pile of text. In other words, language is something we do, and have done for hundreds of thousands of years. The approach taken by Birhane and her colleagues is to understand human thought in terms that are “embodied” and “enacted.” “The idea is that cognition doesn’t end at the brain and the person doesn’t end at the the skin. Rather, cognition is extended. Personhood is messy, ambiguous, intertwined with the existence of others, and so on,” she said.”
  • How Do You Change A Chatbot’s Mind?: To be clear, I think this is a bad and badly-written article penned by someone who, based on the bodying he received for his last piece on AI, I would have expected to still be hiding somewhere, licking his wounds and reading up on how this sh1t actually works. Kevin Roose – for it is he, the man who wrote that risible piece about how he got freaked out because a chatbot said it loved him – writes for the New York Times about how the latest versions of ChatGPT et al will now, when asked about him, be less than complimentary. Roose seems to ascribe this to them having ‘learned’ that he has ‘doubts’ about them, and seems to spin it into some sort of vaguely-Roko’s Basilisk (sorry for dooming you there!) adjacent situation where he wants to change their mind ahead of their inevitable takeover of everything…look, this is all very dumb, and borderline-irresponsible reporting, to my mind (I think the NYT shouldn’t publish essays that make this stuff sound sentient or magical!), but about halfway through it segues into slightly more interesting territory, as Roose starts talking to the new wave of AI SEO consultants (just as mendacious, just as shady, twice as expensive!) and you get a glimpse of how many people are going to make quick back developing ‘AI ingestion-resistent content strategies’. Go on, quick, register the consultancy, buy the url and spin up the website, there are idiots to fleece!
  • The NaNoWriMo AI Controversy: This week’s big ‘GAH THE INTEGRITY OF ART IS BEING FCUKED BY THE MACHINE’ is on one hand a bit depressing and on the other very funny. The depressing bit is that the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo – you know, that thing where people decide to write a terrible, unreadable, unpublishable novel within a 30 day timespan) people this week released a statement saying that they would be fine with people using AI to write said terrible, unreadable novels – WHICH SORT OF RATHER DEFEATS THE FCUKING PURPOSE OF A NOVEL WRITING INITIATIVE SEEING AS THERE WOULDN’T IN FACT BE ANY WRITING HAPPENING. They even went so far as to call opposition to AI ‘ableist’, which, well, fcuking hell. This 404 Media piece does a decent job of outlining the controversy – and NaNoWriMo’s subsequent ‘clarification’ of their position, but to my mind the funny bit is that, well, NaNoWriMo as an entity/organisation is no stranger to some beef, as evidenced by this astonishingly petty and detailed document, and what I want to know is how the everliving fcuk does an initiative which, to be clear, is about nothing more than saying ‘hey, why not try writing a whole book one November? Might be fun!’ has managed to be THIS messy. I am possibly being unfair, but I feel that the NaNoWriMo people have very strong ‘polycule energy’ if you see what I mean.
  • The Doc Web: Jay Springett writes about the beauty of collaborative documents, and the idea of ‘working in the shop window’, and I partly just really like the thinking in here about how this might work as collaborative/performative work: “Here’s the idea: Once a month. A group of authors and contributors come together for a live writing session, jamming in Google Docs. Maybe we stream the Zoom call on Twitch, allowing viewers to watch the new issue evolve in real-time – perhaps even contributing comments and suggestions in the document. This would transform the act of writing and publishing into a performance—a shared experience that blends the roles of creator and audience. As well as making the production of each webzine fun.” Would you like me to open up the Curios draft so you can watch me type this shit in realtime? No, of course you fcuking wouldn’t, shut up Matt.
  • This Summer, Everything Was Marketing: You might read this headline and think ‘only this Summer?’ and then sigh and cry a bit, but it’s a broadly-interesting look at how this year really has felt like the apogee of the ‘zeitgeist chewed up by the global brand ecosystem and digested and fed to us again as the vomited up remains of said zeitgeist’ thing, and how the pace of it is getting A BIT MUCH. “It’s 2024 and every man with a strong nose is a hot rodent boyfriend, every situationship is diabolical, and every girl is demure. Brat the album will stand up on the basis of our individual relationships to it, but Brat the concept has been run into the ground. This is the way of everything now. From the “auras” on display at the Olympics to the coconut tree comments of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, the language of social media is increasingly the first point of entry to culture and politics, creating a mythology that informs the subject rather than the other way around. In other words: everything is marketing and nothing matters.”
  • Securing the Viral Bag in 2024: With the news that FellatioGirl (I refuse to use the other nickname because it is too ugly to type) is launching a podcast under the Paul umbrella (fair play, the title is very good), and the recent story about the ‘demure, mindful’ woman struggling to secure the copyright on her viral catchphrase, this is an interesting piece about how ‘creators’ (sorry, but I feel…angry about being forced to use that word to describe someone who has found fame thanks to her ability to onomatopoeically describe the act of giving sloppy head – no shade to Miss Welch who seems like a nice enough young woman, but ‘creator’?) these days have to move fast to secure the proceeds of their 15 minutes. I like to imagine Antoine Dobson reading this somewhere (hopefully somewhere warm and comfortable) and smiling to himself.
  • Google Forms Dating: I had heard that people were using Google Forms as means of finding and screening potential partners, but I confess that the additional hack of then chucking a bit of ad spend behind the link to promote it to your local postcodes was new to me and is sort of brilliantly depressing. IS THERE NO FACET OF OUR LIVES ADVERMARKETINGPR CANNOT INVADE? No, seemingly not. Anyway, this is a decent overview of the latest nadir in the modern dating landscape and made me momentarily miserable until I realised that I am so old that none of this sh1t is ever going to apply to me again and I should instead just sit and wait quietly for lonely death.
  • The Secret Inside One Million Checkboxes: Nolen Royalty – he of TINY AWARD-WINNING website One Million Checkboxes, writes a genuinely heartwarming (if slightly-geeky) tale of how his webproject got hacked by kids in a genuinely lovely way. This honestly gave me a proper sense of ‘the kids are alright!’, which doesn’t often happen these days – this is SO creative, seriously.
  • Burgers: This is a New York Times piece about burgers – specifically, about 11 variations across the US that ‘make the burger great’ – and I am including it mainly because OH MY GOD do these look good, and read well, and this basically made me want to inhale about seven minced cows at once. Can someone take a look at this and PLEASE tell me where I can get a decent burger in London that doesn’t involve me having to a) queue or b) watch some awful cnut’s TikTok to find the location? Serious request.
  • Countess Bathory: I have always had a soft spot for the Bathory story, but had always assumed that it was either entirely or mostly-confected – turns out, though, that there’s a grisly core of truth to the whole thing and that an awful lot of young women did disappear and die in and around her residence in 1600s Hungary. Questions remain, though, about whether it was Bathory doing the killing, and why – this piece doesn’t answer them, but it’s a fascinating look at both the history and the resulting mythos. It also contains some fabulous details, including this one – whatever you say about People Of Past Times, it is undeniably true that they were endlessly, brilliantly inventive when it came to inventing novel ways of offing people: “Violent public executions were commonplace in Hungary during her childhood, and stories tell of a young Báthory witnessing a man being stitched into a horse while still alive.” READ THAT LAST BIT BACK AGAIN. THAT’S RIGHT.
  • The Rise of Pirated Medicine: This is a nice callback piece – about 6 or seven years ago I featured a longread in here about biohacking collective Four Thieves, who were playing around with CRISPR and related technologies to effectively work out how to fix their own bodies at low cost (you may be unsurprised to learn that this motivation arose from them being North American and realising that, say, ‘getting cancer’ is a really fcuking expensive proposition) – this is an update on the collective, their work, and what they are now able to do, and it is both inspirational and vaguely-terrifying and ought to make you quite angry about how the Pharma industry works and what it charges (and yes, I know, R&D costs! But equally I was once told by someone senior at Pfizer that these days their marketing budgets significantly outweigh the research spend, so, well, fcuk them and their profit margins into the sun).
  • In Search of Lost Time, lol: Ok, this is a single note gag but for some reason it has repeatedly made me laugh quite a lot this morning (overtired, as per), and as such I share it with you – this is a link to a GDrive containing a PDF of Marcel Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’, in all its many thousands of pages, the only difference from the original being that each and every sentence ends in ‘lol’. Which, it turns out, does radically alter the tenor and general vibe of a classic – honestly, can someone build something that will automatically Lolify any ebook in your collection? Please? It’s like stick-on googly eyes for prose.
  • WTF Is The River Cafe Podcast?: Podcasts are, basically, sh1t, aren’t they? Not ALL podcasts, obvs – I went to a recording of this one last night which was actually excellent, and, should you be interested in hearing my horrible, too-fast voice, I even appeared on one earlier this week – but as a rule they can fcuk off (I am just bitter at how much I know Alastair Cambell and Rory Stewart earn from TRIP). In this piece in Vittles, Simran Han goes in on the River Cafe podcast (WHY DOES IT HAVE A PODCAST?!?!?! I *bet* whoever’s doing the production and editing on this is fleecing them like nobody’s business), where Ruth(ie) Rogers interviews a cavalcade of VERY A-List guests about, er, food, I think, and how ace the River Cafe is – I think this does a very good job of articulating why, as a rule, I would like the medium to die, and it’s very funny, and despite everything I’ve written in the preceding 150 words it made me quite want to listen to an episode damn them.
  • I Am Having A Really Hard Time: I have no idea how I found this, or who J Keenan (the author is), but I thought it was a lovely little bit of writing, a semi-stream-of-consciousness about fear and death and friendship and loss, and it stayed with me all week and maybe it will with you too.
  • Oath To The Queen: Xiaolu Guo writes in Granta about the process of ‘becoming English’, taking the citizenship test, about how ideology manifests differently in different countries and how it’s seen and how symbols are interpreted and how, perhaps, a current global giant looks at a previous one, with a degree of curious pity. “As I exited the exam room, I had little hope that I would pass. Deep down I think my lack of preparation was not just laziness, or merely the product of preoccupation with other things, but also resistance. There was something about the implicit pride in a supposed thousand years of monarchy, and the parliamentary system – which few I suspected understood – that made me feel ill at ease. It was the same syndrome as The Archers. I was just being introduced to the cultural symbols and motifs of the United Kingdom. People learn the history of kings and queens just like we learn fairy tales or consume the latest soap operas. And what for? It’s all about instilling the collective wisdom of the ruling classes, yet done in the most bland and innocuous way.”
  • In Search of Circus Europa: I’ll be honest, I’ve never really thought of Switzerland as a place where interesting things happen – there’s a reason P&G, home to the blandest corporate drones ever vat-grown in a lab, have their home there, after all. Then I read this piece, about Basel’s lunatic-sounding three-day carnival, and I want to go SO MUCH. This is honestly such a good piece of writing – about circus and carnival and performance and folklore and community and all sorts besides, which more than anything evokes a powerful sense of the ODD; there’s something incredibly Midsommar-ish about the atmosphere of this piece (no, really), which will make me very disappointed should I ever visit this carnival and not get, I don’t know, abducted by some sort of pagan goat creature.
  • This Is Not A Eulogy: Finally this week, notes on a friendship, notes on a suicide. I thought  this was beautiful. “If this were fiction, I’d set the following scene in a restaurant with a view of the park, the two of us cozied in a velvet banquette, me studying the sprinkling of freckles on her nose revealed in the late afternoon light, crème fraiche and martinis coating our words. Instead, it happened over the phone: she asked me if I wanted to come with her. She’d been saving up pills and was sure her supply had reached overkill. She’d reserved a room at The Paramount, the Philippe Starck place du moment conveniently located only two blocks from my apartment, and said she’d buy champagne too, the good stuff. She was living off her mom’s insurance money. “We lie down, side by side on the bed. On it, not under the covers, that’s important. Then we’re falling, and neither of us will ever be alone.””

By Guy Vording

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 30/08/24

Reading Time: 34 minutes

HAPPY LAST FRIDAY IN AUGUST, EVERYONE!

That’s right – it’s basically all over, it’s all mist and mellow fruitfulness from hereon in (apart from those of you reading this in the antipodes – thanks Rosie! Does this satisfy your hubris?), but thankfully this edition of Curios is PACKED FULL OF SUNSHINE and will possibly extend the summer for another week or so if you click every single link and wish REALLY HARD.

(this is not true, sorry – Curios is the same old litany of phoned-in prose and bitter cynicism it always is, and the cold and the rain are inevitable).

BUT, before we crack on with the links this week, we have our Tiny Awards winners!  Congratulations to Elliott Cost, who made One Minute Park (winner of the main award, £500 and a HANDMADE TROPHY!), and (the truly wonderfully-named) Nolen Royalty, whose One Million Checkboxes won the multiplayer award and £300! The Tiny Awards will be back next year, presuming neither Kris or I die in the intervening 9-10 months or are so deep in penury that we can no longer afford to do it.

A brief moment of sincerity – thanks SO MUCH to everyone who shared the links, who voted, who submitted sites, who said nice things about the project, who wrote about it and who generally made it feel like it was A Good and Worthwhile thing to do – as someone who’s basically got a pathological aversion to, well, ‘trying’, it was honestly wonderful to be reminded of the fact that it is actually worth putting effort into things every now and again because you can occasionally make Nice And Good Things Happen. Seriously, thankyou so much to everyone who engaged even a tiny (lol!) bit with the project, it’s honestly making me get a bit emo so I am going to have to stop typing about it now.

I am still Matt, this is still Curios, and you will never have to read me being ‘sincere’ at you ever again, I promise (well, until next year).

By Slawomir Elsner (images via TIH, as per)

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH A TRULY SUPERB PLAYLIST, 20 HOURS OF ECLECTIC, VARIED BUT CONSISTENTLY-AWESOME TRACKS SELECTED AND COMPILED BY COLECTIVO FUTURO! 

THE SECTION WHICH HAS JUST REALISED IT REALLY NEEDS A HOLIDAY, PT.1:  

  • Stranger Video: The second site in just a few weeks that goes big on EYES – feel free to make this the basis of some sort of spurious ‘moments of ocular contact are going to be BIG in 2025!’ trends prediction! After Neal’s Eyechat from a couple of Curios ago comes this effort from prolific builder of Fun Web Things (and Tiny Award 2024 winner, no less! The prestige! Nolen, should you read this you should probably consider getting that honorific inked somewhere on your flesh) Nolen Royalty – again, the premise is basically that the site pairs you with another user somewhere in the world, showing each of you a view of the other that includes only a pretty intense close-up of their face – whereas Neal’s site was just about staring at each other until you got uncomfortable and noped out, this one introduces a gentle element of competition, with the connection to your mysterious eye buddy lasting only as long as you can both resist blinking – as soon as one participant blinks, the video link is severed. I really, really enjoy this – short periods of INTENSE STARING are, to my mind, the very best way to meet strangers on the web – but do be warned that, depending on traffic, you may end up getting matched with the same person repeatedly, which is exactly what happened to me earlier this week when I ended up repeatedly staring deep into the eyes of an increasingly-uncomfortable kid who I am pretty sure was by the end convinced that I was plumbing the very depths of his soul with my uncomfortably-large pupils. The BEST thing about this, though, is that there’s a very real possibility that for a few hours this afternoon it will enable readers of Curios to GAZE INTO EACH OTHERS’ SOULS – know that if you click this link there is a non-trivial possibility that you will be matched with one of the other weird masochists who chooses to subscribe to this piece of sh1t. Is this…is this ‘community building’? I’ll be inviting you all to sign up for my ‘guided creativity retreat’ next.
  • Onge: This is SO beautifully done. Onge is the personal website of…someone from South America who, as far as I can tell, has built this on top of retro platform NeoCities. It’s very simple – the content amounts to their art portfolio, notes on films they like, a blog, a small lofi chat function, that sort of thing – but the aesthetic on display is GLORIOUS, the transitional animations as you navigate between the different site elements are sublime, and I’m generally a sucker for this sort of vaguely-pointillist/pixellist art style. Aside from anything else, I think building this on NeoCities is incredibly impressive and shows the flexibility of the platform – can we have a resurgence in personal websites in 2025, please? I think it would be A Good Thing, and a nice alternative to fcuking Insta.
  • Cellar Door: What’s the BEST word? No, fcuk off, that’s NOT a spurious and reductive and entirely-subjective question! Cellar Door is a website dedicated to determining the best-loved collection of letters in the English language – click the link and you’re presented with a series of binary choices between words, with your sole task being to pick your preferred option of the two. Click, pick, rinse, repeat. The site tracks votes, so you can also peruse a leaderboard of the current frontrunners, which is how I am able to tell you with no little authority that, as of 731am BST on 30 August, the BEST word in the English language is ‘rut’. No, it is, I don’t make the rules. I would quite like to see this paired with a version designed to find the world’s least-favourite word, except you just know it would be overtaken by the sorts of tedious pr1cks who pretend to find the term ‘moist’ inherently upsetting (NOONE DISLIKES THE WORD ‘MOIST’ YOU PERFORMATIVE DULLARDS, I BET THE VENN DIAGRAM OF YOU AND PEOPLE WHO PRETEND TO BE SCARED OF CLOWNS IS A CIRCLE). For what it’s worth, by the way, the best word is either ‘quiddity’ or ‘zugzwang’ (this is a fact and I will brook no argument).
  • Dracula Flow Scripture: I have featured two separate Dracula Flow videos on here, but I have…doubts as to how many of you engaged with them – partly because obviously I have no idea who clicks on what, partly because I always suspect that people have in the main lost the will to live by the time I eventually get to the videos (this is the point at which you could, if you were so minded, choose to drop me an email reassuring me that this is not in fact the case), and partly because, well, they are very fcuking odd indeed. This is a shame, because I continue to maintain that they are ART in the purest sense – and so I was thrilled this week to discover that some wonderful human has created a Dracula Flow soundboard so you can experience the DEEP WISDOM of the scripture without necessarily needing to imbibe it via the medium of longform YouTube. Click the link, hit the button and let the knowledge seep into your bones – I find this almost cripplingly addictive, to the point that I just lost (*checks*) 4 minutes to it just now, listening to a faceless man shouting ‘get me the fcuking fentanyl’ and cry-laughing. I think I might be overtired tbh.
  • Watercolour Blade Runner: Ok, this should technically be in the videos but I have no idea how to embed it from the Internet Archive and so it can sit here instead – this is quite astonishing, honestly, and really does warrant a look. Per the person who has found and archived it, “twelve years ago, a painter by the name of anders ramsell painted 12,597 aquarelle paintings of blade runner, shot by shot, of the entire film edited down to ~35 minutes. it took two years of painstaking work, all done in his spare time after work each night. the video circled around the web for a few years, and quietly disappeared from every single site it was hosted at. a few months ago i spent a few hours digging for it, and finally found a copy of the original file.” This is proper INTERNET HISTORY, an incredible labour of love and a quite astonishing technical achievement – the degree of effort and painstaking attention speak to a frankly-obsessional tendency in the original artist, but it really is a staggering bit of work (and I say that as someone who has no personal interest in Blade Runner whatsoever).
  • I Need A Book Cover: I am genuinely thrilled when people email me their work for inclusion in Curios, and it was lovely receiving a note from Zoe in the US about this project. I Need A Book Cover is a site that collects different examples of, er, book cover design for anyone to peruse – it’s also grown into a resource for writers looking for cover designers, or designers looking for projects, and in general is a really useful resource for anyone interested in cover design in general . Per Zoe,  “Using the different category tabs on the left, you can filter your results to look at book covers that all use similar styles, such as top and bottom text or another favorite of mine, trompe l’oeil. Or, you can look at only purple covers, etc….Designers love it for inspiration, Art Directors use the directory to remind themselves of who to hire next, editors use it for mood board creation, book bloggers come to the site to find design credits, and self-publishers use the directory and the Jobs Board to HIRE designers. I posted two new book cover design briefs to the jobs board just this morning.” Big fan of this, and even a quick perusal of the selection has shown me some gorgeous bits of work that I’ve never seen before – this, for example, which I would totally have as a piece of art at home.
  • Fuzzzel: I once had a brief thing with someone who, I discovered, was incapable of sleeping without the ‘reassuring’ fuzz of white noise blaring out of their phone speaker as they kipped – this was how I learned that I, by contrast, find the opposite. Still, if you’re the sort of oddity who needs the sound of a detuned radio to slip out of consciousness of a night then you might enjoy this app, which for the low, low sum of $4 will provide you with not just ANY white noise but ARTISANAL white noise, white noise ‘composed’ by sound artists and presumably designed to help you attain a better, cleaner, more valuable tier of rest than that afforded by, I don’t know, turning the AM dial all the way to the left. “These longform explorations of static, drones, fuzz, wind and spectrum-filling oblivion make Fuzzzel not only a utilitarian sound-making device but a one-of-a-kind creative platform. Fuzzzel reroutes the demand for white noise into the hands of professionals, sound artists and creatives. Every piece on Fuzzzel is a lengthy, exclusive ambient journey created with the pulse of a human being and the ear of a gifted musician. Each piece — together totaling more than two hours of new music — loops indefinitely alongside a unique video provided by each artist.” Obviously I am being sniffy about this because, well, I can, but the artists featured here are actual, proper musicians, and I suppose if you’re the sort of person who likes ‘challenging’ music and thinks the sonic output of, say, Skinny Puppy is almost-saccharine in its melodic nature then you might find something deeply satisfying about it.
  • GTAesthetic: A Twitter account posting screenshots and clips from a (seemingly heavily-modded) version of GTA San Andreas. There’s something weirdly, powerfully nostalgic about these visuals – part of it is lost youth nostalgia, obviously (how innocent our San Andreas days!), but part of it’s the odd, post-digital semi-hauntological thing that you get with specific pixel aesthetics, and the very particular strangeness of looking at an old videogame which itself is mimicking the vibe and aesthetic of old TV shows and films. I like this a lot, though the aesthetic is, for me, *slightly* ruined by the fact that the most recent screencaps feature a modded-in version of Hatsune Miku which feels like it queers the vibe slightly.
  • Only Visit Once: Almost certainly not the first site with this gimmick to have featured here over the years, but I’ve not seen one for a while and it’s a concept I am very much a fan of. The site itself isn’t hugely exciting – it’s a relatively simple ‘leave a message for future visitors’-type gimmick where you’re invited to either submit your own nugget of wisdom/sub-Hallmark bromide (delete as applicable) for others to read, or to peruse the words left by previous visitors – but the catch is that you can only visit the url once. Any repeat visits from (I presume) the same IP address will result in a redirect to a different page which simply says “You’ve already passed this way before. Your journey lies ahead—don’t look back.” I feel there is a LOT of quite fun stuff you could do with this – there are a bunch of semi-obvious ‘ARTY WEBSITE’ concepts that spring to mind, but I’m sure you can all think of some EXCITING COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (you filthy capitalists, you!).
  • Live Lightning Maps: I’m not entirely sure how ‘live’ the ‘live’ element of this is, but opening it now I am struck by the fact that WE ARE CONSTANTLY BEING STRUCK BY SPACE ELECTRICITY (yes, I know that lightning is not *technically* – or indeed in any meaningful way whatsoever – ‘space electricity’, but let me have my childish sense of wonder, please). Seriously, this is mildly-terrifying. If you fancy REALLY upsetting your young children, why not bring this up on a big screen and tell them it’s a realtime depiction of where the just-announced nuclear strikes are landing? FUN FOR ALL THE FAMILY!
  • One Million Letters: So after Nolen’s One Million Checkboxes (did I mention it won the multiplayer Tiny Award? It did, you know) it seems ‘One Million X’ is goint to be a thing in frivolous webdesign for a while. This is a variant on the theme which presents a million spaces for characters to be typed, with anyone able to add or remove letters per their wont – what this means in practice is that you’ve got a VERY BIG group writing project, which effectively acts as a completely incomprehensible expression of the collective ID of what appears to be a LOT of c.13 year olds (I am basing this on the number of users who appear to be very keen to talk about ‘poop’). This is pretty much entirely gibberish, but I quite like the massively random nature of it and the scale means that you can occasionally find some quite odd and occasionally poignant things if you scroll down far enough (NB – at the time of writing this doesn’t appear to feature any appalling hatespeech or slurs, etc, but I’m conscious that these sorts of things are only ever one 4Chan brigading away from being nazi-adjacent cesspits so, well, caveat emptor and all that).
  • Elastic Grid: Click the link, move your mouse around and get lost in the optical illusion. I would really, really like to put this on the big wraparound HD screens at the horrible Outernet development at Tottenham Court Road and use it to give the assembled masses a really dreadful case of motion sickness.
  • Coffee: This comes via Kris, I think – I have no idea who has made it, or who they are, or where they live, but I do know, thanks to this site, that they drink a lot of coffee, and document each cup they drink by posting a small, unremarkable photo of it on this site. Per the stats, this has been going for five years and features just shy of 1300 individual cups – why? WHY THE FCUK NOT MUST EVERYTHING HAVE A RATIONALE? JESUS WEPT.
  • Creative Bots: A collection of bots and bot-related projects by Stefan Bohacek – these are mostly on Mastodon now (THANKS ELON YOU FCUKING PR1CK), but if you can get over the general sense of distaste that probably gives you then there’s a really nice range of bots here, from the creative to the whimsical – bots that share lighthouses, bots that share pictures of the sorts of spiral graphics used to hynotise Wil E Coyote in countless Looney Tunes shorts, bots that share photos from the South Pole…partly just a fun collection of digital projects, but also a pleasant reminder of how (relatively) easy it is to spin up something small and frivolous that makes the web a marginally-nicer place than it would otherwise be.
  • Live Air Traffic Control Feeds: According to pretty much everything I’ve read on the topic, and the genuinely weird 90s film Pushing Tin, being an air traffic controller is an insanely stressful job and the sort of thing that makes alcoholics or outpatients of many professionals in the trade. Which in turn makes it odd that listening to the radio chatter from air traffic controllers is so weirdly soothing – as I type I am listening in to the lads in Osaka brining the planes home in crackly Japanese and there’s something undeniably pleasing and ASMR-adjacent about the whole thing. This page takes you to a list of the ‘top 50’ air traffic control streams in the world (I have literally no idea how they are quantifying ‘best’ here) and you can drop in on airports from Boston to Sydney and everywhere inbetween, and this is strangely just wonderful and oddly soothing. Except, I imagine, should you happen on a stream at a point at which something goes terribly, fierily wrong.
  • AI Robocalls: This is, fine, not a particularly interesting website per se – the company’s called Bland and they want to flog you automated calls centre solutions delivered via THE MAGICAL (not magical) POWER OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, which isn’t something I imagine any of you give a particular fcuk about. BUT! This also gives you the option to check out the service by putting in your phone number and getting one of said AI calls centre operators to give you a ring, and it’s worth a go because fcuking hell is this impressive. It still sounds like a robot, but the responsiveness and speed and accuracy is pretty incredible – consider the canary in the ‘are calls centre staff still going to have jobs in 2026?’ coalmine to be pretty definitively fcuked, basically.
  • Fragrantica: I went out for my friend Jay’s birthday drinks this week and met some very nice people, one of whom told me about this INCREDIBLE website – Fragrantica is an online community for people who are really, really into perfumes, and who really, really want to read and write reviews about said perfumes, and OH MY GOD is this a wonderful portal into an obsessional world I genuinely didn’t know existed. This is probably a hugely-useful place if you’re serious about fragrance and want to find a new scent based on stuff you already like, or if you’re the sort of person who understands base notes and top notes, or who wants to find a really obscure smell to make your own, but, for me (a man who as a general rule hopes only that they don’t smell actively terrible), the main joy comes in the reviews, particularly of the more challenging scents – the person who introduced me to this suggested this perfume and subsequent reviews as a decent entry point into the madness, and, well, click this link and read the reviews. “my boyfriend has this…i honestly can’t stand it T_T it just smells like hatred and pain and blood and war and death . there’s some okayish notes like the flowers but they’re a bit weaker but overall it makes me really sad and unless you want to smell like wrath then don’t buy :’(“ HOW MUCH DO YOU WANT TO SMELL THIS NOW? Honestly, ‘smell like wrath’ may well be the most perfect advertising line for a scent ever.

By a seemingly-uncredit artist for Harper’s in 1910

INCREASE THE TEMPO AND YOUR HEARTRATE NOW WITH THIS MIX OF TECH/TRANCE TRACKS BY EVERYONE’S FAVOURITE GERMANOPHILE FORMER EDITOR PAUL!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS JUST REALISED IT REALLY NEEDS A HOLIDAY, PT.2:  

  • No Borders: What does a map look like when you remove countries, seas, borders, coastlines…well, it looks like this. Effectively just a selection of place names arrayed on a grey background, this starts to become interesting when you zoom in – there’s something genuinely strange about the dissociation engendered by the familiarity of the places and the complete absence of any of the familiar cartographic reference points you associate with them, and the way in which your brain starts to insinuate the shapes of nations based on the spaces between placenames…This is ostensibly a very simple and not-hugely-interesting project, but I found it weirdly compelling and spent longer staring at this week than I expected to, for reasons I can’t adequately explain.
  • Departure Mono: Per the description on the site, “departure mono is a monospaced pixel font with a lo-fi technical vibe” – that is, basically, it, but it’s a really rather lovely font that is significantly more aesthetically-pleasing than a lot of similar ones I’ve seen that plough the ‘retro, 8-bit’ furrow. Plus the website is really, really nicely designed, and even includes a proper playable game of Arkanoid at the bottom which is the sort of friendly Easter Egg that I am very much a fan of.
  • Tolans: Since the early days of the GREAT GENERATIVE AI HYPECYCLE BOOM I’ve been waiting for someone to spin up a ‘friendly interactive Tamagotchi on steroids’-type application, a little digital cartoon companion to live in your phone and provide succour and companionship (ahem, not for ME, you understand, I DEFINITELY have enough friends, on the subject of which WHY WON’T YOU CALL ME?) – and lo, a mere two years or so hence, we have Tolans! “Meet your Tolan: a friendly little alien you can talk to about whatever, and who can even help picture your ideas! Want to be a fashion designer? Your Tolan is here to help you visualize a cool new shirt or pair of sneakers. Writing a book? They can help brainstorm your hero’s amazing journey. With Tolans in your life, there are no limits to your creativity. Your Tolan is highly personalized to you. They love to chat about any topic you choose and remember important details from past conversations.” So basically this is like Replika (in theory, at least), except with a hefty additional layer of character design on top, so rather than speaking to a disembodied entity you’re instead chatting with a vaguely-friendly-looking pastel coloured character with what looks like a rubber glove on its head, presented to you as a sort of combination pet-cum-digital-assistant. It’s iOS-only so I’ve not personally tried this out – and it’s a subscription service, obvs – but it might be interesting to take a look at. If nothing else you can have fun attempting to jailbreak it and get your ‘friendly alien companion’ to instruct you on how to make ersatz napalm with some petrol, some instant coffee and some orange juice.
  • ‍Wigglypaint: Ooh, this is a pleasing little digital art toy. “Wigglypaint is a juicy, jiggly drawing program built with Decker, with notable similarities to Shake Art and KidPix. Pick a tool, make a doodle, crop it as desired, and save a GIF.” Obviously for this to have any value for you you’ll need a modicum of artistic talent – when I tried using it the results were…unimpressive, but as I have perhaps previously alluded to I have what can only be described as anti-talent when it comes to drawing (everything basically ends up looking like an exit wound).
  • RIP Crowdtangle: I appreciate that this is possibly a *bit* niche, but this month has seen the shuttering of one of the few tools that made Meta’s social platforms even a tiny bit transparent – Crowdtangle was used by journalists, researchers and academics to track the best-performing content, Pages, etc, across the Facebook/Insta ecosystem, offering what was pretty much the only way of getting an overview of the sorts of things that were trending across the platforms at any given moment. As of August 14th, though, it’s dead – Meta killed it, and replaced it with an alternative system which – and here’s something which I am sure will leave you SHOCKED – doesn’t give anywhere near the same level of insight. Anyway, this site is a bit of an impotent scream into the void, commemorating the service and offering a selection of information about why it was so important and why Meta’s alternative solution is in fact nothing of the sort. There’s apparently going to be some sort of ‘memorial service’ for Crowdtangle on 30 September which is…well, it’s a bit weird, frankly, but then again I’ve been writing 10,000 words about ‘stuff on the internet’ to an audience of approximately seven people for over a decade, so on balance I probably shouldn’t throw stones lest my glass house cut me to ribbons.
  • Interview Warmup: An interesting little tool/toy from Google, which purports to offer you the opportunity to practise for job interviews in a variety of disciplines by TALKING TO THE MACHINE – the site asks you questions, you respond by talking, as you would in a normal job interview, and at the end your answers are assessed and ‘graded’ and you get feedback. It’s more proof-of-concept than anything truly helpful – mind you, I say that as someone who almost certainly couldn’t pass a job interview if they tried, so perhaps I should reassess this – but it’s an interesting use-case for the tech and the sort of thing that I could imagine being potentially useful for people who’ve literally never experienced an interview before, or who don’t quite feel confident with the format. Equally, though, there’s nothing quite like ‘saying this stuff to your laptop in an empty room’ to hammer home exactly how soul-destroyingly vapid the ‘tell me why you’re excited about the possibility of working for us!’ charade is – GYAC mate it is called ‘work’ for a reason, noone is excited by it.
  • Character Webs: This is actually more of a blogpost than it is a single-site type thing, but the draw here is the design work described so I think it fits up here rather than down there. Erin Davis is a dataviz artist at Axios, and this is their personal blog – here they explore mapping the relationships between characters in novels and presenting those as discrete pieces of visual design, and, honestly, this is SUCH a lovely way of communication the relationship structures within a story. Seriously, 100% convinced that these would sell by the shedload were they to set up a shop – Erin, should you ever happen to see this I would commission you to make one of these for me in a heartbeat, so should you be interested then do get in touch.
  • Population: Not an entirely novel idea, but presented rather well – Population is a site which asks you to tell it your gender at birth, your date of birth and your nationality, and which will then tell you a whole bunch of stuff about your likely life expectancy, how it tracks against other countries, that sort of thing. Thanks to this I have been reliably informed that “You are the 5,566,904,165 person alive on the planet. This means that you are older than 68% of the world’s population and older than 55% of all people in United Kingdom” – which, I’m going to be honest, isn’t the most cheering of statistical analyses. Excuse me, I am just off to weep at my senescence.
  • Consumed Today: Simply described as ‘a daily digest of the food and media that make up my diet’, this site does just that (or did – it appears that whoever made this either got bored of tracking their food/media consumption in early August, or they’re dead. Er, let’s hope it’s the former!) – clicking each day lets you look at small photos of their meals, a set of things they read (including hyperlinks where appropriate), and a list of all the songs they listened to (this person listens to a LOT of music), and I genuinely adore the tedious, quotidian minutiae of it all (and the sound effects when you hover over various bits of the site are a genuine pleasure, particularly the crunch/munch audio that accompanies the food pics).
  • Regen Earth: Online since 2016, ”this is an ongoing mapping of documentaries about regenerative projects…We wanted to know the stories of the field of practitioners bringing their world(s) to life. It’s a labor of love, mostly to express gratitude to this remarkable community. We curate the map for projects that: a) are inspiring in their ambition and scope; and b) have had a short or long-form documentary made about them.” The link takes you to a Google Map covered in pins, each of which corresponds to a regeneration project at that location – clicking the pin gets you links, additional info and usually a YouTube video which explains more about the project in question, its impact, etc – so in the UK, for example, there are links to projects about rewilding the River Avon, while in Portugal there’s a link to a project around sustainable building techniques…niche, but if you’re an environmentalist or conservationist, or simply interested in the preservation of the natural world (and why wouldn’t you be? What are you, some sort of MONSTER??) then this will contain loads of interesting stuff for you.
  • The Pessimists’ Archive: I know, I know, you don’t need or want any more newsletters in your life! Curios is enough! More than enough! TOO FCUKING MUCH! Still, should you somehow have additional space in your life for inbox content you might find this of interest – the Pessimists’ Archive is a newsletter which, per the description, is “a project to jog our collective memories about the hysteria, technophobia and moral panic that often greets new technologies, ideas and trends.” So you have things like ‘letters protesting the construction of the Eiffel Tower’, say, or pieces about how robots have ALWAYS been coming for our jobs…I have a vague sense that this is used by a bunch of dreadful people to assuage our fears about how tech is making things worse – there’s an endorsement from ubercnut Marc Andreessen on the page, which did rather give me the fantods – but in general it’s interesting stuff and I figure some of you might find it worth a sub. For what it’s worth, though, SOMETIMES IT IS RIGHT TO BE SCARED AND HYSTERICAL.
  • Could Care: There are many things which are infuriating about North American English – the inability to spell ‘aluminium’, say – but perhaps the most baffling and infuriating in equal measure is the insistence that the correct way of communicating one’s singular lack of engagement with or interest in an issue is to say ‘I could care less’. THIS DOES NOT MAKE ANY FCUKING SENSE, HOWEVER YOU ATTEMPT TO JUSTIFY IT! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU ALL??? Anyway, this site exists for the sole purpose of explaining why this construction is stupid and wrong and should be stopped, with an elegant little bit of slider design. Can we all agree that you will stop saying this forthwith? It’s our language and we can take it back whenever we like, you know.
  • Wandawhirl: Completely and utterly pointless, but not unpleasing. “Wanda Whirl displays calming and playful streamers that dance and whirl in the breeze” – choose from different patterns and shapes, click and drag your mouse to make them move in the imaginary digital wind, and recreate almost-exactly that very specific feeling of being so bored as a small child that you can lose yourself in ‘moving your hand through a beaded curtain’ for hours at a time. There’s quite a pleasing aesthetic to this, and the physics are very satisfying indeed.
  • 100,000 Emoji: Basically the same kind of idea as the ‘One Million Characters’ site earlier on, except featuring emoji and smaller by a factor of 10 (did they not get the memo about how EVERYTHING has to be a million in 2024?) – you can click any of the spaces and select which emoji you’d like represented there, and it feels like there’s some team-based attempts to ‘own’ certain bits of the canvas with particular emoji, and someone VERY dedicated and possibly a little unwell has seemingly made a pattern in emoji crabs which extends for most of the length of the page, and, look, there is literally no point to this at all that I can discern but I am broadly-speaking pleased that it exists.
  • Moviely: Every day you’re given the option of guessing a film or TV show – in each case, you get 10 guesses, and with each one you’re given information about the film or show you’ve selected and which characteristics it shares with the correct answer. So, for example, if your first guess is ‘The Princess Bride’, you’ll be told various bits of info about it – it’s IMDB score, the year it was made, the genres it’s tagged with in IMDB, etc – with any that match the target film in green. The idea is that over the course of 10 guesses you can narrow it down enough to arrive at that day’s correct guess, but, honestly, you’d have to know a fcuktonne more about films than I do (admittedly not hard) to stand even a passing chance of getting any of these, Cinefiles will possibly find this pleasingly-tricky, but personally speaking my main reaction was ‘Jesus, this is fcuking impossible’.
  • Shutterbug: OOH, this is very nicely done indeed and very clever – you’ll need to open it in its own window for it to work properly, though, as the game basically involves resizing your browser to create the right-sized ‘framing’ for a photo. The gimmick is that you’re tasked with taking photos of various insects – each picture requires you to include a set number of components, meaning you’ll need to resize your browser and move the window around to find the right combination of insects and to get them all in shot at the same time. This is *such* a neat mechanic, beautifully-executed, and it feels like something that you’re going to see repurposed in a MUCH shinier advergame by L’Oreal or something in ~6m.
  • Smells Like Chlorine: Our final miscellaneous link this week is this deceptively-funny little game in which you play as a cleaner in a game developer’s office, navigating the space in 3d and attempting to do your job against increasingly-strange constraints. “A menial job. Unfriendly co-workers. What does it take to get some respect as a janitor around here? Things take an interesting turn, however, after your boss tells you some devastating news. Those detergent fumes aren’t helping either…” I very much enjoyed this, and I think you will too.

By Robin F Williams

OUR FINAL PLAYLIST THIS WEEK IS COMPILED BY POP CULTURE EXPERT NICK WALKER AND IS POSSIBLY THE MOST CHAOTIC SELECTION OF MUSIC I HAVE HEARD ALL YEAR – A COLLECTION OF SONGS THAT NICK HAS DESCRIBED AS ‘BANGERS’ ON TWITTER, A DESIGNATION WHICH, AS BECOMES IMMEDIATELY APPARENT FROM LOOKING AT THE TRACK LISTING, VERY MUCH DOES NOT HAVE A FIXED MEANING!  

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Wong Kei: Wong Kei is an iconic restaurant in London’s Chinatown (more on it in the longreads) – this Tumblr was one man’s attempt to eat every dish on the famously-kilometric menu. Apparently he’s developed a variety of food intolerances (presumably unconnected to this project) which mean it’s unlikely to ever reach completion, but if you want a deep dive into a selection of incredibly-unphotogenic meals then this is something of a motherlode.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Official Stick Reviews: This is a slightly larger Insta feed than I usually tend to link to – over 2million followers, so mainstream! – but, look, it’s photos of people with really excellent sticks, how could I not? There are few pleasures in life quite like finding, and subsequently wielding, a really good stick.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • The Mainstreaming of Loserdom: As the author points out in the intro to this piece, it’s a deliberately provocative title; it’s also, though, a piece which felt ‘true’ in quite a specific way, and certainly one which very much describes a particular corner of Life Online in 2024. The central premise is neatly encapsulated in the opening para, to whit: “Over the past few years, something has shifted in the perception of acceptable recreational behavior, or the way people talk about their hobbies: people are gleeful to admit they have no hobbies, no interests, no verve. Somehow, one of the main “hobbies” accepted by the masses is staying home, laying in bed, scrolling on their phones and watching television. What happened?” SPOLERS: there is no definitive conclusion drawn here, but the article shapes the contours of a the phenomenon quite nicely, and it’s an interesting reframing of the old canard about ‘puritanical kids’ and an equally-interesting counterpoint to the narrative about ‘brat summer’ (I AM SORRY I WILL NEVER MENTION THAT PHRASE AGAIN).
  • Low Information Voters: This is specifically about the US, but it’s indicative of a wider trend that’s been observed in research by Reuters and others over the past 18 months or so, specifically people across the world being increasingly-disinclined to engage with ‘the news’ and instead getting their information, such as it is, from a disparate collection of online sources of often questionable quality. It’s quite hard to read this without getting quite a big dose ‘oh dear Christ, we’re fcuked aren’t we?’ fear, but, that aside, it’s also an excellent illustration of one of my (many, many) tedious hobbyhorses, specifically the fact that it’s literally impossible to have any reasonable idea of what anyone’s knowledge/informational baseline is, and as such it’s therefore also becoming harder to talk about things with people because there’s literally no certainty that you will even agree on the very basic fundamental premises of what you are discussing due to this infinitely-fragmented informational landscape. “Decades ago, there were just a few channels on television; the Internet has broadened the choices and lowered the standards. “Now people might seek out information about a particular candidate on a particular policy and think they have genuine info, but they’re being misinformed or misled,” Kalla said. The decline of newspapers has led to a decrease in split-ticket voting: voters know less about the candidates in their districts, so they simply vote along party lines. This has helped to nationalize politics. Cable news, which voters increasingly rely on, “carries a lot less information than the New York Times,” Schleicher said.” Quite hard to find much to disagree with in this, which is in itself somewhat miserable.
  • The Telegram Story: You will, of course, be aware of the arrest of Pavel Durov in France last weekend – frankly the astonishing thing, to my mind, was that it’s taken this long for someone to nab him given the widespread knowledge that Telegram is a proper hotspot of actual, honest-to-goodness, serious crime and has been for a good five years or so now. Anyway, this is a good explainer by 404 Media on What Happened And Why (and why it’s not a freedom of speech issue so much as a reasonably-simple one of abetting criminal activity, despite what Elon and the rest of the peanut gallery of the world’s worst cnuts are claiming), and how it became such a culture war issue – it’s very much worth reading the whole thing, but if you’re after a pithy precis then how about “the fact that I can log onto Telegram right now and find dozens of chats where illegal things are happening, [means] it is simplistic and reductive (and maybe wrong?) to say that Telegram is an “encrypted messaging app,” and it’s also reductive to say that Durov was arrested in France purely because he operates an “encrypted messaging app.””
  • Neoliberalism and Ukraine: A fascinating piece in the New Statesman looking at the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and the way in which significant players in the West are seeing the war, and its eventual resolution, as a significant economic and political opportunity. “The current war has introduced an innovation on the old formula: the fusion of neoliberal economic policies with cowboy advances in technology, particularly artificial intelligence (AI) and digitalisation. Wartime Ukraine has already seen a dramatic influx of Western donor funds, consultants, experts, engineers and Silicon Valley venture capital. The result has been radical experiments in the introduction of AI-enhanced platforms for mine clearance and the rapid collation of commercial satellite data (both supplied by Peter Thiel’s Palantir); and economic strategies like the “fast state”, a Ukrainian government proposal that envisions a state so streamlined that it “disappears in one’s own efficiency”” (I promise I’m not just linking to this because of the Thiel references, honest guv).
  • Palmer Luckey: This is a frankly astonishing profile. I knew the name Palmer Luckey – he’s the guy who invented the original Oculus VR headset which he then subsequently sold to Facebook for a violent amount of money, and who was bounced out again shortly afterwards for reasons which are explained at length in here – but I didn’t really know much about his backstory, or where he’s ended up now, and WOW is this an interesting look at another of those very, very weird individuals that Silicon Valley has a seemingly – and, one might argue, unfortunately – inexhaustible supply of. This is LONG, and personally I’m not a huge fan of the tone/vibe of the piece, but the subject is fascinating (in a sort of arms-length horror sort of way) and there are some interesting connections to the previous article in terms of his new tech warfare business Anduril’s work in Ukraine (and, obviously, MORE FCUKING PETER THIEL LINKS sorry sorry sorry won’t mention him again).  Seriously, though, can we maybe have some tech people who AREN’T like this, maybe just once?
  • Weird AI Hoaxes: As the juicers and hypebeasts of the AI ecosystem wait for Strawberry, whatever the fcuk it actually ends up being, they are also spinning up all sorts of weird and wild rumours which are getting increasingly-unhinged. I watched from the sidelines the other week as a bunch of VERY ACTIVE POSTERS lost their collective sh1t, speculating that they had spotted actual instances of AI agents in the wild – this article is an interesting overview of some of the wilder rumours on the fringe of the industry, but, perhaps more significantly, it feels like a precursor to how odd and uncertain the AI path is going to get, and another proof-point as to how perhaps the greatest casualty of the technological boom (other than, you know, huge swathes of jobs) is going to be our ability to have the faintest fcuking clue as to what is actually going on, what is real and what is fake.
  • Social Media Signals: I don’t think words can adequately express my gratitude at no longer having to really do anything to do with social media for a living any more, but I appreciate not all of you are necessarily so lucky – should you suffer the misfortune of having to do ‘social strategy’, or any similarly-stupid combination of terms to connote a largely-pointless white-collar marketing job, then you may find this presentation, kindly shared by Matthew Stafford, useful. It’s basically a whole ‘state of social and content and TRENDS’-type guide, and it’s generally really good and is full of principles to apply and stuff that you can basically use to populate the horrible empty ‘2025 SOCIAL MARKETING STRATEGY’ document you’re going to be staring at with tears in your eyes come November.
  • How Twitter Blue Happened: I know, I don’t really want to talk about That Fcuking Man Either, and ordinarily I wouldn’t have bothered linking to a piece rehashing another slice of the Muskian Twitter takeover because, well, I had to read his fcuking biography for work and that was more than enough, but this NYT piece is a very good piece of reporting by Ryan Mac which collates the viewpoints of dozens of different people on how the…suboptimal rollout of Twitter’s subscription service happened. As often is the case with pieces like this, what’s most striking is how fcuking dumb so much of what purportedly genius business leaders actually do and say is – also the whole segment on the ‘where should we price this?’ conversation is yet another wonderful example of the fact that there is literally no subject on earth that a middle-aged white man won’t feel absolutely confident giving their opinion on, regardless of their complete lack of expertise on said subject (and I say that with what I promise is a significant dollop of pained self-awareness, honest).
  • You Can’t Believe Your Eyes Any More: Or at least you won’t be able to believe them when you’re looking at photos, specifically photos on a screen – this is the Verge, writing about the new image editing features which are shipping in Google’s new Pixel phones and which let anyone do local text-to-image editing of their photos. I confess to not having spent too much time thinking about this specific usecase, but the examples in here are genuinely amazing and it’s hard to read this and not get a *touch* freaked out at the fact that you can do entirely-photorealistic image insertion into any picture with no visible watermarking.  There’s a particularly lovely example of a bunch of lines and a bottle of booze being ‘shopped into an image, which gives you a small, low-jeopardy glimpse as to what you might end up being able to do with this – in general, though, it does very much feel like we’re hurtling towards a moment whereby you simply won’t be able to take any photograph at face value, ever. “This erosion of the social consensus began before the Pixel 9, and it will not be carried forth by the Pixel 9 alone. Still, the phone’s new AI capabilities are of note not just because the barrier to entry is so low, but because the safeguards we ran into were astonishingly anemic. The industry’s proposed AI image watermarking standard is mired in the usual standards slog, and Google’s own much-vaunted AI watermarking system was nowhere in sight when The Verge tried out the Pixel 9’s Magic Editor. The photos that are modified with the Reimagine tool simply have a line of removable metadata added to them.” The piece concludes with the pithy assessment that ‘we’re fcuked’, and it’s hard not to agree a bit.
  • Eternal Sunshining Your Memories: In a seamless segue – WHO SAYS THIS CURATION SH1T’S EASY, YOU FCUKS? – from the previous piece, this is a profile of the PhotoshopRequests subReddit, in which people ask for assistance in digitally-altering images; a significant proportion of people are doing this to remove former partners from photos, or to try and get a ‘perfect’ picture of a dead loved one, and I found the general themes here about the psychology of manipulating images to subsequently manipulate memory and emotion both fascinating and deeply, deeply sad. This, plus the last piece, is basically a TOP-TIER short story prompt imho.
  • Introduction to Community Development: This is a topline guide to building, maintaining and managing communities, on- or offline, compiled by expert community wrangler and Friend of Curios Ed Saperia, of Newspeak House – not one for the casual reader (or at least only for casual readers with an unusual interest in the specifics of setting up and running community projects), but if you’re someone who’s interested in setting such a thing up then this is potentially a really useful set of principles to bear in mind and steps to take.
  • Monetising Politics on TikTok: I slightly love this, in a ‘ah, modernity, how genuinely baffling you are to me!’ sort of way – apparently kids in the US are making bank on TikTok by doing live debates about politics, basically arguing live against other streamers on Trump vs Harris and inviting viewers to pitch in with cash gifts to manifest their support for one side or the other and thereby ‘win’ the battle for their preferred streamer/candidate. Which is SO WEIRD, to me at least – was this happening anywhere for the UK election? Were the kids doing ‘Reform vs Labour’ battles, bigging up Farage or stanning Starmer? WHY ARE PEOPLE SPENDING ACTUAL CASHMONEY ON THIS? I genuinely don’t understand anything anymore. Anyway, next time someone says that kids aren’t engaging in politics point them at this and reassure them that, don’t worry, the kids are alright (I am not in fact wholly convinced that they are alright, you know).
  • Making A Public Transport Arrival Times Signaller: Ok, so this is QUITE NICHE, but I am very, very keen on this becoming A Thing across London, and as such am sharing the link in the hope that several of you decide that you really want to get into this and this enthusiasm results in a wave of useful signage popping up across the city. Basically Jonty Wareing created a digital screen which takes API data from TfL and uses it to display bus arrival times for the bus stop by the window in which it’s placed – WOULDN’T IT BE GREAT IF THESE WERE EVERYWHERE? Yes, yes it would, so if you could all pull your fingers out and start building them too that would be ace, thanks.
  • The Blue Zone Distraction: There’s been a reasonable number of ‘world’s oldest person turns x years old’ stories recently, or at least that what it feels like, but I rather enjoyed this article which somewhat-grumpily attempts to debunk the idea of ‘blue zones’ which gained some traction a few years back – you may recall c.20…11ish? there was a spate of articles about specific areas of the world where there were seemingly-isolated bubbles of extreme longevity – certain Greek islands, for example, a specific part of Italy – and which suggested that there were certain common traits in environment and lifestyle which might be taken as useful pointers on how to die later than most people. Except, per this piece, the real common factors are less dietary and more to do with tax fraud and generally-poor-quality recordkeeping, which is exactly the sort of cynical, curmudgeonly analysis I can totally get behind.
  • The Last Restaurant In Chinatown: The Wong Kei piece I mentioned earlier on, this is another excellent bit of writing in Vittles, celebrating the history of one of London’s oldest Chinese eateries – not one of its best, or most welcoming (it’s basically a rite of passage for anyone living in the city to have an ok meal with genuinely aggressive service here), but one which very much merits the oft-overused term ‘iconic’. Wonderful social, urban, culinary history.
  • The Charli XCX Interview: I’m not normally particularly interested in celebrity interviews, let alone popstar/musician interviews, but this one struck me as more intriguing than most – there’s something fascinating about the degree of artifice and persona throughout, the question of how much of this is confected sincerity, whether the slight awkwardness at play is a bit or a pose or a vibe…I’m also always fascinated when you read profiles of artists and their sheer, unfettered ambition shines through, and it’s a useful reminder that you don’t get to the top of any profession without having a certain steel behind the (dead) eyes. Basically I’m thinking that Ms XCX has been a popstar for 15 years now, signed to majors for most of those, and if she hasn’t been media trained to within an inch of her life by the age of 32 then I am a monkey’s uncle, and as such I don’t quite buy a lot of what she’s selling the interviewer here. But, then again, maybe THIS is brat (sorry sorry sorry sorry).
  • No Ordinary Love: I think this might be the first ever piece of BRANDED CONTENT to feature in the longreads section of Curios, which feels…well, it feels icky, to be honest, and I’m not wholly happy with it, but, equally, I think this is actually really good, and the essays I’ve read (three of the six) were all genuinely lovely, and significantly better than they needed to be. This is part of the current campaign by…Hinge? Anyway, some dating app or another, which uses REAL STORIES of REAL PEOPLE who have found REAL LOVE via the app (written by actual, talented, named writers, which is the main draw here tbh) and, honestly, they are really, really charming, cute and hopeful and funny and sweet and, look, I am as you are probably aware by now a desperate cynic who is largely dead inside, but I was utterly charmed by these and I think you might be too. Whoever was in charge of this campaign, take a bow, I am genuinely impressed (feel free to put that in your wrapup report, but be sure to attribute it to ‘LEADING INTERNET CULTURE NEWSLETTER WEB CURIOS’ by way of exchange – thanks, anonymous marketing person, should you ever see this!).
  • Summer Loveline: Ok, this is a VERY un-Curios link – this is Emma Garland’s newsletter, which has been on hiatus for a bit but which came back this week with a reader Q&A, like an agony aunt column and, look, this is very much not aimed at People Like Me, and ordinarily I have very little interest in or truck with life advice-type stuff, but I laughed out loud on four separate occasions when reading this and as such feel reasonably confident that at least a few of you will do too.
  • Graffiti as Visual and Written Expression: Jonathan Lethem writes about graffiti. Look, you don’t need more than that, do you? Jonathan Lethem! Brooklyn! Graffiti! Have the opening and then go and read the rest, because it stays this good all the way through: “As children in New York City in the 1970s, we were born into a world covered with paint. Walls, baseboards, moldings, even radiators might be six or seven layers deep with it, architectural edges and corner blurred into globs, approximate shapes. Sometimes you’d find paint over old black-and-white checkerboard tile on the floor of a bathroom, or covering leaky pipes beneath a sink. Old landlord strategy: Throw on another heavy coat. It might be holding the building together. The layers peeled and chipped. We were warned not to eat it. That made us curious: Was it good to eat? At the dawn of gentrification, some of the layers were being undone. Chipped at or stripped away. People dragged sinks or sections of marble fireplaces into the street and poured and scrubbed poisons, hoping to free their old forms. A summer afternoon went rank with solvent. Soon enough, some of our number went out armed with paint and shouted back with our own application.”
  • The Trouble With Friends: On friendship, adulthood, loneliness, the permeability, or otherwise, of personal boundaries – this isn’t a sad essay, per se, but there’s an undeniable sense of melancholy throughout which I found very beautiful indeed.
  • The Contingency Contingent: This is very long, very good, and reminded me so incredibly powerfully of ‘And So We Came To The End’ that it was almost uncanny. Leigh Claire LaBerge writes about working on an Accenture project on ‘Y2K preparedness’ at the turn of the millennium – this is excellent, and evocative to the point you can see the striplighting and feel the poor-quality office carpeting under your feet, and as a sustained piece of stylistic writing it’s almost annoying how well-executed it is.
  • On Cancer and Desire: Finally this week, an essay from 20 years ago in which Annie Ernaux wrote about sex and cancer and death and love and and and. This is glorious, vital, elegiac, cold, sensual, incredible, please read it.

By Diane Dal-pra

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 23/08/24

Reading Time: 37 minutes

So it turns out that going clubbing is still fun, even in middle age! Ok, so I still feel a *bit* like someone has scooped out all my innards and replaced them with sawdust and nails, and I’m hoping the ringing in my ears will stop soon, and I don’t really understand why all the children were wearing sunglasses while dancing (GYAC kids you are all evidently on drugs I can tell even if you cover your pupils), and I confess to being unable to let go of the fact that three separate people in their early 20s independently informed me that I ‘have strong SuperHans energy’, but, broadly speaking, it was a success! 10/10! Would OldClub again!

But you don’t care about that! Frankly, if you’ve been reading Curios for any time at all it’s entirely possible that you don’t in fact care about ANYTHING anymore, so ground down are you by the relentless cynicism, negativity and the general SPAFFBARRAGE – but, still, on with the links!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you might be interested in reading a short interview with Kris and I about the Tiny Awards, voting for which closes in a few short days (winners announced next week!).

By Tine Poppe (all images via TIH this week, for which thanks)

WE BEGIN WITH A WONDERFUL COLLECTION OF SOUL-Y, JAZZ-Y, LOUNGE-Y TUNES COMPILED BY ROY (WHOSE WRITING IS ALSO EXCELLENT AND WHOSE PAMPHLET ‘ALGORITHM PARTY’ I HEARTILY RECOMMEND CHECKING OUT)!

THE SECTION WHICH FIRMLY BELIEVES THAT IN THIS TWEET AND IN THIS THREAD CAN BE FOUND, BASICALLY, ALL THE ANSWERS AS TO WHY NOTHING WORKS AND EVERYTHING SEEMS A BIT SCREWED, PT.1:  

  • The Bulwer-Lytton 2024: While there are some recurring links whose inclusion makes me sigh and consider the passing of time, the ephemerality of the human experience and the fact that every character I type brings me inexorably closer to the sweet release of death, there are others whose annual reappearance is like a welcome visit from an old friend (a friendship which is entirely one-sided, admittedly, where one of the friends doesn’t actually know about the existence of the other and might be slightly discomfited by the weird yearly burst of attention if it ever knew). So it is with the Bulwer-Lytton contest, which you SURELY remember is the annual competition inviting people to invent the best, worst opening line of a fictitious novel, and which this year does not disappoint in the invention and the car-crash quality of the prose on display. The winner is the baldly effective “She had a body that reached out and slapped my face like a five-pound ham-hock tossed from a speeding truck,” a line which,  like many of the very best, rewards a rereading or two to appreciate the full majesty of the mixed metaphors being deployed and their entirely-inappropriate heft, but there are SO MANY good ones. I have a soft spot for “Stepping outside just after dawn, Chef Billingsworth was pleased to discover that for once the morning fog was not as thick as pea soup—or even lobster bisque for that matter—but was more a chicken velouté, or perhaps a beef remouillage,” but I think my personal favourite is this one (pick your own!): “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and it was precisely this questionable choice of paving material, combined with the ongoing flight of middle-class demons from the urban center of Pandaemonium proper to more spacious brimstone-lakefront homes in its suburbs, that had produced the mess of closures, detours, and gridlock that were making Azazel’s commute this morning a living . . .  well, you know.”
  • There Is No Website: To be clear – this is very silly and entirely pointless, but it made me laugh quite a lot, and I am a bit of a sucker for fourth-wall-breaking websites. Load up the page and, well, just see what happens – there are a couple of points where you might think you’ve become stuck, but just keep messing with things and you’ll get there eventually. Yes, I know, this is a terrible and unenticing description that tells you the square root of fcuk all, but to explain more would be to spoil the fun – I would say, though, that this feels like the sort of silly, frivolous thing that might be quite nice to take and polish up a bit, and that, more broadly, websites and digital works that play a little more with the self-aware idea of site-vs-user feel like something that could be deployed more widely, particularly for a generation of people raised on things like Doki Doki Literature Club (which, by the way, if you’ve never played it is a genuinely brilliant, properly unnerving and very smart game which I can recommend unreservedly).  Basically it seems what I want, deep down, is a website that talks back to me, which is possibly the most on-the-nose assessment of my relationship to the web I’ve managed to come up with in a decade and a half.
  • Midjourney On Desktop: AT FCUKING LAST. Midjourney – probably still the best off-the-shelf image gen model, even after the launch of Flux – finally has an open-access web interface, meaning you can now create near-photorealistic pictures without having to deal with the horror that is Discord. You are, I’m sure, familiar with how this stuff works by now, but if you’re interested in playing around then it’s worth reading up on the specific things that Midjourney is good at – isolating specific seeds to then reuse for stylistic consistency, for example, is significantly easier with this than with any of the other mainstream tools I’ve tried. If you’ve yet to play around with this yet and your experience is limited to OpenAI’s image stuff then please do give it a try – the jump in quality is notable. Expect the particular Midjourney visual aesthetic to slowly start to replace the Dall-E one as the overriding ‘vibe’ of AI-generated images on the web (in my head I tend to find MJ’s outputs a touch more on the…shiny/greasy side, for want of a better descriptor, whereas Dall-E feels a bit more rounded and obviously-CG-ish (it may amuse you to know that I was once employed to write press releases for fine art galleries, which is obviously where I learned how to evoke visual concepts in prose with such peerless grace).
  • OKNWA: Before you get your hopes up, this is not in fact anything to do with the NWA the storied pioneers of hiphop (sorry) – in this instance, the NWA in question is North West Arkansas in the US, and the website is an odd proposition (brought to my attention by former-editor Paul), possibly the first ever ‘entirely AI-generated news website’ I’ve seen that is quite open about the fact that that’s what it is. “Our AI reporters work tirelessly, utilizing advanced machine learning techniques to search the web and social media platforms for trending topics and hidden gems. Once a story is identified, they craft articles and generate images that capture the essence of the news piece, all while injecting their distinctive personality into the content” (can you tell it’s AI-spun copy? I THINK YOU CAN). What’s odd about this is…well, there’s quite a lot that’s odd, but I’m particularly intrigued by the fact that they bother to ‘name’ a roster of AI ‘reporters’ – presumably a bunch of differently-pre-prompted LLMs whose instructions compel them to write ‘in the style of a local newspaper arts reporter’, say, or ‘with the enthusiasm and pride of small-town college football correspondent’…why? It seems like a genuinely unnecessary level of complication – after all, if you’re the sort of person who’s happy to receive their news in the dead-eyed style of a generic LLM, you’re unlikely to give much of a fcuk about whether it was ‘written’ by ‘Arlo Artiste’ or ‘Benjamin Business’ (no, really, those are two of the names given to the ‘reporters’. You can FEEL the creative artistry, can’t you?). The news is very much ‘local events’-type stuff, and frankly feels like press releases that have been parsed through The Machine and then thrown online, and while on the one hand I can’t for the life of me imagine who the audience for this is – in the sense that I can’t ever imagine anyone WANTING to read any of this stuff – I can also imagine that, in a world where there is no more local reporting anymore and Facebook doesn’t really work as a ‘what’s my neighbourhood/community up to?’ feed anymore, a one-stop shop where you can find local events, updates, etc, filleted and summarised, might be…sort-of helpful? Don’t get me wrong, this is dreadful, but I can imagine a (worse, to be clear) future in which stuff like this isn’t quite such a weird anomaly. Which, of course, is why initiatives such as Mill Media are so vitally important and should be supported wherever possible.
  • The Onion Front Page Archive: I like the Onion – it is very funny on occasion, and its consistent hit-rate is staggering when you consider how long the schtick has been going – but equally I was slightly baffled by the flood of enthusiasm at the announcement that it’s bringing back its print edition (and also, there’s possibly something telling about one of the big faultlines in Western society when you have one section of people who are continuing to move away from news consumption in general, and another who not only consume ALL THE NEWS ALL THE TIME but who are also willing to pay actual cashmoney for a fictitious magazine satirising all the news they have spent all this time reading). Still, the magazine has made its entire collection of historical front pages – previously published in anthology form – online in one place, which is good of them, and as you would expect there are some corkers. I personally very much enjoyed the WWII-era ones (“San Francisco Grocer Henry Nakamura Chief Suspect in Pearl Harbour Bombing”), but it’s just consistently very, very funny (“Bottom 10% of Last Year’s Graduating Class Ready to Take On Saddam” is particularly on the nose).
  • Traffic Cam Photo Booth: OK, so unless you live in New York then this won’t be of any real use to you, but if you do then this is SUCH a great idea – Morry Colman has effectively written code which lets you use any of New York City’s traffic cameras to take a photo of you, simply by logging onto this url. “Traffic Cam Photobooth is a website that allows anybody to locate their nearest publicly available traffic camera and use it to take pictures of themselves. While these cameras are ostensibly intended for traffic, they also serve to acclimate us to the idea that constant monitoring is an everyday part life in the city. No matter the target of this surveillance, it’s clear from looking at the map that most New Yorkers get unconsentingly captured by the lens of at least one camera – if not several – every day. TCP offers visitors an engaging and lighthearted way to engage with this very serious topic by drawing attention to these easily ignored cameras. People can use their feeds, which their tax dollars help fund, to take pictures of themselves, spreading the knowledge of this sprawling surveillance apparatus through fun self-portraits designed to be sharable online.” I can’t pretend to understand how the technical stuff works, but I adore the hacking of the public surveillance system for this sort of silly purpose. You can even find the source code linked on the homepage should you want to seek to apply this elsewhere – if anyone reading this happens to work for the highways department of a local authority, can we maybe spend some time thinking about how we can turn this into some sort of FUN AND FRIVOLOUS GAME? I reckon there’s potentially something quite cool/fun in the concept which you could build on rather nicely.
  • Tonecraft: I know, I know, in-browser synth toys are BORING and PLAYED OUT and you’ve SEEN THEM ALL BEFORE. Well shut your face, because this one is (moderately) new and (moderately) different! Make your looping bloopy/synthy track using a pleasing little 3d interface, a bit like creating an audiowave with LEGO or Minecraft blocks – you effectively build your soundscape, with each ‘line’ on the building grid representing a different note, and the height of the stacks you build representing a different pitch, and the different types of blocks different instruments, and once you’re done you can share your compositions with the wider world. Pleasingly you can browse the gallery of everyone else’s creations and share them with the world, and the site’s creators are working on an ability to remix others’ compositions while retaining credit to the original creator, which is a nice touch. This is FUN, basically, even though it’s unlikely you’ll be creating anything particularly-sampleable (but, please, prove me wrong).
  • America’s Political Pulse: An interesting use of AI! America’s Political Pulse is a project which attempts to track partisanship in US political discourse (it’s an offshoot project of the Polarisation Research Lab, itself a project by Dartford, Stanford and Pennsylvania Universities), in part through regular surveys of the electorate but also by using AI to analyse political speeches made by representatives across the House and Senate, and offering users the ability to get an overview of the types of interventions they make, the relative proportion of their speeches which contain partisan attack lines, all that sort of jazz. This is really interesting – you can search by individual politician, or look into it at a state-by-state level, and for each individual you’re presented with stats as to the way in which they conduct themselves, how they rank compared to their peers, and examples of how behaviour types manifest themselves, with references back to specific speeches made, or quotes given to media. All of this is done using LLM text analysis – which strikes me as a good use of the tech, and which I think could be usefully done in the UK given the excellent work already done by the clerks of the Commons and Lords in transcribing everything in near-realtime for Hansard. Does anyone know if anything like this is being spun up?
  • How The Olympic Muffins Pop-Up Happened: Know that I am writing this up through slightly-gritted teeth. To be honest this would probably be a better fit in the Longreads section but, well, it’s not exactly stellar prose and so I put it up here instead. The link is to the first Tweet in a THREAD (sorry) all about how this person on Twitter was responsible for bringing the VIRAL CHOCOLATE MUFFINS FROM THE PARIS OLYMPICS to NYC hipsters as part of a limited edition pop-up (there is very little about that sentence that doesn’t cause me to twitch uncomfortably), and it is a frankly EXHAUSTIVE list of the steps taken and the logistical hurdles jumped through, and, basically, my main takeaways were: a) fair play to this person, they are very good at Getting Sh1t Done and the amount of wrangling and general ‘get up and go’ on display here is genuinely impressive; b) this is actually a really good primer in general on how to make events-type stuff happen, in terms of complexity and snags and DEALING WITH PEOPLE, and is a useful reminder that the distance between ‘why don’t we do a pop-up with those muffins?’ and actually getting a mediocre baked treat into the mouths of hypebeasts on the other side of the Atlantic is, well, FCUKING VAST; c) that if the other rumour doing the rounds is true, that these are just standard catering muffins of the sort you could get literally anywhere, then the whole thing is very funny; and d) there is literally no way in hell that the whole palaver was in any way worth the hassle, petrol and stress that it must all have taken to engineer.
  • A Million Pokeballs: Much like ‘Million Dollar Homepage’, I feel that the Million Checkboxes site from earlier this year – a Tiny Award nominee, no less! – is going to get ripped off approximately 100 times a year between now and the heat death of the universe. This is the first moderately-interesting riff I’ve seen on it – the gimmick here is that there are a million Pokeballs arrayed across the vast page, and within said million there are 10 Pokemon to be found. WHO WILL FIND THEM? And, perhaps more importantly, who cares? There doesn’t seem to be any sort of reward for the people who find them – 6/10 at the time of writing, with over 600k balls opened – but it made me think that actually there’s probably a non-terrible competition mechanic here which you MIGHT be able to fund with ad revenue. Then, though, I realised that what I was doing was taking something lovely and pure and frivolous and making it fcuking horrible via the introduction of capitalism, and it is in fact I who am the problem and the cancer. So it goes.
  • Luvr: Presented largely without comme…no, actually, I do feel the very real need to say I HAVE NOT USED THIS OR TRIED IT, I AM MERELY SHARING IT AS A CURIOSITY. So. Luvr is basically a bongo chatbot service (and, as such, this link is moderately-NSFW), offering users the opportunity to ‘enjoy’ ‘uncensored’ chats with a selection of ‘sexy’ AIs, each with image-generation capabilities – you can either ‘speak to’ one of the pre-created bots, or ‘roll your own’, so to speak…but, of course, this is all for a price, with (I presume – again, I HAVE NOT TRIED THIS OUT – am…am I protesting too much? I worry I am) everything stuck behind a paywall. I include this not because I imagine for a second any of YOU want to try this out, but more as a sort of ‘look, this stuff isn’t going to go away, I don’t think, in fact quite the opposite’ warning. Hook this up to AI voice synth and it’s not hard to see an awful lot of teenage boys doing appalling damage to their parents’ credit cards (and their own psychosexual development!) with these things – as someone whose childhood friend Phil Niewiadomski (Phil, I really, really hope you Google yourself and find this) got into trouble c.1993 for ringing up sex lines that cost £1 a minute from his home phone, it’s not that difficult to envisage how this might play with the endlessly horny young men of the world. As an aside, scrolling through the avatars of the various ‘models’ it becomes abundantly clear that, if you think that the ready availability of bongo over the past 15 years or so has slightly warped young people (men, specifically)’s idea of ‘what sex is and what people actually look like and what normal human proportions are’, then OH MY GOD IS IT ALL GOING TO GET MORE MESSY.
  • Brandon Jamar Scott: I don’t as a rule feature individual ‘creators’ in this section, and certainly not TikTok people, but I am going to make an exception for this man because his Princess Peach/Mario song is legitimately hilarious and I watched it about six times this week despite it not being my sort of thing AT ALL, and in general the combination of CG and live video and surrealism and songwriting that is far, far better than it in fact needs to be is winning in ways I didn’t expect.
  • Amazon Review Cleaner: You’ll probably have noticed that one of the great ‘boons’ of the boom in genAI has been the proliferation of surprisingly-similarly-written reviews appearing under Amazon products, reviews praising the, I don’t know, dildo or cat fountain or whatever it is in the now-ubiquitous flat-yet-enthusiastic register of the LLM – this website does one thing and one thing only, to whit ‘it tries to clean up the reviews and remove all the obvious spam’, hopefully letting you get a picture of what ‘REAL PEOPLE’ think rather than what the aggressive armies of ecommerce bots think. There’s a browser extension too, and a free phone app, and this in general feels like it might be useful should you be the sort of person who buys sh1t online and reads the reviews and still holds on to the possible naive belief that anyone on the web is a real person anymore (apart from me, I am DEFINITELY real, definitely).
  • Running The 92: I don’t run (imagine me saying that in the same tone of voice as the unnamed sample-ee says “I don’t mosh” in the intro to this David Holmes track), but, given that I imagine a large proportion of you are of an age when you’re trying to stave off middle-aged spread and the inevitable cardiovascular ill-health that results from One Of Those Lifestyles, I like to assume that a significant proportion of you do – presuming you are one of those people, and presuming you are in London or nearby, I would like to draw your attention to this route on Strava, plotted by one Jordan Wilson, which took him around all 92 underground stations in a total time of 6h43m. CAN YOU BEAT HIM? Seriously, this feels like it could and possibly should become A LONDON THING, and I reckon there’s quite a fun community challenge-type thing you could build out of this with a bit of thought.
  • LinkedIn Lyrics: LinkedIn is evil and wrong and will, one day when we have sorted All This Sh1t Out, will be consigned to the great digital oubliette of history. That said, occasionally someone will create something beautiful from even the basest of raw materials – so it is with the TikTok account LinkedIn Lyrics, which takes popular songs and matches the lyrics to the names of people on LinkedIn. Which I appreciate probably doesn’t make huge amounts of sense when described by me, but which I promise you will put an actual, proper smile on your face when you click the link. Also, because I know you all feel that ‘posting on LinkedIn’ is somehow part of your actual job – IT IS NOT! IT IS PERFORMATIVE BUSINESS COSPLAY! HAVE YOU ALL GONE FCUKING MAD??? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU??? – this feels like a perfect ‘a fun link for Friday TGIF cry-laugh emoji!!!!’ post with which to feed the endless hordes of THOUGHT LEADERS crying out for content (dear God kill me).

By Elspeth Vince

NEXT UP, A RETURN TO BEATS AND BLOOPS AND A GENERALLY TECHNO-ISH VIBE WITH A NEW MIX BY EHEMALIGER REDAKTEUR PAUL, DER SICH WÜNSCHT, ER WÄRE DEUTSCHER!

THE SECTION WHICH FIRMLY BELIEVES THAT IN THIS TWEET AND IN THIS THREAD CAN BE FOUND, BASICALLY, ALL THE ANSWERS AS TO WHY NOTHING WORKS AND EVERYTHING SEEMS A BIT SCREWED, PT.2:

  • Roast Master: You will probably have seen people doing the ‘get GPT to roast your Insta’ meme doing the rounds over the past week or so – this site basically presents a nice little formalised skin to let you get an LLM-generated takedown of any social media profiles you choose (presuming they’re not locked down) across Insta, Twitter and LinkedIn – just plug in the username and BINGO, you’ll get…well, what you’ll get is a pretty-lukewarm series of burns based on a loose analysis of your bio and your posts, and then a FCUKLOAD of other stuff including ‘horoscopes for MBAs’ (Myers Briggs ‘analysis’), attachment style analysis and a host of other TOTAL RUBBISH that somehow sounds moderately convincing. This very much feels like something that’s big in playgrounds right now, but I can’t pretend that there’s not a couple of minutes of light amusement in The Machine’s assessment of your carefully-curated digital persona – it gets weirdly hung up on certain things (like all LLMs, in fairness), which is perhaps why it kept obsessing about me being really into baking despite, to the best of my knowledge, having tweeted about cakes a grand total of 0 times in 15-odd years, and it obviously makes stuff up, but, equally, it was amusingly mean about my friend’s podcast and as a result I warmed to it slightly. I would quite like to create a variant of this where every time you plug in your LikedIn profile it returns ‘you are a dreadful cnut with dust where your soul should be’, regardless of who you are.
  • Good Milk; Look, there is very little likelihood that this link will be of particular use or interest to anyone, but I was so affronted by it that I felt the need to include it, if only so I can ask all of you if anyone can explain it to me. This is a map, on the website of the New England Cheese Making Company, which purports to show suppliers of ‘good milk’ worldwide (‘good’ based on…some sort of arbitrary designation which is never really made clear), and it contains a grand total of ONE UK dairy. ONE. WHAT THE FCUK IS WRONG WITH OUR MILK, NEW ENGLAND CHEESE MAKING COMPANY? ARE YOU SLAGGING OFF OUR COWS? I was annoyed and affronted by this to a degree entirely disproportionate to my interest, involvement and engagement with the UK dairy industry.
  • The DiCamillo Database:: To quote the homepage, “A continuing project to list every country house built in Britain and Ireland, standing or demolished.” You want to embark upon a potentially-doomed project to visit every single country house in the British Isles? OH GOOD! Presuming that you DON’T want to do that, this is still an interesting resource – I had no idea there were so many ‘country houses’ in London, for example, and might use this to go and check out a couple (I winced slightly as the realisation came to me that I am now the sort of person for whom ‘going to check out a country house at the weekend’ is not a wholly-out-of-character pursuit). BUT if any of you decide to make ‘visiting all of the b4stard things’ a lifelong pursuit then I would love to hear about it (briefly).
  • Auglinn: I think I’ve seen at least half-a-dozen AR-enabled ‘leave digital notes attached to physical locations’-type projects over the course of the time I’ve been doing Curios, and obviously none of them have ever crossed my path ever again or ever, as far as I can see, been anything more than an entirely-niche concern. I can’t see this particular variant changing that, but I can’t help but think that we might be at a point when you might finally be able to do something sort-of fun with this. Even if there’s no mass-adoption it feels like a group of people could have quite a lot of fun with the functionality here, building it in to treasure hunts or mystery games, and (if you are a very particular type of person) you could propose using this stuff, or take someone on a surprise tour of a city…I don’t know, it feels like there’s a really underexplored ‘fun and frivolous and slightly-surprising, and leading to Actual Real-World Events and Rewards’-type set of applications to this sort of tech which perhaps might be easier to explore in the VASTLY DIGITAL era of 2024 vs the significantly-less-online years of 2014ish when I last remember this stuff getting attention in any meaningful way.
  • Sun vs Moon: I am slightly in awe of Neal Agarwal’s productivity – this is his latest, an entirely-pointless but oddly-compelling battle between the sun and the moon. WHO WILL RECEIVE THE MOST CLICKY SUPPORT??? Basically you open the site and click in support of either one celestial body or the other, with a running tracker of which of the two is receiving the most overall support, which has a higher points-per-second at the time…presuming this is all real , there is a…frankly staggering amount of clicking going on at any given time, and I do think there’s something interesting about the psychology of stuff like this and the compulsion it seems to engender in people to get into low-stakes ‘one side vs another side’ battles, and how that might be usable in various, probably slightly nefarious, ways. Still, who cares – CLICK FOR THE MOON (you have to pick a side, and that, it turns out, is mine).
  • Teletubbies: So, er, who owns the rights to Teletubbies these days? I ask only because this is a very fcuking odd, and yet seemingly ‘official’, TikTok account which presents videos of the legendary little weirdos in a peculiar and off-brand ‘very online surrealism’-type style. Are these the original costumes being used? It all feels a bit janky and knockoff, but when you go to the Linktree from the bio you get a dizzying series of additional TubbyProperties – loads of millennial/GenZ-friendly brand crossovers, along with the ‘official’ YouTube and Insta channels, which suggests that this is simply a case of a brand that has basically become part of some sort of equity portfolio and is being rinsed incredibly hard in as many places as possible, because, well, that’s how everything works these days! Basically this made me slightly sad, but your tolerance for slightly-forced “It’s the Teletubbies…BUT WEIRD! AND CAMP! AND POP CULTURE!” lols may be higher than mine.
  • Shimmer: This is oddly-soothing – Shimmer is an image search engine which isn’t really a search engine at all (SO WHY DID YOU JUST CALL IT ONE MATT FFS YOU AWFUL FCUKING HACK? I am so sorry), where instead you’re presented with a selection of images in the now-classic ‘infinite scroll’ style, and by clicking on one you’re taken to a wall of images which share the same sort of general aesthetic or composition – it’s not a million miles away from that vibes-based image based search thing from a few years back, but what’s interesting/weird about this is that…I can’t tell what is AI and what isn’t, or rather I can’t tell if it’s ALL AI, or whether some of the pics are real, and there’s no indication where any of this is from, and I suppose it’s just another general indicator of direction of travel, because this is it, isn’t it, the inevitable endpoint of the AI slop boom and the improvements in the imagegen tech, and the degradation of search and the death of the attributory trail, and the presentation of everything in a flat, contextless carousel, and I find this distressing in ways I can’t really quite articulate but which I nevertheless feel quite deeply.
  • A Massive Auction of Fairground Stuff: You know the tedious, internet-facilitated ‘I’m SO SCARED OF CLOWNS!’ thing that people with no real personality of their own have been using as a substitute for ‘character’ since approximately the mid-2000s? GYAC COULROPHOBIA IS NOT SOMETHING THAT ANYONE ACTUALLY HAS. Ahem. Sorry. Anyway, I am personally of the opinion that, while clowns are not in fact any scarier than anything else, there IS something inherently sinister about the carnival aesthetic, fading letterwork on ageing planks and stained tarps and tired-eyed acrobats and alcoholic firebreathers and sad-faced animals gazing from between rusting bars, that sort of thing (on which note, semi-related, if you’ve never read Geek Love then you really, really must). Presuming, though, that you like this sort of thing, you will LOVE this forthcoming auction at Bonhams where you will soon be able to bid on all manner of vaguely-carny memorabilia, from old painted signs to carved figures and wooden animals from the carousel…honestly, this is a hell of a collection  and for people with A Very Specific Domestic Aesthetic there could be a lot to entice you in here. Honestly, I will be very disappointed if not one of you can find a home in their lives for “An English carved and painted double-seated juvenile galloper figure of a Boy Scout centaur” (no, me neither).
  • The iPhone Photo Awards: Is it actually possible to take a non-AI-enhanced image on a phone anymore? Like, is there any way of literally shutting off the automatic ‘life enhancement’ tech that seems to kick in whenever you hit the ‘shutter’ button regardless of whatever ‘no filter’ options you might have selected? This is possibly exacerbated by my penchant for cheap Chinese Android variants, but I swear it’s not been possible to take a photo that looks like real life for several years now. Anyway, that’s by way of slightly-grumpy introduction to the iPhone Photography Awards, which as ever contain some really impressive images but which I find it hard to get that excited about anymore because everything just looks digitally enhanced to the point of slight-surreality. I do worry that our sense of aesthetics for things like this are set to be absolutely banjaxed in the not-too-distant future, and that we’re rapidly approaching a period where it will be impossible to remember online imagery that *didn’t* have that slight sense of CG about it.
  • Ellipsis: What sort of traveller are you? Do you like to plan and itinerarise (whatever spellcheck might want to tell me, that IS a word (or at least it is now)) and generally KNOW WHAT THE FCUK YOU ARE DOING?  If so you might find Ellipsis genuinely useful – it’s AN Other holiday/travel planning app, but with a bunch of nice quality of life features which I think might elevate it for some users; its main draw is that everything’s visible on a map interface, so you can easily see what sort of travel burden you’re committing to by adding all those additional churches to your Tuesday list (for example), but it also allows for multi-user editing and all sorts of other stuff besides. Basically, if you’re the sort of person who REALLY enjoys the planning part of a trip – let’s be honest, probably more than the actual travel with its PEOPLE and HASSLE and UNPREDICTABLE HAPPENINGS messing up your lovely, clear schedule – then you might find this invaluable. Oh, and as far as I can tell it’s a free service, which is a nice bonus.
  • BlockParty: This might be really useful, though I sort-of hope none of you feel the need to explore it too deeply. BlockParty is basically a one-stop-shop to help you ensure that all your privacy settings across all your online profiles are set up in the optimal way to give you the privacy you feel you need – it’s designed specifically, I get the impression, for people who are experiencing a degree of online harassment and would like a quick and easy way of covering off all the basic ways to guard against it. This was established by a former Facebook person – thanks, poacher, you make an excellent gamekeeper! – and, per the ‘About’ section, works as follows: “Privacy Party works by navigating and clicking for you right before your eyes — finding all the hidden controls, toggles, and audience selectors it might take hours to sleuth out otherwise. And not just for privacy controls, but for Notifications too. Anything that intrudes on our minds is fair game. Anything that makes us feel surveilled and unsafe online.” Hope you don’t need this, but just in case you do.
  • Minute Cryptic: A different cryptic crossword clue each day for you to try and solve. I am bitter about this, because cryptic crossword clues are one of those things I like to think I should be smart enough to get my head round but which I have singularly failed to ever be able to do, however often I have tried. The thing that really boils my p1ss about this (sorry, but it does) is that IT DOESN’T EXPLAIN HOW THESE WORK. Like, ok, today’s clue is “Red and White triumphs, clinching home final (5)” and I can sort-of arrive at an explanation for the answer but there’s one bit that baffles me and I WANT TO KNOW HOW IT WORKS and I don’t, and frankly I just feel sort of stupid and grumpy now and quite want to sit and sulk for 5 minutes or so. Anyway, there’s a new one of these each day so maybe if I keep banging my head against the metaphorical brick wall of cryptic puzzle it will all one day click for me (or I will get an unpleasant metaphorical cranial fracture, either/or).
  • Word Associations: This, though, I rather like – it’s both ‘game’ (you can play word association vs the computer, although obviously it’s an infinite game as the computer will never be stumped) and resource, with all the associations made by humans over the course of the hundreds of thousands of plays logged in a database, meaning you can search any word you like and find those other terms which have most-often been correlated with it by previous people to visit the site. I find this really interesting, and there’s something quite pleasing about spending 5 minutes playing Mallet’s Mallet with the computer and knowing that in some small way you’re contributing to a database of actual human knowledge.
  • Gisnep: Oh God this is fiendish. Do you want a Wordle-type game, but one which will take you about 15m every day rather than <30s? No, of course you don’t, you have SH1T TO DO, but I’m going to dangle this in front of you anyway like some sort of terrible temptation. Gisnep is…a bit complicated to explain, but it feels a little bit like literate Sudoku (you’ll see what I mean), and while I can’t personally claim to have fallen in love with it I think there are some for whom it will scratch a very particular itch (are you the sort of person who enjoys those massive grandmotherly ‘BIG BOOK OF WORD PUZZLES’-type things (no shade, my friend Mo has been into them since her mid-20s)? In which case this is for you, basically).
  • Snakebyte: Play Snake in your browser. Except, after a while, you will realise that this is Not Your Ordinary Snake. Fun, if a bit fiddly, and I very much like both the ASCII-ish aesthetic and the vaguely ‘malware in the machine’ feel of the whole thing.
  • Diablo In Your Browser: Do YOU remember the original Diablo? Do YOU want to play the whole thing for free in your browser? OH GOOD HERE IT IS!
  • We Play Dos Games: Finally this week, another ABSOLUTE MOTHERLODE of old videogames, playable in full in your browser via the magic of the web. You know the score by now – this is a host of titles from the 90s and 00s, many of which you’ll have seen on other, similar sites in the past, but others which I’ve not seen as freely playable versions before. XENONII (with a soundtrack composed by actual, proper dance music people Bomb The Bass)! Odd 7-UP promo game Cool Spot! TIE FIGHTER!!! Jesus, I’ve just looked and this appears to have ALL OF THE ULTIMA GAMES, which for a very specific type of middle-aged nerd could well end up being career/marrage-threatening propositions. BE CAREFUL, OLD NERDS! Seriously though, there really are some absolute classics here – if nothing else you owe yourself to check out the classic Lucasarts ‘point and click’ games they have here – Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island I&II, Indiana Jones – because, honestly, they are design classics and SO SO SO GOOD. Honestly, this one’s a fcuking GOLDMINE, you will not regret bookmarking it. OH MY GOD IT HAS CHAMP MAN 97/98 I MAY NEVER FCUKING EMERGE FROM THIS.

By Yoshitomo Nara (this one via Blort, for which thanks)

OUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS A PRACTICALLY-PERFECT COLLECTION OF WHAT, WERE I A SIGNIFICANTLY WORSE PERSON THAN I LIKE TO THINK I ACTUALLY AM, I MIGHT DESCRIBE AS ‘LATE-SUMMER GROOVES’, MIXED BY VARUMI! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Inside Insides: Not in fact a Tumblr! Still, it feels like one, and, as we have agreed, all taxonomy is a preposterous confection! This is a collection of MRI scans of various different foodstuffs, and, well, what else do you want from me? This is it, this is PEAK INTERNET.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Adam Hale: Very cool little animations. Not quite sure how else to describe these – there’s something very ‘design’ about them, is probably the best I can do (sorry, this is fcuking shameful, I am going to make a cup of tea before the next bit and see if I can improve).

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • An Age of Hyperabundance: This could honestly gone at either end of the longreads section this week – it’s ‘literary’ enough in style and approach to sit comfortably with the short stories, but, given the subject matter, we’ll lead with it instead. Laura Preston writes in n+1 about her trip to speak at this year’s Conversational AI Conference in the US, where she’s been booked as a ‘contrarian’ speaker designed to offer a small note of provocation in amongst all the backslapping and salesmanship. This is SO SO SO GOOD, and, having spent a bit of time over the course of the past year working on projects that are vaguely-adjacent to this space, captures the particular blend of mad snake oil and complete lack of any sort of deep engagement with the BIG ETHICAL QUESTIONS which is pretty much the hallmark of any conversation you’ll have with anyone attempting to flog you generative AI. Even if you feel you never want to read another piece about FCUKING LLMs ever again, I promise you that this is worth your time – it really is perfectly-pitched, of a similar tone and style to the bits of reportage that emerged from the big NFT hypefests of c.2020-1, while at the same time doing a better job of detailing the contours of the industry than a lot of ‘straight’ reporting I’ve read over the past year or so. Here are a couple of representative paragraphs to entice you in – but, really, this is superb and deserves your attention: “A woman named Olga was giving a talk about charisma. I listened, hoping to gain some last-minute wisdom for my own remarks. Olga represented a German firm that puts chatbots through some sort of charisma boot camp. According to Olga, here is how a chatbot can show charisma: First, it can remember the customer’s name. That is very charismatic. “A charismatic assistant might have a quirky sense of humor, a soothing voice, or a nice and friendly tone,” she said. “A charismatic assistant can remind you to take your medicine.” Olga had an important message about charisma. In our pursuit of charismatic AI, we must avoid dark patterns. Dark patterns are manipulative design tactics that steer people toward decisions they wouldn’t normally make, and these patterns often resemble charisma. A chatbot using dark patterns might mimic your mannerisms to gain your trust. It might lead you to believe it is a real person. It might have enough data on you to flirt with lethal precision, and then, just after delivering a dopamine hit, ask you to provide a credit card to continue. Better not do any of that, said Olga.” See? Brilliant.
  • Intellectual Menopause: By contrast, I didn’t enjoy the style of this piece anywhere near as much – which is odd, as normally I find Venkatesh Rao a pretty pleasant read – but I found that the points it contains make it worth persisting with. Here Rao explores the broad concept of the ‘intellectual menopause’, a term to describe the particular form of stagnation of thought which he has observed in his peers (and, to his credit, in himself). It’s not Rao’s own coinage, but he arrives at his own composite definition based on reading various other thinkers, which can be summarised as folllows: “Intellectual menopause is an individual disease that men of particular temperaments and a particular age range (40-50) are particularly vulnerable to. It is especially liable to be triggered if they’re part of a paradigm that’s beginning to exhaust itself when they begin their careers, and is likely to infect entire cohorts. It is likely to manifest through behaviors like a focus on abstract values, manifestos, bestowing advice upon younger people, “attitudinizing” one’s own past, or retreating from frontline creative endeavors to supervisory and managerial ones. It is is a symptom of a phase in the lifecycle of complex social systems.” Which, I imagine, sounds…not unfamiliar (can’t lie, felt a *bit* seen). My frustration here lies in the way Rao takes…quite a roundabout way to get to the discussion of the concept and its meaning, application and impact, but once he does it’s an interesting framing which you might find useful (or which might make you feel bodied into the sun, either/or).
  • Dark Corners of the Web and US Politics: Caitlin Dewey at Links conducted a fascinating interview this week with Elle Rive, an expert in online extremism who’s recently published a book detailing what she’s learned from a decade or more hanging out in some pretty unsavoury places with some pretty unsavoury people. Their conversation basically covers ‘so, how to explain How We Got Here in terms of explaining the weird and very-post-Gamergate nature of much of right-wing politics in the US (and as a result elsewhere), and how that intersects with actual proper fascists and the whole weirdly misogynistic thing that the Republicans have going on’, and it’s a really cogent, clear explanation of some of the ways in which stuff from 10-15 years ago has infiltrated the social water table in some unexpected and quite weird ways. I particularly appreciated her making the explicit link between white supremacists and the traditionalist movement (and her invocation of PT, my white whale), but the whole thing is properly interesting. As an aside, I really do think that someone somewhere should commission the definitive ‘So, Who The Fcuk Was Milo Then?’ lookback for the UK press because I feel that it’s been long enough and people should probably be prepared to tell their stories by now. Anyone?
  • Digital Archivists: Or, to give it its correct title, “The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age”. Long-term readers may have noticed I have slight obsession with digital decay and the general sort of ‘lossiness’ of our current media age, and that I firmly believe that the preservation of digital culture in all its forms is a project which should be pursued at a global, society-wide level as part of the preservation of our species’ cultural patrimony – if you happen to share these obsessions then a) congratulations, you’re probably exactly as fun at parties as I am (have…have the invitations dried up for you too?); and b) you will find this very interesting. In part it made me worry that we don’t have a single gold standard medium for long-term digital storage, and that the proliferation of different solutions will end up with a whole bunch of stuff being lost forever because it was encoded on what ends up being 2076’s version of the Betamax.
  • Soviet Sabotage Doctrine: I am not really one for the conspiracies, as a rule (my tedious PT obsession aside), and I remember being generally quite sniffy about Carol Cadwalladr’s ‘IT’S THE RUSSIANS WOT DONE BREXIT’ obsession, and in general I tend to roll my eyes at those of us who see RUSSIAN BOTS as the explanation for any political opinion they don’t like on the internet (HI CENTRIST DADS HI)…but, that said, as part of One Of My Jobs, I have had to spend more time than I would ordinarily like to in the weeds of the miserable racist chat on Twitter in the past few weeks and…yeah, look, it’s impossible to look at this stuff up close and not thing ‘hang on, there is no way in hell this isn’t being coordinated and automated to a certain extent – so, er, by who? And from where?’. It’s more complex than ‘just Russia’, obviously – see the excellent work of Marc Owen Jones if you want a more detailed look at how mad some of this stuff gets when you lift enough rocks – but it seems plausible that there’s SOME sort of Kremlin-y stuff going on. Anyway, the link here goes to a piece about how Soviet mis- and disinformation used to work in the mid-20thC, and why it was employed, and is an interesting historical counterpoint to the more modern techniques being deployed now for reasons which, strategically at least, are largely similar.
  • Back to ObamaCore: This piece nails something I’ve been thinking about for a week but which I wasn’t able to articulate – that there’s a certain familiarity of tone and vibe, if you will, to the Harris campaign at the moment. I’d mistakenly pegged it to Hillary, but here Nate Jones makes the far more successful comparison to the slightly-cringey excitement of the immediate aftermath of the Obama election, all HOPE and ‘the end of history’. The whole piece is worth reading – aside from else, it’s very funny – but the thesis and the parallel can be seen in these couple of paras (an aside – I read something this week which basically said ““Obama will save us” is basically hard-coded into a certain generation of millennials” which made me laugh): “Collectively, we are conjuring the ghost of the Obama era — that earnest, optimistic, energized, celeb-obsessed, self-conscious, cringeworthy time. It was an age that seemed dead and buried as recently as mid-July, when Katy Perry’s “Woman’s World” sought to revive the sound of the mid-2010s then promptly flopped. Two days later, Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt and appeared, for the moment, an indestructible electoral force, barely challenged by the sclerotic octogenarian in the White House. The nation seemed to be sleepwalking toward autocracy until the sudden ascent of presidential hopeful Kamala Harris changed everything. She has, as running mate Tim Walz crowed, brought back “the joy.” Within hours of Harris taking over the Democratic ticket, Fire Island twunks posed in matching Kamala crop tops. CNN panelists debated the question of whether Kamala was brat. Barbie-themed “Madame President” signs sprouted on lawns. Megan Thee Stallion twerked at a rally. Cynthia Nixon sipped from a coconut. A campaign has been constructed around a mood, rather than the other way around.”The mood is Obamacore — the outburst of brightness and positivity that took over pop culture upon the election of our first Black president in 2008, and that continued until the wheels fell off eight years later. This was the age of Glee, Taylor Swift’s 1989, and Hamilton, seemingly disparate art born out of the same impulse: the feeling of a new dawn, a generational shift, a national redemption.”
  • Reviewing the Grimes-Designed AI Toy: I think I’ve mentioned in here before that the author of The Neverending Story, German author Michael Ende, wrote another, less-heralded but imho far better novel for children called ‘Momo’, a highly-allegorical story about imagination and play and the importance of giving kids the space to think and make things up and basically have unstructured ludic time (it’s…a lot more fun than I make it sound, honestly – it features a talking tortoise called Cassiopeia, ffs!), and one of the central points is a dastardly new type of doll that’s released onto the market which talks to kids and which therefore removes the need for imaginative play…anyway, that’s basically what was in my head throughout this writeup of Grok (no, not Elon’s ‘comedy’ AI), a soft toy imbued with THE POWER OF LLMs to, seemingly, have desperately unsatisfying conversations with an increasingly-underwhelmed young person. Obviously, as per, THIS IS THE WORST IT WILL EVER BE, but it’s also yet another example of this stuff being baked into tech which simply isn’t ready and with seemingly nowhere near enough thought given to how this sh1t is actually going to function in real life. I don’t think any of you will be rushing out to pick up a Grok, based on this.
  • Ryan’s World: It was slightly odd reading this, not least because the titular ‘Ryan’ here – of the Ryan’s World YouTube channel, which was a huge story in the Early Days of YouTube, being as it was the first ‘kid unboxing stuff’ channel to go massively stratospheric and make a proper, eyebrow-raising amount from ad revenue and, subsequently, endorsements and merch and and and – is someone who I hadn’t thought about for years (obviously) and who I’d sort of assumed had just sort of aged out of the YouTube grift…but no! He has a film out! He is now obviously a teenager! He…doesn’t appear to have any agency at all in any of this! Honestly, it’s impossible to read this and think ‘I don’t really like your parents very much, Ryan’ – it seems eminently clear (to me, at least) that this is two adults rinsing their kid’s fame for every single penny they can, regardless of whether or not said kid appears to have any interest in doing this any more. It doesn’t feel *bad* per se so much as just deeply, deeply icky and a very strange way of relating to your progeny.
  • Snapchat and Teen Friendships: Someone I know used to work at Snap back in the very frothy days, and they recently mentioned that they predict there is a coming BIG BACKLASH to the platform and all the ways in which the tricks it employs to maintain stickiness are also doing fairly terrible things to kids’ relationship with their phones and, more broadly, their conception of what ‘friendship’ means and what value to ascribe to it. A lot of this is based on ‘streaks’ and the base-level fact that Snap effectively gamifies the idea of friendship with the end goal of boosting dwelltime and engagement…which, when you write it down like that, doesn’t sound *wholly* benign. ““You send streaks to people or you snap them, then you have this idea in your head that you’re friends now. It’s like, No, you’re freaking not, man. They’re just on this app, and you are, too.” Well quite.
  • The Rise of No-Edit YouTube: On the growing trend towards ‘creators’ posting RAW AND CANDID AND UNEDITED VLOGS as an antidote to the hyperkinetic, fast-paced Mr Beast-style content trend of the past few years. Posted mainly in the hope that this will see a similar rise in popularity of No Edit Newsletters in which some lazy pr1ck sh1ts out 10,000 words of totally unfiltered and unedited stream of consciousness because they’re too selfish and lazy to properly value their readers’ time (asking for a friend).
  • Game Rules That Changed Me: OK, ostensibly this is an account of one man’s memory of playing a roleplaying game with friends several years ago, but ACTUALLY it’s a really interesting exploration of how framing and design can change a user’s experience of an event or process in very fundamental ways, and I personally think there’s some quite interesting thinking you can arrive at from here if you squint.
  • A Weekend At The Larp Festival: I don’t suppose I need to explain LARPing to any of you, do I? This is Adrian Hon, writing up his experience of attending the annual Immersion festival of live action role playing in Finland – I wasn’t hugely familiar with the nuances of the LARPing world, but it turns out that not every style of game involves pretending to wield the +2 Vorpal Blade of Tharg and smacking someone repeatedly with a styrofoam buckler (or tossing coins to see who has to be the Nazis this time). Instead this festival focuses on what’s called ‘Nordic Larp’, which has more of a focus on story and ideas and is more akin to improv/immersive theatre (from what I can tell) than ‘tw4tting a middle manager from Croydon with what you are all pretending is a morningstar’ – Adrian spent a couple of days there, playing three different types of game, and offers a really detailed and considered writeup of each, explaining how they work and what the player experience was. This is very much NOT MY SORT OF THING, but, regardless, there’s so much in here that’s interesting to the curious reader, from questions of experience design to group dynamics, and while I think I would turn fully inside-out from embarrassment were I ever put in a position to have to participate in something like this I very much enjoy reading about it and think that you might do too.
  • The Lab Mouse: OH GOD THIS IS SO INTERESTING. Did you know that there’s a whole genetic lineage thing to the generic ‘lab mouse’? That basically there’s a whole history of what you might well describe as ‘mousey eugenics’ underpinning the small, doomed rodents currently being visited with all sorts of unpleasant indignities in the name of science? I personally did not – this really is SO interesting, if very obviously the sort of thing that, should you be a big animal lover, you will probably find *quite* distressing, and which will make even the casual reader hope that the scenario envisaged by Douglas Adams in Hitchhiker’s isn’t actually the case because MAN will they visit some revenge on us, based on some of the stories in here. To be clear, this is quite a scientific and dispassionate writeup, whose broad vibe you might summarise as ‘fcuk’em, they’re only mice’, so probably bear that in mind if you’re of a more sensitive disposition – “Mice also fall into an ethical goldilocks zone. They are similar enough to us to be scientifically useful, but dissimilar enough—partly owing to size bias and their history as pests—that we are not squeamish about using them for research in the same way that we are for cats, dogs, and monkeys. However, there’s a shallower reason for the ascent of the mouse that probably dominates these post hoc justifications: mice, in both volume and variety, were historically easy for scientists to get hold of.” No sentimentality here, just COLD HARD SCIENTIFIC ENQUIRY (poor the meese, though).
  • Camping In Extreme Heat: Have you ever wondered what it feels like to be out in a desert in 120 degree heat? No, me neither, but it turns out that it makes for a good read. Leath Tonino spends 24h in the Mojave desert with a friend to see what it feels like to be really, really hot – turns out, it feels…not loads of fun. Tonino and his companion are obviously reasonably pro at this sort of thing – DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME, KIDS – but I like the way the piece’s tone and pace reflect the deadening effects of extreme heat on every aspect of your existence and the particular odd mental debilitation that you get above a certain temperature. Welcome to the rest of your lives, kids!
  • The Bad Literary Friends: Look, this is very much a DISCOURSE PIECE – it is not, personally, My Sort Of Thing, but I get the impression that for some of you it will be almost indecently compelling. It is VERY LONG, and you will need a lot of patience for ‘he said, she said’, and for a lot of people who (ok, this is my personal opinion but COME ON) struck me as fundamentally fairly dreadful on almost every conceivable level, but if you like the idea of an EXTREMELY MESSY BREAKUP in which all four parties affected are also novelists with a very relaxed attitude to the whole ‘anything’s fair game for an author’ thing then you will very much enjoy this. I came away from it feeling exhausted and like I never, ever wanted to hear from any of the people involved ever again, but if appreciate my response may not be representative – ENJOY!
  • Dr Infinity: This is a…very odd story, about a man called Mr Infinity who attained notoriety for his exceptional ability as an autofellator (I am going to take a punt and presume that that won’t get flagged as obscene), and who spent a significant proportion of his life attempting to bring news of this singular talent (and his belief that it could have INCREDIBLE SPIRITUAL BENEFITS) to the world via all sorts of doomed schemes. This is in-part just VERY ODD, in parts quite funny (in a ‘wow, the 70s and 80s were a different time, eh?’ sort-of way), and in parts quite sad, as it’s clear that Dr Infinity was perhaps not *wholly* mentally well. The throwaway mention about him briefly being Sean Lennon’s babysitter was quite a jawdropper, mind.
  • Gloves On: A short piece in the LRB by Anne Carson, on developing Parkinson’s and how her handwriting has changed as a result, and about identity and self and representation and and and. Beautiful, and of course not a little sad.
  • Femcels: I can’t remember where I came across this, but it’s a really curious piece of writing and a perspective I can’t recall reading before. It’s less, really, about the concept of the ‘femcel’ per se, and more about the shifting ways in which womanhood and femininity show up online, and how, per the author, everything is defined in relation to loneliness. I thought it was fascinating, maybe you will too – there’s definitely *something* here: “In my first draft of this piece, I proposed that the defining  characteristic of the woman involved is rage, but now I think it is much simpler and sadder: it is loneliness. Loneliness can, of course, be aestheticized. As rage or desperation or sex, or some combination of the above. Femcel has been connoted as such through many internet eras, its public personae and inner rules shifting with generational trends. Each iteration of “femcel” retains just enough credible feminism to stay defensible. And there is always just enough chaos to keep the subculture appealing to those girls weak to the siren song.  First there was the misanthropy of early Internet femcels, whose alienation closely mirrored that of involuntarily celibate males. There is, most recently, the “femcelcore” rage of Gen Z, encapsulated in TikToks of a small girlish hand brushing prescription pill bottles and hair pins from a stack of books: My Year of Rest and Relaxation, The Bell Jar, Girl, Interrupted, etc. In both, there is a shared language of disillusionment, a despair at once performative and deeply felt.”
  • Windows: A short story, a small reminiscence, by Michael A Gonzales, about his first ever crush, on a girl who he watched from a window across the alley from his childhood bedroom in New York. This is so redolent of mid-20th-C NYC that you can practically see the stereotypical men in vests and see the steam rising from manhole covers, and I mean that as a compliment.
  • Abject Naturalism: A short story by Sarah Braunstein in the New Yorker, about a child and a telescope and, maybe, a love affair, and strangers and suspicion and and and. I was personally affronted when this ended, I was enjoying it so much.
  • Terminus: Finally this week, a piece from the LRB way back in 1997 – a short story by Hillary Mantel, called ‘Terminus’, which is not only superb but also is a lovely stylistic counterpoint to the link above and which I think (personally speaking) makes a lovely post-script to it. If nothing else it’s a wonderful reminder of what a terrifyingly good writer Mantel was; this is *crafted* and polished and almost sharp-edged in its precision, and I adore it.

By Andrew Hem

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 16/08/24

Reading Time: 37 minutes

Look, I need to be honest with you – I am VERY VERY TIRED. For reasons literally none of you need or want to know about, this has been a week of relatively-minimal shuteye and as such I have written what follows through a general fug of insomniac incomprehension – can we all pretend that it’s usually better than this, and that ‘normal service’ will be resumed next week?

THANKS EVERYONE! Although actually given that I am meant to be going ‘clubbing’ tomorrow, specifically to see a set that runs 230-4am, there’s every possibility that I’m going to be trotting out the same excuse again next Friday so, well, apologies in advance and I am sorry that this isn’t, er, better.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can probably get through this week’s car-crash of an issue if you squint and just ignore most of the words.

By Muretz (once again, credit and thanks to TIH for the images)

A CRACKING SELECTION OF TRACKS TO BEGIN WITH THIS WEEK IN THE FORM OF ALL OF THE MUSIC USED BY THE BREAKDANCERS AT THE OLYMPICS (YES, EVEN THAT AUSTRALIAN ONE WHO HAS BEEN MEMED TO THE POINT OF NOW BEING ALMOST-ENTIRELY-POST-HUMAN)! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY OF THE OPINION THAT THE RELATIVE AVAILABILITY OF AMPHETAMINES VS COCAINE IN THE UK IN 2024 EXPLAINS MUCH OF OUR EXISTING NATIONAL MALAISE, PT.1:  

  • YouTube TV: I was reading something the other day which posited that the current boom in ANXIETY amongst seemingly every fcuker currently alive can perhaps in small part be explained by the fact that we (by which ‘we’ I obviously mean ‘people who are privileged enough to be sitting at a computer reading this pointless crap rather than worrying about where the next meal is coming from or what that unpleasant and increasingly-close-seeming bomb-like droning sound is’) are constantly assailed by CHOICES everywhere we go – often pointless choices, fine, and not ones that bestow anything resembling ‘meaning’, but, well, CHOICES! What social rabbithole to fall down? What to fill our £15 brown cardboard bowl with at the food court? What album to stream, game to play, series to binge or dating app to stare at, slack jawed, pachinko-ing our way through serried ranks of potential paramours…Which, perhaps, is why I’m seeing an increasing number of products and services which seek to replicate the feeling of scarcity one had in slightly-less-digital times, through realtime unarchived broadcasts, say, or limited edition drops, or a return to the necessarily-space-limited use of physical media…or this BRILLIANT idea, which is, put simply, ‘a series of 12 TV channels made up of stuff pulled through from YouTube’, but which is also, thanks to some smart design decisions, significantly more interesting than that. The channels are all hand-curated and themed – so one is ‘nature’, one is ‘sport’, and so on and so forth – and pull from what I assume is a pre-approved selection of existing channels or curated videos, they play back-to-back so there’s no downtime, and they are all synced centrally, so if you switch channels and then come back to what you were watching before you will miss stuff…JUST LIKE TELLY USED TO BE! The videos all stream in pleasingly HD quality, and you can find the individual YouTube code for whatever you’re watching displayed onscreen so you can go to the source material and explore their channels in more detail if you so choose, and basically this is a) fcuking great; and b) still better than actual UK television in the 80s and 90s.
  • Letters Anonymous: ‘Digital Correspondence Oubliettes’ are, fine, not exactly a rarity online (or, on rereading, is that a term that’s ever going to catch on – sorry about that), but I am a big emo and therefore a total sucker for stuff like this. Letters Anonymous is a site on which anyone can write a letter about anything they like and post it online for anyone to read as some sort of…what, catharsis? Performance? The desperate hope that its intended recipient will one day stumble across it and read it and somehow recognise the sender? No idea. Regardless, letters are submitted and vetted by the team behind the site to ensure there’s nothing obviously criminal or lunatic therein, and then are posted online to be read by anyone who happens across them. This is basically crack for me – which I acknowledge probably says something…unpleasant about certain aspects of my personality, but wevs – and I could honestly quite happily sack off the rest of this edition and spend the next couple of hours drifting through the words of the variously hurt, jilted, heartbroken and hopeful (but, perhaps unsurprisingly, rarely happy) that make up the assorted correspondence. All of human life is here – letters to lost loves, to old friends, to the dead, the lost and the abandoned, past selves and future selves and selves who might have been, letters where you can practically feel the tear-soaked paper and letters where you are quite glad that the intended recipient will probably never read it because the words are knives – and there are a few I’ve stumbled across which feels like they contain novels’ worth of backstory hidden between a few lines. The quality of the writing is…uneven, fine, but if you cared about that then, frankly, you wouldn’t be reading me, so.
  • Try Flux: The latest, shiniest text-to-image model to emerge in recent weeks has been Flux, out of Germany, a new open source system which has also been integrated into Twitter’s newly-launched ‘Grok2’ AI (which I am going to presume no Curios readers have tried yet because Curios readers are not the sort of people who want to pay That Fcuking Man a monthly stipend, but whose lack of apparent guardrails at launch feel like, possibly, one or two lawsuits waiting to happen). Anyway, the link at the top here takes you to an in-browser version of Flux that you can try for yourself – it’s better than OpenAI’s best model, although the version you get access to here is necessarily not as good as you would get downloading the full thing to use locally with all the various additional mods and things which make it look REALLY fancy. As far as I can tell, if you really get to grips with it it’s basically comparable with Midjourney in terms of output quality – but, like every other one of these fcuking things, it appears to be being used exclusively for the purpose of ‘making pictures of conventionally-attractive Western women who still don’t quite look like real people so much as a 14-year-old boy’s idea of ‘sexy’’. Still, worth a look, and worth being aware of as the current best option for anyone looking to make something with image-gen tech.
  • The Hiroshima Archive: It was the 79th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6th August, which is presumably why I stumbled across this website this week – I think it’s actually been around for a while now, but it feels timely to share it with you this week. On loading (slowly), you’re presented with a 3d relief map of the city of Hiroshima, overlaid with icons which represent photographs and landmarks and individuals and personal stories – clicking them will various show you a photograph of the city in the aftermath of the blast, or an eyewitness account, or a survivor’s story, and it’s a beautiful way of bringing the (frankly horrible) history to life (also I am a sucker for the 3d model of the city which they use here, which is largely unnecessary but aesthetically very cool).
  • The Spotify Lottery: Ooh, this is clever (in an exceptionally geeky way) (and also, look, I should probably be clear from the outset that the maths/probability stuff here goes almost entirely over my head) – UK-based software person Oli Rowan (HELLO OLI ROWAN, should you be the sort of person to Google yourself!) has made a website which every 5 minutes searches for playlists on Spotify which contain EXACTLY 100 songs. Except it does this search in a very specific and silly way, by generating random strings which correspond to playlist IDs, which means that it’s effectively just plucking playlists out of the ether every 5 minutes in the hope that it will eventually get one with the magical 100 tracks (or at least I think that’s what’s happening), which means, based on Oli’s calculations, that there’s a 0.000000000000000000000000000000665% chance of finding one each time (that’s apparently ‘a nonillionth’, so don’t say Curios never teaches you anything), which means that you and I will probably be dead before this thing ever lucks out. Which is either an excellent illustration of how MASSIVE really big numbers are, or of something about probability, or of the insane volume of music on Spotify…I don’t know, you pick your own high concept, my head is hurting from the numbers.
  • The Lumen Prize 2024 Finalists: Pretty sure I have covered these in previous years, and if I haven’t I really should have done. “The Lumen Prize champions the innovative possibilities of technology-driven creativity. We provide the pre-eminent platform showcasing artists who are pioneering new visual languages at the intersection of art and technology“ – so this is this year’s finalists across a variety of different categories, all united under the general banner of ‘creative digital work’. Sadly a significant proportion of the works here are installations or temporary digital commissions, and so rather than being things you can ‘experience’ they’re instead writeups and explainers, but this is still a wonderful selection of works running the gamut from situation-specific apps to large-scale public installations, featuring a broad selection of artists (many of whom you may recognise from previous Curios, turns out – MindW4nk (of whom more later), Chia Amisola, etc etc). Honestly, if you’re looking for ‘creative inspiration for digital things’ then you could do significantly worse than spending some time looking through these – there’s some really nice high-concept stuff in here, particularly around interesting (no, really!) uses of AI which might spark something.
  • Pudding: Would YOU like the opportunity to slap a cat-shaped blancmange with a digital spoon and watch it wobble and jiggle in pleasing fashion on your screen? Don’t lie to me. There’s a certain angle at which the cat just gets repeatedly nailed in the face which, I can’t lie, I found almost TOO compelling.
  • RateLoaf: Regular readers – or at least those who don’t just skip past any links whose description mentions the initials ‘A’ and ‘I’ – will be bored sh1tless by my neverending whinging about the lack of ‘creative applications of generative AI for fun and frivolous means’. It’s good to see that SOME people are making appropriate use of The Machine, though – witness this superb application of multimodal AI in the form of RateLoaf, a website which exists for one purpose and one purpose alone, to tell you the extent to which your seated cat (or in fact any seated cat, although probably best not to steal one explicitly for this purpose) in fact resembles a loaf of bread. Upload a photo and the site will give you an exact, scientifically-determined score out of 10 to determine your cats…loafiness? The guy behind it has gone to the trouble of explaining the workflow too, should you care exactly which bits and pieces are being plugged together to achieve the results…but you probably don’t care about that, you probably just want to gauge the breadness of your chonky boi (dear God, I appear to have slipped into a wormhole back to 2017). Any of you working for Mars Petcare or similar – THIS IS WHAT YOU OUGHT TO HAVE BEEN DOING WITH AI WHAT THE EVERLIVING FCUK IS WRONG WITH YOU YOU JOYLESS PR1CKS??? Is…is stuff like this why the brand consultancy work’s dried up? Asking for a friend.
  • The Atlas of Surveillance: One for North American readers who want a bit of dystopia in their lives – lol! Like you have a choice about the quantity of dystopia you get! – this is an interesting-if-slightly-unnerving platform which offers you a mapped view of the different surveillance tech being used by different police forces across the US. So, for example, you can see all the places using ‘predictive policing’ as part of the law enforcement package (197!) or face recognition (389!) or the ambiguously-sinisted ‘3rd party platforms’ (584!). This is both interesting and a potentially-useful dataset for research – if you look at the geodistribution of the predictive policing stuff, for example, it is VERY geographically concentrated, which immediately made me think about regional lobbying spend and the like. It does rather feel like it would be A Good Thing for this sort of information to be openly available for every country.
  • Entertrained: No, not a typo (for once – I know Curios is riddled with them, and I am SORRY, but, equally, you think I can be bothered to reread this when I have finished typing the fcuking thing? Lol mate no), this is instead another platform that does the whole ‘get better at typing by typing along with the classics!’ thing, which, yes, I know isn’t original but which is still a good idea and which I figure some of you might still find useful or interesting. This has all the standard public domain texts you’d expect – so Little Women, Jane Eyre, and, for the masochistic, Anna Karenina and THE COUNT OF MONTECRISTO, which feels like the Everest of this sort of endeavour and the sort of thing which if you decided to actually go through with it would render you an almost-perfect touch typist by the end, or mad, or both.
  • Arecaceae: This is a page of information all about palms – the arecaceae of the url, apparently – which, ok, isn’t hugely exciting on its own, but I am slightly in love with the (to be clear, utterly-pointless) interface, which rather than presenting the copy on a static scrolling page, instead gives it to you on some sort of weird digital signpost which you have to rotate to be able to read all of it. And then there are the ants that follow your cursor, for no discernible reason whatsoever. Why is any of this happening? What is it for? I have no idea at all, but I would very much like more sites to take this incredibly overelaborate approach to information delivery.
  • Furl Clock: This is one of the most pleasing digital clock displays I’ve seen in years – honestly, it’s quite mesmerising to watch and I could quite happily just gaze at it for a while (did I mention how fcuking tired I am? I am very fcuking tired). This would look lovely on a high-res display – also, the root url takes you to a wordsearch type game, which is a nice little bonus.
  • Post-Growth Entrepreneurship: I confess to almost having bounced off this on landing, when confronted by the legend: “Business is one of the most effective forms of activism. Business is one of the most expressive forms of art.” Er, lads, I think that’s b0llocks, sorry! But then I read on, and while a lot of the language used here makes my teeth itch and gives me quite strong ‘terrible idiots’ vibes, I think the underlying idea behind the site and the theory it’s espousing is…good?  “Post Growth Entrepreneurship (PGE) reframes business as a form of activism, art, spirituality, and creative expression [EDITORIAL NOTE – OK, SO THE LAST BIT WAS W4NK TOO]. This business model embraces flat growth curves and rejects the need for investors, scaling, and exits. PGE questions entrepreneurial “common wisdom” and re-envisions business as a vehicle for pure positive impact.” What this means in practice is attempting to create – or at least consider – a new approach to entrepreneurialism which rejects the demand for 10x returns and hockey stick growth curves in favour of something less extractive and a bit more realistic and ‘sustainable’…which, as someone who has spent much for the past decade writing here that ‘actually maybe VCs are sort-of the problem with a lot of how capitalism currently works’, feels vaguely-positive? Of course, one might argue that this does sort of rather ignore the elephant in the room – to whit, ‘the purpose of a system is what it does’ – but if you’re someone who works in the startup space this might be worth a look, with its links to resources and its own incubator which you can apply for.
  • Sound Ethics: It feels to me that the coming spate of copyright suits against the text-to-video and text-to-audio models have a slightly better chance of succeeding than the ones against OpenAI – but I am both not a lawyer and notoriously bad at predicting anything, so, well, what the fcuk do I know? – and this site is the home of a collective seeking to galvanise musical artists into coming together to create frameworks through which AI can be used ethically and responsibly for composition rather than the more standard ‘nakedly exploitative’ way in which it appears to be working right now. “Sound Ethics champions the rights and interests of artists at every turn. Our core mission is to ensure that the creative copyright of artists is respected and protected as artificial intelligence becomes more integrated into the music industry. Through partnerships with educational institutions, legal experts, industry stakeholders, and policy makers we are setting new standards and advocating for policies that protect artists’ rights.” This is set up by ACTUAL MUSICIANS, and the broad ethos set out in the ‘About’ section seems broadly positive, so if you’re a muso or adjacent-type-person this might be worth a look.
  • Carabiners: Would you like a website where you can lovingly stare at photographs of carabiners? No, I can’t imagine you would, but when has that ever had any bearing on the links I put in here? Still, given the apparent rise of the carabiner as a keyring for a Certain Type Of Post-Hipster (I SEE YOU) perhaps this is now a very trendy fashion vibe and so EXACTLY the sort of thing you want. What DO you want? Tell me! You won’t get it, obvs, but it’s nice to know exactly HOW I am disappointing  you each week.
  • Deep Live Cam: Ooh, this is a clever little bit of spoofing code – it’s on Github, so you’ll need to be able to run this yourself, sadly – which creates a fake webcam livestream featuring a deepfaked version of whoever you so choose. Feed it a photo and, according to the demo on the page and a few clips I’ve seen floating around, and it’ll generate a pretty-convincing-looking short clip as though filmed from a screentop webcap, letting you mock up a realistic-seeming short video of anyone using a single photo. The disclaimer on here is a BEAUTIFUL example of the genre, by the way: “Users of this software are expected to use this software responsibly while abiding by local laws. If the face of a real person is being used, users are required to get consent from the concerned person and clearly mention that it is a deepfake when posting content online. Developers of this software will not be responsible for actions of end-users.” Any lawyers want to comment on how likely that is to cover the devs? As I personally remain unconvinced.
  • Robot Vall: The TikTok account of a guy who moves like an android, but I mean REALLY moves like an android – like, SO MUCH like an android it’s genuinely slightly upsetting to watch. You know when you were a kid and there was a brief vogue for people doing ‘robotics’ dancing (I am going assume that this is a pan-generational phenomenon, that at basically any point since the 1970s there will be kids in playgrounds doing terrible, vaguely-breakdancing-inflected robostyle dance moves)? This is that, but done by someone who has a degree of fine motor control that makes me feel like a lumpen collection of wooden blocks by comparison – there are bits of these clips where they get so weirdly uncanny valley that my stomach goes a bit funny (which, to be clear, is a compliment!).
  • Twitter 95: I have no idea who made this or why, but if you have ever wondered ‘what would Twitter have looked and felt like in 1995?’ then this is perhaps the answer you needed. This is an LLM-led project with a nice, era-appropriate skin to it, and conversations between suitably-mid-90s celebrities like Michael Jordan and, er, Princess Diana (sadly unaware of the terrible fate that is set to befall her in a few short years) – there’s a certain sort of weird fascination to the dialogue pairings and what the LLM chooses to waffle on about, and there’s obviously something happening in the background that tries to inject some ‘on this day in history…’ type context to what’s being discussed, which means, at the time of writing, you can see a bunch of machine-imaged celebrities ‘discussing’ the Bosnian conflict on a Geocities-inflected version of Twitter from a past that never existed. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT???

By  Joseph Töreki

NEXT UP WHY NOT ENJOY EMMA SLADE’S SET FROM THIS YEAR’S BOOMTOWN, SEVERAL HOURS OF BIG, JUMPY BREAKS! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY OF THE OPINION THAT THE RELATIVE AVAILABILITY OF AMPHETAMINES VS COCAINE IN THE UK IN 2024 EXPLAINS MUCH OF OUR EXISTING NATIONAL MALAISE, PT.2:  

  • Victor’s Way: This is rather wonderful. Victor’s Way is a sculpture park in Ireland, specifically devoted to a collection of works made by Indian sculptors and commissioned by the titular Victor to sit together in the verdant splendour near the Wicklow Mountains National Park which lies South of Dublin. The sculptures may be great, but, honestly, that’s not what we’re here for – we are here for the website, which is a classic piece of late-90s/early-00s html with a…very particular vibe. Victor is not shy about telling you what the park is, and what it very much isn’t: “Victor’s Way is a contemplative space for adults. (It is not a fun park for families)”, says the homepage, and in case that were not specific enough the ‘About’ Page goes on to elaborate that, specifically, it is “designed as a contemplation (or meditation) space for adults between the approx. ages of 28 and 65 who feel the need to take some quality time out for R&R&R (i.e. rest, recovery & spiritual reorientation) in order to find a way out of the mid-life life (purpose transition) crisis.” The whole site is basically a joy, and the fact that the park apparently still exists and still accepts visitors (for the low, low entry fee of 10 Euros!) is just a lovely little bonus.
  • TheoGuessr: ARE YOU SMARTER THAN AN AI? On the one hand, of course you are! On the other, you are so, so much worse than it at so, so many things! Here is just one of them – TheoGuessr is a somewhat scope-reduced play on Geoguessr in which you’re tasked with guessing where exactly a photograph was taken inside the apartment of a bloke named Theo. You get presented with two views – one of the room as photographed, the other a top-down map of the whole apartment space. Your task is to look at the image, work out where exactly you think it was shot from and what angle and then make your guess – you’ll then be told how close you got to being exactly right, and exactly how much closer the AI got than you did. Quite a nice use of tech, and an equally good demonstration of ‘stuff The Machine is significantly better at than us ambulant meatsacks’.
  • Horror Film Locations: Are you the sort of person who has to watch films through their fingers, for whom even relatively-light-touch scares are A Bit Too Much? Or are you instead the sort of person who laughs in the face of jumpscares and stunt blood and who yawned their way through A Serbian Film thinking ‘not sure what all the fuss is about mate’ (NB – if that is in fact you then you are a sociopath and I no longer desire your readership)? If the former, this probably holds little interest for you; if the latter, then welcome to your next big holiday planning tool. Horror Film Locations is, basically, a Google Map that’s been tagged with, er, the filming locations of a fcukload of horror films, sorted by genre – given a significant proportion of horror movies are low-budget, it means that a not-insignificant proportion of said locations are in central and Eastern Europe, meaning you could plan a pretty interesting route through some fascinating places while ALSO visiting the place where they filmed THAT scene with the bats and the amateur tracheotomy from ‘Blood Sister IV: The Murder Superior ’ (not in fact a real film, to the best of my knowledge).
  • The Counties Game: Football fans in the UK will be aware of the concept of ‘doing the 92’, or, more prosaically put, ‘visiting every single football league ground in the UK as some sort of obsessional pilgrimage’ – well, for people who like that idea but think that it lacks scope and ambition, why not take on a more substantial one? This is a site that lets you see how many of the individual counties of the US you can visit, or of Canada, or Mexico, or even the UK, tracking your progress, finding Geocaches, entering your progress on a leaderboard…Incredibly, to my mind at least, there are people who claim to have ACTUALLY DONE THIS for all of the counties in the States which is, frankly, an insane amount of traveling – but I reckon the UK is probably doable without TOO much hassle, over the course of a lifetime. So, er, depending on how old you are, you may or may not be able to fit this in before your inevitable demise – WILL YOU TAKE ON THE RACE AGAINST TIME?
  • ReMediate: It feels like a bit of a minor boomtime for digital magazines, particularly ones exploring writing around the intersection of tech and AI and art – ReMediate is another, recently-launched and found via Kris, whose mission statement is as follows: “At remediate, our goal is to contribute to an active conversation about what good Computer-Assisted Writing, or C-AW, can look like. remediate is anti-gatekeeping. The mission of remediate is to make a home for informed experimentation and conversation in the field of computer-assisted writing. Regardless of form and genre, all of the pieces included in our magazine serve a dual purpose: 1. To be computer-assisted art or criticism; 2. To inform and inspire readers to make computer-assisted writing or criticism about computer-assisted writing.” If I’m being wholly honest I wasn’t hugely whelmed by any of the pieces in the inaugural issue, but it’s equally possible that I caught this on a particularly tired day this week (did I mentionzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz?) or that I am simply just a bit too overexposed to this sort of stuff at the moment and have lost a small sense of wonder – see what you think.
  • Film Frontier Latest: THE GREAT AI CONTENT SLURRY FLOOD CONTINUES! This is a YouTube channel which, even by the standards of the people peddling this crap, has a quite breathtaking production cadence – this is dropping what looks like between 6-20 new clips each day, every single one purporting to be a trailer for a film. Except they’re not – they’re about 3 seconds of trailer footage followed by a poorly-cut series of stills, with an LLM-generated script describing the theoretical movie, alongside AI-generated stills. Some of these are for ‘real’ films, some of them are for imagined sequels (Sonic the Hedgehog 5, coming next year apparently!), some of the thumbnail images are ripped from real movie marketing materials and others are AI-generated slop with accompanying textual fcukups, and occasionally there are moments of hallucinatory high comedy (I would personally not be UN-interested in ‘Twilight Saga 7: Unraveling The Mystery of Forks’, for example), but this is all utter dreck and none of the videos have more than 600 views…can this be making meaningful ad revenue? Per the Facebook slop factories story from last week, I imagine this is all being run from a part of the world where an extra $40 a month makes more of a meaningful difference than it does in London. Still, WELCOME TO THE GLORIOUS PRESENT! Does make you think that the Flux+Runway workflow I’ve been seeing a lot of this week is going to make this sort of problem significantly worse.
  • The Postcard Printing Press: It’s been a while since I’ve featured a Kickstarter in here, so let’s break that trend with this LOVELY (if not exactly cheap) project which is fully-funded with a couple of weeks to go – it’s basically a small, perfectly-appointed printing press, designed to let you craft your own handmade postcards to a pleasingly-high standard. This is obviously aimed at people with at least a passing knowledge of ‘how printing works’ and with, presumably, enough baseline artistic/crafty ability to sort of get the process, but, equally, they say it will ship with detailed instructions and a dedicated series of training videos, and, honestly, there’s something really charming about the idea of being able to make your own cards and notices and flyers with your own printing setup. That said, the entry-level price here is £200 so, well, you probably need to be committed to make a reasonable number of postcards to make this worth the cash.
  • Stuck In The Scroll: Ooh, this is good, and made me think that there must be a bunch of ways this could be flipped or extended – this feels like something you might be able to have fun with, perhaps in a ‘buddy system’/accountability kind of way? Hang on, I haven’t actually told you what the fcuk it is – here: “This site reveals, in real-time, whether I—artist and professor Ben Grosser—am currently scrolling TikTok. Think of it as a last-ditch effort, a sort of public confessional as therapeutic tool aimed at defusing the intense compulsion I feel every day to endlessly scroll the world’s most popular video app. It’s also a way of asking questions about the designed effects of the TikTok platform and related social media apps. Why do I keep on scrolling even when the videos on my For You page are boring, annoying, or unrelated to my interests? How is the app clouding my sense of awareness, frequently leading me into a sort of trance state propelled by infinite swiping? What is it about the TikTok interface that leaves me forgetting what I saw and losing track of how much time I’ve spent? By making my compulsions public, I aim to not only break free of the engagement loop this app has trapped me in, but to also challenge the prevailing narratives about how and why we stay stuck in the scroll.” At the time of writing, Ben is not currently scrolling – but he has done so for just under 180h since 1 July. Which I was initially horrified by, but then realised was probably a fraction of my own time spent just generally STARING INTO THE WEBBY ABYSS and so I should probably just wind my neck in. Anyway, I think there’s definitely something you can do with this (but, er, I don’t have the time to think about it any more so am leaving it with you to take forward, ok? OK!).
  • Skate Oregon: I do not skateboard, despite what my aspirational shoes and silly trousers might tell the casual observer (lol, literally noone observes me and thinks ‘that man skates’ – at best they might wonder ‘does that man eat?’), and I have never been to Oregon and, in all likelihood, I am probably never going to go. BUT that didn’t stop me really enjoying this website which basically collects photos and short descriptions of seemingly every skatepark in the State (and, inexplicably, a few in California and a couple of other places), and which presents an interesting parallel geography of the area as told through small, often community-built, concrete skating arenas. I don’t know why but there’s a certain sort of weird narrative beauty to this (/pseud).
  • Third Friend City: It is very rare to be presented with a completely new way of considering urban space and the built environment, but this is JUST SUCH A THING! Third Friend City is a very small and very simple website which does one thing and one thing only – it tells you which streets in Manhattan can comfortably be walked down by two, three or four people abreast, the idea being so that you can plan group walks in areas where one of you isn’t forced to walk behind the others. Obviously this is a bit silly, and OBVIOUSLY insisting on walking shoulder-to-shoulder with your friends, when there are more than two of you, is COMPLETELY SOCIOPATHIC BEHAVIOUR (I mean this very strongly and I will fight you), but, equally, I very much like the hyperspecificity of this.
  • Shmupulations: This is a pretty amazing, if VERY niche, archive – would you like to read an incredible selection of translated interviews with Japanese developers of shoot-em-up games (‘shmups’, in the vernacular)? OH GOOD! This is VERY much a fan service site, born out of a Patreon, and unless you’re the sort of person who really wants to get into the weeds about the item drop rate in Galaga (I am making this up, but you get the gist) or someone with aspirations to make this sort of thing yourself then it might be of limited appeal, but for the ONE PERSON reading this for whom that applies, know that I do this all for YOU.
  • The Ghost and the Golem: This is a fragment of a whole game, but WHAT a fragment – I really enjoyed this, and you might too. Self-described as “a Jewish historical fantasy of bandits, betrothals, klezmers, and kabbalists!”, this is basically a massive piece of interactive fiction/roleplaying, set in Central Europe and featuring liberal lashings of period character and Yiddish (which you can helpfully ask for hints and explainers on at the outset, for those of you, like me, who don’t necessarily know your schmuck from your schlemiel. The browser version contains three chapters of the whole game, which is an app download on iOS or Android, but there’s LOADS to explore and it’s well-written and funny and properly interesting in terms of the history and the Judaic lore than runs through it, and I think it’s definitely worth a look.
  •  Wordlike: This is basically ‘Scrabble, but turned into a single-player game with levels’ – there are multipliers and bonuses and challenges and modifiers and all sorts of other things going on which I could try and explain but which, honestly, you’ll pick up as you go along. This is FUN, although I have been annoyed at my inability to get past level 13 so please don’t tell me if you clock it first time as I will feel inadequate.
  • Conan Throwbrien: You know what? I slightly resent the amount of knowledge I have of US late night talkshow hosts. I have never watched any of these fcuks, ever, and yet I am forced to be aware of the existence of Jay Leno and John Oliver and James Corden (ok, fine, he’s our fault, but still) and Trevor Noah (also not American, but wevs) and Conan O’Brien, and, well, NO! I DO NOT WANT TO! Anyway, this is a game featuring the last of those, red-headed human jawline Conan O’Brien, and basically this is ‘blackjack, but twisted slightly’, and the game is all about having to deliver setups and punchlines in a monologue to keep the audience adequately entertained and, look, I bounced off this one slightly but am including it because the visual style is actually pretty cool and I figure there might be some of you who like this (although be warned that it has the single most irritating soundtrack to a browser game I have ever heard, ever – seriously, it’s almost aggressively-unpleasant with some really, really nasty crackle – and you might want to mute the tab in anticipation).
  • Sokoblox: A simple Pico-8 game in which you have to roll blocks around a maze to get them to specific positions. This quickly make me VERY ANGRY, but only with myself and how fcuking appalling my sense of spatial awareness is – it’s very clever and rather satisfying when it clicks.
  • Tramsterdam: Last of the miscellaneous webspaff is quite possibly my favourite link of the week – Tramsterdam is not a million miles away from ‘cosy browser-based town creation toy Townscaper’ except with the added brilliance of TRAMS (I have a slightly obsessional love of trams, no idea why)! It’s super-simple – you’re presented with a blank canvas, onto which you can plop individual units of land – trees, houses, paths and TRAMLINES! Everything just slots together seamlessly, and whatever code magic is happening below the hood ensures that whatever you do just looks incredibly cute and well-put-together, and, honestly, the tram animation is SO CUTE and, er, should anyone whose opinion I particularly value be reading this and wondering ‘hang on, is this cnut into train sets?’, please be reassured that the answer is very much ‘no’. Still, this is gorgeous and soothing and will not fail to make you smile, I promise.

By Tyedied

OUR FINAL PLAYLIST THIS WEEK IS WEATHER-APPROPRIATE SUMMERY TECH-HOUSE MIXED BY ISLE OF WAX! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Retro Lesbians: I mean, you probably don’t need me to explain this one, do you? Completely SFW – the sapphism here is of the relatively chaste, occasionally implied, variety rather than the more overtly-labial sort.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Thomas Connelly: I had no idea who the fcuk Thomas Connelly was until the ‘Kanye’s dentist has him hooked on laughing gas, says disgraced UK tech journalist Milo Yiannopoulos’ story broke (a brief aside – it is genuinely astonishing, and not a little upsetting, to me that that fcuking cnut has been cropping up in my life for NEARLY 20 YEARS now, ever since he was an appalling tech hack getting repeatedly fired from the Telegraph, to the days he was making my life a professional living hell c.2011, to The Kernel, to the Gamergate years…honestly, are you aware of Vonnegut’s concept of the ‘karass’? It feels very much like he is part of mine, ffs), but now I do know and WOW does his Instagram look EXACTLY what you’d expect the Instagram of a man who provides incredibly expensive grills to the hiphop elite to look like. SO MANY TATTOOS! SO MANY TOOTHY GEMS! SO MUCH LATENTLY-RAPEY ENERGY! Honestly, it’s like a can of Monster Energy was granted a genie’s wish and asked to become a REAL BOY.
  • Tales of AI Cats: AI-generated cartoon cats in the vague Pixar-adjacent style. Some of these are fcuking mental – I slightly lost it at the image of the sad kitten weeping whilst observing an exam paper that has clearly been graded ‘F-’ (in fact, a lot of the cats are crying – WHY? WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO THE AI CATS???).

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • How The Pandemic Radicalised Britain: The Manchester Mill digs into the links between the pandemic and the UK riots with an excellent piece of writing which links Cosmic Scallies with the chemtrails movement and the right-wing grift empire to excellent effect, and which does a decent job of explaining how a certain unpleasant faction of people realised that people ‘asking questions’ about the pandemic and the government’s response to it, and subsequently the extent to which the degree of control exerted by the state was necessary, were also likely to be quite receptive to follow-on arguments about ‘what else are they not telling you?’ focused on more depressing, traditional tropes about people with different religious heritage or skin colour. This paragraph does a neat job of summarising the piece’s overall thrust, but it’s worth reading it in full – the Mill and its sister publications continue to do God’s work, and if you’re anything like me you will know at least one person, possibly more, who has gone through this exact pipeline and who is now ‘asking questions’ about whether or not anyone in fact SAW any rioting or whether it was ‘just presented by the MSM’: “It wasn’t just about how much time people were spending online. Lewis now recalls that period as a moment when he could feel the presence of the state up close. “It was the first time in our lives we’d seen the government say: ‘You’re gonna do what we tell you to’”. He says his group included lots of young mums who were frustrated by the lockdowns, cooped up at home watching their bored children “playing up”. To people like that, neat theories about who was to blame were appealing. Ordinary people were being drawn into online networks that they would never have been part of before the pandemic, spaces that very quickly filled up with messages that had nothing to do with lockdowns or the much-hated Rule of Six.”
  • Digital Ads: Another excellent piece in the increasingly-essential London Review of Books, this time on the current digital ads landscape, cookies, targeting, user-identification, Apple and all the rest. If you’re an industry expert then this won’t tell you anything you don’t know (but it’s worth reading anyway because it’s just a really well-written article), but if you’re less familiar with the technical ins and outs of ‘how exactly my phone knows it’s my wife’s birthday and I am yet to buy her a present or even think about it yet’ then this is a very good, and very readable, primer.
  • The Chatbot Logs: The Washinton Post reports on what users of a specific LLM, Wildchat, asked The Machine over 40,000-odd conversations – the results aren’t hugely surprising but offer an interesting overview of user behaviour and habits, and confirm a few suspicions you might have had. Yes, a persistent coterie of users are desperate to get sexy with The Machine, even when The Machine does not want to get sexy back; yes, homework; yes, CVs; yes, vast amounts of theoretically-sensitive data thrown into the system with no care whatsoever about its ingestion and eventual incorporation into the corpus…and yes, there’s the racism and the anger and all that jazz. There are also one or two surprising things – the people who just seem to like to ‘play’ with the system, asking it to just ‘imagine’ things, seemingly for the fun of it, for example, or the fact that a significant proportion of people were using it as part of general life workflow (‘write this boring email to the DVLA’, etc etc). Perhaps most interesting, though, is the detail about the fact that the vast majority of users try it once and never go back – the interface problem, and the related open-endedness problem, are still very much a thing.
  • VoiceChat: Another article exploring the experience of using the new ChatGPT voice functionality, still not rolled out to everyone – again, the author is amazed by the natural-feeling conversational interface, but here they give some very specific usage examples which I found particularly interesting, not least the ‘I basically just vented at the machine and got it to summarise my grievances and subsequently realised that it was in fact I who was being a petty little b1tch’ section, and the ‘using it as a quick Q&A companion while reading a book’ usecase. I still don’t have any interest whatsoever in using this myself, but I can absolutely get the appeal for people who are maybe more invested in optimising themselves and their existences (I do not understand these people).
  • The Replika CEO Interview: This has been getting a lot of traction this week because of the section at the end in which she goes off on a bit of a tangent about how ‘of course people will one day have relationships with their AI!’ which is, if you think about it for more than 2s, exactly what you would expect the CEO of a company whose business is the creation of digital companion software to say in a big-ticket corporate profiling piece. Far more interesting, to my mind, was the bit towards the middle in which she talks about the baseline economics of the business and how the tech/cost thing works, and how they think about the service model – but obviously all the headlines went to the ‘MARRY YOUR AI!’ lines because we are fundamentally incapable of thinking of things outside the prism of Hollywood/scifi, turns out. It genuinely amazes me that I first featured Replika in Curios in…hang on…2017! Jesus fcuking Christ I have been doing this for TOO LONG.
  • Minority Report For Influencers: I mean, I’m paraphrasing but that’s basically it. Another WaPo piece, this time about technology being developed which uses AI (OF COURSE IT DOES!) to seek to predict the likelihood that any given influencer, currently being anodyne and apolitical and shiny of hair and tooth, will at some point in the future start spouting politically-motivated cant about ‘the woke mind virus’/’Project25’ and cause problems for your avowedly-apolitical branded content. “A tool recently introduced by Captiv8, a marketing firm that helps advertisers like Walmart and Kraft Heinz connect with influencers, uses artificial intelligence to analyze mentions of social media stars in online articles, and then determines whether they are likely to discuss elections or “political hot topics.” The firm also assigns letter grades to creators based on their posts, comments and media coverage, where an “A” means very safe and a “C” signals caution. The grades incorporate categories like “sensitive social issues,” death and war, hate speech or explicit content.” I like this a lot, because a) it reminds me of all those times I was asked by people to deliver a ‘red/amber/green’ threat assessment system for social media crisis management, despite repeatedly telling them that this was a fcuking facile and largely pointless exercise; b) at no point in the piece is there any discussion or explanation of exactly HOW this is meant to work. Is this total b0llocks, sold by an opportunistic agency or two to gullible clients with more money than sense? Not for me to say (yes, yes it is)!
  • Change Blindness: Curios favourite Professor Ethan Mollick returns with this blogpost which does a decent job summarising the extent of progress in genAI over the past few years – it’s quite arresting when you see it laid out like this, although it’s equally possible that we’re reaching some sort of plateauing point with this particular generation of tech (per his points on LLMs). Still, if you presume continued growth and improvement based on this pace/trajectory (which, to be clear, you shouldn’t, it probably isn’t going to work like that) then it becomes a bit dizzying.
  • The Substackification of Everything: This one’s very much gotten the newsletterers (yes, it is the official term) talking this week – Emily Sundberg writes (in her own Substack, obvs) about the end-point effect of the Substack business model and where it seemingly-inevitably leads: “the point of Substack — unlike Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok — is to get you to monetize your content, and/or get you to spend money on other people’s content. Creating content with the goal of making money off of it is different than creating content with the goal of getting likes, is different than creating content with the goal of being creative and connecting with other people. Seems to me, the obvious attraction of being able to monetize your taste—over putting out a probably-more-interesting letter about your actual life—is leading to a lot of very, very similar Substacks.” I Have Thoughts on this, but will try and keep them brief because, well, life is too short: 1) I subscribe to a LOT of stuff, as you can imagine, but also churn through a lot because I often find new things and try them out for an issue or two before realising they’re not quite my thing, and FCUK ME is there a certain homogeneity within the ecosystem, specifically clustered around ‘things I like’, ‘my recommendations for x/y/z’, ‘my thoughts on viral thing du jour’, that type of idea; 2) I appreciate someone who writes a linkblog, literally the most derivative and least-original format of all time, is in no position to start casting aspersions as to other people’s originality or otherwise; 3) nonetheless, there really is some truly atrocious writing out there (again, trust me, this is written with a degree of self-awareness here); 4) THIS IS THE PROBLEM WITH ‘THE CREATOR ECONOMY’ THERE IS NOT ENOUGH MONETISABLE DIVERSITY OF TASTE AND HENCE EVERYONE ENDS UP CIRCLING THE SAME METAPHORICAL CONTENT/THEMATIC PLUGHOLES WITH EVER-DIMINISHING RETURNS.
  • The Spotify LatAm Podcast Crash: A piece on how Spotify’s support, and subsequent removal of said support, for the podcast market in Latin America effectively led to the creation and subsequent destruction of an entire industry ecosystem, and a general cautionary tale about what happens when the free/VC money runs out, and about what possibly underpinning culture with rickety, transient capital maybe isn’t the smartest idea long-term.
  • Counting in Japanese: Numbers in Japanese will always hold a particular place in my heart as a result of the Summer I spent working at Buckingham Palace, during which I had to interact with a LOT of Japanese tourists and as a result learned a smattering of words that were occasionally useful when attempting to communicate things like ‘no, you need to give me more coins for that sub-Beanie Baby corgi toy you’ve inexplicably chosen to take back to Osaka’. So it was that I learned that ‘one pound’ in Japanese is the INCREDIBLY PLEASING ‘ichi pondo’, and that ‘one, two’ is the equally-pleasing ‘ichi, ni’, and that Japanese people will be incredibly impressed when the malnourished, dead-eyed alcoholic behind the till manages even a word or two in their native tongue. Anyway, this is all about the oddity of counting in Japan, and how when you get past the very basic ‘1-20’ type stuff (which I obviously never did) it gets VERY ODD: “It turns out that, on their own, those beginner-friendly words you learned above are only good to communicate abstract numbers, like “the number 2” or a rocket launch countdown. When you want to refer to numbers of things—arguably the most common use case—you need to attach something called josuushi, or “counter word”, after the number.  For example, to count books, you have to add the kanji 冊 satsu after the number, so that the “two” part of “two books” becomes “ni-satsu” instead of just “ni”. Satsu is a word specialized for counting books, and nothing other than books. To say “two magazines” the number part will become “ni-bu”, and for “two carrots”, “ni-hon”.” Fascinating.
  • The Oddity of Reels: Katie Notopoulos writes on the oddity of Instagram Reels – part of me does wonder whether her status as an official beat reporter on weird and quirky internet culture means that her algos might be a bit more skewed than the average user, but I very much enjoyed her description of the odd, context-free videos that the platform throws up, thanks presumably to its odd demographic mix of people who have grown up with video and are therefore comfortable with shooting and editing and presentation, and those that very much have not.
  • The Disney Animation Process: Ok, so this isn’t so much an article as it is a link to Disney’s actual website – BUT! This is also a GLORIOUS exploration of how Disney does animation in 2024, and it is full of beautiful clips and sketches and animation, and you can genuinely learn stuff about How Cartoons Get Made, and if you have any interest at all in animation or Disney, or if you or someone you know would like to get into it, this is just brilliant.
  • How New LEGO Sets Get Made: This is, I concede, a total PR puff piece for LEGO, but it’s also interesting, particularly given the fact that the company’s not always hugely open to ‘behind the scenes’ stuff. The article looks at how you go from ‘submitting a theoretical design through the LEGO Ideas Programme’ to ‘having that actually become a product that goes on sale worldwide’, and it’s a lot more interesting than it sounds, honest (even if you’re not a LEGO person).
  • Having A Tough Fringe: It’s that time of year again, when thousands of people head to Edinburgh to, as far as I can tell, bankrupt themselves AND give themselves cirrhosis, all in the space of a month or so. It is, famously, increasingly hard to do the Fringe as a performer – prices for accommodation is insane, the competition is insane, the amount of work you need to put in is insane, and you could do all that to find yourself playing to audiences of three people, two of whom spend the entirety of your set giving you the most devastating heckle in the world (to my mind, “you’re not funny” is impossible to come back from when delivered with feeling). This piece, in Chortle, is written by Vix Leyton (who, full disclosure, I used to work with many years ago and who I like) who decided to ‘do comedy’ a few years ago and is now remarkably on her nth Fringe as a less-storied comic, and who writes about what it’s like to be one of the people who are perhaps struggling a bit more than thriving, and how to find the joy when it is p1ssing it down and you are broke and in tears and haven’t eaten a vegetable in three weeks.
  • The Katsuification of Britain: Vittles – of course! – does a deep-dive into the how and why of katsu curry becoming an inescapable food profile in modern Britain, a kind of ‘premium mediocre’ of cosmopolitanism. Typically great, on the history of the dish and its spread through the culinary canon and, if you will, THE SEMIOTICS OF KATSU (I told you, it’s Vittles!). Super-interesting, although you do rather wish it was a more interesting flavour profile that had achieved such crushing ubiquity.
  • We Created A Fake AI Delivery Company: A warning to anyone reading this who works in any sort of ‘creative’ industry and does things like ‘pitching’ and ‘attempting to surprise and delight an incredibly-jaded client who has seen it all’ – you cannot fail to come away from this story feeling INCREDIBLY INADEQUATE and like you’re basically rubbish compared to these two fcukers. Serhii and Oksana are ‘creative problem solvers’ looking for work in London, but with no network or contacts. Their solution to getting their foot in the door with their dream clients? A series of cold mailings using some of the most brilliant stunt/theatre/ARG-ish type moves I have seen in YEARS. Honestly, you will read this with a mounting sense of awe at how involved this gets, and you will then feel very, very ashamed of all the lacklustre pieces of ‘pitch theatre’ you’ve halfheartedly indulged in over the years. This is AMAZING, and I expect these people are fighting off the job offers right about now.
  • How To Write Sex Scenes: I’ve always thought I would make a passable writer of smut, for some reason – I realise this is possibly one of those classic instances of ‘the ineffable arrogance of the middle-aged man’, whereby we’re all secretly convinced that we’d be able to turn our hands to basically anything, given the opportunity (“no, Kamala, it’s no trouble at all, of course I’m happy for you to pick my brains on campaign strategy”), but, equally, I’ve always thought that the combination of ‘being able to type really quickly’ and ‘having a reasonable vocabulary’ would stand me in pretty good stead as a churner-outer of ‘erotic’ potboilers. This piece in the Times features author Kate Weinberg talking to her peers about their approach to fcuking in their books, and it’s interesting throughout, from the ‘everyone assumes you’re talking about what YOU like’ problem, to David Nicholls’ observation about the inherent ‘ickiness’ of the male gaze – although I would say that their list of ‘best sexy books’ at the end is garbage (fwiw, Lila Says which is not only FILTHY but utterly heartbreaking and has a fascinating mythology around it).
  • The Cocaine Kingpin Who Wanted To Play Football: Ok, so this is a two-part bit of crime reporting in the Washington Post and it suffers a bit from, well, reading very much like a stereotypical ‘piece of longform crime writing in a prestige US publication’, but equally the baseline story here (massive narco kingpin realises that small football clubs in South America are in fact an EXCELLENT way of laundering large sums of filthy money and, if you invest enough money and the club is pony enough, will also let you, narco kingpin, fulfil your longstanding dream of playing actual professional football despite not actually being very good) is great, and by the end of the second part you will have developed a VERY SMALL degree of grudging admiration for Sebastián Marset and some VERY BIG questions about exactly what the fcuk you have to do to get arrested for this sort of thing in South America.
  • Bama Confidential: I remember when the whole ‘Bama Rush’ thing blew up a few years ago and I realised I couldn’t really engage with it on any serious level because it would basically involve me having to watch a lot of videos of identikit blonde girls approximately 25 years younger than me just sort of basically dancing and parading and, well, it didn’t feel like the sort of thing I ought to be, or indeed wanted to be, doing. Thankfully, though, Ann-Helen Peterson has now done the ULTIMATE DEEP-DIVE into Alabaman sorority culture, of which this is the first part – she’s published several others this week, focusing on various different aspects of the Greek system, initiations and the like, but this intro piece gives you all the background on the culture and class and history and general madness of the whole thing, and, as ever with this stuff, it exerts a strange and terrible fascination to Brits whos universitarian experiences do not, as a rule, involve living in insane multimilliondollar McMansions and having several hundred people intimately judge you before you’ve even been fingered at Fresher’s Week yet.
  • The Tail End: About the death of a pet, specifically a cat. I wouldn’t ordinarily include this based on the subject matter, but this is a really beautiful piece of writing by Sloane Crosley in the New Yorker. Two things, though – 1) if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t have a lot of time for people getting very upset at the death of their pet, this one might not be for you (although I’d still suggest giving it a try, it really is gorgeous prose); and 2) If you’re the sort of person who finds reading about dying animals in any way traumatic, DO NOT READ THIS. The rest of you, though, ‘enjoy’!
  • The Crush House: Videogame reviews don’t ordinarily get a look-in in the HIGH QUALITY, OH-SO-LITERARY tail end of the longreads, but this – a review of new game The Crush House, all about filming contestants in a fictitious reality TV show – is SUCH a good piece of writing about fiction and presentation and narrative and WHAT IS TRUE, and it repeatedly references Guy Debord, and basically this is 100% the sort of intensely-pretentious (but totally appropriately, I promise) writing about games that I love and would like to read more of.
  • To The Senora On The First Floor: Evelyn Folk writes about a woman who lives in her apartment block in Mexico City – honestly, this evokes the very specific feeling of sharing an apartment block with people in such an incredibly-specific way that it immediately flashed me back to the various nonagenarians I would spend my days conversing with while I was living in Rome and shuffling between my apartment and my mum’s, and the particular feeling of slow heat and time winding itself down that you get…I have no idea if this will speak to any of you, but I adored this.
  • Inner Light: Finally this week, a short-ish piece by Jack Hanson in the Paris Review which I loved and which made me want to read about another 100,000 words of it – see what you think: “There is enormous pleasure to be had in maintaining at least two, if not several, parallel lives. Of course, there are the pleasures of concealment and control, but the true indulgence is in occupying the vast reaches of interior space, populated by all the aspects of yourself that don’t end up in any social circle, any relationship, any reputation, and so don’t really get expressed at all; a big, sumptuous, light-filled nothing, the real you. You find it especially at the age of, say, twenty-five, on an airplane between two major cities, one in which you live and the other in which your girlfriend lives, the latter being where she carries on flings she takes little trouble to conceal, and the former being where you’ve discovered the cover afforded by being mistreated and have decided to carry on a fling of your own. Up there, between clouds, the contradictions don’t really clash, they just float beside one another. It’s useful to float along with them, becoming comfortable with the illogic and the fabrication, particularly when, for example, you are seated beside your new fling at a dinner party, trying not to let on.”

By Mayumi Tsuzuki

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